Katie Melua: Georgia on my mind

Charlotte Cripps meets the 19-year-old chart-topping artist with roots in a former Soviet republic

Katie Melua, a sultry 19-year-old singer-songwriter, to judge by her album cover, looks in the plain light of day even fresher-faced than Joss Stone, the 16-year-old soul diva from Devon and a fellow newcomer to the British music scene. Melua's hair is tied back in a bun, and her big eyes twinkle deeply with serenity - not fear: Melua has nabbed the No 1 spot in the album chart from Dido this week. And everyone is going crackers about this new star because she can actually sing, and write the odd song.

You may feel that it is about time Dido was knocked off her perch, and Melua, whose debut, Call off the Search, has quietly been accumulating sales - more than 300,000 copies since November - sings and plays the guitar with a genuine, if rather old-fashioned, talent. It's a laid-back fusion of blues and jazz that includes covers of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" and John Mayall's "Crawling up a Hill", and two self-penned songs.

In the present climate of manufactured pop, it is hard to believe that this young fogey who sings about love with the voice of an angel and the maturity of a 35-year-old is for real. She is a seasoned live performer and recently headlined at Shepherd's Bush Empire; she begins a UK tour at the end of February. Melua records all her music live, and finds it unimaginably sad that radio stations are shocked when she arrives with her guitar and asks: "Would you like me to sing a song?" She continues: "I think that is the most bog-standard thing any successful artist should be able to do. But my rivals... Someone like Britney Spears doesn't just rely on her vocal ability. She relies on other things, like her dancing. I can't dance to save my life."

Melua was lionised by Terry Wogan on Radio 2, after being taken under the wing of Mike Batt, the former Svengali of The Wombles' musical incarnation (he played Orinoco in the band, and his mother made the costumes), and is well looked after. Batt had his first of eight hit singles in 1974; now, as Melua's manager and mentor, he is promoting a quite different proposition. Batt plays the piano and organ on Melua's album and wrote most of the songs. He also owns the independent record label Dramatico, to which she is signed. Melua is keen to stress that the two of them are a partnership. "I just front the show," she says. "But if we ever have to go back over something and redo a vocal, Mike is like, 'Well, when I started out in the Sixties and Seventies, you couldn't do that. You had to get it all in one go.' Only the best can come out of that. But technology has made it easier for people without talent to get into the industry."

While there may be nothing spectacular about Melua's back-to-basics music, the fact that the record-buying public has embraced her so readily means it is hungry for something genuine. She has received no bad press whatsoever, even if she is being hailed in some quarters as "the new Norah Jones", so does Melua represent a ray of hope in the glittering, poppet-addled world of pop in the Noughties?

For a start, Melua is tragically unhip. Not only does her music have absolutely no edge - she prefers to leave out the synthesisers and drum loops that would only distract from her traditional melodies and lyrics - but, whisper it, she couldn't care less about what she wears. Sitting on a black leather sofa in a west-London studio, it is as if she is frozen in time, unaffected by the past 15 years of the music industry. On her album cover, she looks like a teenage version of Cher, but only because she has had her hair curled - a necessity, unfortunately, for TV appearances, she laments. Today, she wears a pair of jeans from Next, an old red felt top and some dull-looking trainers from Barrats, bought a few days ago by her mother because her last pair, which she wore for three years without a break, stank (or so her mother said).

"When I first got together with Mike, after he saw what I wore, he said he had to take me shopping. We went to Topshop," she says. "But I call them my work clothes. I am a jeans sort of person and I see no reason ever to have to bare my flesh on stage. Ideally, I would never have to have hair and make-up - I would just get up and sing dressed like this."

Melua was born in the Republic of Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, but the family moved to Belfast when she was eight, staying there for five years before relocating, once more, to England. She lives in a semi-detached house in Redhill, Surrey, with her father, a doctor, her mother, a nurse, and her brother, Zurab, 11. Despite her success, she has no plans to move house or install a Jacuzzi in her bedroom. "What is the point?" she asks. "We decorated the house only last year, so there is no point in all of us moving. I need to buy a car, but I'm not planning on spending more than £6,000. It's my first car - I may crash it."

Two years ago, Melua was studying for a BTec and A-level in music at the Brit School for Performing Arts in Croydon. Batt came along and was blown away when he heard her singing "Faraway Voice", a song she wrote about and dedicated to Eva Cassidy, the cult American singer who died of cancer in 1996. Even though, at 15, she won an ITV talent competition by singing Mariah Carey's "Without You", receiving a bedroom makeover as her prize, she has never wanted to be famous. "The ultimate buzz is when people are touched by my songs, not when I'm on the cover of a magazine," she says. "I'm a songwriter. Really, I always wanted to write songs for other people.

"Sure, there may be lots of money to come now, but because we come from Georgia... Where I grew up we had no electricity or water. I had to go down four flights of stairs at the age of seven to bring up water. So we suddenly became very prosperous when we came to the West, and that is when I first discovered that money doesn't make you that much happier," she explains. "There has never been anything I have really wanted to buy that I think would make me happy - apart from a guitar. Clothes or stupid little shoes or things like that, I'm not into. It just feels totally unnecessary."

Melua grew up on a junk diet of the Spice Girls. "I wasn't being given anything that was musically inspiring," she says, "except 'girl power' - which is great when you're 12." Eventually, her uncles introduced her to other sources of inspiration: Queen and Led Zeppelin. The first time she heard Cassidy, singing "Over the Rainbow" (her mother had put on a compilation tape), she was over the moon - until someone pointed out that Cassidy, too, was dead. "I wrote "Faraway Voice" about Eva Cassidy, but also about my generation, who haven't experienced the great artists. You know, the likes of Bob Dylan or The Beatles in their prime." Does she hope to have that sort of impact herself? "That is my ultimate dream, my long-term goal, but let's see what happens. It's still early days."

When pressed, Melua does concede: "There is great music out there - just not in the mainstream charts." She cites Coldplay as OK and would like to do a collaboration with them and two other artists, Jack Johnson ("He's from Hawaii, a surfer and a new Bob Dylan") and the young Dublin-born singer-songwriter Damien Rice. Melua's current single, "The Closest Thing to Crazy", is still hovering somewhere in the Top 20. But has this ingénue of the broken-hearted ballad ever been in love? "Yes, I've been going out with my boyfriend now for two years. But I've never suffered a broken heart. I still access those emotions in my writing and performance, but it's very basic emotions that anyone can experience, no matter what their age."

'Call off the Search' is out now on Dramatico