Who the hell is Katie Melua? Such has been the question on many a lip since the name entered the upper echelons of the New Year album charts. Faster than a speeding bullet and without the advance-warning hype, Call Off The Search had apparently been flying off shelves both here and in the UK. Not a bad debut effort for the teenage unknown. Speaking to Melua just after her appearance at the BRIT Awards, I attempted to fill in the pre-platinum gaps – the whos, whats, whens, wheres, and the many hows that preceded her overnight success.

Down the phone line, where Kate is currently midway through rehearsals for her upcoming tour, she is quick to set the record straight. “I guess it might seem like it’s all happened very quickly but I’ve been going for quite a while now. It’s nice that it’s finally working out.”
Within her 14-date tour across Ireland and the UK, Katie is also playing a one-off gig as part of the ‘Passport – Back to the Bars’ charity tour. It’s a unique concept that sees such names as David Gray, Badly Drawn Boy, Pet Shop Boys and The Cure playing the types of small venues where they began their careers. An admirable cause, though for Katie – as an artist still in the formative stages of her career – I can’t help but think somewhat ironic. The 19-year-old seems to have by-passed the small-town toilet tour stage and gone straight to selling out concert halls in Glasgow, Manchester and London. A handy shortcut if you can get it but Katie maintains that she has paid her dues.
“This is definitely my first sort of official UK tour but in the last four years I have been doing small, intimate venues around London,” she explains. “They were usually just me and the guitar, but a lot of it was involved with the BRIT School. They had for example this club called the Cartoon Club and that was rented out as a once-a-month kind of thing, so you could sort of do it with a few friends.”
The first date on her highly anticipated headlining tour is in Belfast, where the singer spent some of her childhood. I ask Katie if this is the first time performing there. “It will be my own solo stuff, but when I lived there I did perform at the Waterfront Hall as part of a school choir.”
Born in Georgia in the former USSR, Katie moved to Belfast at the age of eight when her father took a job there as a heart surgeon. When Katie was aged thirteen the Melua family moved to South London, and it was there that she finished her education at the BRIT School of Performing Arts, in Croydon.
“The first instrument I ever learnt to play was a tin whistle in Belfast when I was about 8 or 9,” she says in her strong London schoolgirl accent. Naming Damien Rice as her favourite Irish musician, Katie has early memories of Irish trad. “I was quite young then but it was more kinda hearing the sound of it, with the fiddle-playing and the bodhran and the tin whistle – that combination that you get in your average pub in Ireland, I just loved that sound.
It was through the BRIT school – partly government, partly music industry-funded – that Katie was offered performance opportunities, cutting her teeth at the Smash Hits Music Awards where she did backing vocals for Westlife. “Yeah that was actually in my first year, it was cool,” she laughs. “That was such a long time ago!”
But you’re only 19! “It was only 3 years ago, I guess that’s not that long ago but it seems like it! To be honest it’s quite weird ’cause we didn’t sing which I think was really strange.” So were you miming? “Well yeah, we weren’t but there were no mics to mic us up… Yeah we were miming, I guess.”
Having lived in three different cities and attended seven different schools, it’s little wonder that Katie’s perspective of time, and perhaps experience, seems slightly distorted.
“Feeling twenty-two, acting seventeen/This is the nearest thing to crazy I have ever known/I was never crazy on my own”.
It was during her time at the BRIT School that Katie was ‘discovered’ by Mike Batt, the acclaimed producer and songwriter with such credits to his name as Art Gunfunkel and David Essex, not to mention the theme song from the ’70s kids’ TV favourites, The Wombles.
“Mike came to the college and he was looking for a jazz band and a jazz bassist and he was also on the lookout for a singer,” explains Katie. “I heard that he was a songwriter and I’d just written a song called ‘Faraway Voices’ about Eva Cassidy and I let him hear it and he really liked it. He asked if I was interested in making an album and I said, ‘Yeah what sort of stuff?’ and so we got together over a few weeks’ period. He played me his songs and I absolutely loved them, and I played him more of mine and he liked them, so we just started working together like that and made the album.”
