TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

January 10, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward 

Little Boots, who is Victoria Hesketh when she’s at home, is a twenty-four year old electronica musician from Blackpool. Even while she was studying for what turned out to be a first class honors degree in cultural studies from Leeds University, she knew that she wanted to be a performer.

She played with various bands; she appeared on the British version of American Idol, where her quirky talent only survived three rounds.  ”They said no, and then I cried and then went home,” she recalls.

She made videos in her bedroom (the musical equivalent of pajamas media) and posted them on YouTube and, before very long, the world was beating a path to her door.  Within a week of posting her video of her song “Meddle,” it had more than two hundred thousand viewers.

In November she appeared on the BBC’s important music performance show Later…with Jools Holland.

In December she flew to LA to work on her first album.

And yesterday she received the good news that she placed at Number One on the BBC’s Sound of 2009 poll of editors, critics, and broadcasters to find the most promising new talents likely to emerge in the upcoming year. (The first winner, in 2003, was 50 Cent; last year’s winner was the currently ubiquitous Adele.)

Now, with her appearance on TNN, the obvious next steps in Little Boots’ career trajectory are a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Nobel Prize.

Little Boots adopted her —let’s face it— less than felicitous stage name after watching Caligula (it’s the English rendering of the Emperor’s name).  Her instruments of choice are the a Tenori-On, a Stylophone, a synthesizer, and a conventional keyboard.  

The Tenori-On —“the world’s newest musical instrument”— is fast developing a devoted following.  It’s a 16″x16″ grid of LED switches that can be mixed and matched to create distinctive rhythmic patterns. The Stylophone is a small keyboard invented and sold in the late 1960s as a child’s toy. The keys are depressed by a hand-held pen and create a calliope-like sound. Little Boots joins the Stylophonic ranks of David Bowie, Rick Wakeman, Kraftwerk, and Belle and Sebastian.

Here’s one of her self-made bedroom tapes — in this case, the abovementioned “Meddle.”   The music begins about :40 in:

I remember all the things she did before.
I remember all the times she cried.
I remember all the things you promised her,
and no one heard.
I remember all the times you lied.

Don’t meddle with the heart,
or meddle with the mind,
or meddle with the things that are inside.
You don’t know what you’ll find,
you don’t know what she hides.
So don’t go meddling with the heart,
or messing with the mind,
or messing with the things that are inside.
You don’t know what you’ll find,
You don’t know what she hides.

She still remembers like it’s yesterday.
She still remembers you so well.
She still remembers all the things you swore,
forever more.
She still remembers but won’t tell.

‘Cause she’s a mixed up girl,
in a mixed up world,
and you know she don’t mean any harm.
So please understand,
if you take her hand
you’ll get much more than you bargained for.

And here’s the Boots/Meddle somewhat more polished performance on the breakthrough TV appearance on Jools Holland’s Later:

Here are some excerpts from an interview on the Later website.  And here’s a link to Little Boots’ music and blog site (where you can download a free mixtape).  This is a link to the BBC’s Sound of 2009 website where you can see —and listen to— the other finalists.

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