Interview VV Brown
From Leeds' Chapeltown to a rich cottage in North London, VV Brown's got global pop potential. Ben Johnson catches up with the singer who's going places
Interview: VV Brown
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Back in 2008, chart-topping Brit singer Estelle got in a spot of bother in an interview with the Guardian newspaper when she rather accurately pointed out that, at a time when both Duffy and Adele were flying the flag for British soul singers, there wasn’t a single black female face singing soul in the UK charts. After constant rebuttals from record labels in the UK, Estelle hit the US and instantly secured a deal with the head honcho at Atlantic. VV Brown - a media-savvy pop singer with big plans - is already looking west for even greater approval ratings. “It’s been tough over here,” she tells me. “It’s like if you’re not performing the traditional R&B music then people don’t know what to do with you, and every single thing seems to involve a fight. But I’m a fighter and I won’t ever stop.”
Fighting is something that the headstrong VV (or Vanessa) is used to, having already been involved in the music industry for a number of years and finally, at the age of 25, she has the album to prove it: Travelling Like the Light is a bubbling, sassy pop record, as much a testament to the singer’s musical talent as it is the image she has created around it. She’s both a vibrant clash of modern, urban Britain and a throwback to the style and sound of 1950s America.
In person, VV cuts a quaint, shy presence, but anyone who caught one of her many festival performances over the summer (including a stint on Glastonbury’s main stage) can testify that she’s very much a livewire with a voice that both croons and hollers. World domination is never a certainty, but at a time when the charts are overflowing with an abundance of strong, female soloists, she could not have picked a better time to try and make it. “The industry is really changing, it’s embracing real artists who are about the music and aren’t just falling out of clubs. With the likes of Florence and La Roux and Lilly Allen, people are loving music again. It seems like a bit of a contradiction; music’s becoming real again and the media’s getting worse.”
VV certainly keeps good company, but she knows that she’ll have to work that little bit harder given such an onslaught of striking popettes. Luckily, the sound ranges from good time rock’n'roll (see ‘Crying Blood’) to more contemporary soul leanings (see ‘Shark in the Water’), and is much closer to Amy Winehouse than it is the dippy hippy of Florence. And, importantly, those singers don’t seem to be having even half as much fun.
“If you’re a musician and you love music, I think it’s highly pretentious to just listen to one type of music, and I think that’s why my music’s quite hard to define,” she tells me, quoting everything from Elvis Presley, Blur and classical music as an influence. It’s a broad palette, but one that Brown seems eager to indulge. It has already earned her many plaudits, cited and hyped at the beginning of the year as a ‘One to Watch for 2009’. No pressure, then. “That’s part of the game. I feel very flattered. And it’s nice, but I’ll keep my feet on the ground.” This is reassuring, especially when I hear her describe her new-found media attention as “delusional”.
This, if it is true, is troubling, as VV is a paparazzi dream - strikingly fashionable and photogenic, she can be regularly spotted in style mags and weekly glossies the country over. When we meet backstage at V Festival, her huge flattop fringe is covered by a dark blue visor, the scale of which is in danger of catching the attention of Lady Gaga in the opposite tent, or her US label mate Katy Perry, who is also stridently advocating the vintage pop look. Her enterprising antics don’t stop in the studio, either: check out VVVintage.com, the singer’s own online boutique store, where her new designs include ruffled sleeves, retro block dresses and big shoulders. Yes, she has fallen foul of the fame game, but, so she tells me, through no fault of her own. “It’s not real,” she says. “I’ve been doing this so long that I now realise the realities of everything in the industry - I’m not into falling out of clubs and being friends with celebrities. I’d rather make music, do a gig, go home, eat tomato soup and watch ‘Coronation Street’.”
Home, for now at least, is her own cottage in North London, but she still has strong family connections to Chapeltown, Leeds, of which the northern hospitality helps her to avoid the “bubble” of London. “I really like Yorkshire people,” she says. “I think they’re really friendly and funny, down to earth and very intelligent. There are stereotypes about the accent but they’re really clued up. That’s quite a generalisation - all the northerners I’ve met are cool.”
13 November. The Cockpit, Swinegate, LS1 4AG, 0113 244 1573, 7pm, £7.50
Posted on Wednesday 14th October 2009
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