She could have been the next Taylor Swift. Then tragedy struck

Telegraph

09-04-2025

Amidst the sea of lasers, confetti, man-sized Zorbs and fancy-dressed fans that characterise a typically atypical Flaming Lips concert, it's the girl in the red parrot costume who catches the eye of frontman Wayne Coyne.
'She's perched on someone's shoulders, so I can see her while we're performing,' remembers the frontman of that June 2018 night at Montana's Kettlehouse Amphitheatre. 'This parrot-suited woman, and she's excited. But that's not that unusual.'
Later that month, his group headlining the Sled Island Festival in Calgary, Coyne again spots Parrot Girl in the crowd. 'I'm sort of like: 'Oh, yeah, you're this freak,'' says Coyne, approvingly ''I see you're here again.' I don't know that she's just 11-years-old. And [that night] she left a note for me on the tour bus, about us meeting, how we should do music, she's a musician, stuff like that. And then we did.'
The girl was Nell Smith. She was born in Leeds General Infirmary on July 17 2007 to English parents, Jude Smith and Rachel Cline. When Nell was five the family relocated from Yorkshire to Canada, her parents keen for, in the words of Jude, 'a complete lifestyle change'.
Their sensitive, music-obsessed, skater-girl daughter fell particularly, precociously hard for The Flaming Lips, the triple-Grammy-winning acid-crazed alt.rock Oklahoma band. Soon Nell and her parents were driving to as many Lips gigs as they could, the British family road-tripping far from their adoptive home in Fernie, a small ski town in British Columbia.
After he found Nell's note on the tour bus, Coyne – an unusual rock star in that he prizes connection on every level – texted Jude. He became friends with the family and encouraged their adolescent daughter in her nascent musical aspirations. Nell began teaching herself guitar and Coyne set her the task of learning six Lips songs in a week. Then, when the pandemic nixed plans for Nell to record her own compositions with Coyne at the band's studio in Oklahoma City, he suggested they record versions of Nick Cave songs, starting with Into My Arms.
That nine-strong set of covers became well-received album 2021 Where the Viaduct Looms, released on The Flaming Lips' British indie label, Simon Raymonde's Bella Union. That led to Nell joining the band onstage during their 2022 UK tour to sing Red Right Hand. And that, in turn, led to Nell making her own album.
Anxious was recorded in Bella Union's Brighton studio in spring 2023 when Nell was 15. Jack and Lily Wolter, the brother-sister musical duo who comprise Penelope Isles, helped her finish and produce her songs. The plan was to release the album this spring when Nell, having finished school, would have the time and focus to promote the record.
On October 6 last year, shortly after filming the video for a forthcoming single titled Split In the Sky, Nell died in a car crash in British Columbia. She was 17.
Six months later, Anxious – a lovely, 10-song collection of sunshine indie-pop – is coming out as planned, even as everyone involved in Nell's life and music remains, understandably, in raw grief. Remembering Calgary, and the moment in his band's set when he would climb into what he calls the 'space bubble' and bounce over the audience's head, Coyne tells me: 'I sang David Bowie's Space Oddity while I was in the bubble. There's [fan] videos of Nell and I, and we're touching hands through the space bubble.
'I'm singing to the whole audience, but there's moments where I'm singing just to her,' the 64-year-old continues of a scene that Nell herself memorialised in her suitably buoyant song Boy in a Bubble, a personal tribute to Coyne and everything he did for her. 'So, a special moment. Not because she's gonna die later. But these things are just ridiculous, when you think about them afterwards. When things happen.'
When he video-calls from the Smiths' home in Fernie, his daughter's Gretsch acoustic guitar hanging on the wall behind him, I ask Jude Smith: how difficult was the decision to release Anxious?
'It wasn't difficult at all, actually,' replies the 49-year-old. 'I remember messaging Simon [about it], probably only a week after Nell died. It galvanised the need to get it out, really. She'd worked so hard on it. I know parents are biased, but I think it's a brilliant piece of work.'
His daughter, for all the gung-ho, go-getting spirit she displayed in first connecting with Coyne, was nervous about the album. And, of course, it was a 15-year-old who had made this record called Anxious, a girl as anxious as anyone is at 15. 'She had imposter syndrome. But we knew that people were going to love it. So it just made it really, really, even more important to make sure it got out and got heard.'
