Paul Lester investigates new young women artists

La Roux? Yesterday's news already. The music business has a whole army of new young women artists lined up. Paul Lester investigates

In December 2008, the Guardian ran a feature proclaiming the emergence of a new wave of female, solo synthpop stars: La Roux, Little Boots, Ladyhawke and Lady GaGa. Six months later, the electro girl-pop revolution has come to pass: Ladyhawke's self-titled debut album has been certified gold, Lady GaGa is rarely out of the Top 10, La Roux has just relinquished the No 2 slot and is well on the way to selling 300,000 copies of her single In for the Kill, while Little Boots is expected to enter the charts at pole position when her debut single proper, New in Town, is released next week.

But that is just the tip of the female-artist iceberg, and synthpop is only a tiny part of the huge wave of emerging artists. There are currently dozens of mainly British female performers, newly signed to major labels, waiting at the nation's gates - among them the glossy soul girl Pixie Lott, cabaret-style balladeer Paloma Faith, quirky new wave throwback Alex Roots, dance-pop starlet Sky Ferreira (who is from LA but is enjoying the patronage of south London synthboy Frankmusik) and punk-pop kid Daisy Dares You.

Nick Raphael, the UK head of the Epic label, reckons you'll be remembering some of these names, even if he admits there will be casualties along the way. "The market is big enough to sustain four or five of them," he says. "By Christmas, there will be three girls left, although I'm not going to name them. And in a few years' time, we'll look back and there will be one who will be considered truly significant, up there with the likes of Aretha, Whitney and Mariah. We're all fighting for that spot."

However, even seasoned music business insiders are surprised by the huge number of young women currently getting record deals. It's like riot grrrl actually happened. "It's massive, and it's not all one genre," says Sophie Williams, press officer for Ladyhawke, garish funk noisenik Ebony Bones, school-age tweepop quartet Poppy & the Jezebels and swamp-blues trio An Experiment On a Bird in the Air Pump. Williams sees this avalanche of new female talent not just as a "backlash against lad rock" which has been dominant for several years, but also as testament to the enormous influence of two recent musicians: Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, whose catalytic effect on this generation of performers could be compared to that of the Sex Pistols and the Clash during punk.

"Young women, inspired by Lily and Amy, have found their voices, and instead of going to a production company like PWL or Xenomania, they're doing what indie boys have always done: picking up guitars or keyboards and doing it themselves." Williams points out that it's not so long ago that there were so few British female stars that the same two or three would regularly get wheeled out at the Brits, regardless of whether they had actually released any music in the preceding year. Now there are so many that one newspaper headline, in the week of the awards this year, ran: "The Future Is Female."

However, James Oldham, the head of A&R at the A&M label - part of the Universal group - warns: "There is currently an appetite for female voices, and girls are making the best, most innovative music right now. But pretty soon it will reach saturation point and there will be a resurgence of something else. All those Oasis fans out there are waiting for a band like that to come again."

Paloma Faith, a feisty, flamboyant 24-year-old torch singer, is one of those hoping to be the artist you remember in years to come. "Björk meets Róisín Murphy while possessed by the ghost of Billie Holiday," is one excited description of this former burlesque dancer, magician's assistant and actor. She is excited by the positive response to her music - Radio 1 started playing her debut single, Stone Cold Sober, an astonishing eight weeks ahead of its release - but recoils at the notion of a femme-pop movement.

"It is amazing how many [women] there are, but I'm slightly uncomfortable when people use expressions like 'the industry is saturated by female artists,'" Faith says, in a voice as high and husky as Macy Gray's. "The whole of bloody history has been saturated by men for the last fucking however long! So don't make it like we've suddenly appeared out of the woodwork - we were there already, it's just that the business has decided to embrace talented women because they think they can sell us after years of boy indie bands staring at their trainers. So there are all different types of female musician now, are there? Well it's funny, but there are lots of different types of women."

Faith cites Holiday, Tina Turner, Grace Jones, PJ Harvey and Etta James as examples of great and varied pop female artistry from the past. But are there not more models for women to follow today, such as the DIY synthpop girl? "There is a moment now in British music where women are having more of a chance," she concedes, "amazing people like Shingai [Shoniwa] from Noisettes."

