It’s hard to know where to begin when interviewing VV Brown. At the age of 29 she’s managed to launch several music careers, dump her record label, found her own, model professionally and set up her own vintage clothing line.

Although she started early – she was just 17 when she got her first music deal – Brown has crammed a lot into the past decade and has no plans to ease up any time soon. “I’m a spider,” she offers, with a laugh. “I’ve got all these legs. And just when you think I’ve disappeared, I come right back out again!”

This month sees the launch of her second album, Samson And Delilah, a dramatic departure from the retro-pop hits Shark In The Water and Crying Blood that propelled her to fame back in 2009.

Brown initially made a different follow-up album – the sort her then-label Island wanted her to make.

But she was so disenchanted by the result, titled Lollipops And Politics, that she eventually abandoned both the album and the label.

“It was someone else’s idea of what I should be doing,” she explains. “The label wanted me to make another Travelling Like The Light [Brown’s first album] and I’m the sort of musician who can write whatever people want me to write. But it wasn’t representative of me.”

Although no stranger to bold decisions – as a teenager she rejected a place to study law at Oxford University to pursue music – Brown admits leaving the major label was a “terrifying" time. She toyed with the idea of returning to education, or starting again as a teacher, before she decided to launch her own record label to release the record she really wanted to make.

The story of the past few years runs though the new album and directly informed its title. To Brown, the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah represents the artist’s battle for creative control.

“I see Samson as the artist who has this strength but is seduced by an alluring temptress who promises happiness but takes away the artist’s power. I read it at exactly the right time. I was really afraid and worried about what I was going to do next and then I got to Samson regaining his strength and pulling down the walls of the Philistines. I was like, ‘Yeah! I’m going to do this my way!’”

Brown thinks her experience is part of a surge of “feminist feeling” within the male-dominated music industry, citing Beyoncé, Kate Nash and Florence Welch as examples of female artists who went it alone before her. “I feel like we’re taking control. I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I’ve made a record I’m really proud of and which truly comes from me and that feels great.”

She’s got the same fire in her belly when it comes to modelling, choosing to star in ads for British institution Marks & Spencer in an attempt to boost the presence of black women in the public eye.

In a compelling piece she wrote for The Guardian recently, Brown lamented the lack of black models in fashion and the effect that has on notions of beauty. Her own experiences as a pop star had proved revealing; she recounts examples of make-up artists irritated by a hair and skin colour they were not equipped to deal with and of seeing photographs where her face had been lightened and made to look more European.

“It was never full-blown racism but there was certainly a lot of ignorance. I hope by modelling for a big company like M&S I’ve contributed to changing that in my own small way.”

She attacks the fashion industry’s obsession with weight in the same swipe – life she says, is simply too short to agonise over the size of your thighs. “I know I’ve put on a bit of weight since modelling and I know I don’t fit the ideal of a pop star. A few years ago I would have been mortified by that and would have gone on a ridiculous diet but I’m becoming more comfortable with looking like a woman.

Perhaps some people would tell me I need to tone up but hey, I like a cheeseburger!”

Clearly the Brown of 2013 is a force to be reckoned with. But perhaps she always has been. In her family, she says, the concept of success is “very, very important”.

Failure has never been an option and her Jamaican parents led by example, graduating from university and then, while still in their early 20s, founding a school in Northamptonshire.

Brown, the eldest of six siblings, watched them grow the business from only three pupils into one of the most respected independent schools in the area.

The six children were brought up to believe they too should make something of themselves.

“My mum always warned us not to become another statistic, not to become the labels other people might project on us.

It installed a real sense of assertiveness in all of us, I think, and a lot of drive.”

Her Hummer-driving mother remains her role model. “She’s such a strong woman and it’s from her that I learnt how to capitalise on failure. I’ve seen her and my dad handle trials and hurdles and recessions and racism and she’s never once given up. She has this persistent strength. She’s the key, man!”

Brown and her partner, an art director she’s been with for more than four years, are hoping to have children of their own soon and, as ever, she has a plan for that too.

“I‘m a compulsive strategist!” she laughs. “My boyfriend thinks I’m nuts.”

VV Vintage, the clothing line she set up last year, is intended to pay the couple’s mortgage while her label Wire Records is her “core business”

that she intends to build and which she hopes will keep her making music in one form or another. “I think motherhood is going to slow me down.I’m a workaholic but I think I’m going to want to stop everything and be a stay-at-home mum.” Watch this space…

* VV Brown plays Coalition, in King’s Road, Brighton, on Monday, October 21.

Tickets cost £7.50 Call 01273 722385