The moody blues star

With songs that are epically emotional in scope, Leontiou is one of those rare singer-songwriters who is able to plumb troubled depths without ever making you want to garrotte him with his own bleeding heartstrings. So how is he coping with being hailed as the new David Gray?

“It’s harder to deal with than I thought,” he says, nervously sucking his lip-stud in an office of his record company, Polydor. “The comparisons are flattering but if I’m listening to the radio and my song comes on, I just turn over to another station. I can’t help it — I’m too worried about what the DJ might say. I’d rather not listen at all than hear anything negative.”

Beneath the bashful insecurity lies sterner stuff. Suffering from an extreme form of dyslexia, Leontiou can barely read or write. By the time he was 16 years old, he had all but resigned himself to a lifetime working in his parents’ barbershop in Neasden, northwest London. “My teachers knew that I was dyslexic when I was at primary school. It was quite obvious, and they explained it to my parents, but they just didn’t deal with it. I think they thought, well, let him get on with it and we can take care of the rest of the class.”

Deprived of special tuition, Leontiou began playing up to divert attention from his academic troubles. “I think dyslexia just made me disruptive,” he says. “It was harsh because I’d be asked to stand and read in front of the class, and when you’re 11 or 12 and you still can’t do that, you end up feeling stupid. My mates just took the mickey. So I dealt with it by being naughty so they’d concentrate on that instead.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, by the time he had enrolled in his local comprehensive, he had begun skiving: first missing the odd English lesson, then maths, then, eventually, entire days. And while most parents would disapprove of a substitute education of PlayStation games and Teletubbies, Leontiou’s were remarkably understanding — a fact he puts down to being first-generation Greek immigrants.

“My father left home when he was 13 years old, so it wasn’t like, ‘Right, you have to get an education’,” he says. “I don’t think it was a big thing for him.” And mother? “I’d get up and she would go, ‘Are you going into school today?’. And, I’d be like, ‘Nah’. I think she thought that there was no point arguing.” Instead, his parents encouraged him to channel his energies into extracurricular activities — sport, rather than music — and he ended up becoming a semi-professional snooker player by the time he was 17. “I was about 7 years old when I first picked up a snooker cue,” he says. “My father is into snooker, and when I started winning he pushed me to do it professionally. He used to take me to snooker halls where people would sponsor me to play in competitions. But while I enjoyed winning, I hated the training. In the end, I decided that it was just too boring.”

Karate was also a passion. “I got my black belt when I was 10 years old,” he boasts, chopping the air. “I read in the paper a few months ago about a kid who was supposed to be the youngest ever black belt at 11. But I got mine when I was 10.”

Thanks to these victories, Leontiou began to develop his wilful streak — “I never settle for second best” — and decided to pursue his dream of becoming a singer, despite his parents’ worries about a career that is generally about as lucrative as selling matchsticks. After leaving school, he took a series of day jobs but began writing songs by night, using the same recording studio as his singer sister Alexia. “I was always completely knackered, but I just thought, ‘This is what I really want to do.’ I’m that sort of person. If I get something in my head, I go for it.”

The nocturnal studio sessions paid off two years ago when, after hawking his tunes around management companies, his songs fell into the hands of Warner/Chappell’s Mike Sault, the publisher of the singer Dido. After hooking up with the husband and wife team Pete Wilkinson and Sarah Erasmus — with whom he now co-writes all of his songs — Leontiou signed a £3 million deal with Polydor last November before Story of My Life hit the racks in the spring.

Given that his fortune now lies with rhyming rather than reading — Story of My Life includes one of chart-pop’s most depressing choruses: “We try our lives away/ And stumble to the grave / We cry . . .” — he feels that the distress of dyslexia is almost behind him. He says he doesn’t think he will ever return to education. “It’s not a major obstacle any more. I’ve accepted it and moved on.”

Instead, Leontiou overcomes his shortcomings by memorising all his lyrics from jotted-down words before taking them into the studio — although literacy is still occasionally a problem with radio and television appearances. “The worst thing that happened to me recently was when I was invited on a TV show,” he says. “They had a competition and wanted me to read out the answers. I said, well, I can’t. I was afraid that I’d look stupid and stutter, or read it back to front. In the end they understood.”

So how has he taken to life on the road — has he started requesting a rider of M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out yet? “Er . . . I do love chocolate,” he says, looking puzzled, as though I’ve just asked him to knit a sandwich. “But I’ll eat anything, really. If there’s food in front of me I will always finish it, no matter how full I am.” He admits that he has always had a healthy Mediterranean appetite, and for chocolate and bread in particular. After growing up with “nothing to eat but black-eyed peas and lentils”, he began stocking up on high-calorie snacks when he left home and piled on the pounds to tip 14st (83kg) by the time he was 20. “I was living with my girlfriend and quite unfit at the time,” he says. “I love food and I have to be quite disciplined because I tend to eat too much.”

Once he had a publishing deal under his belt, Leontiou decided it was time to slim and two years ago kick-started his first diet. Nowadays he sticks to a regime of protein shakes and fewer sweets, and works out at the gym three times a week with a personal trainer. “You feel good for it,” he says. “I’m not into weights or trying to get big, though. I go just to be healthy.”

When he’s not pounding the treadmill, he likes to let off steam by burning rubber in his car. He rode sports bikes as a teenager, but when two accidents left him with a slipped disc and bad bruises, he decided to opt for four wheels instead of two. With tattoos and piercings over his body, Leontiou says that he is often mistaken for a garage rock MC rather than a soulful singer-songwriter whose true passion lies with Lionel Richie. But, he says, the hard-looking tats are just skin-deep. “The one on my right arm is my birth sign in Japanese,” he explains. “And the ones on my left are the karate code: ‘honesty’, ‘loyalty’, and so on.”

There is a crucifix inked on his neck, too, but he says this is not a sign of his Catholic upbringing, but “just for good luck”. A Christian with his “own form” of spirituality, he is nonetheless reluctant to talk about his relationship with God. “I won’t get into discussions about religion at all,” he says. “I know what I believe in, but I won’t sit there and force it on anyone.”

With his ever-growing confidence, both on air and off, the only thing that worries Leontiou now is accusations that his music is “boring”. “I hear plenty of songs on the radio that are too clever,” he says. “I try to strike that happy medium of having tunes that are clever but also catchy. Songs that actually mean something to you.”

His commercial success looks set to go from strength to strength. And with a seemingly bottomless well of misery to draw from, despite his present good fortune — “my songs are about my own teenage problems and heartbreaks, as well as my friends’” — inspiration is a long way from drying up.

So what’s next on his schedule? “I want to stay as healthy as I can, polish up my live performance and start another round gigging in the autumn,” he says, rooting around in the minibar for some chocolate.

Kristian Leontiou: the urban power balladeer with the world at his feet and his head in the fridge.

Kristian Leontiou’s album Some Day Soon is out now on Polydor

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