Listening to the crystalline, shiny pop music of Little Boots, you might imagine it was created on digital dream machines in some remote pop laboratory. But drop in on its creator's house in East London and you'll find no such hi-techisms, rather a scruffy old piano, a bath full of balloons, and a drummer dashing out of the front door while a manky cat breaks in through a gap in the back one.

And then there's the woman herself - Victoria Hesketh, recently labelled “the future of pop” by the Popjustice website and hotly tipped by our own Pete Paphides. Here she sits in her bedroom, surrounded by a wonderland of beeping and bleeping musical instruments. Tiny, northern, 25 years old, the one-woman show that is Little Boots has bleached blonde hair, enough eyeliner to do an Egyptian cat proud, and a brand new prize: runner-up in the Critics' Choice Award for the Brits 2009. Is she annoyed not to have come first?

“No! It's amazing to even get shortlisted when I haven't properly released a record yet or even made a video - so to come second is pretty mind-blowing. This time last year I didn't even exist as Little Boots. I was in my mum's garage freezing cold with a piano trying to do Elton John covers - now I've played my own song on Jools Holland.”

Her synth-led sounds and glassy vocals have also led to comparisons with Kylie - but only if Kylie gave up her unattainable mystique and chatted away like a checkout girl about growing up in Blackpool, “which is full of strip bars and fat people walking round in swimming trunks, dying on the rollercoasters or murdering each other”. Hesketh continues cheerily: “I used to work on the local paper and every week someone else had been chopped up and put in a bin.”

Success for Little Boots may be recent, but for Hesketh, this is a life's work. Aged 5, she begged her family for a piano. They couldn't afford one but her uncle found one in a pub, and “it was all right - well, after my mum had cleaned the puke and the burnt bits off it”. She started lessons and won a scholarship to a music school where she learnt flute and harp (though she flogged her harp to buy a synthesizer). Then there was the “proper mental singing teacher with lipstick all over her teeth who made me sing Broadway numbers with a chair on my head”. But the technique worked - this slip of a girl found that she could really sing.

Singing wasn't enough for the Pop Idol judges, though - Hesketh auditioned in her late teens and got nowhere, bursting into tears afterwards. It's hard to imagine now but she says she was just a geeky little girl, lacking in confidence, “and they're looking for a larger-than-life personality”. She found her performing feet later - after dabbling in a prog rock band and a jazz trio, Hesketh realised she could pay her way through Leeds University if she spent her nights plonking away at “mushy Norah Jones covers on the piano” in hotels and bars. She made loads of money and hated it. (She also managed to get a first in cultural studies, with a dissertation on “The concept of originality in the music of Jamie Cullum”.)

After graduating, she toured the Continent with a big band, playing bandstands in German theme parks, and then joined an all-girl band called Dead Disco who went to LA to work with Greg Kurstin, Lily Allen's producer. But it didn't work out and she left the band. Having found a musical soulmate in Kurstin, however, she has kept working with him.

“All the time I'd been hiding my own songs and finally I had to make the sort of music I actually wanted to listen to. The first two records I ever had were Blondie and Kylie and my musical taste basically hasn't changed since I was 5. Before I used to always think, ‘What would a jazz performer do?' or ‘What would the band do?' - now it's so easy because it's ‘What would I do?' It's just me.”

There is a disco influence at play, and also the recent electronic pop of Roisin Murphy and Goldfrapp, though Little Boots is perhaps a warmer proposition, younger and a little less arch, not so high fashion. She is also a seamless mixture of low-brow and highbrow. On her MySpace page it says that her influences are “anything on the Radio 1 playlist”, but she borrowed her nickname from the Roman emperor Caligula (it means Little Boots) and wrote Mathematics, in which she sings beautifully about Fibonacci and Pythagoras, after reading a line from Sylvia Plath's poem Love is a Parallax: “... yet love/ knows not of death nor calculus above/ the simple sum of heart plus heart”.

She has also been working with Joe Goddard from Hot Chip and recently ended up in Basement Jaxx's studio to do some “awful, sexy” guest vocals which she reckons won't see the light of day. She also has a YouTube channel where she takes requests to record a new cover version every week - watch her sing Wiley's grime crossover hit Wearing My Rolex “in a Blackpool accent, with my s*** drum machine that cost five quid”. And marvel at those other instruments - theremins, a Stylophone, and a Tenorion, “which is a sequencer made of lights”.

It's heartening that women have now come so far in the music industry that they feel compelled to remind you of male achievements. “Everybody keeps grouping me in with a new wave of young women making music but there's also a lot of interesting young men too!

“Last year,” she says, “was all about the big-voice stuff like Duffy and Adele - look at my huge amazing voice. The year before was say-what-you-see quirky cheeky Kate Nash and Lily Allen - so this year people are looking toward more fantastical ideas, more unhinged escapism.” She says her favourite artists are Kate Bush and Davie Bowie, “where it's a whole little universe of this person, this character. A lot of the artists coming through this year haven't just got a great voice and a mind of their own - there's a real character coming through in everything that they do.” Little Boots - big personality.

Little Boots plays the NME Awards Tour Shepherds Bush Empire, W12, 0870 7712000, Feb 13.

www.littlebootsmusic.co.uk

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