She explains that she and Shoniwa, who once shared a flat, were singing Holiday and Eartha Kitt songs on London's cabaret circuit before Winehouse made that sort of music fashionable again. "I've been doing it for as long as her," she asserts. "I just didn't know she existed. I'd been singing all these old-fashioned things with old blokes in bands, and I felt like an outsider, because there was no one of my generation in the audience. Then her second album [Back to Black] came out. But she only seems like the pioneer because she got the record deal first." Faith says she's a great believer in a "collective consciousness": "You can have an idea and someone else can think the same thing at the same time," she says. "That doesn't mean you copied it."

She feels the difference between herself and Winehouse lies in her resistance to vice and inner strength: "I'm 100% pro being a strong woman. I'm not singing about being a mess on the floor, I'm singing about getting up off the floor. I'd definitely go to rehab - stone cold sober." She accepts that people will compare her to Winehouse and Duffy, but looks forward to the day when "they call someone 'a bit Paloma Faith'".

Alex Roots is a 16-year-old whose perky, jerky guitar-pop and yelpy vocals are reminiscent of late-70s new wave singers Toyah and Lene Lovich. Growing up, she listened to Steps and Queen, and Cyndi Lauper was a regular on the Roots turntable in Bromley. She went to the Italia Conti theatre arts school, where she was one year below Pixie Lott, but she considers herself apart from the Class of 2009. "I'm not into synthesisers or using effects, and my voice is quite different to theirs," she says. "But we're all making pop." With retro-soul and synthpop already covered by other artists, did she see a gap in the market for a neo-new wave girl? She laughs at the suggestion of such clever contrivance. "I'd love to say so, but come on - I was 14 when I started." Besides, she doesn't just want to appeal to late-70s nostalgists. "I never wanted to make music for either a young or old age group. I think I've got the balance right." Her intention now is to avoid the obvious pratfalls. "I don't like the idea that the only way to get accepted is to do something dark," she says. "I can't help what lives people have, and if they use it as inspiration that's great. But I'm not ashamed of the fact that I don't have some huge story to tell. I'm just passionate about performing. I'm not boring, but I'm not particularly rebellious. I'm a normal suburban girl."

Daisy Coburn, who trades as Daisy Dares You, is a year younger than Roots and still at school in Great Dunmow, Essex, but has signed to Epic. There has been talk of her as a British Avril Lavigne, but she prefers Karen O and Natasha Khan to the Canadian singer, and probably sounds more like a young, brash Kirsty MacColl. She has a ProTools setup at home on which she writes "guitar-driven pop songs" and she isn't overly concerned about the competition: "I don't wake up every day with a sinking feeling because there are other girls out there." She dismisses the idea that legions of teenagers were just waiting to have their lives turned around by Lily and Amy. Besides, their music is not really her thing. "I love Paloma Faith, she rocks, and Pixie will be big because she's got an amazing voice and good songs. But I'm more into White Denim and the Kills."

Other women have different concerns. Lissy Trullie, a cool New Yorker signed to London indie Wichita, doesn't think there has been a truly radical female artist since Beth Ditto broke through in 2006, and would like to see more women behind the scenes in music, running labels and looking for talent. "The first thing I noticed was there really weren't a lot of girls in the industry here, which can be a little intimidating," she says. "It's definitely a boys' club, and if you play rock'n'roll, you have to prove yourself even more if you're a girl." Ebony Bones agrees: "It seems like it's OK for women to be on stage singing songs but not to be in a position where they're making decisions." What bothers her more, though, is the lack of original, idiosyncratic voices from other cultures. "How many of the artists being signed are ethnic or of colour?" she asks. "What makes this country magical is the diversity. I'm not sure if the labels are representing that. I've never seen one Asian or Japanese artist from the UK come forward."

Whether or not women continue to dominate the agenda remains to be seen. Ash Collins of Toast PR, which represents scores of the kinds of acts that dominate the NME, foresees a time when we could be complaining about "landfill girlpop" rather than the derided "landfill indie" of the past couple of years. "How many bands got signed during Britpop?" he asks. "Hundreds. How many do we remember now? We're not at that Menswear moment yet, but ..."

• An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump's These Sins EP and Ebony Bones's The Muzik single are available now on iTunes. Paloma Faith's Stone Cold Sober is released on 15 June. Lissy Trullie's Self-Taught Learner EP is released by Wichita on 29 June Alex Roots's single Don't Stop Looking comes out in July

Contributor

Paul Lester

The GuardianTramp

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