Get On Your...Little Boots

Victoria Hesketh is sitting in a private members club in East London discussing what she misses about her hometown of Blackpool. “Not really the donkeys or seaside, but I guess moving from there to London was quite a big deal,” she recalls, wistfully. “The main thing I miss about Blackpool is my family. It’s a cool place, you know? It’s an interesting place - but I just miss my family. I don’t pine for the pier or the promenade or anything. Although I miss being by the sea.”

It was in Blackpool – in her parents’ garage, to be more precise – where Hesketh last year began, rather unwittingly, laying the foundations to a pop career which, under her moniker Little Boots, has already seen her being tipped as this year’s brightest female talent. Armed with a keyboard, a Tenor-ion and a Stylophone - and spurned on by some encouragement from a friend - she began uploading videos of herself performing cover versions onto YouTube. Within months, Hesketh’s artist profile was one of the video-sharing website’s most subscribed; people just couldn’t get enough of the mysterious girl who looked like she’d just fallen out of bed. (Quite a lot of the times she had.) “It was literally just a joke that went…kind of too far.” Soon the 25-year old was tackling song requests from subscribers ranging from Wiley’s ‘Wearing My Roles’ to ‘Bullet In the Gun’ by Planet Perfecto.

But it was her own creation, ‘Stuck On Repeat’, which she says was initially written with the intention of giving it to Kylie or the Sugababes, that caught the attention of the music industry. The acoustic pop track was transformed last summer into an infectious dance anthem by Hesketh’s friend and Hot Chip star Joe Goddard. “The song didn't really go away,” she says. “Still now if I go to clubs I'll hear it getting played, it's just kind of never gone away which I think shows it's a good song really.”

Ever since, things have been moving at “hyper-speed” for Hesketh, who first tasted minor music success as a teenager with the all-female indie band Dead Disco. After additional songs and demos – including the similarly catchy ‘Meddle’ and ‘Mathematics’ - began circulating online, Hesketh was invited last November to perform on Later…with Jools Holland. Not only, she says, did her performance expose her to fans – “older fans” – who weren’t just aware of her through music blogs, it also had “great repercussions” professionally. One of those came at the start of January when she topped the BBC’s Sound of 2009 poll. (Previous winners include Adele, 50 Cent and Keane.)