Taking Back Sandé

I imagine the worst part about being a major label bigwig is that every time you cough up a new pop star, you also have to come up with a unique selling point to brand them with, so that the public can tell them all apart. “Sure, she may look and sound like every other bright-eyed divaette, but this one’s different! She’s got multicolored hair and she plays the piccolo trumpet!” Exhausting.

Bearing this in mind, you’d think record execs would have been all over 24 year-old Glaswegian Emeli Sandé. Besides coming with three industry staples as standard (impressive vocal chops, a pretty face and a wacky haircut), the tattooed, half-Zambian, half-Cumbrian singer had already written songs for Leona Lewis, Cheryl Cole and Susan Boyle, leading Simon Cowell to dub her his “favourite songwriter at the minute”. She was also less than a year away from a degree in clinical neuroscience. But oddly enough, what should have been seen as PR gold only scared label heads away.
“I was finding it very difficult to get a deal,” Sandé admits, “to really be taken seriously as an artist and find somebody in the industry who would take a risk on something that was a bit… different.”
Granted, during her days writing moody bespoke pop songs for established stars, Sandé had to get used to being approached with caution.
“When you go and meet producers for the first time they just think you’re another singer and you don’t really know much. You really have to prove yourself. I wanted everyone to know that I’m not here to muck around. I’m not here just to be another singer. I want to write. I want to write for other people and I want to be an important person in the industry.”
The pitch worked. Pretty soon, the young Scot was being credited on records by chart-toppers like Tinie Tempah, The Saturdays and Cher Lloyd, mostly without having even been in the same room as them.
“I worked directly with Leona,” she offers, “she came into the studio and that was really cool, we got on really well, but I haven’t met Cheryl Cole, I haven’t met Susan Boyle or Simon Cowell. It’s all done by the click of an email, like, ‘Do you like this song’?”
What? No thank-you note?
“Like, sometimes you get emails back,” she hums, “but not really. You just write it, pass it on and they take it from there. But I love it. I’d really love to write for the rest of my life. I’m sure my voice will be pretty knackered by the time I’m 60, so I’d love to still be a writer and write things that will last a long time.”
Whatever happened to Dr. Sandé?
“I mean, I loved studying medicine,” she muses. “It wasn’t the fact that I wasn’t enjoying it, it was just that I knew it wasn’t my dream, and as much as I would love to be a doctor, this was something that I’d always regret not pursuing. I think it just came from seeing people on the course that had dreamt of being a doctor since they were four as I’d dreamt of being a musician. I could see that passion in their eyes and even though I loved it, I didn’t have the same passion that I had for music, so when the opportunity came to get involved in the industry, I knew it was my time to really follow what I wanted to do.”
The presumably terrifying leap from medical student to pop star even inspired a track on her sophisticated debut album, Our Version Of Events.
“‘Clown’ is about how if you really want something, you have to be prepared to be the idiot. People are going to laugh at anyone who tries to achieve a dream because it makes them feel better about not achieving theirs, and you have to put up with that. You might fail and no-one says it’s going to work out, but you have to at least put yourself out there and be that clown.”
Sandé first came to our attention through collaborations with Professor Green, Naughty Boy and Wiley, so it will probably surprise fans to learn that there’s not a single duet on the album.
“I didn’t grow up in London, I’ve never really been in that scene. I come from sitting at a piano and writing songs so I wanted that to be my album, like ‘This is how I do things’. I just wanted the songs to really sum up what’s going on around us right now and I wanted it to reflect how I feel being 24 right now in the UK. Sometimes I think music has lost that connection with what’s going on, so I wanted to say, ‘This is my version of events’. But I also hope that people can find a connection and relate to the lyrics.”
It’s interesting to note that, this year, Sandé has mostly been sharing the hype with Bill Withers soundalike Michael Kiwanuka and soul man Maverick Sabre. Does she feel like she’s part of some kind of movement?
“I hope so!” she laughs. “I certainly feel like there’s a big change in music and it’s great to know that younger people want to hear a classic song. I love that and I really hope I can be part of that change.”
A little birdie tells me that she also plays the cello (...groan!). Did she get a chance to show off her string skills on the album?
“Oh, no, no, no, I’m not good enough for that! I only started playing about two years ago. Maybe on the next record I’ll actually get to play something but I’m nowhere near good enough. But I love string sections and I love the cello, so getting to see a room full of 23 players playing my music was incredible. I remember when we went to do ‘Heaven’, it was just incredible. The strings you put on in the studio sound nice, but nothing sounds like the real thing. It was really a great moment.”
All right. Confession time. I wasn’t expecting to like Emeli Sandé very much. After all, if she lived on my road, my mam would be constantly pointing at her and asking, “Why can’t you be more like that Sandé girl?”, but the woman is just too chirpy to hate. Envy, on the other hand is perfectly acceptable, so feel free to covet her friendship with Alicia Keys or her mysterious scientist fiancé who probably moonlights as a secret agent or a circus ringmaster.
And then there’s the biggest score of all, the Brits’ Critics Choice Award, which she’ll be accepting this month, following in the footsteps of Adele, Florence + The Machine, Ellie Goulding and Jessie J.
“I’m just over the moon,” she beams. “It felt so surreal, it really is a dream come true. It took a while to sink in, actually. Really just over Christmas when I had time to chill out and think about last year, I was like, ‘Wow’.”
The Brits are known for plotting off-the-wall musical pairings. If the organisers come a-knocking, who will Sandé request to share the stage with?
“Hmm… Oh, okay! Definitely Björk. I would love to do a duet with her. I’ve only heard a few songs from her new album and I thought they were amazing. That video when she’s in space? With all the lights and everything? Amazing!”
See? You can take the girl out of the science degree….

Our Version Of Events is out now on Virgin records.