Sicknote@Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh
4 stars
Xenomania, Cathy Dennis and other purveyors of production-line pop better watch out. Because 24-year-old Victoria Hesketh, aka Little Boots (which translates as Caligula in Latin) has absorbed the back-catalogues of Kylie, Girls Aloud and Christina Aguilera in the way little girls learn dance routines. What’s more, her own collection of disco dolly electro-pop was composed not in glossily expensive studios, but on a pile of retro-analogue equipment that look leftover from Tomorrow’s World and performed by herself as a one-gal band. While initially resembling the sort of pub turn she may well have observed during her Blackpool upbringing, now she’s been tipped to be the pop sensation of 2009 the bright lights look set to shine a lot further than on the prom.
For this late night club show, Hesketh is augmented by a keyboardist and drummer, allowing her to concentrate on the words. With an opening song resembling Anita Ward’s 1970s hit, Ring My Bell, what follows over the next half hour is a kind of gay disco Rave cabaret that looks to Gary Numan, St Etienne and Giorgio Moroder for its moves. Not that it’s studied in any way. Hesketh remains utterly guileless, with no pretence of ice-cold cool in her make up. Rather, she gushily chats to the audience about how she met Girls Aloud and Dizee Rascal at the NME awards, and sounds like she can’t quite believe it herself when she announces that her song Symmetry is set to be a duet with The Human League’s Phil Oakey. Such down-to-earth chipperness may sound at odds with the closing robotic mantra of Stuck On Repeat, but a future Eurovision star may just have been born.
ends
4 stars
Xenomania, Cathy Dennis and other purveyors of production-line pop better watch out. Because 24-year-old Victoria Hesketh, aka Little Boots (which translates as Caligula in Latin) has absorbed the back-catalogues of Kylie, Girls Aloud and Christina Aguilera in the way little girls learn dance routines. What’s more, her own collection of disco dolly electro-pop was composed not in glossily expensive studios, but on a pile of retro-analogue equipment that look leftover from Tomorrow’s World and performed by herself as a one-gal band. While initially resembling the sort of pub turn she may well have observed during her Blackpool upbringing, now she’s been tipped to be the pop sensation of 2009 the bright lights look set to shine a lot further than on the prom.
For this late night club show, Hesketh is augmented by a keyboardist and drummer, allowing her to concentrate on the words. With an opening song resembling Anita Ward’s 1970s hit, Ring My Bell, what follows over the next half hour is a kind of gay disco Rave cabaret that looks to Gary Numan, St Etienne and Giorgio Moroder for its moves. Not that it’s studied in any way. Hesketh remains utterly guileless, with no pretence of ice-cold cool in her make up. Rather, she gushily chats to the audience about how she met Girls Aloud and Dizee Rascal at the NME awards, and sounds like she can’t quite believe it herself when she announces that her song Symmetry is set to be a duet with The Human League’s Phil Oakey. Such down-to-earth chipperness may sound at odds with the closing robotic mantra of Stuck On Repeat, but a future Eurovision star may just have been born.
ends
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