Victoria Hesketh is beginning to learn a few things about hype.

Having already recorded a T4 live performance this morning, she has to be in Germany in a couple of hours. In between she’s on the phone to English journos who all want their fifteen minutes. She has a long day ahead of her. She’s already beginning to sound jaded. It’s only quarter past twelve.

The 25-year-old singer (a.k.a Little Boots) has just got back from LA where, among other things, an entire Carson Daily show was dedicated to her. She’s already been voted the hottest act of 2009 by pretty much everybody in the know. They’re calling her the future of pop. The next Lilly Allen. The PR machine is truly in motion. For Hesketh, the pressure is on.

“It’s quite daunting I guess, but I just have to get on with it now,” she tells me. “The real test will be the fact that the album is coming out soon, how well that does, how many people actually genuinely listen to it, and how it does on the radio and stuff.

“All that stuff is actually really, genuinely important. However many critics said you’d do well and how ever many taste makers you win over, it’s still not gonna secure your future as a musician.

“That’s just got to do with how many records you sell, so kind of – without being cynical – all the hype is really not that important. I want to be a musician and make a career of it, so I’m nervous for the release, you know.

“I think there’s also quite a lot of expectation on it, and I feel like the critics will be ready to pounce but you know, we’ll see. Hopefully they’ll stick by me. I think people would say that it’s like I’m releasing my second album, because there’s so much expectation on it.”

Like she says, Hesketh has truly been a hit with the taste-makers. Her brand of electro-pop falls somewhere between Ladyhawke and Girls Aloud, Goldfrapp and Kylie on a good day. It’s catchy. Good. She can obviously write a tune and the production is every bit as slick as you’d imagine. ‘The future of the pop’, though, seems a bit bold.

It was only a year ago that Victoria Hesketh had just left a minor indie band called Dead Disco and was yet to even come up with the name Little Boots.

“It was actually a really hard decision,” she tells me, of leaving the band. “It really did take me quite a long time to say, ‘no, I’m gonna go and do something else’, you know. Obviously, now I realise that it was the best thing that I could have done but it took me quite a long time to come round to that decision. There was never just one moment where I decided to do it. There was always things pulling me in different directions which was quite hard.”

Clearly, the singer made the right choice. And from that point she made the decision to go ‘pure pop’ (an early audition with Pop Idol might have been a clue here). There’s pop, though, and then there’s pop. Clearly, Hesketh had no vision of being the new Kylie Minogue. She writes her own songs, plays her own instruments. She has a hand in the production.

In fact, stuff like Kylie and Girls Aloud is just what Hesketh wants to get away from. It’s that generic, manufactured sound that she sees as having made British pop music so stayed and uninspiring in recent years.

“I think what I love about British pop music is that legacy of all the slightly eccentric characters there’s been, from like David Bowie to Elton John to Kate Bush to Hot Chip, you know. It’s all just has that real British eccentricity in it, but at the same time as being really poppy. There’s a lot of character in it you know, it’s not just straight-forward. I love that.

And what about the current scene? “I think there’s some more interesting stuff coming through now,” she says politely (she doesn’t want to start a war). “I guess if you look in the charts at the moment there’s a lot of kind of stuff like Akon, which I find quite unimaginative really, a lot of that kind of stuff. I think there’s loads of more interesting British stuff coming through right now though. More interesting indie, electro and dance stuff coming through which is fusing a lot more with pop these days.”

The Little Boots album is out in June and it looks set to deliver on the hype. She describes the record as “pure pop”, but says it is “dark and electronic” too. On it she’s worked with LA super-producer, Greg Kurstin (Lilly Allen, Britney Spears, Ladyhawke, Kylie Minogue) as well as Joe Goddard of Hot Chip (“Some things are just meant to happen - I’m a big believer in fate”), and has even found time to duet with Phil Oakey.

“I had written a track which always felt like it should be a duet and needed male and female vocals on it,” she says. “I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew him, and when they said we might be able to get him, I was like ‘oh that would be amazing’ because I’m a huge Human League fan.

“They sent it to him and he was apparently really into it, so it was just amazing when he agreed to do it.

“I didn’t actually get to meet him though. The only time he could do it was when I was in LA. It was actually really annoying that I didn’t get to meet him, but we sent lots of emails and stuff.”

The fact that not meeting Phil Oakey was a difficult cross to bare for Hesketh is something that speaks volumes about the singer’s credentials as a connoisseur of British pop. Lilly Allen might not know who Oakey was. Girls Aloud definitely wouldn’t.

And in her background, there’s a history that shows this is a dedicated musician. Okay, she may have auditioned for Pop Idol, but she’s also played the harp in a prog-rock band, has done jazz gigs in restaurants, and wrote her university dissertation on… “originality in music and the concept of jazz and stuff like that”.

A multi-instrumentalist, these days as well as singing and playing the piano and Stylophone, she’s also turning her hand to ‘the tenori-on’. Consisting of a hand held screen that’s made up of a 16 by 16 grid of LED switches, the tenori-on is impressive to say the least.

“Somebody I worked with in the studio once had one so I borrowed it and started mucking around with it and got really into it,” she explains. “I bought one myself and then ended up getting a few more and just found myself really liking it.
“It’s a Japanese design. It’s made by Yamaha. It’s like a sequencer, basically, that lights up. It takes quite a while to master. You have to know what you’re doing I guess. It’s quite easy to do for a bit of fun but if you wanna do something more serious then you have to take a bit more time. But it’s well worth it.”

When the Little Boots album comes out in June we’ll see whether Victoria Hesketh is going to be ‘just a bit of fun’, or ‘something more serious’. With so many predicting big things, though, at the moment the future looks anything but little…