La Roux is on fire!

_Hi La Roux! So you made it on to pretty much everybody’s ‘Ones to Watch in 2009’ list, do you have a plan for how you’re going to live up to all the hype and fulfil everyone’s expectations?_

Well yeah, hopefully that is the plan. I’m not planning on failing. I think just continuing to do things like this, building up small fan bases around the country. Obviously not many people know about us yet, unless you’re of aware of Kitsuné and their CDs and compilations you wouldn’t. The first single (‘Quicksand’) is out on their label, but the next few singles are much bigger, and they’ll hopefully get more radio play, that kind of thing. So just gigging and stuff. And word of mouth. Word of mouth is more powerful than anything. And then we’re off on Lily, which is more exposure than we could have hoped for at such an early stage.

_Being a young, female, kind-of-solo artist (producer Ben Langmaid is Jackson’s partner in the studio, although the live show is all about her), you inevitably get compared to Lily. Is that frustrating?_

You know when you start doing this job that whatever kind of music you make, even if it doesn’t sound like anything else before it, it will get compared to something. I don’t think my music is anything like Lily Allen, I don’t think it’s even remotely similar. We’re both girls and we’re both from London and that is literally about it. And I think that if we were similar she wouldn’t have me on the tour, because you don’t want your support act to be exactly like you; that would be stupid. I mean, I’m not going to lie and say I’ve ever been massively into her tunes, but she’s sold fucking loads of records and she’s been very, very successful and you can’t knock that kind of fan base and that kind of exposure. I’ve only met her once or twice but she’s really sweet and we get on. And she loves the tunes, which is obviously lovely to hear. We’ll just see what it’s like. It should be a lot of fun and that’s what this job is about. You get to sing and play music all the time. It’s the best job in the world, it’s amazing.

_And you get to have mad hair?_

I used to have really long, flat, straight hair, I don’t have curly, thick hair or anything, you just gotta get the right combination of products: a little bit of mousse, a little bit of blow drying, a little bit more mousse, then a bit of volume spray…John Frieda I recommend highly…volume spray, good one, um… and then a little bit of wax, natural matt wax, and then Elnett, like what your granny uses, just reminds you of your gran. You can brush it out and it’s all gone. You’ve only got like a hundred split ends but that’s all fine. And it’s just, feel it, it’s rock solid.

_Wow! I bet that takes a long time to achieve._

It used to me ages but now it takes about ten minutes. I arrived here at quarter to eleven and was ready by eleven o’clock.

_Is there a reason why you arrive at the shows so late?_

I don’t like getting to a gig until about ten or fifteen minutes beforehand because when you do your sound check it’s all really empty and quiet, and then you watch people coming in and the crowd building up and it makes you nervous. If you just get here ten minutes before the gig you get on and you do your set and you fuck off. You come in and do your thing and get out like a little SAS mission. That way you don’t get nervous.

_One last thing, I read in an interview that you’ve only had one job ever. This interview is for a student paper. By this point in the term our loans are almost completely gone, and, what with the credit crunch, the chance of getting a well-paid job after graduating isn’t looking promising. Do you have any top tips for surviving the unemployed lifestyle?_

Yeah I’ve only ever had one job, and most people would be like: ‘oh you snob’. I never went to uni but if I had gone my parents would have backed and supported me, so I suppose they saw this as kind of my uni because they did support me for a couple of years. The job was working in a pub. I lasted four months. It was a dingy pub and I was rubbish at it, crappest barmaid ever. I used to give the wrong change because I’m rubbish at maths. And then that was it really. I knew exactly what I wanted to do my whole life but I took that job because I wanted to support myself for a bit and not take the piss out of my parents. But I can’t handle it, I can’t hack it. I just want to do one thing and one thing only, and now I’m able to.

_So what you’re saying here is that we should all forget about university and become rock-stars instead?_

Yes. Definitely.