Waiting for the siren's call

Looking back, it was all so predictable. Dreamy chanteuse clambers into bed with mainstream record label. Figuring it might just have a new crossover starlet on its books, mainstream record label subjects chanteuse to bubblegum makeover. Thereafter, the relationship plummets rapidly downhill. Doors are slammed, calls go unanswered, against her better judgement chanteuse appears on CD:UK and nearly dies of the humiliation. When it comes, the break-up is swift and ill-tempered.

“They wanted to present me in a very pop way,” reminisces Nerina Pallot of her first, disastrous, record industry courtship. “If I'd gone along with them it would have backfired badly. People can tell if you're faking it. I would have been badly exposed, I think.”
Today, Pallot, a waifish warbler from the Channel Isles, can afford to be sanguine. Since parting with Polydor three years ago the 31-year-old has scaled pop’s slippery pole on her own terms. Self-financed and, initially, released on her own website, Pallot’s second album, Fires, has proved a huge sleeper hit and looks set to be one of the 2007’s cross-over successes (Polydor belatedy reissued her ill-fated debut, Dear Frustrated Superstar, in the wake of Fires).
A glossy suite of FM rockers and piano torch-songs (Pallot complains of being constantly compared to Tori Amos but the similarities are too obvious to ignore), the LP is exuberantly, unashamedly commercial – whatever else prompted her rift with Polydor, it certainly wasn’t an aversion to the limelight.
“I write commercial songs. I’m not ashamed of that,” she states. “I’ve always loved commercial music. I like Kylie Minogue. Being cool holds very little interest for me.”
Pallot spent part of her childhood in India (her mother is from the northern city of Prayag). While there are no exotic influences, per se, in her music, those years in the Orient helped mould her outlook as a songwriter, she feels.
“I was exposed to a lot of Bollywood musicals which I think is interesting because, with Bollywood, the subject matter of the song is often quite heavy and dramatic. There’s a lot of love and death in Bollywood. They’re not afraid of grappling the big themes.”
As a female artist – one blessed/cursed with babydoll eyes and notable cheekbones – Pallot says she's confronted constantly by sexist assumptions: “People can’t seem to get their heads around the fact that I’m a pretty good musician. I play my own instruments. I write and arrange the songs. If you're a women, there appears to be an understanding that, really, you just turn up to sing the song and that everything else is done for you.”
To date, Fires has yielded three hit singles (a fourth, ‘Learning To Breathe’, was released this month). The first of those, ‘Everybody’s Gone To War’, is remarkable: an anti-war polemic coated in a sugary pop melody.
“I’m proud of that contradiction between the stark lyrics and the upbeat melody,” Pallot proffers. “I love the idea of little kids singing along to it, not realising how scathing the words are. I’ve always been a big fan of The Beautiful South, who write these really dark songs but nobody notices because the melodies are so joyful.”
In ‘Everybody’s Gone To War’, Pallot addresses an unnamed soldier friend (a “pure bred killing machine”) itching for the frontline. The lyrics are rooted in personal experience: “I went to a school where a high proportion of the students were from military families. So a lot of my friends have gone into the army. I know people who are serving in Iraq right now.”
Still, ‘Everybody’s Gone To War’ should not, cautions Pallot, be read as a barricade rushing anti-war anthem: “I’m not a tree hugging hippie. I’m not saying war is always wrong, in every circumstance. The point I’m making is that my friends, the people I know, are being sent out there as cannon fodder.”