W: Adora I:Olly Bromidge

I spot Alice in front of me as I walk towards our meeting spot, The George Tavern right by Victoria Station; by spot Alice I mean spot her hair, long, free, and bleach blonde. She’s wearing jeans, trainers, a blouse and a long cheetah print fur coat. I lose her as she crosses the road but I finally catch up to her inside by the bar. I had previously shared a stage with Alice at her earliest form last December and had been following her journey ever since then.

When I ask her the first question I always ask everyone, “Who is Lost Alice?”; she laughs and pauses before answering. “I really wish I knew,” she admits. “Right now, Lost Alice is kind of like an amalgamation of everything going on in my life right now, from music and just being generally lost in life, to my stance and my love life and kind of everything in between. Like, it’s very messy, but at the same time, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Lost Alice is, at its core, Alice’s evolution,  from Cambridge teenager sneaking off to London with an acoustic guitar strapped to her back, to the full-band rock frontwoman she always wanted to be. “I used to be an acoustic singer-songwriter, and I would come to London by myself, late-night train journeys my parents didn’t even know about, just to play these little gigs,” she recalls. “All these years later, I found my band and now I’m kind of happy doing my rock stuff again. So it feels good.”

That transition wasn’t as much of a jump as it might look from the outside. “The music that I write now is the music that’s always been in my head,” she explains. “I grew up on School of Rock and Bruce Springsteen and Avril Lavigne. I always heard my songs as full-band tracks, I just didn’t have the production skills to make them sound like that. So moving to rock felt less like a change and more like coming home.”

Her first taste of performing live gave her the sense that she was exactly where she needed to be. “My first show was at Dingwalls when I was like sixteen. I remember thinking, everyone is in the palm of my hand right now. This is where I want to be.”

That moment of connection has only grown stronger. The turning point, she tells me, was her headline show at The Victoria this past June. “The set felt so ingrained. People were singing back to me, they had their lighters up, it felt like a moment. I knew then this was all I was ever going to want to do.”

But Lost Alice isn’t just about the music, it’s about creating space for women in the scene. Alice is adamant that fan culture and groupie history have been written through a misogynistic lens. “Beetlemania wouldn’t exist without women. Elvis wouldn’t be Elvis without women,” she says. “The fact that groupie culture is dismissed as seedy or desperate? Absolutely not. I want to rewrite that.”

Her now-famous ritual during the song “Devil Woman” is part of that rewriting. “When we hit double time at the end, I call all the girls to the front. I tell them to take up all the space they want. And then they get a signature from me. The first time I did it, I left the venue and there were girls outside waiting for selfies, comparing signatures. That was when I knew I’d done the right thing. The girls are seen. That’s what it’s about.”

Being a woman in rock comes with both opportunity and challenge. “People underestimate me all the time. They don’t expect me to have that much frontwoman energy. But once they see it, they get it. And in the last six months, I’ve started getting opportunities I’ve never had before.”

Her song “Just Fine” might be the clearest statement of who she is. “I’ve had girls crying in my audience singing that song. The chorus is just ‘she’ll be just fine’ repeated, but it feels like a catharsis. It’s about the girl being the one who comes out okay in the end. That’s me to a T.”

Balancing the nine-to-six office job with the late-night gigs is something Alice takes in stride- but not without effort. “No one can multitask like women,” she laughs. “I’ll finish work, race to soundcheck, get changed in the bathroom, and be on stage an hour later. I’m not from a wealthy family, so I have to work to live. And no musician should feel ashamed of that. The struggling artist thing doesn’t work anymore, get your bag and be creative.”

As for what’s next, Alice isn’t slowing down. “We’ve already started booking festivals for next year, which is insane considering we’ve only been going six months. I want more girls coming to my gigs. I want to look at a crowd and not recognise anyone, just all these new faces finding us.”

She grins when I ask what she needs most right now. “A manager! Do you know how hard it is keeping track of a full-time job, gigs, festivals, interviews? But yeah, I also just want to release my tracks. They’re recorded. I just want them out in the world.”

And for Alice, the person? “Honestly, I want to get to the point where my music pays my bills. Lost Alice is going to save Alice. And then maybe I won’t be lost anymore.”