She left New Zealand a rock chick but Pip Brown - aka Ladyhawke - returns from London as an It-girl pop star on the rise. She tells Scott Kara how it happened
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For 80s child Pip Brown, the music from the legwarmer and double-belt era takes her back to a safe and happy place.
The London-based New Zealander - who's making a name for herself as electro-pop queen Ladyhawke - remembers sitting at the kitchen table in her home town of Masterton, taping songs off the radio and playing them over and over again.
And it's songs from this era, especially by the likes of The Pretenders, Pat Benatar, Cyndi Lauper and Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks, that have got her through a few tough times in the past.
Like when she was living in Melbourne a few years back. Her rough-and-ready rock 'n' roll band, Two Lane Blacktop, had split up in late 2003, she was "bitter and angry". She'd never quite clicked with her adopted city and it didn't help that she also caught glandular fever.
"I was lying in bed, sick as a dog, my [glands] the size of golf balls and I was like, 'You know what, I don't think Melbourne's the place for me anymore'," she recalls.
So she went back and listened to the music that was like comfort food to her.
"I guess I was just going to a place that was happy in my head and also reminiscing about my youth and the warm feelings I used to get, feeling safe and listening to a radio in the summer time at home when I was 10," she says, sounding more like a teenager than a well-travelled woman in her late 20s.
This 80s influence, along with a dash of Kraftwerk and some pulsing modern-day electro, is also at the core of the Ladyhawke sound.
When I speak to her, on the phone from London, Brown is in another of her safe and happy places. She's tucked up in bed at home having just got back from a 14-hour day doing a photo shoot at the British seaside.
"It was at this beach and it was nothing like a beach we get back in New Zealand," she laughs. "It was pretty bad, but cool as well, because it was this old caravan park."
She's not complaining because she knows photo shoots are part of her lot now that everyone wants a piece of her.
With two singles out - the meandering and loved-up 80s anthem Back of the Van and the pulsing pop of Paris is Burning - and her self-titled debut album due in September, Brown has been in demand. She's featured in the Guardian and the Independent newpapers, magazines like Rolling Stone and i-D, and on her way back to New Zealand for two shows, including one at the Kings Arms in Auckland tonight, she played the Summer Sonic Festival in Japan.
But it's fair to say she's taken aback by the attention her music is getting.
"It's been quite hard to digest because I didn't expect it and I've always just been plodding along doing my thing and I didn't really expect it to do what it was doing. All I did was record some songs and this stuff happened."
Of course, there's more to it than that. Before Ladyhawke, Brown was a guitarist and sometime singer in Two Lane Blacktop - named after a rebellious early 70s road movie.
From 2001 to 2003 the band toured New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, even playing legendary New York rock club CBGB, and released a handful of songs.
When they split up due to personal and musical differences she moved to Melbourne and found herself playing guitar in a band called Teenager, led by friend Nick Littlemore.
A move to Sydney followed, but after a while she realised she "was playing in a band that didn't really feel like my own.
"I wanted to do my own music exactly how I wanted and I wanted to call the shots, so that's how I started Ladyhawke."
The first Ladyhawke material was made in her bedroom on an acoustic guitar and a mini Korg keyboard. It was far from the stylish electro-pop of Paris is Burning or the rousing 80s synth pop-meets-minimal Kraftwerk mood of Delirium, from the new album.
"The first official Ladyhawke song was about me growing up in Masterton, called Private Broadcast. I should probably bust that out at some point," she remembers.
It's even harder to believe the noisy racket she made with Two Lane Blacktop could evolve into Ladyhawke. But she says her style of songwriting evolved naturally because her mother and step-father were both musicians and she grew up around music her whole life.
"And I've also experienced a lot, like been in bands, been a guitar tech, toured, and just done everything. I think it's probably not just the music, I think people saw that I was genuine and I wasn't trying to fake anything."
While she can't fully explain the key to her current success, she says she's always been ambitious, although she prefers to say she has focus rather than ambition.
And perhaps the reason there is no grand explanation is the fact that all she wants her music to do is put a smile on your face and, most importantly, take people to a happy place.
