Keys to the kingdom

By CRAIG McLEAN

Sunday night in Brighton, and a fierce autumn wind is whipping the seafront. The city, and especially the beachside Honey Club, is a curious venue for a global superstar to go about quietly launching the follow-up to her 10-million-selling debut album.

Outside around 8pm, three-and-a-half hours before showtime, hired labour are bent double in the wind, erecting hoardings around the venue. Engineers and roadies are in and out of the doors to the club, finessing sound and tweaking lights.

Inside, a four-piece band and three backing vocalists are standing on the small stage. Judging by their chilly expressions and profusion of knitwear they have been here a while. Only the 1.2m-something "crowd hyper" in the shin-length Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls basketball shirt seems to feel no cold. This is Freak Nasty, and he is a ball of ceaseless energy and enthusiasm.

Finally, after driving from London, their employer strides through the door. She wears a thick, woolly, cream scarf that reaches up to her cheeks and down to her knees. A leather bucket hat, seemingly by Chanel, is pulled low over one eye. Tight jeans. Pristine trainers. A big smile. Bunched clumps of a frayed Afro peek out from either side of the hat.

She greets her band and flops down at her piano, side-saddle. She stabs dramatically at her keyboard, testing out the acoustics in this small venue. "Who said I couldn't get my drummer on this stage?" she grins to the empty club.

The drummer, squished in a corner behind the speaker stack, presumably grins back. She does some soulful runs up and down the keys. She gives a James Brown grunt - "Oourhg!" - and shouts "Gimme a soul clap!" And, as one smoothly lubricated whole, nine people (wee Freak Nasty included) slot into an immaculate rhythmic tattoo.

Alicia Keys has entered the freezing, poky building and, as if by cheesy magic, the cold isn't so noticeable any more. It is the opening European salvo in the mammoth worldwide push for Keys' new album, The Diary Of Alicia Keys.

As she continues with her brief soundcheck, a giant of a man in a huge leather coat pokes at the ineffectual crash barriers placed floppily in front of the tiny stage. This is Carter, and he is Keys' security guy. He is clearly less than impressed with the safety arrangements.

Hovering nearby, a funky middle-aged white woman in a flat corduroy cap, safari jacket with a hoodie underneath, burgundy "combat slacks" and trainers, is also concerned. This is Keys' mum, Terri Augello.

She travels with Keys often and is on a wage as a member of the tour personnel. "She would [travel all the time] for me," Keys has said. "But I tell her, 'I can't have you sleeping in those bunks, mum, in a tour bus for six months. It's just not right.'"

The Keys' camp is used to more elaborate productions. It is barely two-and-a-half years since the release of her debut album, Songs in A Minor, and Keys is still only 22, but she is a bona fide phenomenon already.

Songs in A Minor entered the US charts at number one, and her first single Fallin cruised to the top of the Hot 100 and stayed there. She won five Grammys, an unprecedented achievement for a debut-album artist, a Brit (Best R&B) and countless other awards around the world.

Why these figures and feats? Because Songs in A Minor was a work of some genius. Sure, there was a devastatingly effective marketing campaign behind the launch of Keys - including a crucial appearance on an Oprah Winfrey TV music special - orchestrated by her mentor Clive Davis, the legendary record label boss who discovered, among others, Whitney Houston.

But hype will take you only so far. Grit is needed behind the grin. Keys' thing was simple: classic soul with a contemporary twist.

She had the piano-playing aplomb of Stevie Wonder, the heartlifting voice of Aretha Franklin, the songwriting chops of any soul legend you care to mention. On top of this she knew hip-hop inside out, and could produce modern street anthems as well as Missy Elliott.

Fallin was an epic, and epically effective, ballad; Girlfriend, Rock Wit' U and How Come You Don't Call Me? were sinuous dancefloor anthems. A Woman's Worth cornered the head-tossed-back diva market. The result was an album that appealed to lovers of vintage soul, and young hip-hop/R&B heads.

On top of all this, she was drop-dead, classy-fashion beautiful. For her near-iconic braids alone, Alicia Keys appeared on the cover of Braids And Beauty, Black Hairstyle and Trends and Try It Yourself Hair.

