Five Reasons Why... the resurrection of V V Brown is a V V Good Thing

1. Her new album’s quite good, you know 

I mean, like, really good. It’s all very stormily electronic, very brooding and very kinetic. There are a lot of bits which make you go “Heavens above”. A case in point is The Apple, the first single: a bolshy groove which lurches and lollops before a joyously pummelling chorus heaves itself up from the electro-fug and scrawls in foot-high letters on the outside of the Ministry Of Pop: “GUYS I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING NOW AND BY GEORGE IT FEELS GOOD.”

2. Her new album’s also one in the eye for “The Man” and “The General Public At Large” 

Now I’m sure we’ve all done things we’ve regretted in the past. However, most people don’t have their mistakes recorded and then put on general release. Basically, if you work your way into tastemakers’ lists and then the public says, “actually, we’ve had quite enough of this tastefully retro post-Winehouse pop, thanks, we’re ready for synthesizers again”, then that’s pretty much your tilt at pop success done for. (It is the view of this parish that Travelling Like The Light, VV Brown’s 2009 tastefully retro post-Winehouse pop album, was conspicuously not shit, but people at large are completely useless and sadly enough it is people at large who buy records and decide which pop stars are elevated to the elysian fields and which pop stars are left to fight for a 10-minute performance slot after the turning on of Keswick’s Christmas lights. Democracy doesn’t work.) Think of Parade, Daisy Dares You, The Vines: they swung, they missed, they sank. If you get dropped by your label like a hot potato served with jus de smallpox, then you’re not only sunk but wearing concrete galoshes too. If you follow that up with endless promises of a second album which is then shelved indefinitely, you might as well stick your bags in Davy Jones’ locker, get comfy on Davy Jones’ sofa, and book your kids a place at Davey Jones’ Community High School – you’re never coming back from the abyss. You’re irredeemably toxic. Certainly, it looked a bit like VV was going to go that way too, what with the Marks & Spencer’s modelling thing. (Yes, I know Bryan Ferry did it too, but he’s Bryan Ferry. People have got away with murder with worse excuses.) That VV’s album is so ace after a couple of punts to the teeth is a testament to VV’s tenacity and the fact that she pretty obviously loves pop music, which is always an attractive trait in a pop star.

3. The video for The Apple 

In which VV Brown plays a geisha and makes an old Japanese chap young and sexy again with a magic potion. That description doesn’t really do it justice. Just watch it.

4. A brand new V Voice 

Gone is sweet, flutey-piped VV Brown. Here instead is a thrusting, assertive yowl, pitched somewhere between Grace Jones’ signature “hello darlings, I’m here and I’m fabulous” mewl, the operatic end of Annie Lennox’s range, and Gandalf when he gets pissed off at Bilbo and says he’s not just some conjuror of cheap tricks and makes the room go all dark and bendy. When VV sings, “Don’t patronise me”, in this new voice, the only response can be, “Righto, won’t be doing any patronising then."

5. She can do so much better than modelling for Marks & Spencer anyway 

The new album is so good that VV should be aiming for her own line of John Lewis kettles AT THE VERY LEAST.

Five Reasons Why... A*M*E is fairly A*M*A*Z*I*N*G

1. She just sort of ‘gets’ the whole pop star thing

Some pop stars get it, others don’t. Madonna and Robbie ‘get it’. Olly Murs and Pixie Lott do not ‘get it’. Pop stars who ‘get it’ tend to realise quite early on that the bits which aren’t ‘the tunes’ are actually very very important too, so set about cultivating an image and that. Pop stars who don’t ‘get it’ go through a similar stage of development, but tend to outsource it to people who’ve never actually met them and who make most of their sartorial and artistic choices by doing a blind trolley-dash around All Saints and Topshop. Then they make bad videos and boring album artwork because they’ve managed to become a team captain on an ITV2 comedy panel show and don’t really care anymore. A*M*E is firmly in the former camp.

2. Play the Game Boy and Need You 100% are both very ace

The first is a vaguely 8-bit-ish affair with an oddly lurching but propulsive groove and is very very good indeed. It sounded very very good when I heard it in a three-quarters-empty student union on a wet Sunday night, which is a mark of just how very very good it is. That Need You 100% was number one for three weeks straight makes writing a defence of its merits relatively academic, but it’s still worthwhile to point out just how weird a hit single it is. There’s so much space within the relatively sparse production for that bassline to bounce around, and there’s a handclap breakdown (!!!). Handclap breakdowns were temporarily ruined by every skinny-jeaned indie band formed between 2005 and 2008 with the intention of exciting sunstroke-afflicted 13-year-olds at Reading and Leeds, so A*M*E and Duke Dumont’s redemption of the trope is very welcome indeed.

3. She’s absolutely tiny

Having briefly met her when she played at Newcastle SU as a support act for Lonsdale Boys Club (Long, Stale Bores Club more like L.O.L.) I can exclusively confirm that A*M*E is between 5 feet and 5 feet 2 inches tall. That’s shorter than the average postbox (5’ 4”).  More to the point, this means that while being not quite as great as, for example, Foxes right now, A*M*E is a full 18 inches shorter than the artist formerly known as Louisa Rose Allen. This means that while Foxes scores a highly respectable 3.2 Pop Units/inch³, A*M*E bests her with a stratospheric 4.78 Pop Units/inch³. Can’t argue with maths.

4. Her zine, The A*M*E

The only reason I actually went to see A*M*E was because of the strength of The A*M*E, a 30-odd-page publication which includes such luminating features as an advice page with Ken Kofi, wherein the ex-secretary general of the UN/special friend of Barbie dispenses his worldly advice (to a girl whose boyfriend is ribbing her for being fat: “Are his jokes good? I love fat jokes”; to a girl with acne: “We suggest cleaning yourself more”). There’s also a weird 90s nostalgia page which praises the decade which “had pop legends like Debbi [sic] Harry” (Blondie were on hiatus from 1982 to 1997 but never mind). Music in the 90s “had structure… versus [sic], a mid eight”, which certainly helps to explain why since Y2K hit the charts have been filled with amorphous 20-minute-long drone rock and acid jazz freakouts. “It was good honest music”, says A*M*E, banging her shoe on the desk and crying hot, angry tears over the time when she found out that while Shakira’s hips may not have lied, her shins and collarbones were fucking turncoat bastards. The A*M*E is almost entirely pictures, but then so is Harper’s Bazaar and people still buy that. Must be a London thing.

5.  “You got my heart running faster than Usain, boy”

Is that line from new single Heartless good? Is it bad? I have literally no idea. The way A*M*E says it not once but TWICE suggests to me that she thinks it is, but then I’ve been had by pop stars before (Pixie Lott; VV Brown; Shakira's kneecaps).