Ladyhawke vamps it up

Nick Bond
May 22, 2012

The beauty of Ladyhawke’s 2008 debut album lay in the way she artfully weaved the sounds of her heroes — the fizzy synths and dreamy guitars of ’80s icons like Stevie Nicks, Pat Benatar and Debbie Harry — into her own music.

Even so, her recent ‘comeback’ single Black, White & Blue came as something of a surprise. The song’s anthemic chorus should sound familiar to anyone who remembers the Bee Gees’ (and later Steps, ’90s cut-price pop fans) disco classic Tragedy.

The Kiwi singer-songwriter, real name Pip Brown, insisted the Gibb brothers tribute was unintentional.

“I had no idea, absolutely no idea!” she protested down the line from her London home.

“I’ve heard a few people say it sounds like ABBA, too. To me it was a rock song with a climbing bass line, so I did not hear those pop sounds in it.

“To be honest, I was mortified when people said it to me — it felt like an insult to my songwriting. If I was going to try and copy anyone else, I think it would be a little bit more obvious.
This wasn’t even obvious to me!”

Bee Gees soundalike aside, Brown’s newly released sophomore album Anxiety does its best to scuff off much of the high-pop sheen of her debut. Gone are the poppy synths, replaced by fuzzy, distorted guitars. The addictive tunes are still there (check the ’60s beat-pop of Vaccine, or the majestic power ballad Cellophane), just not in quite the same easily palatable form that made songs like My Delirium and Paris Is Burning such enduring radio hits.

“I didn’t want to make my first album all over again. I’m a musician, so I really wanted to play more instruments and give myself more of an opportunity to play guitars on stage,” Brown explained.

“I love being behind a guitar — it’s like a real security blanket for me.”

Brown opened up in interviews between albums about her own battles with Asperger syndrome and social anxiety.

That honesty is present in the lyrics of Anxiety.

“Life inside your head has come undone,” she sings, seemingly to herself, in Black, White & Blue. “Your slow descent to madness has just begun.”

Would the album’s title be a fair reflection of her state of mind, particularly given the four-year gap between albums?

“I guess there is a bit of anxiety there about releasing the album,” she said. “I’m quite an anxious person in general anyway.

“Once I finished touring in 2010 I felt the pressure to start working on the second album straight away, but I hadn’t had a break or anything for a really long time so I took six months off.

“I didn’t want to feel like one of those people who gets pressured into ‘Quick, we’ve gotta get the album out! We’ve got to ride on the coattails of your first album!’ I just wanted to take my time and do an album in a natural way.”

And now she’s back, it’s not just her music that’s headed in unexpected directions — just clock the video for Black, White & Blue, where the devout tomboy trades her signature jeans and hoodie for a retro glam makeover in a homage to Faye Dunaway’s 1978 camp classic Eyes of Laura Mars.

“The day before the video shoot [the director] showed me my costume and I said ‘I’m not wearing that. There’s no way’. The bloody costume — it had jodhpurs, like I was riding a horse!

“She convinced me by saying, ‘Think of it like you’re Pip playing Faye Dunaway playing Laura Mars’. I thought, OK, you’ve got me there. I’ll be that person for one day, but never again!”

The video for current single Sunday Drive sees her back in her Ladyhawke uniform, but hardly in her comfort zone — she spends much of the clip tied up in the boot of a car.