Interview: Ladyhawke, musician

THREE years ago a new breed of female was discovered, and just like the Wild Women of Wongo they seemed to promise B-movie wonkiness, strangeness and charm. The Invasion of the L-Girls comprised Lady Gaga, La Roux, Little Boots and Ladyhawke. You needed an L in front of your name to secure membership to this tribe, as well as great tunes and great hair.

Some tried to label them Girls with Synthesisers – a welcome antidote to Boys with Guitars, although Lady Gaga wasn’t going to be held back by keyboard duties or anything very much in her bid to become the most extraordinary pop star there’s ever been. If she’s by far the most successful of the four and Little Boots got a bit lost and La Roux won the battle of hair, what happened to the L-Girl who resembled Stevie Nicks’ gangly tomboy kid sister and was the only one of the four to show herself tangled up in a synth and associated gubbins on the sleeve of her debut album?

“That whole thing was funny and silly,” says New Zealander Pip Brown alias Ladyhawke when we catch up in London. “We were supposed to be the Electro Girls but Florence [Welch, of Florence + the Machine] was included and her music wasn’t that. Really, we were grouped together because we were women, which was a bit sad but kind of typical. If we had anything in common before, look at us now. We’re all doing our own thing.”

In terms of how they react to the spotlight, you couldn’t get two more drastically different performers than Lady Gaga and Ladyhawke. For Gaga, gloriously, it’s: “I’m ready for my close-up. Me, me, me! YES, YES, YES!” But this is Brown, 32, on her most recent gig experience, from the night before our chat: “It was only an in-store and it was only half an hour. All day I was absolutely calm. I even allowed myself to think, hey, I’ve come quite far, I’m OK. But when I got to the shop I lost it. I was shaking and went blank, and because everybody was staring at me, I froze and couldn’t speak. That’s the worst it’s been for a while.”

This is her stage fright. Shy all her life – “I was a real stay-at-home kid, never going on a single sleepover” – she was finally diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome five years ago following a bout of depression when she was unable to leave the house. That she suffers from an autism-related condition which makes communication a challenge for her, it’s remarkable she ever gets on to the stage – remarkable, too, that her music is so exuberant.

The Ladyhawke moniker comes from the Michelle Pfeiffer sword-and-scorcery movie of 1985, a year instantly evoked by a self-titled debut of synth-powered, hood-down, Fleetwood Mac-esque wallopers – songs with verses which sounded more delirious than other people’s choruses, songs which sounded like great singles, which most of them were (Paris Is Burning, Back Of The Van and, of course, My Delirium). Brown has called the follow-up Anxiety, but this is by no means a restrained affair. And with guitars winning the power struggle with the synths this time, it’s more of a true reflection of her.

She says: “Because of the first album people assume 80s pop must be my favourite music but it’s always been rock’n’roll, quite heavy stuff, and with this record I wanted to experiment with the kind of grungey guitar pedals I dreamed about owning when I was a teenager but have only now been able to afford.”

Brown grew up in the town of Masterton, two hours’ drive from Wellington, in a wooden-board house built by her grandparents which always resounded to music – everything from Joni Mitchell to Black Sabbath. She discovered Nirvana and Metallica by herself but would continue to explore bands from her parents’ era, including Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers.

Masterton is a quiet place, although Brown hardly noticed and never complained as she was lost in her own little world. “As a kid I’d talk at home but never to visitors or out in public. Other kids knew me as the weirdo. I contracted an illness usually found in seabirds which hadn’t been in our town for 20 years and they were like: ‘Of course, we knew you’d be the one to get the funny seagull disease!’

“When Asperger’s was diagnosed, my childhood finally made sense. My mum told me how I used to lie on the floor doing puzzles for hours. I looked at my old school reports recently and lots of them went: ‘Phillipa is a diligent child but she’s always staring out of the window.’”

Her daydreams were invariably musical. “I know now that for Asperger’s sufferers music can be a retreat and they’ll obsess about it. Aged 11, I was definitely obsessed with drums; it was a fixation. In my favourite fantasy I was dressed like Bruce Springsteen and playing a white Fender Stratocaster in front of all those people, never of course thinking that crowds would be an issue.”

But you’d be wrong to mistake her anxiety attacks as a sign of weakness. The worst of them happened in Brisbane two years ago. “I was staring at the set-list on the floor wishing for My Delirium to hurry up so it would all be over. I got as far as Paris Is Burning before having to run off, throw up and freak out for a bit.” But, trouper that she is, she finished the show.

And if you’re a stylist you’d certainly be wrong to attempt to alter her image to make it more “girlie”. Never mind Gaga’s meat dresses, Ladyhawke doesn’t do dresses of any kind. “I’m definite about this in my emails but still at shoots they’ll try to put me in heels,” says Brown, the owner of an impressively large and colourful collection of Doc Marten boots. “So I have to bust some heads.”

Is music worth all the – that word again – anxiety? Oh yes, she says, and probably she knows that all of these little dramas have become vital to the creation of the big dramas that are her songs. “At breakfast, if an egg’s too runny it can ruin the whole day. When we’re driving to the next show I have to sit alongside my tour manager because he’s the one who can keep me calm. There are lots of these rituals. My life is bloody complicated but, you know, it’s my life.” «

Anxiety is released on 19 March on Island. Ladyhawke plays Edinburgh’s Liquid Rooms on 30 April