Title: Pixie Lott
Description: Funky Pop Amy Winehouse 2.0
Description: Funky Pop Amy Winehouse 2.0
chilln_chick2002 - April 23, 2009 06:30 PM (GMT)
| QUOTE |
Pixie Lott: Next year’s cover girl Aged just 18 and from Essex, she has the most authentic pop voice in years Outside the post-Brits party at Claridge’s hotel, in London, an army of paparazzi is turning feral. A succession of limousines and people carriers disgorge their celebrity cargo and the flashbulbs ignite. One especially violent explosion occurs when a diminutive blonde is practically carried from her car and through the chaos by security guards. But it isn’t Duffy, the triple Brits winner. It is an 18-year-old from Essex, unknown for now, but who will, with luck, be wresting trophies from the competition in years to come. One of the best and most naturally gifted female singers this country has produced in years, Pixie Lott looks as if she was born for the part as the paps snap furiously. “I think,” she says drily, a few days after the awards, “they thought I was Lady GaGa.” Could she imagine getting used to the lenses? “I do quite like it,” she laughs. “You come out of some place and you’re almost blinded.” For reasons she cannot quite explain, Lott has emerged from a family she describes as “the least musical in the world”, and a stage-school education that might have reduced a weaker person to bland uniformity, with a voice that is thrillingly powerful and utterly authentic. She may have been working with a battalion of top songwriters on her forthcoming debut single and album, but Lott has, in the process, managed to hold on to the quality and originality that won her both a management contract at 14 and, after a solo performance for the American music executive Antonio “LA” Reid, a major-label deal when she was a year older. Where does she think that voice came from? “I can’t really describe how it happened,” she shrugs. “It’s just there. You’re born with it, I suppose. I was always singing round the house, in the car, literally the whole time. And people would say to my mum, ‘She should do something with that.’ But I don’t know where it came from. It’s just something that I have to do.” In conversation, Lott’s callowness betrays itself in slightly breathless replies such as: “I love all aspects of the performing arts — I love dancing, acting — but my passion is singing.” You get a strong sense, too, of the media training she admits she has received: she is diplomatic and guarded to a fault. On record, on the other hand, she is an altogether different proposition. The album track Hold Me in Your Arms, which she co-wrote when she was only 14, manages, thanks to an extraordinarily subtle vocal, to be both tender and forlorn. Elsewhere — thank God — Lott eschews today’s tiresomely ubiquitous retro 1960s stylings in favour of a sonic template that maxes on that lovely moment, just before disco, when bubble-gum pop and soul exchanged vows. The album is rammed with potential hit singles, among them her first release, Mama Do. Duffy-style, it is the product of three years of work, yet Lott comes across as unmanufactured where she could so easily have been a frighteningly peachy-keen, Bonnie Langford-like barnstormer. “You mean the whole stage-school thing?” she mock-horrors. “Well, [Italia Conti] was definitely more about musical theatre — you know, all smiles and jazz hands and all that. But they knew what I wanted to do, and I don’t think they’d have tried to take that away from me.” If Taylor Swift, the 19-year-old, MySpace-savvy American singer we featured here last week, represents the US chapter of social networking’s march towards a monopoly of marketing and chit-chat, Lott has been keeping her own growing fan base here up to date with a series of video diaries. In them, you can trace her journey from first experiences of songwriting with some of the industry’s biggest hitters to the market-ready product of today. Now, three years after signing her, Lott’s US and UK labels are ready to roll: if they get this right, they’ll have another Amy or Duffy on their hands. Is she going to concentrate on her home territory initially? “Definitely the UK first,” she says, breathless again, “because that’s where I’m from. But the idea is definitely worldwide. That’s the plan.” It is only when discussing the possibility that she might have to move to America in order to make it there that Lott’s demeanour darkens slightly. “Everyone says you have to be careful when” — not “if”, you’ll notice — “you move to LA, because you can get involved in all that crap, fake stuff. That when I release stuff and all that, I will get people who want to be my friends because of what I do rather than who I am. That’s the fact that scares me — that people want a piece of you. I’m naive in that way, in that I trust everyone. I don’t want to be done over by someone.” Swift toured sports stadiums and sang the pre-game national anthem to secure herself a ready-made audience. In Britain, it doesn’t quite work like that. For the wannabe star, it’s either The X Factor, or — as the Spice Girls were to demonstrate so successfully — the classified ads in The Stage newspaper. And it was the latter that set Lott on the path to where she is now. “I'd always be going through it,” she says, “looking for open auditions. This one said something like, ‘Seeking the next pop diva, age 16-21.’ I was about 14 at the time, so I wasn’t actually old enough. But I was nagging my mum, ‘Please take me, please take me’, and she was saying, ‘It’s probably a con.’ She gave in in the end, and there was this huge queue, loads of girls. It was for a management deal. I sang a couple of Mariah Carey songs, and I got it. [The advertiser] became my manager and flew me out to New York. That’s how it all started. I lied and said I was 16. And a couple of weeks later, I went, ‘By the way. . . ’ ” Being flown across the Atlantic at just 14; fibbing to school about having a dentist’s appointment in order to stand in a hotel room and emote at a leading music-biz player: these are not normal activities for the average teenager. And early and extreme exposure to fame can prove disastrous for some. Yet Lott, just as she seems to approach the unusual nature of her situation with a resolutely happy-go-lucky attitude, does not look like a future candidate for rehab or career freefall. For that very reason, I suspect, she will be viewed by some with suspicion: we like our singers tormented, not trouble-free; we want to feel that they’re always on the run, in flight, the devil at their heels. The snob in me clamours to side with the purists, to conclude that Lott is, indeed, no more than a note-perfect, well-drilled mouthpiece who was in the right place at the right time, to view the inevitable (and inevitably oppressive) marketing push as irrefutable evidence of her plasticity. Then you listen to Hold Me in Your Arms, or the perfect, attitudinal radio pop of Turn It Up, or the wrestled-to-the-floor torch-song kiss-off that is Cry Me Out, and you think, nah, maybe not. Is she ready for the brickbats as well as the praise? “I kind of take it all with a pinch of salt,” she says cheerfully. “Everything changes all the time in this business.” Pixie Lott, then. A veteran already, at just 18. And coming to a post-awards red carpet near you soon. Keep your camera handy. |
TommyTank. - April 23, 2009 07:54 PM (GMT)
I really like it!