For her comeback, Keys sports a wilder, but still immaculate, hairstyle and a tougher sound. Fully immersed in her soundcheck, Keys zings her band through the bustling Streets Of New York, the urgent hip-hop track featuring rappers Nas and Rakim. Then it's into the brick-rattling ballad If I Was Your Woman. It is only a soundcheck, but Keys pushes her tonsils to the limit.

Augello raised Keys alone after she and her dad, a flight attendant named Craig Cook, separated when Keys was 2. Augello juggled single parenthood with a job as a legal secretary and a struggling acting career.

She would return from work to their tiny apartment in the off-Broadway, midtown Manhattan area of New York, known as Hell's Kitchen, in the small hours. After a couple of hours' rest, she'd be off to her day job.

"But I'd end up bumping into walls," the seemingly ever-cheerful Augello told me between supportive handclaps as she watched her daughter's soundcheck. "But Alicia gets up, performs, smiles, and does it all over again." For her part, Keys attributes her ability to multi-task - in the studio and on the road - to Augello.

"Oh my God, my mum taught me how to juggle without even knowing it," she beams. "She taught me how to be a workaholic, she taught me how to be strong. She's a determined person. She never gave me the impression there was anything she couldn't do by herself. She was always like, 'I'm gonna make it through this'.

"She really showed me what a real woman is, what a strong woman is. That's why I feel like I'm not a pushover. How could I be with that type of [upbringing]?"

Yes, she says coolly, she's aware that this is only the start. "I knew I was gonna have to do, like, triple-time with the album coming out, doing some live dates and doing some promotion at the same time."

Make that quadruple time. Keys was in the recording studio between promotional engagements because she hasn't finished the album she is meant to be promoting. She is off to France, Germany and Holland after Britain, and she has studios booked and waiting there, too.

Is she insane? "Yes," she replied with an emphatic grin. Her hat was pulled low over her face. In the gloom from the car's interior light, I could see one - frankly gorgeous - eye staring at me. It was quite unnerving.

Also unnerving was the fact that, in the front passenger seat of the car sat Kerry "Krucial" Brothers. A good-looking young guy in a bulky parka, he was introduced to me by Keys as her studio partner and the other half of the writing/production outfit known as KrucialKeys. In Brighton I would see him fetching some Louis Vuitton luggage over to Keys' mum. .

So, the as-yet-incomplete Diary Of Alicia Keys is meant to be coming out four weeks and one day after our meeting; three days before, I had sat in a boardroom at her record label while the A&R chap from the New York office played us the 11 tracks that existed in completed form.

"I had to finish up small things," she says of her all-night studio session. "Tying songs together. I like it to have a fluid movement. Sometimes there's points where I want one song to lead into the next. I then need to do a small musical suite to do that."

Keys is a different kind of young pop female. For one thing, she is an accomplished enough musician - she took piano lessons from a young age - to talk calmly about conjuring up "musical suites" in foreign studios strung around Europe.

As a producer and songwriter, she has created tracks for acts as diverse as hip-hop hero Nas (Warrior Song), bullish rapper Eve (the hit single duet Gangsta Love) and big-lunged chameleon Christina Aguilera (Impossible on her Stripped album).

She is remarkably self-possessed for someone two months shy of their 23rd birthday. But then, her manager has said that, courtesy of various record company and publishing deals, Alicia Keys has had "seven figures in the bank since she was 14".

She was always an old head on young shoulders. "When I was younger I never felt I exactly belonged, in the sense that I thought differently," she purrs. "What concerned people in high school, I just didn't care about.

"It was just boring to me. I hated all that scene. But I can be silly and stupid too," she says playfully. She may pray daily, have a meat-free diet and no great enthusiasm for alcohol, and have been pursuing her musical dreams since she was 14, but she's no ascetic, God-invoking robo-diva.

In conversation, she claims that she always felt she could only express herself fully on paper - "If I spoke it all came out twisted" - yet she talks smoothly and with guarded precision.

