Everyone loves Katie

Katie Melua foolproofs her songs by stripping them down.

It's a bit early to ask for Katie Melua's first impressions of China. "Well the motorway looks all right," she giggles as the car she's travelling in barrels towards Beijing's bustling centre.

For the next four days she will do interviews and meet and greet the movers and shakers of China's music industry - and fit in a few international phone interviews along the way.

Keeping her company on what could be a lonely excursion for an English-speaking 20-year-old, is her manager and right-hand man, Mike Batt, as well as her hair and makeup artist. The transient lifestyle, complete with dodgy cellphone coverage to the outside world, has become a day-to-day reality since her debut album Call off the Search booted Dido out of the top spot on the British charts and went on to become the top-selling UK album of 2004. A few days after this interview, Melua will board another plane bound for Australia; on Tuesday night she will perform in Auckland, New Zealand, a country she knows only from Lord of the Rings.

"You'll probably think that's such a touristy thing. It looks stunning, obviously," she says, before the line cuts out.

She's been described as the missing link between Eva Cassidy and Norah Jones, and the only thing missing from her performances, according to one music scribe, is the long cigarette holder.

Her interpretation of jazz and blues songs, a mixture of originals and covers (Randy Newman, John Mayall, Nina Simone) has somehow cut ahead of the slick, groomed pop and R&B that usually tops the charts.

Although she plays with a four-piece band, her gigs are humble affairs.

"I like to do some of the tunes and songs just on my own with a guitar which makes them quite intimate. I like playing at big venues but there's nothing like the smaller ones where you get really personal contact with the audience."

After Melua performed in Australia, one smitten fan wrote "Thank you, Katie, for one of the most beautiful nights of my life so far. Your Adelaide concert was superb. My fiance asked me to marry him while Closest Thing to Crazy was playing on our CD player nine months ago and our bridal waltz is going to be Call off the Search."

Born in Georgia (in the former USSR) and raised in Belfast, Melua didn't start singing until she was eight, and even then she treated it as a hobby. "The things I listened to back then were basically the music of now - everything from the Spice Girls to Eminem to Destiny's Child," she says. "Obviously I think their music is great but those artists didn't make me want to base my life on music."

It wasn't until she started listening to the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Eva Cassidy, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Nick Drake and Tom Waits that she changed her mind.

"They're the ones that basically inspired me so much that I wanted to go into music as a career."

She attended the South London Brit School of Performing Arts, where she was a diligent student with good grades. Then the unlikely day arrived that changed her life forever - a Womble came to class.

Batt, best known for writing the music for the TV series about a group of environmentally conscious furry creatures, was looking for a bass player for a potential acid rock band, and a singer in the vein of Eva Cassidy. When he heard Melua for the first time, he was shocked, telling Music Week, "I wasn't expecting that touch of greatness - that somebody who would one day be one of the greats would walk into the room. But I certainly believe that is what happened."

He whisked Melua away and signed her to his label. Batt became her producer, manager, co-writer, piano player and musical adviser.

"Before I met Mike I hadn't really properly sung jazz and blues," says Melua. "And the first few sessions that we had, when I started singing those songs like Call Off the Search or Learning the Blues or Crawling up a Hill, what surprised me is that it felt so natural. I was doing these things with the vocal and I wasn't quite sure where it had come from."

Melua's debut album, Call off the Search, comprised of 10 standards and two original songs, was released in 2003. By March, 2004, it had sold one million copies, driven by high-profile performances at the Royal Variety Show and the Brit Awards.

But not everyone has been so convinced. Some critics gripe that her music makes for a strange mix of jazz and pop, that it's too safe, middle-of-the-road.

"I definitely don't call myself a jazz artist," says Melua. "I think it's probably offensive to real jazz artists to call me that. Even though I do listen to a lot of music from the past, there is no way of escaping music from the present, from the radio constantly ... I still listen to it because I think it's good to have your ears open to everything."

Halfway through recording the next album, Melua has co-written five of the songs by focusing on the melodies and lyrics and "foolproofing" them by stripping them back.

"If the song sounds great just on the guitar, you know it's good. But I can't let the fact that I want to song-write take over an album. So I'm trying to stay extremely critical of each song, regardless of who wrote it. I think that is one of the most important things. People know me more as a singer than a songwriter.

"I think what would be wrong for me to do would be to make another record of other songwriters because that's an easy thing to do now because the first album was a success. It would be so easy to record another album of classic songs. You have to take chances."

Besides, she was 18 when she recorded Call off the Search and now that she's 20 she says she knows what she is capable of. Recently she started listening to Georgian folk singers and was surprised at how much her own voice sounded similar. If there's anything she's not so sure of, it's who her fans are. When she first started performing she thought her audience would be older than she was. Now she finds it "mind-boggling" that everyone from pre-schoolers to elderly people come to her gigs.

"I feel so fortunate that I can sing and play concerts. I don't really care who listens to it. How could I possibly think that it's bad that an 80-year-old enjoys my music as much as a 20-year-old? Because then you're just talking about being cool. And the most uncool thing is to try to be cool."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Katie Melua

RELEASES: Debut album, Call off the Search, platinum sales (over 30,000) in New Zealand

TRIVIA: Named her guitars after characters from Toy Story; wrote the song Faraway Voice as a tribute to the late Eva Cassidy.