Midday on a Saturday in a rehearsal studio in Bermondsey, South London, and Katie Melua has not yet arrived for her rehearsal. Not to worry, I tell her tour manager: she’s a pop star and pop stars are always late. “But,” says Steve Croxford, “Katie doesn’t think she is a pop star.”
It’s true. The biggest-selling female artist in Britain, whose hits The Closest Thing To Crazy and Nine Million Bicycles are considered classics already, is in denial big time.
Despite the £2-million record deal in her pocket, the 21-year-old buys her clothes in charity shops and drives a Seat Ibiza. When a magazine asked her to review the London restaurant of her choice, she plumped for a pub so modest that staff at The Times use it for leaving dos. She still lives with her parents in suburban Surrey, although she recently bought a bolt hole near Paddington station. For Waterloo and the train home, you change, she says, at Baker Street, for the Bakerloo or Jubilee line. Had she only, she sighs, taken the Tube today, rather than accept a lift from her make-up artist, she wouldn’t have been late.
She is not really late, 20 minutes being nothing in celeb time, but she scurries in apologetically, dressed, beneath a grungy parka, in Oxfam chic: jeans, shirt, tie and a black velvet jacket. Had there been no photos to do, she assures me that her face would be quite naked, her hair quite straight and her look somewhat scruffier. The coiffured Katie Melua of the videos and album covers is her beta version. “On a personal level, as a human being, ” she says, “I don’t really consider myself famous at all.”
In the nevertheless burgeoning Melua legend, middle-aged men feature more than is, perhaps, ideal. There is Mike Batt, who discovered her, produces her and signed her to his independent record label, Dramatico, and who seems slightly chuffed when I call him her Svengali, perhaps because it is better than calling him Orinoco Womble, which is what he once was. Then there are Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson, who championed her music on Radio 2. I own up and say that I love her music, too. Now, there is nothing new in older men taking a shine to beautiful younger women — Melua has flawless opal skin, deep dark eyes, and a face and figure as compact as an iPod nano — but doesn’t she find her music’s middle-aged pulling power a slight embarrassment?
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“To be honest,” she says, “I don’t think you can pick who listens to your music. You can’t make music thinking about your audience. I make the type of music that feels natural to me and comes out of me from a very deep place. I don’t really know why my music appeals to an older generation. Maybe it’s because I myself listen to artists such as Eva Cassidy, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell — all artists from a different generation.”
Didn’t Amy Winehouse, her troublesome contemporary, last year criticise Melua’s music for lacking edge? “All I can say is that it’s completely from my heart and it’s what feels most natural. OK, it happens not to be hip and cool, but I’d hate to make music to just be hip and cool. I’m not going to suddenly get an electric guitar out and, you know, get naked just to appeal to the younger fans.”
She speaks in a pleasant Home Counties accent that makes the very thought appalling. It is a voice she must, at some level, have chosen. Wind back the years and before Surrey she lived in South London, before that Northern Ireland and before that Georgia in the former Soviet state. She was born Keti Melua, and, until she was 4and the family moved to a one-bedroom flat in Batumi by the Black Sea, lived with her grandparents in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Her father, Amiran, was a heart surgeon and her mother, Tamara, a nurse, although communism rewarded neither skill particularly handsomely.
Like all the other families, the Meluas received a coupon entitling them to a loaf of bread a week, a system that did not prevent chaotic, jostling crowds at the bakery. Summers were hot, winters bitter. Electricity and water supplies were often interrupted and Katie would have to fill a big bucket of water and take it up four flights to their flat. Another bucket, a wooden one, passed for a bath. Georgia broke away from the USSR in 1991, when Katie was 6, but conditions hardly improved and these early privations left her with a permanent horror of waste and extravagance. Though most wealthy young women cannot resist the lure of a shoe shop, Melua still wears the perfectly serviceable trainers she bought at 13.
When she returns to Georgia these days — flying economy, of course — what strikes her most is the country’s musical heritage and the influence it must have had on her. “The people there had a hard life and they turned to the arts as a way of expression,” she says. “Everyone sings. It sounds like something that would happen in England a hundred years ago, but when I was a kid in the evenings we got together by a piano and my mum would play old Georgian songs and we’d sing the harmonies and my gran and my auntie would join in.”
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She pauses. “It’s quite sort of a sweet, cheesy little picture, isn’t it?” But it is genuine, I protest. “Absolutely.”
Though she took British citizenship last year, I notice that she calls Georgia “home”. That is how she thinks of it. “I love England and I don’t ever see myself moving back to Georgia full time, but I think I would like to be buried there when I die.”
In November she performed at a concert marking the anniversary of the Rose Revolution that chased Eduard Shevardnadze from power. She still follows Georgian politics. Though a hippy at heart, she recognises, for instance, that what the economy needs now is an unfashionable dose of globalisation. But what, I ask, if she were asked to represent Georgia in the Eurovision Song Contest? She looks terrified. “If they did I would just say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’.” It is one thing, it seems, to be buried in your country, another to be buried by it.
