It isn't the despairing screams of a million unemployed graduates. It isn't the crispy crackle of a credit crunch, nor even the icy blast of a financial freeze. The sound of 2009 is synthesisers and sequencers; it is a Blackpool accent and diminutive footwear. It is Victoria Hesketh aka Little Boots and she is the future of pop.
The death throws of bad guitar pop are still echoing through the charts, but in the coming months the electro-pop revivalists will smash the big time in a big way. Lady Gaga, La Roux and Passion Pit are just a few artists whose stars are set to shine. Little Boots though, has been picked ahead of all of them. She's been hyped for a while now and this month she came top of the BBC Sound of 2009. An industry wide poll of tastemakers that last year tipped Adele and Duffy for the top.
Little Boots is a small northern lass with frighteningly blonde hair and an ethereal amount of glittery mascara. With classical training from the age of four, she's been making music for years. She built a fan base on the internet through posting videos of herself playing covers on her Tenorion, an instrument made of light. It sounds perhaps more exciting than it actually is, the Tenorion is simply a sequencer with an LED panel on the front that visualises sounds. It seems though, like an original way of making music, so I began by asking Little Boots how if affected the way she produces music. I'm immediately met with a look of tiring exasperation, she's clearly been asked it before, and I sense a hint of dismay as if people think her sound revolves around this gimmick. "I don't use it to write and I don't use it in the studio, the internal sounds aren't very good so you might as well use a good sequencer on the computer in the studio. So it doesn't really affect the way I make music, but they way we play it live is completely affected by it. It's kind of the brain of it. We programme and upload all our samples and basslines and things like that. It's really great for live shows because it's really visual, with electronic music it's difficult to play it live."
About a year ago Little Boots wrote a song, Stuck on Repeat, that she originally intended for Kylie to sing. A demo was given to Joe Goddard (Hot Chip's superproducer) by a friend of a friend, much to her embarrassment "it was shit, I recorded it on a terrible mic on to Garage Band." Yet he loved the song and worked on an improved version, "the idea of it was already there, he just expanded all the themes and made it a lot more exciting." Stuck on Repeat is undeniably infectious, it was rinsed on dance floors across the country last year. The 7-minute extended mix is a beautiful piece of electro-pop. The instrumental introduction builds elegantly, you're hooked on that beat and you only realise you were desperate for the hook when it arrives (perfectly on time) fully two minutes into the track. This contrasts with the fairly derivative radio edit, where the hook is unceremoniously dumped on you barely 15 seconds into the song. The radio edit is an inferior song, but it is a more accessible sound, and when the aim of the game is to sell as many records as possible, pop demands accessibility. Yet music that's made to sell can mean a watered down sound only appealing to the lowest common denominator, with accessibility, to my mind, often equating to inferiority. Little Boots though couldn't disagree more, "the more people that can connect with it the better. I think if you write a good song then hopefully it will connect with all people across the board." Perhaps this is the point then, that is what pop music is about, regardless, Little Boots clearly saw through my bullshit. "I'm not into just doing some like, cooler thing that'll sell like 100 records to a bunch of scenesters in London. I don't care! I'm from Blackpool, I wanna be sold in Woolworths [nb. interview was conducted before the catastrophic demise of a national institution] on the seafront you know? I want my little brother to go in the shop down the road and be able to buy my CD."
With the choruses to Stuck on Repeat, Meddle and Every Little Earthquake all jostling for attention in my brain, I was determined to investigate the idea of catchiness. I wanted to know if catchiness itself was something Little Boots aimed for? "I dunno, I try and write hooks. I like hooks. I mean what's a song without a chorus? I dunno it's just a load of noise innit? I just love choruses. I love big choruses and beautiful melodies that everyone wants to get involved with. The crazy frog is catchy but it's a fucking annoying sound. It's not really about catchiness for me it's more about like classic, like, great choruses. If you can write a chorus that's really catchy but doesn't get annoying. You know those kind of songs that you can put on 20 times and you're not annoyed and you still think they're bloody great? That's normally a sign of a pretty good pop song."
Pop itself is increasingly difficult to define, with a hyphen being spliced between that word and every conceivable genre. Music that is resolutely not pop usually strays in to the realm of the weird. I had always thought that to make an abstract album that remains interesting is a difficult thing to do. Once again Little Boots debased my assumptions. "Pop music really challenges me, it's so much harder than being weird. It's pretty easy to make cool albums or weird albums. You can lock yourself away for a bit and be weird. It's not that hard. It's much harder to write Michael Jackson – Thriller, with an album of number ones."
People who know much more than I do keep telling me that the music Girls Aloud put out is innovative and brilliant. For the record Little Boots thinks "all their tracks sound the same, even though they're all pretty fucking good." My problem with Girls Aloud, and with so many similarly throwaway popstars, is that they don't make their music. They're just the branding that is stamped on what is apparently quite exciting pop music. With their matching dresses and contrasting hairstyles, they represent what I see, however pretentiously, as the anti-thesis of proper music, a total lack of artistic integrity. Little Boots makes music that is sometimes brilliant and often fairly tepid, but she is entirely her own person and her own brand. She doesn't have pop's most powerful voice, but she writes her own songs. Music that is made by people who fully own their sound, that is the kind of pop I can get behind. In response to a question on whether she feels pressured to look or act a certain way she just kind of shrugged, "not really, I just do what I want, I don't really think about it. I suppose girls are kind of pressurised to look sexy or whatever. I mean to be honest I'd rather look sexy than not sexy. But I just like what I like so I wear what I like, which just tends to be crystals and fancy stuff and glittery dresses and that's just what I like. It's not because I think I should try and be something that I'm not or anything like that. I just do what I want, the minute someone tries to tell what to do I just say no."
