Pippa has slogged hard for every inch of her success. Born in Frome and raised in Bristol, she has been trying to get her foot in the door of the music industry since the age of 16, when she dropped out of school. ‘Things happen in such a crazy way,’ she says. ‘I’d been plugging away for eight years and was starting to think about giving up, I was so sick of it. Endless student union gigs do nothing for a person’s morale. I was on the point of calling it a day and doing something sensible with my life when I met the girls. By “the girls”, she means the other five members of her band: Cathy Murray, Gabby Bridges, Suzie Ayres, Neha Davis and Louise Thornton. Pippa met them during a recording session at Butterfly Studios in Brixton. Gabby Bridges, who was already signed to Sony and had her foot in the door at Loose Ship, was impressed by Pippa’s voice and asked her to join her fledgling band, which at the time was called Obelisk. The name Limited Sympathy was Pippa’s idea. ‘I thought Obelisk was stupid,’ she says. ‘What is it? Just some random tourist attraction in France? I didn’t want to be part of a band called that, and it turned out none of the girls were keen on it. One day I was bitching to them about my parents, who have never encouraged my music career. I told them my dad said to me when I was really broke that he had limited sympathy for me, because he believed I’d brought it on myself for choosing to pursue my unrealistic dreams instead of becoming a dull-asditchwater accountant like him. That phrase had stuck in my mind—“limited sympathy”—because it was so dishonest. What he really meant was that he had no sympathy at all, so why didn’t he say that? Anyway, I suggested it as a band name and the girls loved it.’ A couple of months later, Limited Sympathy had a three-album deal.

As well as being lead singer, Pippa, astonishingly, manages the band. ‘We had a manager originally,’ she says, ‘but it didn’t work out. He wasn’t as efficient as I am, and I ended up doing the bulk of the work myself. Eventually we decided to let him go.’ Limited Sympathy’s first album, out in January, is intriguingly entitled Why Didn’t You Go When You Knew I Wanted You To? Pippa says she can’t tell me why it’s called that—it’s not the name of any song on the album. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to tell you the story,’ she says. ‘It’s based on something that really happened with our ex-manager.’