Gospel according to Alice

Alice Russell sings with the emotional power of a queen of soul.

The first time most people heard Alice Russell sing was on her gutsy soul version of the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army.

That cover - the kind that makes people stop and think, "Hell, that's cool" - came out last year on a nondescript 12-inch single by a guy called Nostalgia 77. There were no pictures of her. Just her voice on a slab of vinyl.

Most presumed she was a gorgeous big black woman with lungs like bellows, not a sweet wee blonde from Brighton.

"People are alarmed because I am a short little munchkin," she laughs. "I used to be a lot fatter. I'm still pudgy but I've lost a bit of weight."

She is at her hotel in Melbourne and feeling a bit "gormless" after a busy tour schedule in Britain and too much beer drinking in Japan. But she's looking forward to New Zealand.

Russell and the Quantic Soul Orchestral (QSO), led by Brit geezer and producer Will Holland, perform at the Union Fish Building in Auckland next Friday. Australian band the Bamboos will be the official QSO for the tour Down Under since Holland has played with them before. And Russell says they will be playing Seven Nation Army, because she loves it.

"It was Ben, Nostalgia 77's idea to do the cover and he phoned me up and I heard it and I thought, 'Yeeaah'. Those lyrics, Jack White, what a lyricist. He's amazing. And Ben played me the version he'd done, it was really funky, with the horns, and it was just fun to do."

Around the same time that song came out Russell released her debut album, Under the Munka Moon, a collection of songs that had been building up over the years. This year she released the more refined, but no less soulful and funky, My Favourite Letters.

"For me it was the next step. Munka Moon was a collection of songs whereas My Favourite Letters was the idea that I was going to do a start to finish project with one other person [producer TM Juke]. It's a more intense way of working and it feels more juicy. There's nothing like a start to finish album," she says.

The British music press has made the inevitable comparisons to soul-pop singer Joss Stone. But Russell's hip-hop and jazz-funk leanings make her more believable than Stone.

"I think it's just because we're both white, we're English, and we're doing the soul thing," she says, dismissively.

Russell is laid-back and it's no surprise she prefers to live in a seaside town like Brighton, rather than London. "It's very relaxed. You'll go into town and everyone will be in the coffee bars and it's like, 'Who's working?'."

She is open about the fact she has very little sense of ambition and doesn't think too much about how her career has panned out so far.

"Some people come up to me, young singers, and they're wanting to go places, and wanting answers about how I did it. But I actually don't think there are any. You just do it because you do and even if I couldn't make a living out of it, which I'm still struggling to do, I think I'll always want to do it.

"Yeah, career. I've never really thought about, 'Right, I've gotta go to that place'. Maybe I should. A lot of people have said, 'Alice you should go to [the US], they'd love it. But ... "

She has plans to go to America, but not with the purpose of breaking into the music market, it's more about hooking up with some of her musical heroes and doing "a bit of a history chase".

Her main influences are singers like Minnie Ripperton, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan and Aretha Franklin. Growing up she remembers listening to the radio and most of it was black American soul music and early hip-hop.

"I'd sit there with my little record button ready," she laughs.

Her parents are both musicians and her father was the choir master at the local church when she was growing up "in the countryside".

"So from an early age we always sang in harmony at church and then in my early teens I got into Stevie Wonder, Prince and the blues. And then, there were loads of blues bands round where we lived and I just used to get up with them and do one off songs as a petrified and drunk teenager."

Although she was too young to experience the hey day of Britain's rave culture, she and her friends had their own musical amusements. "We'd get generators and go out into the forest and set up. But it was more hip-hop for us. We were into hip-hop and soul."

She never thought too much about having a unique and strong voice when she was younger, and even now, she's flippant about it.

"It's weird, I just do it, I just sing.

"But also, I think what you listen to has a lot to do with it and that's how your influences come out. So I listened to a lot of gospel growing up and it had that gut wrenching emotion, it was very expressive and almost to the edge of the Richter scale."

Next Friday then, will be a nice day for an earthquake.

* The Quantic Soul Orchestra with Alice Russell is at Union Fish Building, Quay Street, Auckland, November 25; Long Room, Basin Reserve, Wellington, November 26

*Albums: Alice Russell: My Favourite Letters (2005), Under the Munka Moon (2004); Quantic Soul Orchestra: Stampede (2003), Pushin' On (2005)