At just 20, Pixie Lott is an established hit artist who’s worked with plenty of pop royalty, and has just released her second album. She tells John Byrne about growing up in studios and on stage – and meeting her hero, Stevie Wonder.
Sometimes in this job you get to travel all over the world to meet up with people. This is not one of those times. In fact, along with any other interview done in the dressing-room area of RTÉ TV, it’s a handy, 20-second stroll from the RTÉ Guide office, through a door and into a place where red lights flash action rather than danger.
It’s just after two in the afternoon, and already Pixie Lott is perched inside her dressing-room, waiting for the call to do a sound check in preparation for her performance later that night on The Saturday Night Show.
By her teens Pixie Lott had attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, worked in a West End production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and appeared on BBC TV’s Celebrate The Sound of Music, as well as spending a lot of time in recording studios, I wonder if she was always one of those precocious kids who performed at every opportunity.
“Yeah, pretty much”, she says, smiling broadly. “I’ve been singing for ages. There are home videos of me when I was three, and singing at parties and stuff. I’ve always wanted to sing and write, and be on the stage, so yeah, from a young age I’ve always been auditioning, doing shows at school, doing shows on the West End, TV shows and stuff.”
But playing somebody else wasn’t what Pixie Lott really wanted to do with her life. While some people take to the stage to hide from themselves, she wanted to show off her own personality. “I always wanted to be a recording artist”, she insists. “So that’s why I started in a recording studio when I was really young, because I knew what I wanted to do.”
Given that she’s both talented and pretty, the inevitable recording contract arrived and, a pile of hit singles and a debut album later, she’s one of Britain’s top popstars. And she’s not 21 until January.
“I think it’s good start young”, she says. “Obviously I was ready to record when I was 14 or 15, and I was really frustrated. It didn’t happen until I was 18. But I think it was good to start young because, even though I felt frustrated because I didn’t get anything released for about four years, I felt like I learned loads in that time. The material got stronger, I got more confident. I got used to audiences. Because, going from singing in school or musical theatre, was very different to singing your own stuff.”
In her eagerness to learn, Lott quickly realised the value of working with others, be they writers, producers or fellow performers. “I like collaborating, especially songwriting with people”, she says. “On my first album I didn’t have any artist collaborations at all, so I really wanted to do some for this album. And I really enjoyed it. It’s cool when you’re with another artist and you both bring something different to the table. It just keeps it fresh.”
It also enabled her to work with her hero, Motown legend Stevie Wonder, who features on her recently released second album, Young Foolish Happy.
“It was amazing!” she recalls, noting that their original meet-up, in a restaurant in Los Angeles, happened purely by chance. “We were just in this restaurant at the same time he was coming in.” One of the people in Pixie’s company, Adrian Gurvitz (the guy who had a hit with the song Classic back in 1982), had also worked with Stevie. One thing led to another and they were introduced.
“So it was kind of weird”, she admits, while noting that it was typical LA. “When you go there, there are just so many opportunities because there’s always people round the corner.”
John Byrne
