Strong ties keep star grounded

Ladyhawke is keeping a secret.
The 30-year-old Masterton-born singer songwriter, real name Pip Brown, is back in town this week after storming the New Zealand Music Awards as her charting electro-pop persona on Thursday night.
Brown absolutely stole the show, leaving the Auckland venue with a record haul of six Tui awards and sealing her rule as the denim and Dr Martens darling of the Kiwi music industry.
"I was just beyond shocked and I think everyone could tell. I was speechless. It was like I'd been hit by a truck - in a good way though. If there is a good way to be hit by a truck."
The gathering adoration of Brown does not come without family history or commercial success. Her mother Jillian has worked as a singer and Frank Bain, her stepfather and original music teacher, was in 1997 drumming with Masterton celtic group, Wild Geese, when the band won the then equivalent of a Tui for folk album of the year.
The self-titled debut album from Ladyhawke, released late last year, has sold more than 100,000 copies in Britain, 35,000 in Australia and 8000 in New Zealand. The multi-instrumentalist has also won nominations for five ARIA Awards and may yet again walk the red carpet a winner at the awards show in Sydney on November 26.
Her latest and greatest single to date, My Delirium, camped for weeks this year on domestic and international charts and even sparked gossip that American diva Christina Aguilera was to cover the tune on an upcoming album.
"That's just a crazy rumour that has spun out of control. I don't even know how it started," Brown said.
Ladyhawke has won the favour in reality of grotty rocker Courtney Love and pop queen Kylie Minogue. Over past months she has also begun soaring stateside, where she just finished touring at the invitation of mockstar blogger, Perez Hilton.
Then there have been tours throughout the UK and Europe since the start of the year and gigs in Moscow, Japan, and Scandinavia.
"This year has been really, really hectic. My feet have hardly had time to touch the ground."
Brown is today still keeping her footfalls light, she said, after being forced to walk a minefield of quizzes and cameras since landing in New Zealand last week from London, her base of operations for the past two years.
There is a fistful of questions Brown refuses to field - like anything concerning herself and Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism that marked her inward-looking and artistic early years in Masterton.
She admits the condition, which often leaves sufferers socially awkward if not outright crippled, might now be helping to anchor her in the face of such dizzying success.
"I've never been someone who gets carried away in anything. I am who I am," she said.
"I find it absolutely disgusting when I see fellow musicians acting like they own the world and making other people feel like crap. There's no point. It doesn't get you anywhere and you just end up looking like a tool."
Some reviewers have linked lyrics from My Delirium to Brown's experience of Asperger's and her acknowledged vulnerability to homesickness.
She confesses with a "thanks Mum for telling " to constantly carrying with her a Care Bear named Tenderheart that she was given 16 years ago, as well as photographs of her family.
"I also keep in touch with heaps of my mates. I mean, the amount of people I went to school with in Masterton that turn up at gigs all over the world. They're literally scattered about all over. It's awesome."
She said the foundations of her career were gratefully laid while learning music from her stepfather at home and at Chanel College, where she also studied art. One of her latest collaborations has been designing Ladyhawke labels for Beck's beer in Europe.
Masterton also set the scene for her "in hindsight kind of weird" performance debut as a teen busker in Queen Street, throwing down beats on a full drum kit and netting " ten dollars at the most" for her efforts.
The town sparked as well her enduring love of cats, which have remained a steady feature of Ladyhawke promotions and pictorials.
"I got my first cat, Tiger, from the pet shop there when I was four. He was a bastard but I still loved him. I haven't been able to have any cats for far too long now. I would never be home, which would be cruel."
Brown is now set to spend the summer in New Zealand. She is planning a road trip around the country that will pace a sprinkling of gigs and the restoration of her Masterton family home, which her parents have just bought back after leaving the region for Wellington a decade ago.
She said new music might also be written in Wairarapa on a portable studio she has in tow, and she "would absolutely love to have a summertime cat as well, if I could. That would be cool".
Brown has already written a song featuring Masterton titled Private Broadcast, which so far remains "one that's still kind of in the wings, waiting". She is also keeping veiled the finer points of her first kiss and maiden hometown romance.
"It did happen in Masterton, of course. But I'm not telling you any more than that. It's a secret."