"She’s the coolest”: Billie Eilish on her new-found appreciation of a ‘00s pop-punk icon

Billie Eilish’s arrival on the pop scene felt like a breath of fresh air, but the star says that she’s come to the realisation that she’s taken a certain amount of inspiration from another female artist who made a similarly big impression in the early ‘00s.

Step forward one Avril Lavigne, who Eilish says laid the groundwork for her singular style. In a joint interview with her brother Finneas for the LA Times , the brother and sister duo say that they recently spent an evening watching Lavigne’s videos, and something about her look was immediately familiar.

“I was like, ‘This is so me,’” says Eilish. “She was one of the first women who was dressing kind of like a boy, and I was so drawn to that. She’s the coolest.”

It’s easy to forget just how massive Lavigne was back in the day, to the extent that she eventually got her own Fender signature guitars.

Birds Of A Feather, of course, has now become a phenomenon, but Eilish admits that it took her a while to come around to it.

“I had moments of thinking, ‘Oh, my God, ‘Birds of a Feather’ is our worst song,’” she says. “I thought it was too poppy and that everyone was gonna hate it.”

Eilish is currently in the midst of her Hit Me Hard And Soft tour, which she says is “very different” to her previous jaunts. Performed in the round, it’s the first to be backed by a full band and not to feature Finneas at every show, though he did pop up at her Newark date on 9 October, where he helped out on Happier Than Ever and - you guessed it - Birds Of A Feather.