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- The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2008
New Zealand's hipster pop queen Ladyhawke
Walking gawkily into the room, Pip Brown is a mess of crumpled urban-wear and ruffled blonde hair. Held together by a Patti Smith T-shirt, black leather jacket, hooded blue shirt, skinny black jeans and unlaced Doc Martens, Brown - aka Ladyhawke - doesn't exactly look like someone you'd go to for fashion tips. But she's fast becoming a name to drop in the music world, revered as much for her dress sense as for her 80s-referencing, melodic synth-heavy rock.
"It's really funny, that style icon thing," says the 27-year-old New Zealander, now relocated to London. For a start, she says, she doesn't wear women's clothes, like, ever. "I have this thing where I refuse to wear anything made for a female because I don't like conforming to gender stereotypes. It's so predictable to get girly-cut jeans and blouses. I wear men's clothes: jackets, shirts and shoes. It doesn't take away from my femininity."
And it certainly hasn't stopped Courtney Love and Kylie Minogue from becoming huge fans. Love recently put Brown in a list of her top artists, while Kylie contacted her management to say how much she loved Paris Is Burning, Ladyhawke's summer single, which evoked the expensive, polished sound of Fleetwood Mac in their late-80s pomp. So is a Kylie collaboration in the pipeline? "Kylie's awesome," she says. "I'd love to." How about Love? "Hell, no. I'd be really intimidated."
Brown is now making the transition from little-known indie-rocker on the fringes of the Australian alt.rock scene to pop star, having been a member of a little-known garage band called Two Lane Blacktop and, more recently, one half of experimental duo Teenager. All those years of bashing around on guitar, bass and drums have paid off, as press and public are finally starting to notice her talents. Yet it's her abilities with music technology (she's a gadget addict, forging her sound in the studio and only using a band to tour) that have let her realise her dream of being a one-woman hit machine. She calls herself Ladyhawke, after a 1985 fantasy movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer, because she sees herself as a sort of pop superwoman creating radio-friendly songs with a single bound.
At school back home in New Zealand, she was "a quiet, wallflower student" who "excelled at design and woodwork and arty subjects". Her stepfather was a music teacher, so she had free rein of the music room, but in regular lessons she was lost in thought: "Every one of my reports said, 'Philippa is a lovely child but she stares out the window a bit much.'" It wasn't until later - a couple of years ago, in fact - that Brown, by then performing with Two Lane Blacktop, sought an explanation from a doctor for her almost pathological shyness and discomfort in crowds. She wanted to know why, every so often, she was gripped with fear at the prospect of leaving the house.
"I have this thing called Asperger's syndrome," she says. - a disorder on the autism spectrum characterised by difficulties with social interaction and idiosyncratic behaviour. "When I found out, it explained my whole childhood. I told my mum and she said, 'That's why you used to sit on the floor doing puzzles for hours!' It was the reason I was so solitary. I'd say completely inappropriate things. The other kids thought I was a weirdo."
She mentions two traits associated with Asperger's: a thirst for knowledge and a love of music. At home, she would sit with her ear glued to the radio, or listen to her parents' Beatles and Pretenders albums. That's when she wasn't being sick: she suffered from a panoply of illnesses and allergies that kept her in and out of hospital. Then, at the age of 10, she developed "this weird random disease that no one had seen in New Zealand for 20 years. It's common in seagulls, but is rarely transmitted to humans. Somewhere in New Zealand there's a photo of my face in a medical journal. It crept up to my brain. They caught it hours before I was about to slip into a coma." She laughs. "So they put me on penicillin and I had an allergic reaction to that! I nearly died."
She was always difficult to treat: antibiotics, penicillin, antihistamines - she's allergic to them all. And don't even mention dairy products. "I was lactose intolerant from the minute I was born," she says. "I couldn't be breast-fed. I really miss cheese." Her various dietary problems make travelling tough, bad news for a musician. "On planes, if I order a non-dairy meal, they always give you a vegan eggplant thing - and I'm allergic to aubergine."
Not surprisingly, she stayed away from narcotics growing up; ditto nicotine. "I never smoked a cigarette in my life," she says. "I don't know what they taste like." Coffee unnerves her. She prefers herbal tea - and alcohol. "I started drinking when I was 16," she says. "I'd do that teenage thing: raiding your parents' alcohol cupboard." Alcohol, especially beer, gave her the confidence to face the world. "When I was younger, I could really sink them. It brought me out of my shell. A dozen beers would have me hammered."
Brown doesn't channel her anxieties, her history of illnesses, into her lyrics. But she does concede that her music betrays a fastidious attention to detail. Her debut album, Ladyhawke, is full of percussive flourishes and synth curlicues - decorations on a musical cake that tastes of all those 1980s hits by Brown's heroines: Kim Wilde, Pat Benatar, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Joan Jett and Stevie Nicks. The irresistible hooks and choruses seem likely to make Brown a star. All she has to do now is overcome her stage fright.
"I find live performances hard," she says. "I can't look anyone in the eye. I'm so conscious of everyone staring at me. I start to think I'm terrible or I'm singing out of tune. I get sickly-nervous before I play. I throw up and start shaking and sweating. The second I get on stage it disappears and the adrenaline kicks in. I try not to look at anyone in the audience or it will freak me out. Especially when they're smiling."
Off stage, life is no joyride either. "Walking into a room and thinking everyone's looking at you: I feel like that, only it's a million times worse. That's why my head is always down." In the Paris Is Burning video, Brown is shown walking down a street, shoulders hunched, looking as if she'd rather be anywhere else on earth. "That's the best I could do," she says. "You don't know how many takes I had to do or how many times they yelled, 'Less awkward! Shoulders back!' I'm the most awkward person ever. I find it hard enough walking down the street, just putting one foot in front of the other, but doing it over and over on camera - it was painful."
She doesn't, however, want to give the impression she's still that quiet, wallflower schoolgirl, too afraid to go out. "I was in this club in Barcelona and some guy was hitting on me," she recalls. "He was really old and disgusting - in his late 40s, and everyone else in the club was in their 20s. It was just seedy. I don't care what age you are, just don't touch me. So my video diary-maker, who films me for my website, clopped him in the face and threw beer over him. I was like, 'Yessss!'"
Did she land one on him herself? "I didn't punch him, no," she says, suddenly serious. "Never. I think I'd break my hand."
· The Ladyhawke single Dusk Till Dawn is released by Modular on Monday. The album follows on September 22
