The new dynamic: with fellow UK innovators and her own prodicious talent, Little Boots finds the brilliance in pop

Fader, The, Jan-Feb, 2009 by Kim Taylor Bennett

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On a wet, blustery day in mid-November, Victoria Hesketh arrives in the chilly city of Brighton, England after an hour-long flight from Hamburg, Germany and a two-hour van ride to the coast. She is here for her show at Coalition, a chrome-interiored club just yards from the squalling sea. Yesterday she played an Urban Outfitters in-store before getting trashed at a warehouse party. Today she's feeling rumpled from her hangover and the lingering cold she caught in New York that found her getting "totally wired on hardcore American flu drugs." In spite of all this, Hesketh remains a sparky chatterbox.

Hesketh, who records and performs as Little Boots, natters away backstage while rooting through her exploding suitcase, while lining her blue eyes, while braiding her platinum hair, while sending emails and even while mixing her latest downloadable compilation--meticulously fussing with the tracks until '80s italo disco tune "Sexy Teacher" by Check Up Twins blends seamlessly into the glacial electronica of Fan Death's "Veronica's Veil." "I have to be productive all the time, always multi-tasking, thinking about tomorrow, the next week," she explains over a cup of tea, still hours away from her 1AM set time. "My brother's got ADD really bad. I'm okay because I channel it in my music, but all my family has a mild strain of it. We all talk one hundred miles an hour. Back home everyone is bouncing off the walls. It's like a bus station!"

Tonight she's feeling particularly antsy because her first ever performance on Later ... With Jools Holland will soon be televised. The show has long been a milestone for British musicians, and on this episode she reworked her slinky synth single "Meddle" amidst the lineup of Al Green, Damon Albarn, Fleet Foxes and The Killers. For this rendition she stripped her song of its dancefloor gloss, reducing the accompaniment to her piano, her Stylophone and her trademark Tenori-On--a Japanese sequencer that visually represents beats and samples in LED lights. "It was one of the scariest experiences of my life!" she says, although she seems deliriously excited about meeting Killers frontman Brandon Flowers. "I was such a fan girl," she says, her voice ratcheting up an octave. "I kept trying to crack jokes. So embarrassing!" Afterwards she met up with her mom and dad, who traveled to London for the taping from her native Blackpool--England's resort town of yesteryear. "I think it was the moment my dad understood that this is not just some teenage dream that's been going on for a bit too long," says the twenty-four-year-old.

"Meddle" was produced by Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, who says he was inspired by Britney Spears' "Toxic." But it's really "Stuck on Repeat," another Goddard-assisted track, that's caused the overly-eager to tag her with the shuddersome title "The Future of British Pop." With entranced lyrics that echo the song's hypnotic pulse, everything from the sleigh bell jingle to the Moroder synth-throbs create a dynamic synergy in "Stuck on Repeat" that pop royalty blows million-dollar budgets looking for. Hesketh originally penned the song with Kylie Minogue in mind. It was recorded in Goddard's cramped bedroom.

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Hesketh caught the attention of Later's producers after a video of her performing "Meddle" in her bedroom was featured on YouTube's frontpage. It is her personal channel on the video-sharing website that has mostly defined her public perception so far. On it she performs alternate versions of her own songs and "Funtime Covers" where she reinterprets chart toppers. Often dressed down in a T-shirt or her pajamas, Hesketh gives Estelle's "American Boy" a piano virtuoso flair, trades robotosized tween angst for soul on Miley Cyrus' "See You Again" and turns hands-in-the-air house anthem "Bullet in the Gun" by Planet Perfecto into "Bullet in the Fun" by beginning it as a sultry dive bar ballad before she sets her Tenori-On to make-your-own rave. "[The videos] really connect with people because I'm just genuinely in my bedroom dicking around," Hesketh says. "I'm a real person in a dodgy bedroom in East London, playing piano and singing into a webcam."

Hesketh started doing the covers as a sanity-preserving exercise as she tried to write her own music, but found that deconstructing the hits was an unexpectedly useful tool. "When you have big, shiny pop music, people just think it's come out of a machine," she says. "I want people to see the process."

As her friend Dev Hynes, who records as Lightspeed Champion, adds, "She's the only other person who is as obsessed as I am with structures and forms in pop music. She'll dissect songs with me for hours." As Little Boots, Hesketh gives her penchant for pop free reign. She calls herself "a cheese machine," but as Jas Shaw of Simian Mobile Disco, who produced her track "Ghost," notes, she balances her populist side with savvy collaborative choices that lead to innovative results. "She's really up for trying stuff out and that's reflected in the people she's worked with, people with a more leftfield aesthetic, like Joe Goddard and Joe Mount of Metronomy," he says. "Usually when you get people in the studio you're desperately searching for hooks, with her there's a barrage of them."