With a style that turns heads, a voice that raises eyebrows, a dancing ability that wows and a songwriting flair that sets toes tapping, Pixie Lott has certainly brought a fresh vibrancy to Mercury Records since signing on with the label last year. Her fun and free vocals, infused with soulful depth and maturity, give this teenage pop princess an impish, dexterous vim.

Fortunately for Pixie’s Asian fans, who can hardly wait to catch a glimpse of their idol in the flesh, the pop hottie will be strutting her stuff at MTV World Stage “Live in Malaysia”

When she was 14, Pixie found herself flicking through The Stage and spotted a classified ad that would set everything in motion. It’s sometimes hard to look at these ads and think that anything would ever come from these oddly-worded, sometimes quite suspicious looking requests for young girls and boys, but before long this particular ad had taken Pixie to New York, to begin writing and recording demos. From that point in, things began to snowball.

“I remember I was at school,” Pixie recalls, “and I got a message through telling me that LA Reid was flying over to meet me the next day in a hotel room. I didn’t even know who he was and I’d never done any meetings.”

As she discovered, LA Reid was a Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer. She made up a dentist appointment, skipped the next day’s lessons, sang a Mariah Carey song for LA, went back to school the next day and didn’t tell anyone. As time went by and more demos were posted on Pixie’s MySpace a bidding war broke out, eventually leading Pixie to sign with Mercury in the UK and Interscope in America.

Now, Pixie possesses in her bag of tricks songs that run the gamut of teen-dom with songs about hearts skipping and hearts breaking, crushed dreams and dreamy crushes. ‘Mama Do’, her first single, is an archetypal teenage tale of sneaking out on dates under the cover of night, written with renowned songwriter Phil Thornalley and Mads Hague. ”Turn It Up’ tells the story of a teenage couple breaking up but staying friends. On the other spectrum, Alicia Keys-esque ballad ‘Cry Me Out’ is a song which says, “It’s really time to get over yourself”. “Gravity”, meanwhile, is a ballad about how easy it is to drift apart, how difficult it is to stay apart, how quickly we’re pulled to people and thrown away in the opposite direction. It’s a song about love on a bungee rope.

We’re at an odd point in the music world where the success of an artist seems somehow to be measured in terms of their product endorsements, ranges of perfume or appearances on reality TV shows. Pixie Lott’s ambitions are reassuringly traditional. It’s no coincidence that her music takes us back to a more carefree era in music, where all that mattered were big tunes, big ideas, and brilliant singers.

For more information on Pixie Lott:
www.pixielott.com
www.myspace.com/pixiesongs