32MusicWeek 23.08.13 INTERVIEW KATIE MELUA
MELUA’S PERFECT 10 I
One of Britain’s best-selling musical exports looks back on a decade of independent success
TALENT n BY TINA HART
t’s been just over 10 years since a teenage, pop-and-R&B-loving Katie Melua discovered guitar music, found her perfect songwriting
partner in one Mike Batt and embarked on a journey that encompassed multiple label rejections, going independent and becoming one of Britain’s best-selling musical exports. Returning to her roots for sixth studio album
Ketevan (Katie’s Georgian birth name) set for release on her 29th birthday - September 16 - Melua has once again called on Batt for co-writing camaraderie. Not just Melua’s songwriting buddy, the
Dramatico label boss has helped steer her career which, over a decade, has clocked up achievements amounting to more than 11 million album sales, 1 million concert tickets and 56 platinum awards. He’s taken a few risks to get there too though,
including remortgaging his house to put out Melua’s debut LP Call Off The Search (which went on to be certified 6 x platinum in the UK) and booking the Shepherd’s Bush Empire with a fourteen-piece orchestra for her first ‘proper’ gig as a relatively unknown singer (it sold out). Music Week caught up with the BRIT School
student turned international music star to talk about her new record, tenth anniversary celebrations and the ‘plan-Bs’ that she’s never had to fall back on.
“The most difficult thing I’ve learnt is that if you want to get to the top and stay there, you have to just kill for it. I can’t stop thinking about music” KATIE MELUA
Once you had the phenomenal success with Call Off The Search, did you ever think you would make it to album number six, let alone continue with such an impressive success rate? Not really. Even though my parents were always happy for me to go into the music business, I was always sensible and thought up plan-Bs, like going to uni to study literature, or chemistry. Or business plans for this and that. I’m so glad I never had to implement any plan-Bs as the consistency of how my music has gone really has delighted me and given me so much confidence and faith in both the industry as a whole and all the people that I work with.
You worked on the forthcoming record, Ketevan, with new collaborators Luke Batt [Mike Batt’s son] and Toby Jepson. How did that come about? Luke engineered my last album [Secret Symphony] and he was working on a mix of a track last December for a bonus edition of Secret Symphony but it came out so good and sounded so different to the original sound of that album that Mike and I
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