Little Boots has big shoes to fill thanks to media pressure
Victoria Hesketh, better known as the English electro-pop sensation Little Boots, has been listening to a lot of ABBA lately. She says that’s what’s on her iPod right now. It’s not hard to discern where inspiration for her upbeat dance-synth style comes from. In a sense, she writes what she listens to. But when asked if she listens to her own music, she gave a resounding “no.”
By Kristi Jut [Entertainment Bureau Chief]
Victoria Hesketh, better known as the English electro-pop sensation Little Boots, has been listening to a lot of ABBA lately. She says that’s what’s on her iPod right now.
It’s not hard to discern where inspiration for her upbeat dance-synth style comes from. In a sense, she writes what she listens to. But when asked if she listens to her own music, she gave a resounding “no.”
“When you listen to [your own song] a hundred times in the studio, it gets a little weird,” she says.
Though Little Boots has just broken into the music scene in the past year, the 25-year-old artist isn’t new to music. She started making music at 13 and bought her first synthesizer at 17. While still in university, she joined the band Dead Disco. With them, she played several sold-out shows and even the Carling-Leeds music festival.
“I knew I wanted to go pro when I was 16,” Hesketh says. “I got my first synth when I was 17, but before that it was just me and a piano.”
Since those times when Little Boots was just Victoria with a piano, she has been named the 2009 artist to watch by Rolling Stone, the NME’s artist of the year and has played alongside acts like the Pet Shop Boys and Annie Lennox, “which was so cool because she is amazing!” she exclaims.
But is the pressure of those titles ever too much?
“I think there’s pressure on everyone,” she says, “the media needs to stop doing these things to people but there’s nothing I can do about it [so to be given those titles] I have to consider myself a little more lucky.”
And any musician would feel lucky given the opportunity to play the shows and festivals Little Boots has in the past year. She’s had the opportunity to perform a little differently in each separate experience.
“Playing festivals, there’s this different energy, a bigger energy—but the shows where it’s just me, it’s a little more intimate. I think it’s good to do both,” she concludes of her past year of touring.
When asked if there was one memorable experience from her past year on the road that’s made her grateful to be making music as a professional, she couldn’t pinpoint it.
“Not just one,” she says in her thick, feminine English accent. “It’s been the whole year, really.”
Little Boots plays Venue tomorrow, Mar. 5
