VV Brown – it seems – has found herself. The 25-year-old singer (everyone’s ‘one to watch’ in 2009) is enjoying a second bite at fame. And this time it’s on her own terms.

“I was young and naive and I didn’t really know who I was as a person and as a musician,” explains Brown on her first real taste of the music industry. “I knew I could write songs but it’s important as an artist to know who you are from a conceptual point of view, and so I was making music that I knew wasn’t me.

“But I was scared to say anything because I was surrounded by very powerful and big producers so I didn’t want to rock the boat and before I knew it I was lost in the politics of it all and the whole business of it.”

Vanessa ‘VV’ Brown was whisked away to LA by a major label as a tender 19-year-old to become the next pop/R&B princess.

What no one – least of all Brown - realised at the time though, was that she didn’t really want to be. The statuesque beauty (Brown is nearly six foot tall) of Caribbean descent had the whole package to be some kind of Leona Lewis, but something wasn’t quite right. And feeling the pressure of major label politics surrounding her, VV jumped ship.

“It was very pop, very R&B,” she says. “And I really hate stereotypes. Sometimes I get very annoyed when I read people saying the new ‘soul’ person. It frustrates me because I think it’s very lazy to make comparisons and use stereotypes.

“If people see a black girl they just assume, you know, she’s must have a ‘soulful’ voice. It’s more complicated than that, and that’s what happened. I had been stereotyped and I’d been categorized.”

Getting out of that deal, Brown remained in LA where she sang backing vocals for The Pussycat Dolls to pay the rent, and even had a song she’d written used by the band. But home beckoned (“the weather was great but I just missed the normal things from home like Marmite and baked beans and English TV”) and she was soon on a plane back to London.

Selling everything she owned dirt cheap - even her treasured keyboard - to get a ticket home, on returning to London Brown found herself living in her aunt’s flat with no more record deal and no more money.

Depression set in but she bought a second hand guitar and began writing again; and it was an after an “over-the-phone” break-up with her LA boyfriend that she wrote her breakthrough single ‘Crying Blood’.

“I wrote Crying Blood and got really excited,” she tells me. “My whole collapsed world seemed to miraculously just come back together there and then. It was in the first month that I’d arrived back. I had just broken up with my boyfriend because he was living in LA and I’d moved back. He wasn’t very nice and it just ended on the phone by me kind of hanging up on him and just saying he’s an arsehole.

“I wrote the song out of frustration and pain. Not just at him but at the fact that things were really kind of fucked up at the time. If you’d had a record deal, you’d been in LA, you’d worked with the biggest producers, you’d had high hopes and you knew that you had what it takes to write good songs and then all your dreams are shattered before you. You had the opportunity to do law at Oxford, you gave that up. All your mates are in high salary jobs and you’re sat in an attic, broke with a one string guitar not knowing what you’re gonna do with your life, that would make anyone feel depressed.”

In writing ‘Crying Blood’ Brown had found the 50s doo-wop/60s girl-group sound that has come to define her second journey into the world of pop. It’s a quirk that looks sure to set her apart from the melee of female singer/songwriters around at the minute but this time around, Brown is taking things slow, doing it her own way and making sure she doesn’t get pigeon-holed again.

“I do love the 50s stuff,” she says, “but I don’t want to be a slave to it. It is a massive influence on me as an artist but I do want to be able to evolve and try other stuff, but the 50s thing – particularly for this record – is definitely a major influence.”

Listening to her speak about the music she grew up with and the stages of listening tastes she went through (from obscure early jazz records and 60s pop as a kid right through to Bowie in her late teens) it’s clear that Brown knows a thing or two and really isn’t just your next manufactured popstress – with the 50s thing thrown in to persuade you otherwise. And with writing credits for both The Pussycat Dolls and Sugababes to her name (not exactly Radiohead we know), as well as the fact she co-produced her own album, she’s clearly not just a pretty face.

Obviously affected by what went on before, Brown keeps assuring me that this time around she’s taking things slowly, letting it grow organically and that the deal she has now is a lot smaller than most people think.

“I think it’s important to not just force things down people’s throats and I think that’s what is often done nowadays,” she says. “We live in a very fast-food, quick-fix nation.

“I’m just happy at how it’s gone so slowly and naturally. We put out a small seven-inch, so the future will hopefully develop that way. More organic and less pressure. People’s expectations are so high that they don’t let it breathe or grow sometimes.

“They almost suffocate it. My main concern is people hearing an honest record. I know that not every single person is gonna love it, as long as I like it. That’s why you become an artist, you don’t become and artist to please people, you become one for expression and the hope that someone else can feel it too.”

VV Brown’s album is out in May. She’s been all over the TV lately and with the current craze for female artists, coupled with her looks and knack for a penning a hit it remains to be seen just how slow, natural and organic her rise to the top can continue to be.

VV Brown plays Bush Hall (020 8222 6933) on 20 March.