Given her name, it’s just as well that Pixie Saytar is 4ft 11.
“It’s very fortuitous,” she laughs. “If I’d grown any taller I’d have had to change it to Barbie.”
Brought up in New York but domiciled in Belfast for the last five years, anyone who has stumbled across one of Pixie’s live performances will already know that what the 25 year old lacks in inches, she more than compensates for in the gale-forced impact of her voice.
She may have trouble getting served at a busy bar, but place a microphone in front of Ms Saytar and she’s going to grab your attention.
“When you meet me in the street,” she says, “I’ve the voice of a nine-year-old. My friends who have never seen me sing before, they all come up to me afterwards – ‘where the hell did that come from?’ I suppose it can be quite shocking. Something does come over me when I’m writing and performing, but I need to be cocooned off in my own little bubble to reach that stage.”
In a town dominated by creatively passive indie boys, Pixie’s presence proves a welcome, assertive alternative. Picking up a guitar for the first time in her early 20s, she has, in the space of 18 months, written a host of material, recruited her own band, and slowly established herself as a live performer of growing repute.
A recent jaunt along the East Coast of the US, would also suggest that her ambition extends beyond a headline slot in Katy Daly’s.
“I emailed an old friend of mine in Philly who put on shows and asked him if he could suggest a few names of other promoters in other cities,” she explains. “Next thing I know my in-box is full of invites and it just snowballed from there. It turned out to be a great adventure. I took a Greyhound bus all the way along the East Coast, my guitar propped up on the seat next to me. It was like being 18 again. That’s the thing with Greyhounds: you have to accept that everyone there – including you and the driver – is insane.”
Pixie initially found her first experience on the road to be an over-whelming one, but as a teenage fan of Kerouac, she soon began to take it in her stride.
“I’m arriving in a city where I don’t know anyone – and the best approach was to wake up each morning and say to myself – ‘right, who are my family going to be today?’. Will I be sleeping on the couch or the floor? Will someone be there to pick me up from the station? I struggled with the loss of control. I was completely at the mercy of other people, couldn’t drive myself around. It was horrible. But then, the weird thing is, a week later and you end up loving it.”
Equally strange was her reaction to being back in her home city.
“Usually when I go back to New York, I get real satisfied and then come back to Belfast and become very depressed and an evil bitch,” she says. “This time it was the complete opposite – I just couldn’t settle. The longer I’m away, the harder I find it to relate to Americans.”
Is that because of the politics?
“Yeah, in part, but it’s mostly to do with me. I was 20 when I came to Belfast. Since then, I got married, I had a child. I’m a grown-up now. Performing was great, the audiences were very kind and generous and welcoming to me. But off-stage it was a lot less fun.”
The next stage of the Pixie Saytar offensive is currently being written and recorded, with a 2007 release planned. More gigs, meanwhile, have been booked for the very near future. If the reaction of her three-and-a-half year old son Liam is anything to go by, her music is going to prove difficult to ignore.
“He knows all the lyrics,” she smiles. “Which is totally inappropriate. I was singing ‘Exposed’ in the kitchen – totally unaware, just wrapped up in the song – and came to the line ‘Start running boy cos my teeth are sharp and I’m hungry’. And Liam piped up ‘Mam, I’m hungry too’.”