She has a number one album and is the biggest-selling new artist of 2012. Craig McLean catches up with singing sensation Emeli Sandé.
It is November 2011 and inside the magnificent (if damp-stained) church of St John at Hackney in east London Coldplay are playing a fundraising acoustic set with support from Emeli Sandé.
Despite being only one single into her career, the Scottish singer has been chosen thanks to her jaw-dropping voice and full-blooded performance style.
In her songs – Daddy, about sticking with a faithless boy against your better judgment; Suitcase, about a partner preparing to leave for the last time; Mountains, an arm-waving anthem of togetherness – Sandé gives everything of herself.
‘It’s a big step to really put all your vulnerabilities out there,’ says Sandé (who has also written songs for everyone from Professor Green to Leona Lewis, Susan Boyle to Alicia Keys).
‘All the artists I’ve ever been interested in do that. You get to know them. But I think, especially for females, that’s difficult.’ As a woman in the pop game, she says, you’re meant to be feisty, defiant or Lady Gaga-bonkers.
Unless you’re Adele – who, let’s face it, is on a different planet – there’s no room for sentiment, only bullet-proof confidence. But for Sandé, 24, connecting with listeners is what matters.
By the time we meet again, earlier this spring, Sandé has won the Critics’ Choice award at the Brits. She has just played in her hometown of Aberdeen, her first show there since her debut album, ‘Our Version of Events’, went to number one.
A mother came backstage with her autistic 11-year-old daughter. ‘Since she’d heard my album, her mum said it had completely changed her life. She can go out and speak to people. To hear stories like that is crazy.’ Sandé smiles.
‘And I don’t think you’d get that if you just had an album full of radio-orientated pop songs. I’m glad I didn’t think that you had to dumb down everything you do.’
Sandé is currently the bestselling new artist of 2012 (outselling even the much-hyped Lana Del Rey). In fact, so far this year only Adele has sold more albums than her in Britain.
For the former Glasgow University medical student, life has changed beyond all recognition with head-spinning speed.
In January Prince Charles invited Sandé and other cultural figures to a Prince’s Trust summit at Clarence House. ‘Boy George came up to me and said, “Oh, I like your single Next to Me.”
‘I didn’t recognise him in his baseball cap!’ says Sandé, letting rip with her big, throaty laugh. ‘I met Eric Clapton, Mark Ronson… I had no idea what to say to all these people because they’re such legends.
‘Then the Prince walks in and I shook his hand. I spoke to him about the cello.’
Why? ‘I read Jacqueline du Pré’s autobiography,’ replies Sandé, who has played piano from a young age and whose Zambian-born father taught the choir at her secondary school.
‘Du Pré writes that when he was a kid Charles met her and played her cello. And I wondered if he’d continued to play.’ And had he? ‘No! I was like, “O-kaay!” That was my only conversation piece.’
Then there was the evening spent with Annie Lennox, at the former Eurythmics singer’s International Women’s Day concert in London in March.
Sandé found her to be an inspirational figure, and not just because they both grew up in the north-east of Scotland. ‘It was amazing to meet her.
‘She really has a voice and she’s not afraid to use it,’ Sandé says, and she’s not just talking about singing. ‘She properly has an opinion. And it’s not as if she just stands for things a few days a year, when they’re being promoted or PR’d.
‘She and I had a conversation and you could tell how deeply she thinks about things. She’s travelled to impoverished places in Africa; she’s really seen what women have to deal with there.’
At the end of the concert Sandé joined Katy B, Jess Mills and Lennox for a performance of Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves. It was an exhilarating experience for the newcomer.
‘Annie was really humble and nice and not a diva at all. It’s weird,’ she says with a shake of her head. ‘All this is everything I would have dreamt of when I was a kid. I know it sounds clichéed but it’s surreal.
‘Everything I wanted to happen has happened. The people I wanted to meet, the people I really respected…’ she trails off, smiling.
Sandé and I are having lunch in the restaurant at her hotel on a wet Tuesday in Glasgow. ‘It’s raining – which makes it feel like home,’ she says as she dithers over her order.
She’s dressed in Converse trainers, a black skirt and a grey V-neck. I already know about the tattoo of Frida Kahlo on her arm (she loves the artist’s ‘strong masculinity’) but wasn’t aware of the inscription I can now see on her left collarbone.
