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Completely broke, broken hearted, and a plane ride home from sunny LA, roller skates and boobs, to red buses and skinny jeans, it was great and weird to be bk home in London . My music felt like it was going into a quagmire of self doubt and complete hell. I was lost in a flood of tears and blinding love and felt like a complete piece of nothing. Got a cheap guitar and started to write in my room I was renting. Was starting to listen to a lot of old rock n roll music, especially Ruth Brown, after working with a few producers who were sweet but a little imposing, and began this journey. The first song I ever played that I was like cool, from coming home from LA to London, was written on the one string of a guitar and I used my nail varnish to show the fingering, as the piano was my main instrument, but I didn't have a piano as I sold it to get a ticket bk to London from LA. Writing was all on the guitar. Then I started to record and trust my instincts... producing was a trusting yourself thing, do I like it, that's all I based it on, pushing out the thoughts of what could be right for everyone else, which was the slavery I had experienced before. Just right humble songs. Found a piano and wrote more. Then the trust took me on this wonderful journey, hot water came from cold, and Universal opened up a shiny door. Nick,Darcus and Angus. Started making the album and am in the process of finishing. I call it do wop indie from outer space. Hope you like. Follow our journey, I don't know where its going but its all about trying to make good music.. that's it.
V V on C4's Freshly Squeezed
CRYING BLOOD VIDEO
V V INFLUENCES
V V NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL
POP JUSTICE WRITES.
VV Brown is a singer, a songwriter, a performer, multi-instrumentalist and a producer. In this 24-year-old’s world, love sounds like the perfect melody. Both are difficult to define she says, but both pour out of the songs on her debut album. This is music which sounds like performance: dramatic, charismatic and, frequently, as mad as a box of frogs. This is high definition, high concept pop with scuffed edges and laddered tights. “It’s about letting out all these ideas I’ve had locked up in my mind,” Brown states. “It’s honest - it’s not about being festooned with £10m diamonds or having perfect hair.”
Leading the charge is Crying Blood, written on Vanessa’s one-string guitar, but more of that later, which colourfully illustrates Brown’s penchant for mixing upbeat melodies with lyrics specialising in full-on despair. There are a few of these on her debut album, which is the story of Vanessa’s life but also the story of one specific relationship with one specific arsehole. “He broke my heart just before I began writing the album,” Vanessa says. “In a way writing Crying Blood, was liberating because I was letting everything out and it felt like there was some distance. But the fact that I was still writing songs about him meant that I wasn’t as liberated as I thought”. As Vanessa now realises, writing these songs brought everything to a close. From the brutal imagery of the song’s title, through “falling like a comet from a broken sky” to the point where she arrives back on earth with a bump, Crying Blood represents a cathartic process which also resulted in a pretty nifty pop tune.
“I can’t remember a time when music was not a part of me,” she says; “when I was five, I remember writing my first song on the piano. I played the same notes over and over again and from that moment I just knew that music would be a huge part of my life.” Evenings were spent in the attic with her five brothers and sisters playing at being in a band and dreaming about being on Top Of The Pops. At school, Vanessa was almost unrecognisable – lunch-breaks would be spent sitting in the school field on her blazer wondering, as she says, “why the grass was green”. Feeling liberated rather than lonely, she immersed herself in her own thoughts. “I’ve always felt slightly on the edge of the circle,” she explains, and this double life, flitting from extrovert to introvert as the mood takes her, now runs through her album. Every Sunday she’d go to church and sing in the gospel choir; at home her mum and dad would listen to Aretha, The Rolling Stones, Ruth Brown, Elvis Presley, Queen and the music from Super Marioland. Anything with a tune was fair game.
It’s easy to see how Vanessa inherited her theatrical, charismatic personality. It’s an excitingly eclectic mix, but Vanessa has another phrase for it: “musical mashed potatoes”.
“I was broke!” she howls, so broke in fact that she had to sell her keyboard to pay for her flight home from LA, “but I wasn’t sitting around watching Cash In The Attic – every day was spent making music. Every hour, every day from nine in the morning until two the next morning.” Money was so tight that Vanessa bought a one-string guitar in a charity shop, marked the frets out with her red nail varnish and wrote Crying Blood the very next day. “I’ll wake up in the morning and have no idea what I’m going to write”. It was these sessions threw up the extraordinary songs which scored Vanessa her new deal with Island. Her songs are now instantly addictive and unmistakably honest, with lyrics asking what the bloody point is answered by melodies full of life and reasons to be cheerful. The contradiction works, throwing the listener from happy to sad and back again in the space of three minutes.
“Everything that’s happened in the last few years has taught me to value the idea of knowing yourself and being your-self,” Vanessa says. “And, my God, it took me a long time to get here.” True to this, and as she prepares to unleash the album on the world, Vanessa’s binned off the LA lifestyle, choosing instead to live in London in her auntie’s house with her sisters. “I can’t see myself moving any time soon,” Vanessa says. “Why should I change? I just want a simple life, with extraordinary music in it.”
V V @ The Forum October 2008 -
Photo by Stephen Simpson
EXCLUSIVE V.V. BROWN INTERVIEW + COMPETITION TO WIN A SIGNED PROMO SINGLE + BADGES & WHATNOT on WEDNESDAY 19th NOVEMBER @ 10pm GMT (listen online via www. ERRORFM. com)
When i heard u on ch4 the other day i was like duuudee ive got 2 get her cd n get myself 2 a gig! Anyways u rock and i wil defo be a groupie from now on mwahahaha! Good luk with everything x
i wrote to u ages ago and said i loved ur music and today i saw u on T4 well done!! i didnt know u wrote a song for sugababes and the pussycat dolls...i love those songs. i love ur song at the mo...good luck for the future. xxx
