Pixie Lott: 'When I stop enjoying it, I'll pack it in'
She's not planning on leaving the limelight any time soon...BY BETH NEIL
THERE aren’t many people who do Positive Mental Attitude better than Pixie Lott. She’s so relentlessly cheerful, so permanently bushy-tailed, that it’s difficult to imagine anything getting her down.
Take the disappointment of her eponymous third album – released in the summer of 2014 – failing to break into the Top 10, and the last couple of singles not faring particularly well either.
Bromley-born Pixie, 25, simply shrugs her shoulders. “I just keep on going,” she says on coping when music she’s poured her heart and soul into doesn’t, for whatever reason, quite cut the mustard in terms of chart performance.
“I do stuff that I believe in myself. You can’t keep everybody happy all the time, so you need to keep doing what you enjoy and do what you think is right.
“When I stop enjoying myself, I’ll just pack it in! But I don’t think that’ll ever happen, because I have the bug to just keep going. I’ve been doing this for ages and the buzz is still the same as it was from the start.”
Nevertheless, she acknowledges that it’s important to diversify, which is why she’s put music on the back-burner in order to concentrate on adding strings to her bow – hence her upcoming lead role in a new stage version of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. She’s constantly writing new material, but admits it’s unlikely anything will be released until next year.
“Music has been and still is my number one, but there are other areas I want to focus on,” she says. “Doing Strictly [in 2014] was definitely branching out of my comfort zone, and I learned so much from that, and that’s what I’m hoping for from Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
“I remember going to see Chicago on Broadway when I was about 15 and Usher was performing as Billy Flynn, and I knew then not to be afraid to go into other areas and to be as rounded a performer as you can be.”
Every time we’ve shot and interviewed Pixie for the cover of Fabulous, she’s been nothing less than completely charming. She’s unassuming, unstarry and undemanding, and so laid-back there can’t be much in life that ruffles her feathers.
Since she arrived on the music scene back in 2009 with the No.1 debut single Mama Do, Pixie – who was born Victoria but was given the nickname as a baby – has gone on to establish herself as one of the country’s most stylish celebs.
She rarely puts a fashion foot wrong and designers such as Dolce & Gabbana, who have become good friends, queue up to dress her. She’s never afraid to experiment, doesn’t ever take herself too seriously and switches easily between grunge, glam, classic cuts and more offbeat styles.
She makes flat shoes look sexy every time – nobody does a brogue quite like Pixie. And it all makes her the perfect choice to be our Style Issue cover star.
“I do love fashion,” she says. “I think my favourite era will always be the 1960s. It can be quirky, fun and sexy, but also classic and beautiful. I love Brigitte Bardot, Edie Sedgwick, Marilyn Monroe...I love Audrey Hepburn as well. So I like to keep it contemporary but inspired by different eras.”
The spare room of her east London flat sounds like a fashionista’s heaven. She describes vast piles of designer clothes, vintage handbags and “millions and millions” of shoes, which means her second bedroom is not fit for purpose and bursting at the seams.
Organised chaos?
“No, just chaos,” she says, holding her hands up. “Total chaos, like, everywhere. It’s so bad and I need to organise it because it’s crazy to live in. I’ve got too much stuff and I never put anything away.
Which is why she’s spending more time on Rightmove than Net-A-Porter these days – not that there’s much space in the schedule for house-hunting, either. Pixie is in the middle of rehearsing six days a week for the iconic role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which will tour the country between March and June before landing in London’s West End for a three-month run at Theatre Royal Haymarket.
She’s currently based in Leicester, where the cast are rehearsing for five weeks until the tour kicks off there. We meet at a cocktail bar in the East Midlands city, and Pixie – in typically upbeat spirits despite having just finished a full-on 10-hour rehearsal – arrives with her guitar slung on her back and orders a cup of tea.
She’s dressed down in a pair of J Brand skinnies, a Bella Freud jumper and the cutest pair of Minna Parikka bunny “sneaks” (complete with rabbit ears and fluffy tail), and is wrapped up against the February chill in a toasty parka by Ruby Sky London.
Pixie is in the enviable position of often being handed expensive freebies, which no doubt add to the disarray in that out-of-control spare bedroom.
“I know I’m lucky, whether things are gifted or even if I just borrow them for an event and then send them back. I still get excited. Dolce & Gabbana sent me and Oliver a Valentine’s his ‘n’ hers box. There was this amazing dress, purse and phone case, and I was all: ‘Oh my god.’”
Oliver is Oliver Cheshire, 27, Pixie’s live-in boyfriend and a male model with campaigns for the likes of D&G and Calvin Klein under his belt – and the sort of cheekbones that could slice metal.
She met him at a fashion show six years ago and the two of them quickly became friends. He came to watch her support Rihanna in London, and they later ended up in New York at the same time, where they went out with a group of friends. As they saw each other more, the friendship developed into romance.
“I always thought he was really nice because he seemed, like, really normal,” says Pixie. “I think that was it more than anything else, and I sort of got him straight away. In that showbizzy world, he was just like a person from back home. He was really easy to talk to.”
Does she ever worry that she met The One at the age of 19, before she’d experienced more of life?
“No,” she replies, very definitely. “I think every relationship is different and there are no real rules. Some of my friends have dated loads of people and others are still with the first person they started going out with, a bit like me. If it feels right, you just go with it.”
Both Pixie and Oliver’s schedules mean long spells apart. He’s been travelling to Leicester when work allows it, but Pixie admits there are stretches when, save for FaceTime, they barely see each other.
“Either I’m away or he’s away, and those times are hard. But we’re used to it because it’s been like that since the beginning. We have complete trust, and I think if we didn’t have that, it would be much more difficult than it is. I’d like to think we were heading that way [towards marriage], definitely.”
Aside from performing, Pixie also has a collection of hair products called Paint – which includes chalks, metallic sprays and wash-out colours – as well as her own eyelash range. There’s the possibility of a fashion line in the future, although it would be different from her collaboration with Lipsy a few years ago – an arrangement that produced four successful collections but that didn’t sit comfortably with Pixie.
“Some of the pieces – which had to be there because they were their bestsellers – were not things I would personally wear. I’d want to do it so every single piece was my own,” she says.
Pixie drains her teacup and happily poses for a selfie with an eagle-eyed fan who has spotted her huddled away in our low-lit corner.
As she leaves to head back to her temporary digs, she mentions a recent meeting in LA with the legendary producer Quincy Jones, who gave her some advice she now plans to live by: “He told me: ‘Have humility with your creativity and grace with your success,’” she says.
Pixie already has both those things in spades.
Pixie’s Paint hair products and Pixie Loves Eylure eyelashes are available at Superdrug. Breakfast at Tiffany's tours nationwide from March 3 (Breakfastattiffanys.co.uk).
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