Charlotte OC reveals she was racially abused on a London train after EU Referendum

Singer-songwriter Charlotte OC has revealed she was racially abused for the first time following the EU referendum.

The musician, who is the daughter of a half-Malawi, half-Indian mother and an Irish father, was told that she “couldn’t sit” with other passengers on a train to Wimbledon last summer.

“I’ve never been attacked before,” she told ES Magazine. “And then, a week after the Brexit vote it happens, this Glaswegian woman was yelling at me like, ‘You can’t sit with us. Go and sit down there, I don’t want you near me.’

"She went for me and tried to remove me from my seat: pointing to an Asian woman and wanting me to sit with them.”

The 26-year-old rising star — real name Charlotte O’Connor — has written a song about the experience for her album, Careless People.

After signing to Stranger Records in 2013, she released a series of EPs, and was tipped as “one to watch” by the BBC.

But she felt “pressurised by the buzz” and took two years out to concentrate on the new album, inspired by The Great Gatsby.

She recorded it as she went through a break-up and fell in love again.

“I was being careless, and caring too much, all at the same time,” she said. You’re very careless between the ages of 22 and 25.”

After a stint in east London, the singer is living back with her parents and sister in her home town, Blackburn, to “just unwind”.

But she plans to move back to the capital soon. “London is my favourite city in the world,” she said. “I feel like I grew up here. I feel like it’s my city.”