And shes SO beautiful
Thanks for sharing! :)
And shes SO beautiful
Thanks for sharing! :)
blaketat - April 24, 2009 09:33 AM (GMT)
I found her songs, really enjoyable.
Thanks heaps Keisha!
Thanks heaps Keisha!
chilln_chick2002 - April 24, 2009 06:57 PM (GMT)
She reminds me a teenage Duffy but without the freckles and with better music, lol.
Album teaser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWFQGjcVoqU
Album teaser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWFQGjcVoqU
blaketat - April 25, 2009 05:09 AM (GMT)
| QUOTE (chilln_chick2002 @ Apr 24 2009, 06:57 PM) |
| She reminds me a teenage Duffy but without the freckles and with better music, lol. |
I agree.
SugaNET.info - April 26, 2009 02:30 PM (GMT)
Nice music! And she looks very cute and pretty!
* I like the Mama Do video!
* I like the Mama Do video!
chilln_chick2002 - June 8, 2009 03:48 PM (GMT)
BUMP!
She is currently #1 on iTunes.
She is currently #1 on iTunes.
SugaNET.info - June 8, 2009 07:20 PM (GMT)
| QUOTE (chilln_chick2002 @ Jun 8 2009, 05:48 PM) |
| BUMP! She is currently #1 on iTunes. |
whaaaaat :P
chilln_chick2002 - July 27, 2009 12:58 PM (GMT)
Official music video for Boys & Girls:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gpqL3m7iwo
I like Pixie, but this song is shit! The video isn't impressive and one outfit in particular is definitely not age appropriate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gpqL3m7iwo
I like Pixie, but this song is shit! The video isn't impressive and one outfit in particular is definitely not age appropriate.
Aidan - July 28, 2009 09:10 AM (GMT)
I really like the new edit of Boys And Girls, it has a new feel to it.
W2K - July 28, 2009 10:09 AM (GMT)
I had the great pleasure of seeing Pixie support The Saturdays. She's brilliant, and I love Boys & Girls.
Rich - August 12, 2009 01:53 PM (GMT)
Same, she was amazing supporting them!!
Although I really hate that Girls and Boys song :(
Although I really hate that Girls and Boys song :(
lola - August 13, 2009 11:08 PM (GMT)
i love Boys and Girls, the video is great as well but too many GaGa things are there
Pixie looks amazing [scenes with pink lips and 'ponytail']
demo version of the song was shit so i was worried about it being a single but there's nothing to worry about anymore!
oh and i LOVE Here we go again [aka I wish I was there]
should be next single :angel
Pixie looks amazing [scenes with pink lips and 'ponytail']
demo version of the song was shit so i was worried about it being a single but there's nothing to worry about anymore!
oh and i LOVE Here we go again [aka I wish I was there]
should be next single :angel
Natalie.x - August 15, 2009 02:25 PM (GMT)
Love her latest song!
She looks so awesome in the video too.
She looks so awesome in the video too.
lola - September 5, 2009 10:09 AM (GMT)
i've just listened to the album preview
and i'm disappointed
too many similar and slow songs
i wish there were powerful songs like Boys and Girls
hope they didn't overproduced Here We Go Again too much...
and i'm disappointed
too many similar and slow songs
i wish there were powerful songs like Boys and Girls
hope they didn't overproduced Here We Go Again too much...
Tom - September 9, 2009 04:24 PM (GMT)
Here We Go Again is the best. I love her!
lola - September 9, 2009 04:45 PM (GMT)
i think the same i just hope it wasn't overproduced too much. the new sample of it seems to be great finally [for me]
Aidan - September 13, 2009 01:02 PM (GMT)
:o Leaked. Just downloading.