Sprite at the End of the Tunnel

If the reader required proof of the radical structural changes going on in the music industry, you could do a lot worse than take Hot Press’s recent encounter with R&B/pop starlet Pixie Lott as a handy analogue. For a start, when we enter the Shelbourne Hotel, we’re greeted not by record company personnel but public relations emissaries from the Carphone Warehouse, who’ve organised the 18-year-old’s fleeting Dublin meet ‘n’ greet/publicity/press junket.

Our time with the talent, we are told by the publicist, will be five to ten minutes, a new minimum in conveyor-belt press processing. Upstairs we go to Ms Lott’s suite, where there’s a security guard posted, to meet with a second PR lady, who will sit in on our conversation. To her credit, our chaperone never interrupts the interview, but still, three’s a crowd.
More than ever, pop is machinery. Everything seems pre-destined, even arbitrary: the sales strategy, the market targeting, the endorsement deals, the producers and chart stats, the only variable being the talent’s name and number.
One could get all sniffy and dismiss an assignment like this as no job for a 40-year-old man, and a chat with my daughters later in the afternoon highlights the incongruity.
“Pixie Lott?” queried the 18-year-old Murphette (a QOTSA and Florence And The Machine fan). “Pixie Lott?” said the 13-year-old, (a Muse and Green Day devotee). “PIXIE LOTT?!!” exclaimed the 9-year-old (a Fleetwood Mac obsessive). No end of furrowed brows and wrinkled noses.
Except I happen to like pop music, and Ms Lott’s debut album is as spit-and-polished a modern R&B record as you’ll get. It ain’t Nina Simone, but the girl obviously has vocal talent. She’s also on the pig’s back: her first two singles ‘Mama Do’ and ‘Boys and Girls’ topped the UK chart and the album Turn It Up went top ten.
Today though, Victoria Louise Lott is snuffling and slightly poorly (her spirits and vocal chords will be greatly revived an hour later at a packed in-store promo). She seems like a down to earth kid, no more affected than any 18-year-old thumbing her phone and chattering in Starbucks, but she’s obviously been well-drilled in media handling, and already possesses the ability to answer all questions without saying anything remotely repeatable. When we talk about her new single, the heartbreak ballad ‘Cry Me Out’, I ask Ms Lott if she has to have experienced an emotion in order to sing about it convincingly, or can she use her imagination, like an actor?
“I think you can kind of relate it to different things,” she says. “I’ve been heartbroken before, but not in a relationship situation, more with friends, and so you can kind of use that as an emotion. I love ballads, I just love stuff that has emotion in it. I sing a lot of Kings Of Leon, Jackson Five, I love anything that’s a got a little bit of soul in it.”
Ms Lott, it transpires, like so many modern R&B singers, first learned to sing secular soul in the houses of the holy.
“I went to, like, a church school when I was younger,” she says. “I did a gospel choir chorus, which I really enjoyed. But I think really my way into music was just the music that was played in my house, a lot of Stevie Wonder and Donnie Hathaway and Whitney and Mariah, and they just had that passion and taught me how to sing. My parents are not musical, but they love music.”
Ms Lott was enrolled in the Italia Conti Associates Saturday school in Chislehurst from the age of five. When her family moved to Essex, she attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. Presumably the experience taught her discipline?
“I think it kind of did,” she says, “’cos now when I do shows I don’t get nervous, it’s like second nature to me. It kind of teaches you how to perform in front of an audience, how to handle yourself. Because you’re put in so many situations where you have to audition all the time for shows, you’re just so used to it because it’s drummed into you.”
Barely into her tweenie years and Ms Lott was part of the chorus line for Roger Waters’s opera Ça Ira. Did she meet the composer?
“I met Roger Waters just briefly, it was really just a handshake though and that was it. We weren’t allowed to ask for his autograph because apparently that was ‘unprofessional’. I was only about 12.”
Not long after, the young incumbent was bunking off school to take meetings with Def Jam and Interscope executives.
“The first meeting I had with the label, I had to pretend to my school that I was at the dentist,” she recalls. “I went straight back to school and had maths, and I was so excited, I was buzzing, and I had to keep it a secret.”
Did she receive any particular guidance or counseling from her label handlers on account of being so young?
“No I haven’t had any, like, therapy or anything. I don’t feel at risk at all, I don’t like to get involved in any craziness, but I think if I did get into any trouble, I have such a great team... I don’t really get too phased by anything, my personality hasn’t really changed at all, the only thing that’s changed in my life is I’m all over the place all the time.”
So she hasn’t had a chance to do the usual rites-of-passage stuff – the summer job, the backpacking stint?
“No, I probably would have done that this year if I wasn’t doing this. My friends are doing that now. I’m still at home with my family, and when I’m in the UK I have to be in London most of the time, so I have to get up two hours earlier to travel, so it’d make more sense for me to get a place in London.”
Does she ever bunk off, go AWOL?
“No, I can’t. I’m not allowed!”