Growing Up With Ladyhawke

From Jim Morrison's early performances with his back to the audience to Michael Stipe’s self-conscious ‘sing-murmuring’, music has a history with the, shall we say, socially awkward. Phillipa ‘Pip’ Brown is no such household name, but can certainly join this gang of misfits. Late last year, her debut solo album – under the pseudonym Ladyhawke – received critical acclaim and modest chart success, resulting in a worldwide tour with the diminutive New Zealander playing to hundreds of finger-on-the pulse fans every night. Not bad for someone who has suffered years of pathological shyness and odd behavioural tics, later diagnosed as Asperger’s, a form of autism characterised by atypical speech, clumsiness and difficulties in social interaction.

None of these are evident when I speak to the pop revivalist, fresh off the stage at Cabaret Voltaire, but the question still remains: why would such a person place themselves in the limelight? “I guess I love playing music and I’m old enough to deal with the consequences of that now,” she asserts. “I know that part of making music is playing and I love playing live. Sometimes it’s hard. I can’t describe it, it’s like you see all these people standing there and I just don’t know what to say and sometimes it feels like there’s a wall, which is silly, but I try my best.”

Her best, it seems, is good enough, but also likely to help keep Brown on her game is her maturity and grounding, which are in evidence throughout our conversation. Ladyhawke has been no overnight success, with Brown having cut her teeth with Wellington bands Two Lane Blacktop and Teenager before adopting her current moniker from an obscure 1985 Richard Donner film. “I started Ladyhawke three years ago and I was demoing everything in my bedroom and with my friend in his studio,” she reveals. “I play all the guitars on the record and some of the bass. I prefer it like that. I mean it’s not that I’m a control freak, it’s just that I know what I want.”

“Big production, big synths and big guitar riffs,” it seems is what she wants. However, despite being labelled as an eighties kid trying to re-imagine The Breakfast Club soundtrack, Brown is at pains to avoid such pigeon-holing. “The thing with music is you’re constantly discovering stuff,” she explains, “and that’s exactly how I’ve evolved, from a child listening to The Beatles, The Pretenders, Blondie and Kraftwerk to a teenager obsessed with Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden. I was just constantly hunting for new music, constantly looking in record stores, and my friends would say ‘you should really listen to this and this’, you know? Right now with me it’s like a combination of all of that mixed into one.”

“I’m more excited about my next album,” she confesses, validating a feeling that tonight’s show exhibited a certain level of ennui around the likes of breakthrough single Paris is Burning. “It’s going to be a bit different; it’s going to be more Bowie meets the Pixies. I think it’s going to be my nineties grunge influences. I almost feel like people are going to follow me evolving as a human being, starting off as a child listening to the radio in the eighties, then getting older and getting a bit more 'angsty'.”

However, Brown isn’t quite ready to relinquish her childhood yet, as we discover from her little side project. “I’m obsessed with video games. I’ve recorded from my NES [the original 80s Nintendo console]. I’ve recorded all the sounds from every different game you could imagine and put them into silly, crappy tracks, some really weird songs that have really heavy guitars mixed with really cheesy Nintendo sounds. They’re never going to be used for anything, but...” she trails off, and we wouldn’t completely rule out seeing a conceptual MarioWorld-goes-metal album yet.