Little Boots reveals ghoulish encounter

SHE'S the brightest star on the horizon, the petite pop phenomenon who's set to haunt the charts with her spaced-out electro disco.

But Victoria Hesketh - better known to fans as Little Boots - discovered that the spectre of success isn't the only one around.

The 25-year-old, one of the highlights of today's Futures Stage line-up at T In The Park, reckons she had a close encounter of the paranormal kind . . . with the ghost of Marilyn Monroe.

And she confessed: "It was scary. Really creepy."

The hotly-tipped blonde, who grew up in Blackpool, had her brush with the spirit world while in Los Angeles finishing off her debut album Hands.

She explained: "I was staying in the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood.

"It's got a lot of movie history - it's where they held the first-ever Oscars ceremony in 1929 and Douglas Fairbanks was one of the original investors.

"Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where all the movie stars have their handprints imprinted into the concrete, is on the other side of the road.

"But the hotel itself is notoriously haunted. There are spooks out by the swimming pool and people say the ghost of the film star Montgomery Clift plays the bugle on the ninth floor.

"Some even say they've seen Marilyn dancing in the ballroom."

The tragic star, who died in mysterious circumstances in August 1962, had lived at the Roosevelt for two years while she was trying to break into acting.

The mirror from her favourite suite now hangs next to the lift in the lobby. Hotel staff swear her apparition regularly appears in it.

"Of course I saw her," Victoria insisted. "It's funny because, at university, I did a module on Marilyn as an icon. So being at the Roosevelt - and the pressure of recording the album - I think began to bring it all back to me.

"I kept getting a really weird vibe. The lights in my room would come on it the middle of the night for no apparent reason. I was having nightmares, feeling that I was being suffocated."

One of the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe's death, at the age of just 36, is that she was SMOTHERED by secret service agents desperate to protect the reputation of President John F Kennedy amid rumours of an affair.

"It was very strange," added Victoria. "I was really freaked out by it. I'd never had an experience like that before.

"It's weird because I've been in LA quite a lot without having anything like that happen so there's no practical explanation for it."

The City of Angels played a key part in the making of Hands, which crashed into the Top Five when it was released last month.

It's where producer Greg Kurstin - who's also worked with Lily Allen, Gwen Stefani and Beck - is based.

He'd produced Victoria's previous band Dead Disco and, when they split two years ago, he offered to help midwife her Little Boots project.

"Greg was really crucial to the whole thing," she revealed. "In my old band if I'd come up with a hook or a melody that was too catchy I'd have to make excuses for it.

"But he was the first person to say to me, 'You should explore that more, you're a really good pop writer'." She began shuttling between the UK and America - "sometimes for just a couple of days at a time, sometimes for three weeks at a stretch" - to work on her songs.

"The thing is," she admitted, "I HATE flying and I hate long-haul flights . . . but it was worth it." One of the first songs to emerge from her visits to California was last month's Top 20 hit New In Town.

"I had a really good time in LA," she explained, "but actually it can be quite lonely. Quite a lot of the songs on the album were written in the studio, then I'd take the basic thing back to my hotel room at night and write the melody and the words.

"But there's only so much you can do in terms of working on songs that way.

"So I started going out. At first, I went to the hotel bar then the next night I went to the bar down the street.

"I ended up going to quite a lot of random places and hanging out with strangers. I had quite a few crazy nights.

"New In Town came out of that. The song is about the sense of excitement and fear you get from being in an unfamiliar place.

"I wanted to convey that mix of anticipation and danger - you don't know where you're at or what's going to happen but somehow it's exhilarating."

The pop element of the Little Boots sound - heavy on '80s-style synth melodies, dance beats and Victoria's lighter-than- air vocals - emerged from her childhood obsession with The Spice Girls, All Saints and Debbie Harry.

"I used to love Blondie," she explained. "My babysitter used to write the lyrics out for me so I could sing along."

But it was her schoolgirl fascination with Kylie Minogue that inspired one of the album's standout tracks, Stuck On Repeat.

She explained: "I have a lot of admiration for those professional songwriters like, say, Cathy Dennis who create songs for Kylie and Britney Spears.

"Stuck On Repeat came out of me thinking about the kind of tune that Kylie would sing - the way the riff on Can't Get You Out Of My Head sticks in your mind and the way it works with the lyric. I love the idea of songs that connect on different levels." At the turn of the year, when she outgunned White Lies and Florence & The Machine in polls of the most promising acts, the notion that she was an overnight success made her smile.

In fact, she got her first piano when she was just five and was writing songs by the age of 13. "

I didn't play them to anyone," she confided. "I just kept them to myself. I was in dozens of groups too - 30-piece big bands, prog rock acts, choirs, jazz trios - but I was too shy to play my own songs.

"It was only really in my last band that I began to think, 'Actually, I should be doing my own thing'."

After gigs in Inverness, Edinburgh and Glasgow, Victoria's already had a taste of Scottish crowds.

So today she's looking forward to playing in front of the world's most up-for-it audience at T. "I've heard so much about it," she smiled. "The shows I've done in Scotland have been some of the best ever but they tell me T In The Park is even better so I can't wait to experience it." As well as album favourites like Earthquake and Click, fans at T may also be treated to a version of the album's title track.

"I've put every inch of myself into this album," explained Victoria, "but Hands is very special to me.

"It's about a girl with a broken heart. She doesn't know how to fix it. In the end she realises she's known how to mend it all along, she just has to have faith in herself.

"It means a lot to me because the biggest thing I've learned over the last year or so is that I had it in me all this time . . . I just had to have faith in myself."

LITTLE Boots plays the Red Bull Bedroom Jam Futures Stage today (Sunday).

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