He and Rachel's daughter (they also have two sons, Ike, 13, and Jed, 20) was 'quite unique from four or five. She was one of those kids who would just hold everyone's attention. She was really good at having conversations with people way older. She was very captivating.'
Her father can understand why his daughter and Coyne gravitated towards each other: both supremely caring people who, again, prize the human touch. Jude relays a story his mother back in England recently reminded him of. 'We were somewhere [on holiday] and there was a little girl with Down's syndrome. She was struggling, scared to go down the slide. Nell was there straight away, with her for two hours, helping until she got down the slide.' Another girl, the autistic daughter of a friend of Jude's, 'struggles with friendships and relationships. And right through school, Nell would go around and hang out with her when no one else would. She had this way of breaking down these – sorry.'
Jude's tears come quickly, but he quickly regains his composure. 'Just breaking down barriers, because she wanted to make people feel good.'
No wonder that the joy-bringing Flaming Lips became her band. At their concerts, the pre-teen would make her parents take her right into the middle of the crowd. Nell would be on Jude's shoulders for the whole set, parroting all the songs. 'People would take photos of her!' smiles Jude. ''Who the hell is that little kid?''
A letter to her musical idol, more connection, was the logical next step for the super-fan adolescent. Jude says that his sister recently sent him a photograph of an earlier note that Nell had written to Coyne but never sent. 'It said something like: 'My name's Nell, I'm 10 years old, and I love your music, and my dream is to go on tour and sing on stage with The Flaming Lips. I'll do anything if I can do that. I would die if I could do that.' All this stuff.
'And all of that came true,' he adds. 'She wrote it down when she was 10. And it all happened. It's just bizarre.'
When I video-call Coyne, he's sitting in his car at home in Oklahoma City. The Flaming Lips have collaborated with many artists including Cave, Yoko Ono, Miley Cyrus, Kesha and Erykah Badu. For him, partnering with an unknown, untrained English kid not yet in her teens 'really worked. What Nick Cave does, what a Nick Caves song does, and the status of what he's about, had such a great contrast with Nell. She's like: 'I don't even know what a Nick Cave is! And I don't know these songs. But if you want me to sing them, Wayne, I'll try.' All that set us up for this great combination.'
Nell's was a rare talent, somewhere between Laura Marling and Taylor Swift in terms of her precocious teen artistry. As Coyne puts it of his mentee: 'She's not trying to be worldly, or cynical, or tough. She's not trying to be anything. She's just seeing if she can sing the song… It's the sort of thing, if someone else had made it, I would go: 'Oh, wait a second, I've got to hear this.' And I would be pleasantly surprised that it's so genuine and so sincere.'
Cave, certainly, was impressed. 'This version of Girl in Amber is just lovely,' he wrote in September 2021 on his Red Hand Files of the album's opening track. 'I was going to say Nell Smith inhabits the song, but that's wrong. Rather she vacates the song, in a way that I could never do. I always found it difficult to step away from this particular song and sing it with its necessary remove. Just got so twisted up in the words, I guess. Nell shows a remarkable understanding of the song, a sense of dispassion that is both beautiful and chilling. I just love it. I'm a fan.'
Bad Seed and long-term Cave wingman Warren Ellis was similarly moved. He met the 'bubbling with enthusiasm' Nell backstage at London's Victoria Park, after the Australians played All Points East in 2022. 'She was a bit younger than my kids, but she seemed a normal teenager,' he tells me. 'But her way into the songs was unique. It was a different look at the songs, and her voice was so fabulous. Nick was the one who said: 'Listen to this, it's really amazing.''
When it came to making Nell Smith's own album, twentysomething sibling duo Penelope Isles were a more logical choice of creative partners. Raymonde describes the Wolters, who are signed to his label, as strong writers, producers, multi-instrumentalists 'and super-collaborators'. Not to mention nice people 'who loved Nell's music. It made [the album-making process] not stressful in the way it could have been if we'd chucked in someone so young to a scenario where they might feel a bit intimidated.'