Mike Batt gave Katie a five-album record deal with his label Dramatico Records. He wrote most of the songs on Call Off The Search, with the addition of a few covers and the aforementioned ‘Faraway Voices’. Katie also wrote a song entitled ‘Belfast (Penguins and Cats)’, based on her personal experience of the political climate there.
“I always loved Belfast and I thought that it was such a nice, nice place. I thought the people were so warm and welcoming. But then in the back of your mind there’s this thing that you see on the TV, that you sort of hear about but you never actually see yourself. There’s supposed to be this kinda Protestant-Catholic thing that’s supposed to be happening but you’ve never actually seen it.
“I used the animal names to represent the two sides but that’s just the symbolism for it,” she explains. “What I felt was that the conflict between the two sides wasn’t about religion, it was about who rules Northern Ireland – whether it be part of the UK or, as some of the Catholics would like, for it to become part of Ireland again.”
While Katie adds that she doesn’t like to overanalyze her music, she admits that at one stage she actually had an interest in becoming a politician. As she wrote in her press biography, “I honestly thought I could bring peace to the world… if I ruled it!”
“That was one of the things that you sort of think about when you’re twelve or something like that,” she says with a laugh. “I do think that if I wanted to be a politician the next best thing is an artist because I think they have just as much influence on people, well not influence, but people listen.”
And listen they do. In their hundreds of thousands. While she’s not likely to incite a revolution anytime soon, there’s certainly something in the music of Katie Melua that strikes a chord with the masses. While many people point to neighbouring chart-mates Norah Jones and Jamie Cullum, Katie is the first to distance herself from the Jazz-is-the-new-black hubbub.
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh it’s jazz coming back’, but I don’t think it’s really jazz. I think jazz in its purest form is very much unlike what I do and also very much unlike what Norah does and also these other various artists. And I’m sure they’ll tell you this themselves, it’s in no way putting anyone down.
“I think with Norah Jones’ album it was the fact that it didn’t sound mainstream, and the fact that it was about melodies and simplicity rather than overproduction and a beat kinda thing. So that definitely did pave the way, or make it a bit easier, for the likes of me and Jamie. And it’s fetching to be compared to Norah but I think musically we are both different in our own ways.”
Individual differences aside, it would certainly seem that Norah, Jamie and Katie are sharing shelf space in the same homes. According to recent figures from the British Phonographic Industry, the middle-aged masses are now accounting for more album sales than the previously dominant teenage market. Consumers in the 40-59 years age group now represent 33.4% of total album sales, while teenagers are spending significantly less (down from 22.1% to 16.4% over a two year period).
Of course the increasing spending patterns of the 40-plus age group has a corresponding impact on the charts. It’s more or less the same market that make up the vast (easy) listenership of BBC Radio 2 where, not coincidentally, Miss Melua first reached a mass audience. It was thanks to the patronage of Terry Wogan who – as he did with Melua’s idol Eva Cassidy – chose to champion the young musician, playing her single two months before its release.
Katie says that the airplay she received on Jazz FM and Wogan’s show on BBC Radio 2 were “helpful” in her success: “I think that was how the record was heard by the public, and if we didn’t have that obviously we would have had to find a different means of making people hear the actual songs,” she says.
My final question to Katie is to ask her favourite song on the album. “Probably ‘Crawling Up A Hill’ ’cause it’s fun to sing,” she replies enthusiastically. Fun to hear, the John Mayall tune is also her interviewer’s favourite, but a slightly ironic choice for a 19-year-old on the short road to success: “Minute after minute, second after second/Hour after hour goes by/Working for a rich girl/Staying just a poor girl/Never stop to wonder why…My life is just a slow train crawling up a hill.”

Call Off The Search is out now on Dramatico Records