Katie Melua

Best-selling artist Katie Melua talks to Alistair Duncan about musical success and the journey to West London via Georgia

Above: Katie Melua

The week before I interview Katie Melua, the 22-year-old pop starlet woke up in a different country every single day.

‘It was just manic,’ she says, using one of her catchword phrases. ‘You know when you’re so tired that you go past tired and then you’re giggling because you’re too tired to acknowledge how tired you are? It does get physically really heavy, all this touring.’

Katie’s life has been whizzing along at light speed for five years now. She shot to fame as an angelically faced, guitar-strumming songstress when she was just 18, after being discovered by pop impresario Mike Batt at her college in Croydon. Offering a laid-back melange of jazz, folk and pop balladry, she was an instant commercial success, going on to record three chart-storming albums (her most recent, Pictures, was released at the end of last year). Two years ago she was named the best-selling female British artist in the world. So far, in total, she has sold around eight million albums – a dazzling number, by any newly arrived pop star’s standards. In a word, yes, it’s all been rather ‘manic’.

Katie, whose delicate prettiness and diminutive frame accompany an affable, girl-next-door sort of charm, assures me that she does often find her schedule physically tiring, but she ‘never loses mental energy’. Rather, she realises how fortunate she is, how things could easily have been so different, and that, she says, ‘gives [her] so much energy and happiness’.

How could things have been so different? Well, if it wasn’t for Terry Wogan, then there might not have been a pop career at all for Katie Melua. If this sounds like the build-up to one of the Irish presenter’s limp gags, actually this is a true story.

‘My single The Closest Thing To Crazy definitely wouldn’t have become as big as it did, were it not for Terry,’ she explains. ‘First of all, my music isn’t your average mainstream type of music and, secondly, I have always been on an independent label. No-one took me seriously at the start. It was impossible to get any kind of radio play. But luckily, Terry just liked the song.’

Finding a fan in middle-aged housewives’ favourite Terry Wogan, who has a breakfast show on Radio 2, was always going to be as much a hindrance as a help in the image-obsessed world of pop music, however. Her music seemed to appeal more to her parents’ generation than her own.

Indeed, this is the charge that still bedevils Katie Melua, in spite of her staggering success, but when I ask her why she doesn’t give her music a 21st-century makeover – do an R ‘n’ B-flavoured record, for instance, or get a cool producer to design a slick, dancey backdrop for her vocals – she shudders at the idea.

‘I’m not that into R ‘n’ B and hip-hop,’ she says, although she quickly adds that she was once a fan of So Solid Crew and Eminem. ‘It’s great for dancing in a club, but it was the music of my parents’ generation that always seemed to speak to my soul. I know that sounds really cheesy, but it kind of grabbed me emotionally.’

She goes on to joke that if she woke up tomorrow and felt that ‘the only to express herself was through rap’, then she’d do a rap album, though we both agree that that’s about as likely as Eminem becoming a chorister. If anything, her roots are in Georgian folk music, a sound that she remembers fondly from her childhood in the former Soviet state.

Katie lived in Georgia until she was nine, moving over to the UK when her father, a heart surgeon, secured a job in Northern Ireland (at which point she had to learn to speak English for the first time). After five years, the family moved to London, then to Surrey, where Katie lived until recently, buying her first place in West London three years ago.

She describes the area where she lives now as ‘in between Notting Hill and Paddington’. She says that her parents have now also moved nearby to Maida Vale.

‘I love all the old buildings throughout West London,’ she says dreamily, ‘especially in Notting Hill, with all those grand white facades. And I’ve got to know Edgware Road now, as my parents live near there. I love it. It’s great. You suddenly feel like you’re in a different country.’

She says that she loves Jane Bourvis on Golborne Road, a shop specialising in decadent vintage dresses and also likes pottering about markets like Church Street Market, off Edgware Road. Meanwhile, for nights out, she often heads to Ginglik bar on Shepherd’s Bush Green, a former public toilet, now a hip nightspot that stages weekly singer-songwriter showcase nights.

Does she head back to Georgia often? ‘I go back every year, every summer for a month, if I can,’ she says, admitting that she does get ‘a little bit’ of the red carpet treatment. Her grandparents still live there, the main reason for the yearly pilgrimage, even if she’s a little embarrassed that they seem to keep every single newspaper cutting relating to her.

‘I haven’t got the heart to tell them that I really don’t need to see it, that I don’t want to see it,’ she says, cringing.

She’s full of warmth for the Georgian people, describing them romantically as ‘so creative…there’s a real artist in a Georgian soul’. They love to sing, she says, but then she admits that that’s hardly surprising as ‘there’s never been much of a music industry in Georgia’.

Back to the world of Western pop, though, and I ask her what have been the harshest lessons to learn in the infamously cut-throat business. ‘It’s been pretty f***ing eye-opening,’ she says, her tone somewhere between disenchantment and despair. ‘There’s so much politics. I used to think that it was just about music, whether an artist was successful or not.

But having seen the most incredible artist not sell anything and then see an average artist selling millions – and seeing it from the inside, seeing how and why it happens – it’s awful. It does make you lose hope a little bit, but you have to just believe that talent will out. Ultimately, it does, I like to think.’

Katie’s album Pictures, is out now. Her next single, What I Miss About You, is out 12 May. Katie is in concert at the Royal Albert Hall on 4 May.
Visit www.katiemelua.com for details