In line with a disdain for the ostentatious "bling-bling" side of her profession - "When I have to walk among the entertainment world I do, because that's where I work. But I don't live in that world" - Keys tells you only what she needs you to know and not much more.

At 14 she was in a short-lived girl trio called Embishion. They wore sportswear and were like Salt'N'Pepa meets En Vogue. At 16 she had a solo deal with Columbia Records and had won a scholarship to study at Columbia University. Both went wrong: the degree because she was trying to do too much, the deal because new executives came to the label.

They didn't understand her music. They told her that she should use more samples and guest vocalists, "and get the best producer, and this dance instructor, and wear this dress. Everything that I wasn't."

She started sinking into "a hole - monetarily, spiritually, physically. That was absolutely devastating, I didn't know where I was going." Then Clive Davis came to the rescue and signed her to his new J Records imprint.

"It was like, 'Wow'. I felt so relieved. It seemed like they cared, just a little bit. Suddenly it seemed like the Moon and the stars were aligned."

She had met Kerry Brothers, co-producer with her on several tracks on The Diary Of Alicia Keys, around the age of 14 in Greenwich Village.

"Everybody would go every night of the week to the Village to play basketball, drive around, walk around, party, just freestyle on corners. It was alive. We were both into music, freestyling and rhyming."

How long did it take you to get together? "As partners, to work together? It took a while. But we were cool with each other for a long time. And we just started working together around halfway through my Columbia experience. We both started talking about some things and we kinda connected. And he said, 'Man, they should try some things like this'. And it just naturally happened."

Is it cool working together and dating? [sharply] "Who said we were dating?"

Your A&R guy. [more sharply] "Who's that?"

The guy from New York who played me the tunes last week in your label's office.

"Yeah?" Her voice lowers and I have trouble making out what she's saying.

"I'm gonna let you know, [Kerry's] known me for a long time and you guys, I don't know where your head is coming from, but it's definitely like home base, absolutely. That's solid."

"Okay, cool," I say, bamboozled.

I think she's making the assertion that that's private stuff and we don't talk about that. The flash of steel was so unexpected and forceful that I start to doubt myself. Maybe the A&R guy didn't say he was her boyfriend. I'm sure he did though, and she didn't say he wasn't.

It doesn't seem to matter either way. But maybe a near-decade in the business, years of frustration followed by sudden vaulting success, have taught Alicia Keys the value of tactical circumspection.

The night after Brighton, Keys plays a small show at the Criterion Theatre in London.

At 8.04pm she appears at the piano. Her head is lowered and That Hat is pulled low over her eyes. She is wearing a bolero-type jacket, velvet strap-dangling trousers and a glittering top.

An emphatic piano solo gives way to Rock Wit U and a dynamic rendition of How Come You Don't Call Me. A scorching new ballad, If I Was Your Woman, has Keys the gung-ho performer up off her stool, bouncing and vibing and swaying.

The urban hymn Streets Of New York is fantastic, a jazzy hubbub of rapping and sweet soul singing that does exactly what Keys told me she wanted it to do - "be a description of New York as I know it". The snatch of Stevie Wonder's Living For The City completes the vivid picture.

Finally, after an intense version of Fallin', Keys launches into You Don't Know My Name, the first single from The Diary Of Alicia Keys. It's a lush, Philly-feeling track with a talkie bit in the middle where Keys plays the part of a waitress cold-calling a hot customer. It's rapturous, a love song that makes a mention of "hot chocolate with cream" the most sensuous thing you'll hear all year. It's proper soul.

In the car on the way to Brighton, as Kerry Brothers sat in the front with his headphones on, I had asked where the name Keys came from, as it's neither of her parents' second names.

"Lotsa places," Alicia Keys had replied. "Keys to opening doors, doors that have never been opened before. Keys to opportunity. Keys to life." At this she fished a diamond-encrusted, key-shaped pendant out of her big jacket.

"And keys to the piano," she smiled satisfiedly, like the cat who got the cream, and the hot chocolate.

- INDEPENDENT

* The Diary of Alicia Keys is out now.