Pop star PinkPantheress has been named producer of the year by the Brit Awards ahead of this weekend’s ceremony.
The 24-year-old, whose hits include Illegal, Stateside and Boy’s A Liar, is the first woman to be given the prize since its inception in 1977.
“I guess it’s bittersweet that I’m the first one, the first woman, to get it,” she told BBC News.
“As young as I am, it feels almost a bit crazy. Like, I’m not really legendary enough to be receiving it – but you know, I will definitely take it!”
Previous winners of the prize include the Beatles’ producer Sir George Martin, Trevor Horn, Brian Eno, the Eurythmics’ David Stewart, Calvin Harris and Chase & Status.
Until now, Kate Bush was the only other female producer to have been nominated, for her 1989 album The Sensual World.
“That’s not great,” said PinkPantheress, describing the lack of former female winners as “crazy”.
The musician is also the youngest ever recipient of the prize, which comes just five years after she posted the lo-fi breakout tracks Break it Off and Pain on TikTok.
Written in the dead of night in her university room, they were rooted in the sounds of UK garage and drum and bass, and the buzz earned her the BBC’s Sound of 2022 award.
Since then, she’s racked up over one billion streams and scored a major worldwide hit with 2023’s Boy’s a Liar, Pt. 2. Last year’s punchy, sample-heavy mixtape Fancy That became her first top 10 album and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.
Unusually, her unique production style, full of skittering breakbeats and sugar strand melodies, is entirely self-taught.
“When I was 17, I was at a girl’s school and I had a friend who was a singer, and she wanted someone to produce for her. And I was like, ‘I’ll do it’,” she recalls.
She learned the basics by watching YouTube tutorials, taking inspiration from female artists such as Nia Archives, Tinashe and WondaGurl, who “made me feel like it was possible”.
Without the resources to hire a recording studio, she used whatever equipment came to hand.
“Quite literally, I did not have a microphone, but I had a karaoke game on the Nintendo Wii and they gave you a mic with the game. And I just was like, ‘It has a USB connection, maybe it will work plugged it in’.
“It was a lot of trial and error.”
Even now, she records many of her vocals at home, with a sock stretched over the microphone to prevent popping and sibilance.
“You can do anything from your bedroom. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”
The musician is speaking to the BBC from the hip Ace Hotel in Sydney, where she’s based while performing over two consecutive weekends at Australia’s Laneway Festival.
She sips tea throughout the interview in an effort to protect her voice, which is “really delicate” – not from the concerts, but because “I’ve been talking too much to my friends”.
The shows are part of her biggest tour to date, which showcases a newfound confidence – in terms of styling, sass and choreography – from an artist who initially performed under a shroud of anonymity.
“I was never quite interested in being the star of my own show – but as I grew as an artist, I had to embody that,” she explains.
“Not because I felt pressure from my fans, they’re very respectful, but I don’t want to be sidelined – and I think that’s very easy to do when you have a lack of visual identity, which I definitely did have earlier in my career.
“That’s obviously a lot to do with being a woman in music and being a pop star, or whatever, but I will say that if I wasn’t down to do it, then I wouldn’t.”
Despite her increasingly public profile, fans were surprised to see the singer pop up on BBC quiz show The Weakest Link earlier this month.
Appearing alongside comedians Alex Brooker and Harriet Kemsley, choirmaster Gareth Malone and former Love Island contestant Luca Bish, she took third place.
“I’m just a really big game show fan,” she says by way of explanation.
“I used to binge-watch every single quiz show you could think of. So I’ve always wanted to go on a quiz show, and honestly the experience was really great.
“I did pretty well. I was quite shocked.”
Her appearance, described by one viewer as “camp and iconic”, instantly went viral – spawning memes of the star’s face screwed up in concentration, before pulling an answer out of thin air with a victorious swish of her hair.
“I think the pressure of the ‘lights, camera, action’ was making me a bit flustered,” she laughs, “because if you’d asked those questions to me in a room like this, I would have known them instantly.
“I’m just obsessed with trivia. I used to want to be a chaser on The Chase.”
If her quiz show career continues, she adds, her specialist subject on Mastermind would be The Simpsons.
For now, however, she’s jetting back from Australia to attend Saturday’s Brits – where she’s also up for best artist and best dance act.
She initially instructed her team to keep her in the dark about the nominations “to manage my expectations“.
“If I get disappointed, I get disappointed really hard – so I actually do this thing where I’ll look at who I’m up against and decide, ‘OK, I’m rooting for them instead’.”
But with the best producer trophy already in the bag, she hopes to inspire a new generation of female producers “who look like me, and want to make an alternative style of music”.
When aspiring artists approach her for advice, she adds, her first response is always to ask, “What steps have you taken?”
“And the answer will usually be, ‘I haven’t been able to’, because there’s a lack of access, lack of knowledge, lack of resources.
“There’s so many reasons why it sounds impossible to do music at any given point, especially if you’re at school, but what I will say is, even though it might seem impossible, there are apps now that can help you get into production.
“I actually started on the [free] GarageBand app on the iPad – and although you might be insecure about your first three or four beats, I genuinely think that if you have a phone, you have a potential career in music.”
