V.V. Brown

原名Vanessa Brown的VV Brown(born 1983)，除了小时候开始学习音乐，长大后更是学业有成，不过后来她决定投身音乐事业。在2007年她担任了Amy Winehouse英国巡回演唱的暖场嘉宾之一，2009年被BBC选为潜力新人第七名。今年二月V.V. Brown完成了她首张新专辑的录制，负责专辑的创作及乐器演奏另外由于她的身材佼好高佻，还应Vogue杂志邀约拍摄了不少內页照片，并也在几场重要的Fashion Show中担任任Model走秀。　　由于VV Brown小時候学习过爵士钢琴，也听了不少爵士歌手的音乐，所以她的音乐听起来除了放克的隨性放松外还多了几分爵士的魅力音调。
V V 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 V V’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 V V’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,” V V 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 V V 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, V V 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 V V inherited her theatrical, charismatic personality. It’s an excitingly eclectic mix, but V V 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 V V 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 V V 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,” V V 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, V V’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,” V V says. “Why should I change? I just want a simple life, with extraordinary music in it.”