Pop: Turn on the bright lights

Not yet. The chances are, though, that she will. Fifteen months ago, an appearance on Later with Jools Holland propelled KT Tunstall into the charts; she ended 2005 having sold almost 1m albums in Britain. Bailey Rae wowed the show herself last October with a performance of her first single, Like a Star. The presenter’s eulogy — “A voice so fabulous that after I hear this, I will melt” — has since been figuratively pasted to the Leeds-born singer ’s back.

Commercially, then, Bailey Rae looks like being a drop of golden sun. A heap of expectations has accumulated underneath her, and that heap tapers to a tiny and potentially quite isolating point at the top. Doesn’t this chorus of approval worry her a little bit? “I hope,” she says warily, “there hasn’t been so much talk that people can’t discover it for themselves. When I hear someone being hyped, I’m like, ‘I bet I wouldn’t like it.’ It gets my back up. So, yeah, I’m a bit scared of that side of it.”

The parallels with Tunstall are instructive in so far as, like the Scottish musician, Bailey Rae comes from an indie background (she sang in the Leeds band Helen, who were signed briefly, but dropped before they released a record). Like Tunstall, too, she has recorded a debut album full of music that is likely to appeal both to fans of soft-focus balladry and to those who tend to prefer something a little murkier.

In Tunstall’s case, several songs on Eye to the Telescope were remixed by Keane’s producer to buff them up for radio. And in Bailey Rae’s, she has worked with backroom songwriters responsible for songs by Christina Aguilera, Dido and Janet Jackson. Significantly, the pared-down Like a Star, which will surely be a huge hit when it is rereleased this year, is hers alone.

“I made a big effort on the album,” she concedes, “to polish up songs, to kind of put them somewhere along that scale” — although she doesn’t specify what the scale is. She’s at pains to rebut suggestions that she is therefore somehow a confection. “It’s not that calculated,” she laughs. “You know, ‘How can I make it?’” She has, she insists, always sung the same way, ever since she was (as a shy, skinny 15-year-old) encouraged to write her own songs by an inspirational youth leader at the church she attended, who also bought her her first guitar.

“He had albums by Björk, Jamiroquai, Led Zeppelin. It was so unexpected. I loved it: doing music, I felt less gawky. And in Helen, I sounded the same, but louder. We never really fitted into that Brit-poppy scene; everyone else was Blur-ish or a bit more metal. We were always seen as a bit light because of my vocals.”

When Helen foundered, while Bailey Rae was at university, she began to sing in a jazz club she worked at part-time. “I’d never been able to do anything more complicated than the indie, four-chord thing. And I was getting to sing Stevie Wonder songs, old standards, ballads, music I’d loved when I was growing up.”

She is, she feels, “limited” in what she can do as a singer. “I haven’t got a huge range or a very powerful voice. I’ve always sounded the same because I haven’t actually got many options. So it’s not like I used to sing like Damon Albarn and now I sing like Billie Holiday.”

Her voice, though, as Holland realised, is Bailey Rae’s prize asset. That isn’t to say that the songs are all sweetness and light, but you sense it’s only a matter of time before Parky and his ilk pounce on her and attempt to push her towards the easy-listening end of the spectrum. If that were to happen, might people begin to miss the sharp little shards concealed in the candyfloss? “I wouldn’t like to be seen as middle-of-the-road,” Bailey Rae answers carefully. “I’d like there to be those little lines you stumble over, those twists. For example, I wouldn’t want to be compared to someone like Katie Melua, or on Radio 2.” An abrupt about-turn. “I mean, not just there.”

The voice, too, is what gives her lyrics their heartbreaking impact — as when she captures the way in which friction and apparent dislike can often be a mask for intense attraction, with lines such as: “I wonder why it is I don’t argue like this with anyone but you.”

“Hopefully, the next thing I do,” she continues, “will maybe be a little less safe, and that will probably make me less popular. But that’s what I’d rather do: moving in an edgier direction rather than preserving what you have.”

In her lyrics, she balances romantic optimism with an innate caution born, she says, out of a childhood where her parents divorced when she was 14, and a family that is “a bit of a disaster, marriage-wise, on both sides”. Yet she herself has been married for four years, to a saxophonist who has helped to broaden her tastes.

“He listens to so much complicated stuff,” she smiles. “Jazz, rare funk. Listening to him practise and doing all these chord changes, that’s got to sink in. And it saves me doing loads of homework.”

One recent article made much of the smile she wears when she sings live. “What a thing to write,” she chides. “That’s when it becomes a ‘thing’, doesn’t it? And I had a photo session where they said, ‘Can you smile like you do when you’re on stage?’ No, I can’t. I’m in a little world, then it’s the end and I’m like, hmm, everyone’s still here.”

And everyone is. Watching, waiting, listening, expecting. Is she ready? “I love, love, love, love singing,” she answers optimistically. But a little cautiously, too.

The single Put Your Records On is released on February 20 on EMI/Good Groove; the album follows on March 6