Chantelle Marquez:
From
runaway to rising music star

Chantelle Marquez sits in a café, dressed head-to-toe in black, her signature dark hair falling over her face as she stirs her tea. Her Essex accent cuts through the noise, sharp, direct, no-nonsense. “I’ve been writing raps since I was six,” she says, smirking. Back then, she was a kid in care, bouncing between homes, glued to Channel AKA, filling her notebooks with lyrics that no one was paying attention to. By 12, she was in detention, again, but this time in the performing arts department, passing the time by writing. Then came the unexpected, a teacher forced her to audition for a school play... during detention. She wasn’t that interested, but she did the performance anyway. She got the part. It wasn’t just another day, but one that proved she was never meant to be in the background. “That’s when I knew if I step up, people will listen.”

Chantelle had spent years moving from one care home to the next, from one city to another, a runaway with no fixed ground beneath her feet. Music was always the constant, the thing she wanted most, but survival came first. “I was everywhere, trying to find my way,” she says, her fingers interlocked. There was no time for studios or stages when she was figuring out where she’d stay next. But when she started dancing in a strip club in her 20’s, the world opened up, just not in the way she expected. By then, she had already stepped into a fast-moving world, where “money, safety and danger, they were all conflated,” she says, talking mostly with her hands. Chantelle was living a life that most people only saw in films, high stakes, high reward, high risk. But there is nothing fictional about her ascent.

The path she found herself on was far from a straight line. High-profile criminals surrounded her,” I was caught in a cycle of excess and adrenaline.”  Loyalty meant everything, and stepping out of line meant losing it all. “It was hell, I didn’t have control back then,” she reminisces, chuckling softly to herself. In that world, music wasn’t the priority, it was background noise to a lifestyle that demanded her full attention. It wasn’t until she turned 28, that Chantelle finally found her way back to music. She spent her late nights, scribbling lyrics in her phone, sneaking in moments of creativity between the madness. The lifestyle that had consumed her no longer held the same allure. It wasn’t a clean break, but it was a necessary one. She chose music, and in doing so, chose herself.

At first, she was not taken seriously in the industry. “The first year, I was a joke to people.” She saw the dismissive nods, she heard the empty remarks. In her own words, she did not ‘give a flying f*ck.’ The industry didn’t roll out the red carpet for her or hand her a shortcut but a year later she was on the main stage at Abbey Park. Chantelle never asked for a seat at the table, she took it. “My musics gritty and honest, people can feel it.” There’s an urgency to her sound, an unfiltered rawness that doesn’t ask for permission. In the same year, the Filipino born musician was in the back of an Uber, when she heard her own voice coming through the speakers. ‘Pint in London’ was playing on BBC Radio 1. “I told the driver to turn it up,” she laughs, because whatever happened next, one thing was clear, she was in the game now. A song she wrote, her voice, playing on the radio. No mentor, no label push or industry co-sign. Just her.

Chantelle did not take the usual route into music, because there wasn’t one for her. “In America, you see dancers become artists all the time. Here? It’s rare. It’s weird.” But weird never put her off. “When you’ve been in the strip club, nothing can stop you, because you’re so used to setbacks, having to hold your breath, build resilience.” The strip club, as she puts it, “is a portal into a mad world,” and for four years, she moved through it. She’s seen men at their most powerful and their most pathetic and yet Chantelle admits, the music industry is still the hardest industry she’s ever worked in. “The lifestyles similar to an athletes,” she explains, “I follow a methodical routine, I have to stay healthy, keep disciplined in my diet and sleep well to sing and create music.” And when asked about the industry itself? She pauses and smiles, “Beautiful but savage…like me.”  And yet, for all its brutality, there’s a high that makes it worth it. “That feeling when you’re on stage, when you’re in complete flow state, it’s coming from a higher place.”

Chantelle knows exactly where she is headed. “Glastonbury, Leeds, Parklife,” she says, the weight of her ambition undeniable. But her vision extends far beyond the stage. “When I make it, I’m helping women in the sex industry.” Having witnessed firsthand the confines placed on women, she is determined to rewrite the narrative. Making it isn’t just about proving herself, it’s about caring for people, and making room for women whose stories do not fit the norm. From care homes to strip clubs to the music scene, her journey has been one of constant reinvention. “I’m a lover, a fighter, I’m focused and I’m hungry,” she says with smile like a Cheshire Cat.

It’s easy to paint her journey as a redemption arc, but Chantelle doesn’t see it that way, she didn’t escape a life, she expanded into a new one, carrying every version of herself forward rather than leaving them behind. She’s not surviving, she’s thriving. Instead of following the script, she has rewritten it. Her eyes are full of life and her last words to me are, “after every breakdown, there’s a breakthrough.” It’s a mantra she’s lived by, and the best part? Her breakthrough has only begun.