As she grew up, Hollywood movies provided vistas of the promised land of the West. It was a hemisphere filled with “beautiful houses, massive cars and stunning blondes with huge breasts”. When her father finally got an exit visa, when she was 9, the corner of this paradise to which he took the family was Belfast. You’d think she would have been disappointed. Instead, she was dazzled, particularly by her new school, which, with its crayoned paintings on the walls, was so colourful compared with her old one, where they were forced to recite Georgian poetry. Her father worked in the Royal Victoria Hospital and though their hospital flat was close to the Falls Road, she saw nothing of the Troubles. She enjoyed Belfast so much that she wrote Belfast (Penguins and Cats), as a tribute, one of only two songs she penned for her first album, Call Off the Search in 2003.
After five years, the Meluas moved to London and then again, to Cheam, where her father now works as a GP and her mother stays at home bringing up Katie’s 13-year-old brother, Zurab. Although when she arrived in Northern Ireland she could barely speak a word of English, by the time she was at school in England she was good at everything. “I was,” she says, “a dork, a geek.”
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Her parents did not need to push her. Nor did they pressurise her to pursue academia rather than music. They were not, she says particularly strict parents. “Well, my dad is when it comes to drugs and things like that,” she corrects herself. And did she take any notice? Her skin deepens a tone. (I am a little relieved, for no one wants to be fan of a total geek.) And so it was on to the state-funded BRIT School for the Performing Arts & Technology in Croydon and that fateful day when Mike Batt, impresario, came to the college searching for a suitable voice for an album of jazz standards.
Melua sang a song she had written in tribute to the late Eva Cassidy; he noted on a pad that she had a clear voice. They met again, signed a record deal, and began to look for songs beyond jazz for her. He played her a number from a solo album he had recorded ten years before but which, because record companies remembered he was a Womble, had never had a proper release in Britain. “I didn’t think it was quite right, but then I read the lyrics of Closest Thing to Crazy on the sleeve notes and I said, ‘Oh what’s this one?’ And he said, ‘Oh you won’t like it. It’s not a good one.’ I said, ‘No, no play it to me’, and he played it to me and I thought it was such a beautiful song. It sounded like I’d already heard it somewhere before, which usually is a good sign. He still wasn’t sure if it was right. He thought it was too slow but I said, ‘Look, let’s just record it’, and we did. So that was quite lucky.”
Quite lucky! After Wogan played it, an avalanche of e-mails arrived commanding him to play it again. The decision about which single to release from Call Off the Search was suddenly an easy one and Closest Thing became a top-ten hit.
The closest thing to crazy is, of course, being in love. But did she know whereof she sang? Had she been in love? “Definitely,” she says. “I don’t think I could ever imagine myself loving someone more than I did at that particular time. You don’t have to be 35, 45 or 25 to know what love is.”
Melua’s detractors claim, nevertheless, that her songs are too old for her; one critic even charged that there was “something fundamentally bogus about ‘teen classicism’.” Her riposte is that songs do not require their singers to share their circumstances, merely a level of emotional knowledge.
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In the case of Closest Thing, however, she had, as it were, called off the search, having met at the BRIT School a student guitarist called Luke Pritchard. So this, I hazard, would make the title song of last year’s album, Piece By Piece (refrain “Piece by piece/ Is how I’ll let you go”) about how, three years later, they broke up. “I wrote it before we broke up, but not long before. When we did break up that song helped me a lot to deal with it. It is funny. Normally what happens is you break up with someone and that inspires you to write a song, doesn’t it? Yet it wasn’t like I was foreseeing it or anything, either.”
She doesn’t think that on some level she knew? “Very deep down, subconsciously, maybe.”
Like other BRIT students now catching up with her accelerated success, Pritchard has a career of his own in a band called The Kooks. It sounds as if their careers prised them apart? “I love music more than anything else in the world and I know he loves music more than anything else in the world and so, you know . . . ”
More than they could love each other? “In different ways. We knew both of us had to go off and do this thing that we needed to get out of ourselves. We did love each other, and I think in some ways we still do, but this is something both of us needed to go off and do on our own.”
With Katie Melua, the current cliché, “What’s not to like?” comes to mind. There is, however, something a little terrifying about the application she brings to her music: watching her rehearse, I am impressed by how serious and joke-free the session is. But those who criticise her for singing beyond her years miss the point. In her early poverty, frequent migrations, and precocious success, Melua has lived beyond her years.
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Maybe that is why she never hits a phoney note and why, one day soon, she is going to have to come to terms with the star she is.
Katie Melua’s European tour continues in Britain until February 14.
www.timesonline.co.uk/music