What does it say? ‘Volim te, Adame,’ she replies. It’s “I love you, Adam” in Serbian. Adam is her fiancé, a Montenegrin she knows from Aberdeen. A marine biologist, he’s been there from the beginning of her career.
‘He’s seen all the s— gigs in Glasgow! He’s seen me really trying.’
The night we meet, Sandé is playing in the 2,000-capacity Old Fruitmarket. She performed in Glasgow in December, in the SECC arena as part of her tour supporting Coldplay.
But this is her biggest headlining show in the city. Eight hours later she is almost drowned out as the largely female crowd lustily sings along to her songs.
Born in Sunderland, Sandé moved to the small Aberdeenshire town of Alford aged four when her father secured a teaching post at the local school. Coming from small-town Scotland myself, I know that a non-white face was rare even in the 1990s.
How was it for the Sandés when they arrived in Aberdeenshire? ‘My parents lived in Sunderland in the 1980s and they experienced a lot of racism being an inter-racial couple.’ Sandé’s mother is from Cumbria.
‘When they moved to Scotland people were curious and it was big news – it was actually in the local paper, The Piper, that this African teacher had joined the Academy! – and there were little comments.
‘But nothing compared to what they’d experienced elsewhere.’
It was only when she was 13 and at secondary school that Sandé was conscious of looking different from her classmates.
‘That’s when I started listening to [the soul and R’n’B DJ] Trevor Nelson and getting interested in black culture in London and music from America. I always knew songs my friends didn’t know. I’d tell them about Bob Marley in the playground.
‘But before that I remember when my friend came round to play when I was five. We had a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall. I knew this whole story about him but she had no idea who he was.
‘But I never thought it was strange – I thought I was just giving them information.’
Even when, aged eight, she had a glimpse of prejudice, Sandé – apparently as clever, confident and cheerful then as she is now – brushed it off. ‘This new girl came to the school, and we were playing catch, and I said, “Tag,” and she said,
“Oh, I don’t like black people touching me…”
‘That was the first time I’d heard anything like that. I was like, “What? She’s a new girl! She should be trying to get me onside!”’
Top of the class at school, Sandé was equally diligent once she had embarked on her medical degree at Glasgow University. But the pull of music and the weight of her studies were dragging at her.
She managed to maintain good marks through first, second and third years, even as she was writing songs and turning in four-hour piano-jazz sessions in hotels and restaurants.
After catching the attention of the music industry in London (where she now shares a flat in Brick Lane with her younger sister, a law graduate), Sandé secured a record deal and in 2009 decided to abandon medicine and concentrate on music full time.
Read All About It, which she created with Professor Green and on which she sang the towering chorus, was a number one last year. Trouble, written for Leona Lewis’s next album, is a smash-in-waiting.
If Sandé’s songs are powerful, her style is equally striking, from her gravity-defying blonde cockatoo quiff through to her clothes.
‘I’m into really cool new designers,’ she says, adding that her stylist, Bay Garnett (a Vogue contributor and consultant for Louis Vuitton), helps her find new talent, ‘which is really great – I’d love to just grow with somebody, be part of their journey from the beginning and they can be part of mine’.
She singles out the young Scottish designers Alan Moore and Henrietta Ludgate. ‘Alan had these beautiful patterns which reminded me so much of Frida Kahlo, almost African but brought up to date and made very British. Very strong and simple.’
Similarly, ‘onstage, I just wear clothes that give some kind of strength’.
The album ‘Our Version of Events’ will be released in America next month and Sandé will continue to support Coldplay on their tour of American stadiums later in the summer.
First, though, is her new single, My Kind of Love. The soaring, gospel-tinged piano anthem is, she admits, ‘very emotional. It’s connected to medical school, really. I wrote it about the patients I met while I was there.
‘When you walk into a hospital, everything is left at the door – your status, your money, whatever. All you are is a patient. You’re stripped of everything.
‘Some people have families who come to visit and you see that connection when they realise that maybe they don’t have that much time together. It’s really naked emotion.’
Not, Sandé says with a smile, that she regrets abandoning her medical career.
‘When I lived here in Glasgow I was studying, and music just wasn’t part of my life professionally. Now it feels as if I’ve come back as the person I’m supposed to be.’
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