When she stopped singing, I started,Linda Harrison recalls of the moment when she chose her future. My grandmother sang to me every Sunday night. This was really special to me, but she died when I was 7. When you lose something you have to fill it with something, and for me it was this dream of being a musician. There’s never been anything else. I doubt there ever will be.
Harrison has just released her second physical single, Supermodel, has 1 million YouTube hits, a fashion line and an album recorded when she was 16 to her name, and collaborations and connections from Frankmusik to Perez Hilton. But this seemingly glitzy start is the result of fierce independence and self-belief. She has refused management and publishing deals to pour her own savings into doing things the way she thinks is right. Her upbeat pop songs are rooted in emotional hardship and solid experience gained from Edinburgh to LA’s slums. Vulnerable but with a steely stubbornness, she is a pop star who has paid dues the latest X Factor puppets don’t know exist.
In my teenage years I got into heavily emotional music, acoustic stuff that I would find online,” she says of her early influences. “And I listened to punk-ska, and Weezer and the Foo Fighters. Then I got into Slipknot
Traumatic events around her influenced the music she liked, and secretly and bashfully made. I had a lot of experience of suicidal friends when I was young, she says of her early years in Edinburgh. The first suicidal friend I had was when I was 10, and it just kept on going. That forced me to get more into music. There was so much going on that I had to get it out somehow. I wasn’t talking to my parents or telling my friends, so I needed to write about those things.