When Pip Millett was a child her family dubbed her and her sister “the silent twins” due to their quiet nature. However, as with many playful nicknames, it wasn’t entirely accurate. “I was always quietly confident,” she explains now, some ten years down the line. “I’ve just always been calm about it.”
Calmness is the key to Pip’s music; a blissful fusion of R&B and soul that’s always full of feeling. Her love affair with music began during those quiet school days when she received guitar lessons as a present from her mum. Initially picking up the bass, where she learned to play wild rock songs by artists like The White Stripes and Slipknot, Pip eventually moved her way up to six strings. “It made me come out of myself a little,” she says of her early lessons. “It was a massive boost to me.”
Born in Manchester, Pip moved out of the city and into the countryside as a child following her parents split. She jokes that she and her siblings were “the only brown people in the town” but they always felt welcome in the area.
A move to London to study music was Pip’s first indication that stepping into the limelight, while still refusing to conform, might be what she’d been after all along. “I knew I wanted to sing from a young age,” she says, though it’s always been writing that helped her the most. In many ways it feels that the precise nature of her words take precedence over her low-key vocals.
Though her releases to date can be counted on a couple of hands, Pip has shown that she’s not here to make up the numbers. Take the delicate and melodic “Make Me Cry,” for example, or “Talk About It,” a raw moment of yearning set to a deceptively upbeat rhythm.
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