There’s a secret track on the debut album from Little Boots. It’s an aching piano ballad, a bit Kate Bush, and ‘it’s about this girl who has a broken heart,’ says Victoria Hesketh, the 25-year-old from Blackpool who goes by the name of Little Boots. ‘She goes round asking people to help her fix it. But she manages to fix it herself in the end. She had it in her the whole time. She just had to have faith in herself.’ It is, concedes this unblinkingly honest singer/songwriter-meets-cyberdisco futurestar, ‘a bit of a silly song. But it was one of the starting points for this project, even though it’s totally different from everything else on the album. And it just made me think about this whole thing. All my life I’ve been in bands and music projects. But this is the first time I’ve had a solo project. I had it in me the whole time. Actually it took quite a lot of confidence to get to the stage where I went, “this is my opinion and I’m gonna go with it.”’ The superconfident, superbright, superclub result is Hands, recorded in London and Los Angeles and named after that closing secret track. It’s the glory-pop album of this year, any year, exploding with sleek but spiky, intimate but glorious, sensual and soulful anthem. It’ll spin heads, hearts, hips and feet from Blackpool via Ibiza to Tokyo and back again. Break open the disco-lasers and crank up the volume: Little Boots, the pop star we’ve been waiting for, is here at last. Growing up in Blackpool, faded seaside jewel of the English northwest, Victoria Hesketh may not have been plugged into the metropolitan cultural cool of London. But she was always plugged into music. She played piano from the age of five, learning early on the thrill of deconstructing, picking apart, opening up songs. It was a skill that would stand her in good stead during her three years on a Cultural Studies course at Leeds University. And during her student-era job as a hotel lounge pianist. Being able to understand how Norah Jones wrote her gazillion-selling soft-jazz smashes made the pain of having to play them for disinterested punters a notch more bearable. Loving music meant loving performing. Growing up, Hesketh took any gig that came her way. ‘Joining a jazz orchestra, playing in theme parks with a big band, dressed up as a Blues Brother, being in dogdy girl bands, being in choirs, playing piano in hotels and restaurants when no one gives a shit – it was so, so good for me.’ Aged 16 she even took a punt at Pop Idol, although mostly to ‘shut up’ the friends and pub workmates in Blackpool who, realising they had a future star in their midst, kept badgering her to audition. She sang Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. Yes, she got through a couple of heats. No, she didn’t meet Simon Cowell. Yes, she’s wildly relieved she didn’t get onto the telly rounds. Hesketh didn’t need it anyway. When she was 21 Dead Disco, the indie-electronic band she and some mates formed at university, were signed to 679 Records. Fun though it was, Hesketh’s fast-blooming songwriting skills – and her exploding enthusiasm for pure pop music – weren’t satisfied. Then, around two years ago, she met Greg Kurstin. The LA-based songwriter, producer and performer (he’s half of The Bird And The Bee) was yet to work (with great success) with Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears, and he had not long started working with Lily Allen. He and Hesketh hit it off. He recognised her skills and encouraged her: if she didn’t want to be an artist, she could certainly make it as a songwriter for other people. But Hesketh, her enthusiasm for pop and performance matched by her enthusiasm for visual creativity and experimentation, did want to be an artist – on her own terms. She wanted a cascade of synths, sequins and glitterball anthems. She wanted music technology that Japanese electronic firms hadn’t invented yet. She wanted to collaborate with some of her heroes. She wanted to have unicorns and wolves onstage, to wear self-designed club-couture on her five-foot-nothing frame. A musical vision as complete as Little Boots’ wanted – needed – everything. Sticking with 679 and fully embracing the synthesisers she’d always loved experimenting with, Hesketh began writing the songs that would become Hands. Another early champion was Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, who Hesketh met through mutual friends. They passed him a demo of Stuck On Repeat. She was nervous: they were a cool band, ‘and I was this completely unknown, dweeby girl writing cheesy songs. Now I know he likes pop songs the way I do. He saw something in Stuck On Repeat – he was the first person to see what I saw in it.’ Once passed through Goddard’s home studio, Stuck On Repeat became a throbbing, glacial epic. Once posted on Little Boots’ myspace, it became word-of-mouth hit. Goddard went on to produce the bleep-groove of Mathematics and the urgent pop-techno pound of Meddle, other tracks that contributed to Little Boots’ blogosphere legend in 2008. ‘Joe’s production is out there,’ enthuses Hesketth. ‘Synths that are completely out of tune, permanently changing, not in any particular time. That’s the best thing about it for me. It’s not perfect, it’s alive and it’s changing. It feels human. With electronic music it’s so easy to sound cold.’ But the ‘backbone’ of the album’s writing and recording took place with Kurstin in LA. ‘He’s very laidback, not at all like these cheesy LA pop writers. He’s just very musical and ridiculously talented. And he comes from a keyboard background, which is similar to me, and he has a background in jazz, which I also have. So we connected on a lot of different points. I just found him so easy to write with, and have exciting ideas with.’ One of the first songs Hesketh composed there was New In Town, her debut single proper. ‘I’d spend all day in the studio with Greg then go home to this apartment I had on Sunset and Vine and sit there, going mad, trying to write. Greg was the only person I knew in LA, I didn’t have a car, so it all felt quite dislocating and weird. I lacked inspiration so I started going out to bars on my own, which is quite a scary thing to do – and not a clever thing for a girl.’ Happily inspiration rather than boozy disaster befell her – New In Town is slinky robo-funk, with a huge video by Jake Nava (Beyoncé’s Crazy In Love) to match. Another track with monster-smash-hit stamped all over it is Remedy, written with Lady GaGa collaborator RedOne. Remedy is tear-the-roof-off time: it is, by Hesketh’s proud admission, the most commercial sounding track on the Hands. ‘I’m sure there will be people who’ve followed me from blogs from last year who loved Stuck On Repeat and think that the album’s really poppy and I’ve sold out. But that’s totally missing the point – the whole thing I wanted to do was make an ambitious big pop record and get played on the radio. It was a real proper mission.’ Click and Ghost, meanwhile, were written solely by Hesketh and produced by Jas Shaw from Simian Mobile Disco – in the latter song Hesketh expresses her ‘dark, escapist side’ with images of “black air, frozen lakes, skulls full of dreams”. Then there’s the Giorgio Moroder-esque No Brakes, one of two songwriting collaborations with Biff Stannard (the other is Hearts Collide), which feels like ‘it should be the soundtrack to a space education film’. Earthquake is ‘quite epic, about storms and landsides. It’s almost Swedish-sounding, like Robyn, with crazy vocal harmonies verging on Enya!’ It should be noted here that to Hesketh these references are all Good Things. Then there’s a personal favourite, Symmetry. ‘It’s about a relationship and the balance of love. The minute someone likes someone less or more, the balance shifts. So it‘s about loving someone perfectly symmetrically.’ All off which, for the thorough, song-analysing Hesketh, demanded a duet. Step forward Philip Oakey of Sheffield legends The Human League. ‘It’s the most Eighties song. It wanted to do a synth record because that’s what I play. There’s some songs that are nods to things like Madonna, Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Gary Numan, but I didn’t want it to be this retro pastiche Eighties revival thing. But Philip is my hero so getting him for Symmetry was perfect. I like the fact that the song is in the tradition of The Human League’s boy/girl vocals. Plus he’s northern as well, which I like. Bit of northern pride!’ Last year was a good one for this brand new artist. A limited edition single release of Stuck On Repeat, hefty myspace plays, and an enthusiastic YouTube following for her series of DIY/bedroom cover versions (Wiley, Haddaway, The Human League, Madonna) were enough, as 2008 closed, to land Little Boots the number one slot in the BBC’s annual Sound Of… poll to find the best new artist of the coming year. But 2009 promises to be even better. She’s just notched up her second appearance on the BBC’s Later… With Jools Holland – no other artist has featured twice on the show before an actual release. Now, with the album completed, hands-on Hesketh is busy working on her stage show and sleeve designs. It all feeds in. ‘Music is the seed, everything else a further expression of that, whether it’s the live show, the myspace background or the artwork or how I Iook in a photoshoot,’ she enthuses. ’Everything is a creative opportunity. It’s not style over substance. I’m so lucky to have an opportunity to do a photoshoot with amazing clothes and a horse. I’m not gonna sit next to a brick wall! Get some mental clothes in! And a unicorn! That’s what I want next.’