Some bonus bits from @NerinaPallot

I had a quick chat with Nerina Pallot last week when she popped into the 6 Music news bunker (tidy, isn't it?). The results went up on the BBC News Website today. We talk about babies, fans who make out to her songs, and who is tallest: Nerina or Kylie? You can read the interview here - but, as ever, there are a few little morsels that didn't make the main piece. So here's a few snippets of conversation from the cutting room floor...

I love the synthpop remix of the new single, Put Your Hands Up (Like It's 1987). How did that come about?

I’ll let you into a little secret. That is not the remix. That's the first version we ever did.

Actually, to be honest, the way I wrote the song was on the piano and it was very singer-songwriter. I played it to my husband, and he said, "there’s so much potential here but it’s a bit of a yawn" so we re-worked it together and it became this uber-pop moment. I have this obsession with mid-80s Stock Aitken and Waterman, so I wanted to let that song have its moment in that way.

This album ditches the uber-pop moments you had on your last record, The Graduate, though...

I wanted to make a concerted effort to bring back the rock element to my records. I hadn’t done that on The Graduate. For me, that record was an indulgence. I produced it on my own and I’m not the world’s greatest electric guitar player, so it really lacked that. Bernard [Butler - producer] was one of my first choices, because of that element. And also he had a vision, which was really old-fashioned. We rehearsed a band and cut most of the album live. I think that’s where that grit comes from – just a bunch of people in the studio playing together.

Put Your Hands Up has done really well on Radio 2, but do you find it difficult to get your songs played elsewhere?

We live in a time where things are meant to be niched – but that doesn’t bear reflection of people’s iTunes collections. I think people’s listening is more diverse than we think it is. One day, there’ll be a perfect radio station where they play Britney next to Nirvana.

Maybe it would be good to look at the American model of including airplay and general media exposure into the singles chart. Then we'd get a truer picture of what is a really popular track, what is a fake hit, and what is a manipulated hit. But no-one's going to listen to me on that!

Here's Nerina performing of Put Your Hands Up on ITV1 yesterday. The drummer is having a little too much fun, if you ask me.

Nerina Pallot - Put Your Hands Up (live)

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