"'I look at Amy or Whitney and think, that could have been me'
She was pop’s golden girl before a breakdown forced her to re-evaluate her life. Katie Melua talks about the pressures of fame.
'It feels good to read about yourself. That’s why stars have egos, because we start to believe the hype,' says Katie Melua (Photo: PAUL GROVER)
By Cole Moreton - www.telegraph.co.uk
7:30AM GMT 19 Feb 2012
Fame can kill young women like Katie Melua, and she knows it. “There is a loneliness at the centre of it all, a sense of isolation,” says the singer, who became famous at the age of 19. “You can’t cope, but you can’t say so because the life is what you always wanted.”
Katie became a national sweetheart and sold millions of records as the girl with the big eyes and ringlets who sang jazzy ballads such as Nine Million Bicycles and The Closest Thing to Crazy in a warm, husky voice. Then came a sudden personal crisis two years ago, that led to Melua being briefly hospitalised. “I had a breakdown and I had to drop out for a while.”
Now she is about to release a comeback album called Secret Symphony and looks healthy and happy at her flat in west London. But Melua knows the stakes are high. Last week, the father of the late Amy Winehouse picked up a posthumous Grammy for his daughter, who was once at the same performing arts school as Melua. “She was a troubled soul.”
And on the other side of the Atlantic, as we speak, the family of Whitney Houston is in mourning. “It’s really sad. Whitney had a magnificent voice. I keep hearing people say they’re not surprised by her death, and I’m not either. When you consider the pressure she was under, and add in the drugs, something terrible is going to happen.”
If anyone understands those pressures it is Melua, who became a star in 2003 at the same young age as Houston had. Within three years, she was Britain’s biggest-selling female artist.
She hasn’t talked about this publicly before, apart from saying a year ago: “I’ve had a bit of a breakdown and been very unwell… the fact is, I just couldn’t go on any longer. I knew there was something seriously wrong because I was just sitting in a chair staring into space.”
Why did she even say that? “I was drunk at a party. I got approached by a journalist. She kind of put the words in my mouth. She said: 'I hear you had a breakdown.’ And I went: 'A bit of’. Then that got written about.”
Is it not true? “Well no, it is true. That is what happened. I never spoke about the symptoms, because it’s between you and your doctor.”
Melua does call it “the breakdown” and says she did not work for six months, but what was the trigger? “The amount of travelling I was doing was a pressure I put on myself. I had just made my first album without Mike and I wanted it to do very well, so I pushed myself. I had a tour coming up but I still went to America and hopped around the world doing promotion. That was crazy. Then, when it’s not working, you can’t go: 'No, it’s too knackering.’ You’ve got the dream job and people expect things of you.”
Stressed out and exhausted, she felt responsible for a lot of people’s livelihoods, unable to switch off and, crucially, unable to admit she was in trouble. “All those bits of tension mount up. Then there’s the thing about how you should be happy because you are doing the thing you love. It seems bizarre to people that you’re not constantly happy.”
It would be easy to listen to this young, beautiful, talented and wealthy woman talk about the pressures of fame and think: “Try being out of work or raising a family on a wage that doesn’t cover the bills.” And to be fair, she would agree. Melua was born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where bread meant long queues and water had to be carried in a bucket up four flights of stairs to the family flat. Many of her relatives are still there, but Melua came to Britain at the age of eight when her father, a heart surgeon, got a job in Belfast.
“We had ideas about what moving to the West would be like from Hollywood films, in which all the houses had little white, picket fences. When we saw the houses it was a bit of a shock. We were staying in accommodation for the hospital workers and it was like a Soviet block.”
As a child, she was only aware of the Troubles “as part of the atmosphere. But life was better for us. I was able to have a hot bath. The electricity stayed on. The school didn’t shut down in winter. Those things made it magical.”
The family moved to Surrey before Melua won a place at the Brit School of the performing arts in Croydon. She was there when Batt – best known for creating The Wombles – came looking for a young woman who could perform like the late Eva Cassidy. He created a relaxed musical style for her that appealed to the huge Radio 2 audience.
“I remember the phone call when the album got to the top of the charts. You expect balloons and fireworks, but I was just in the kitchen in Redhill with my mum. She was like, 'Yay.’ Then we continued to have breakfast.”
Her first three albums were a huge success for Batt’s label, Dramatico, but she was now at the centre of a Katie Melua industry. “That sounds horrific. You try not to think about it while creating the music. You can’t think of yourself as a money machine.”
Other people did think that way, particularly when she went back to Georgia. “I try to help, but the best thing is to say you don’t have as much money as people think you do. That is true.” The figure I’ve read is £12 million. “I know. The papers exaggerate it.” How much is she worth? More than a million? “Yeah, but I’m not telling you.”
She’s a smart woman, as the mathematician Simon Singh found out when he questioned the accuracy of her song, Nine Million Bicycles. Singh disputed the claim that we are: “12 billion miles from the edge. That’s a guess.” She popped up on Radio 4 with a new verse, incorporating his numbers: “We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe. That’s a good estimate, with well-defined error bars… ”
She can laugh at herself, then. So it is surprising that one early pressure came from believing the hype about herself. “Can it be resisted? To tell the truth, it feels good. That’s why stars have egos: because we start to believe it. The praise is magnified – but if anything happens like a bad review, then that is magnified too, and it is a big blow.”
Melua began to feel vulnerable on stage. “You’re not risking your life but sometimes it feels like you are, when you walk on and there are thousands of people staring at you. Fear kicks in.”
While all this was going on in her head, Melua was being seen as the yin to the yang of the feisty Winehouse, who was once astonishingly rude about her on TV. Asked if they could work together, she snarled: “I’d rather have cat Aids.”
The audience laughter showed how much Melua’s wholesome image had become divorced from any sense of her as a real person.
“She was mean about me, very mean,” says Melua, quietly. “I was shocked when she died because she was so young, but I wasn’t completely surprised. Maybe the person ends up believing the story that is being told about them.”
The question that all outsiders ask is, why do stars with so many blessings end up taking drugs as well? “I am only guessing, because I don’t do that, but I think maybe they’re trying to get some kind of feeling back. There is a numbness that takes over. You start to get insecure about why people are with you.”
Does she look at Winehouse and Houston and think it could have been her? “About the drugs, I do think that. I thank God for the people I am surrounded by and how close I am to my family. I’m sure they were both talented people and it could happen to anyone. Who knows – touch wood – where my life is going to take me.”
Up the aisle, is one answer. In September, she will marry World Superbike champion James Toseland. Melua used to distract herself with dangerous sports such as skydiving – and performed the world’s deepest underwater concert in an oil rig 303 metres under the sea – but ironically, loving a danger man seems to have calmed her down.
“My fiancé used to ride motorcycles at 250mph. That’s a pressurised job. He finds it amazing that I get as focused about my work.” Does he say: “Come on love, it’s only singing?” She laughs. “He’s not condescending, but he does say something like that. It’s so refreshing to hear.”
On the new record, Melua returns to the sound that made her famous. Mike Batt wrote many of the songs, with contributions from Fran Healy and Ron Sexsmith. The one song she wrote is called Forgetting All My Troubles.
“I wanted to make quite an effortless record,” she says. “The last album was quite a challenge and there was a lot of soul-searching. This time, I just wanted to sing.”
She will tour in October but then rest. “I will take a few months off. Maybe make a family, although nothing is planned. I’m going to do things differently from now on.” "
