'THE SAVIOUR of pop music? It's a big title, isn't it?" It is, but the description doesn't seem to alarm its recipient – Little Boots, aka Victoria Hesketh, who is tucked into the large sofa in her five-star London hotel suite. She's a compact person, is Victoria, with an ego to match. Considering the buzz that has followed her since the start of the year ( NMEbestowed the "saviour" title six months ago), it is surprising she hasn't fallen on the floor in a heap, writes TONY CLAYTON-LEA

“I don’t really believe titles like that, because they’re so ridiculously hyperbolic. I mean, I’m hardly the Second Coming, am I? It’s good that people think I have a shot at doing something big, but I don’t worry about living up to it too much. It’s a weird one – I don’t wake up under pressure, but I know I can’t sleep properly, and I have nightmares a lot.

"I probably put myself under my own kind of pressure. I suppose there's a lot of expectation on the forthcoming album [ Hands], and I think people are expecting it to be phenomenal."

Hesketh understands that the very people who are expecting great things from Handswill pounce and carp if they think it falls short.

“But I’m not making a record for those people,” she says. “I’m making a record for people who are, hopefully, going buy it and for people who want to put it on the radio.”

So the primary objective is to make music for people to share?

“Yes, I have always thought it strange that so many musicians say they’re making an album for themselves. I want to connect with a lot of people – to make them feel happy – or something, anything.”

Is it escapist music? Maybe, but please, she begs, don’t associate her music with the word “recession”. “That’s just timing and coincidence getting in the way.”

Twenty-four-year-old Hesketh is from Blackpool, a working-class town with a tourist reputation built on the fundamental idea that entertainment is the be-all and end-all. There’s nothing fancy about the town, and there’s nothing fancy about Little Boots. Five-star hotels don’t do it for her, she says, looking around her impressive contemporary-décor suite, because most are built specifically to engender superiority.

“Blackpool is a special place, and not just because I grew up there,” she remarks. “I just love the idea that the whole town is based around entertaining people. Even if for some that form of entertainment is getting pissed, throwing kebabs at each other and having a fight at stag and hen nights. I genuinely think that the town’s ethic of entertaining has crossed over into me.

“I think the media try to spin it a certain way – the shiny town with a dark underbelly angle – and from that I’m asked questions about how dark my music is underneath its bright and shiny façade. I say no way to that, and repeat that although there is a tacky side to Blackpool – the karaoke bars, drag shows and Elvis impersonators – why on earth should I be ashamed of that? It’s like being asked if I’d be ashamed of being popular or mainstream, isn’t it?

“Thousands of people love karaoke and dressing up as Elvis – it makes them happy, so it’s more about that, and embracing it, too. If you see people in Blackpool doing that, enjoying it, what’s the harm? I don’t think Blackpool is a dark place at all. So there!”

The road to Little Boots’s success has been long, and character-building. From her teenage years, Hesketh has served time in a girlband (she got fired because she wouldn’t take singing lessons), a punk band, a prog-rock band and a hotel lounge/jazz singer. Her most recent stab at success was indie-rock act Dead Disco, which she quit at the end of 2007.

At first Hesketh toyed with the idea of writing songs and handing them over to people (her hit Stuck on Repeatwas initially written with Kylie in mind), but gradually she decided not to.

“Dead Disco had defined my life for about two years,” she says, “so I didn’t really know what I was about anymore. I felt I had to relearn things, to transform, and after Hot Chip’s producer Joe Goddard stepped in to assist, I finally realised who my songs were meant for – me. Then I signed a new record deal, got a MySpace page together, did some cool things for YouTube [a succession of cheesy pop covers] and here we are.”

She knows it was a mixture of luck, management skills, talent and record company strategy that got her linked with Goddard and producer/co-writer Greg Kurstin (creative collaborator with the likes of Lily Allen and Kylie), yet she fully understands that if she hadn’t spent all those years serving her apprenticeship in a succession of failed acts, then Little Boots might not be so well heeled.

She nods her head vigorously. “Absolutely – it was amazing training. If you can dress up in a blue feather boa and perform in front of thousands in a theme park in Belgium, then you can easily get up in east London as Little Boots.

“Which of my previous entertainment lives is my least favourite? That’s difficult to answer because most of the things I did I started off loving them, yet ended up hating them. When I used to play in hotels doing cover versions, at first it was great, I loved it. But at the end I thought why am I sitting here playing songs I haven’t written to people who aren’t listening? Even though I was making several hundred quid a night when I was a teenager I just knew I had to stop.

“I have loads of friends, mind, who have no problem working in covers bands and working all the weddings they can get. What’s the difference between them and me? Nothing major; we’re just different people. For me, I wasn’t being creative, and if I’m not that I get itchy. In hotel bands you definitely go through the motions, but with your own songs you so regularly get into the zone. Little Boots is my project, my songs, so it’s different.”

So is she the saviour of pop music?

Probably not, but with Hands, Hesketh has fashioned one of the soundtrack albums of the summer: it's bright, it's smart, it's tuneful and, in the best traditions of her hometown, it's entertaining. Best of all, though, is its lack of superiority and self-awareness.

“I have no desire to be a cool pop star,” she says, as the chat draws to a close. “I just want to create pop songs that make people happy. I know some people ache to be cool, but I’m from Blackpool, remember. I live in east London now, which is pretty much the epicentre of cool, and I find it all fairly ridiculous. I love London, but somewhere like Shoreditch – where all the pointy haircuts and skinny jeans live – is funny, because some of it isn’t real. There are good people there, but lots of idiots as well.

“With Little Boots I can be as carefree and cheesy as I want, and so it’s kinda funny that the cool people are into it. I just don’t care about being cool, though – it’s ridiculous. I remember my mum saying to me a few years ago that the best thing I could ever be is to be myself. So I do. Alarm bells start to ring when I’m not.”

• Handsis released through Warner Music on June 6th. Little Boots performs at Oxegen, July 10th - 12th.