Recalling the period in spring 2023 when Nell came to Brighton to record, Lily Wolter describes 'a lot of sitting and picking apart her little brain and working out what we were going to write songs about. There was a fair to be done, but that was the best part.'
Her label boss, a former musician himself (Raymonde was in Cocteau Twins), was happy for Nell to take her time, to find her voice and her footing. As he points out, 'there are lots of kids on YouTube and TikTok doing covers all day long.' But to move beyond that, to become an artist in your own right? 'The music industry has never been more volatile and peculiar than it is right now – especially if you're a young musician starting out. It's impossible to get a gauge on 'can I have a career in music?', because the model is telling you most probably no.'
Jude Smith says his daughter was indeed at sixes and sevens about whether to pursue a career in music. Having finished high school a year early, 'she was having a real crisis of confidence'. So last year her parents sent her back to the UK, 'to get her feet on the ground and decide what she wanted to do next.' A two-week stay extended to six. 'She travelled around. She got into a nightclub in Leeds underage! She spent time with her grandparents and her cousins and friends from back in England. She had a great time.'
On her return to Canada, a notion to study in England eventually gave way to a decision to attend Selkirk College in Nelson, British Columbia. But the music course there, says Jude, 'is quite a technical course, and she'd never studied music. And the timeframe that she had to learn music theory for the entrance exam was too short.' Nell failed the exam, so decided to start a hairdressing course last autumn, 'and her plan was to then go into the music course this year'.
I ask Jude if he minds telling me the circumstances of the crash. 'Oh, man,' he says, exhaling heavily. 'Yeah, I don't mind telling you. She was on her own in the car, driving to her boyfriend's at a ridiculous time of night, on a road that was quite remote. And she rolled the car. I've been to the location, and there's just no explanation for it. I've just got a vision – there's quite a lot of animals on the road there, so maybe she saw a deer and swerved. There were no other vehicles involved. There's no one else there. She was on her own in the car. She hadn't been drinking. It's just a crazy, ridiculous tragedy. There's no explanation for it, really.'
I apologise for asking. 'That's OK. Weirdly, I need to talk about this stuff with people. In a perverse way, it helps.'
With the hazy, gauzy, atmospheric Anxious, Nell's voice and memory live on. Her posthumous legacy continues in other ways, too: Jude and Rachel have created the Nell Smith Memorial Fund to offer financial support to young musicians. Their aim is to raise $100,000, with annual grants of $10,000 dispensed every year for 10 years. 'And probably longer than that, because the money will get invested and it'll earn interest,' says Jude. The initiative will 'bounce between the UK and Canada… And as of this morning, we've raised $30,000.'
Spiritually and financially, Nell Smith's artistry ­– blazing but inchoate, happening but not-yet-wholly-happening – is the gift that keeps on giving. With Anxious, and with the Fund, she's still doing what she did for that kid on holiday, or that kid at school: making people feel good.
'I think I want to do music and I want to be a musician,' Nell said in a short documentary, Stand Here, filmed around those May 2022 UK shows with The Flaming Lips and released earlier this year. 'I sometimes wish that it started a little bit later in my life. I do sometimes wish that I could just live a normal teenager life.'
'We're eternally grateful for all the gifts that she's left behind,' says her father. 'It's really, really hard because it's so raw now, but her dreams came true. And she left so much behind for people now and in the future. And there's more stuff. There's demos on this computer,' he says, gesturing to the one he's using to talk to me, 'that will probably get turned into something at some point. There's quite a lot of stuff that'll keep going. We're just focusing on her legacy and what we can do to cement that.'
Listening back to the music he made with the remarkable young woman he knew for almost half of her cruelly-too-short life, Wayne Coyne can still hear 'her enthusiasm, her love, how much she cares. You can hear Nell trying. Those are all things that you want to hear in music. Sometimes there's so many overconfident people in the world! And with Nell, you get this great [sense of] – and I think she would be the first to say – 'I don't know what I'm doing… but I want to do it anyway.' That's what I would applaud.'
And she did all that by the age of 15. 'Yeah. And part of her power would have been: I'm gonna keep learning. I'm gonna keep exploring. I'm gonna keep becoming. That's the part of it that's just too hard to bear. Because she's already gone.'