A lot of would-be pop stars fall flat on their arses. But few do so as publicly — and literally — as did Nerina Pallot. Summer 2001, in the studio of the Saturday morning kids’ show
Live and Kicking, and the classically trained one-time musical prodigy is wondering what she’s let herself in for. As she’s lined up alongside the pertest popettes of the day, like the beauty pageant from hell, a scrum begins for the best camera angles and a dozen bony elbows batter her to the back.
A few minutes later, after some perfunctory questions about her debut album, she is politely sliding along the sofa to make room for each successive interviewee, when Faye Tozer from Steps somehow shoves her right off it and on to the floor. Live. On national television. Her record label drops her a few weeks later.
What a difference five years can make. The singer-songwriter now promoting her second album, Fires, is an altogether more determined creature. Pallot (the final “t” is silent, as in French) persuaded some top session musicians to contribute to the record, on favours and a small advance from her publishing company. When it was finished, she still wasn’t happy with some of the arrangements, but Chrysalis would not invest any more. The old Pallot would have shrugged her shoulders. The new Pallot remortgaged her house, and paid for a new producer herself.
“I wasn’t being bloody-minded,” she protests, “I just wanted to put out something on which I didn’t cringe. And I cringe a lot about my first record. Even the title, Dear Frustrated Superstar. Part of me knew I’d taken my eye off the ball.”
The result is one of the most haunting albums I’ve heard in years, one I’ve played 50 times and never tired of. Since Pallot released Fires independently last year, it has sold more than 10,000 copies through the internet (she could blog for England) and through after-gig sales while supporting the likes of Sheryl Crow and James Blunt. The queues after her gig with Suzanne Vega so impressed Christian Tattershall, the head of the Warners offshoot 14th Floor, that he signed her up, and will be re-releasing the album, with full marketing push and a series of gigs, next month. Given that his previous signings include David Gray and Damien Rice, this is A Very Big Deal.
Pallot knows it. “This is my last major-label chance. As a woman, primarily as a woman — I’m going to be 31 soon; it’s really hard to get exposure as a woman of my age. I was told at the age of 21 that if I didn’t make it by 25, it’d never happen. Isn’t that crazy? What are you going to write about at that age?” It’s something Tattershall echoes when I ask him why he signed her. “That over-25 thing is a common prejudice of record companies. They look at the Arctic Monkeys, and that’s the pinnacle of what they want to be involved with — but actually they’re the unusual ones, the reality is that it’s mainly older artists who are selling. And who writes great lyrics when they’re young? Apart from Keats?” Keats — is that some new band? But no, Tattershall does indeed mean the poet. Pallot, who is half-way through an English literature degree, having already been to music and art college, is clearly in good company.
All have high hopes for her breakthrough single, which she performed on Top of the Pops last weekend. Pallot wrote Everybody’s Going to War three years ago, and — sadly — it still sounds as topical now. Typically of her, it started not as a political statement but a personal one: Pallot attended a military school in her teens, and so knows a lot of “our boys”, as she calls them: “They have gone without the support of our nations, they’ve gone woefully underprepared for the guerrilla campaign — as the war was unfolding it seemed wrong on so many levels.
“The specific person this song is about comes from a military family. When we were teenagers he was into music and painting, but the family gene took over and he decided to go to Sandhurst. I sat out with him on Clapham Common the summer after he’d joined up, and I asked him what life in the Army was like. He said, ‘I love it. It’s great. The only problem is, I’m a completely trained killer.’ My God! If you knew this person as a teenager, with long hair and everything, to hear him say, so matter-of-fact, ‘I’m a trained killer,’ was surreal.”
The song has a terrific video, which you can see at www.timesonline.co.uk/musicvideos, and it is faster, poppier and musically simpler than most on the album, perhaps because Pallot wrote it on a bass guitar rather than piano. Most of the other tracks are growers, melodically more complex creations that require more than one listening to unfold. And while you may hear echoes of Joni Mitchell or Carole King, lyrically the songs are her own. They spring from experience. Each is a stubborn foothold chiselled into the unscaleable rock-face of love. And smart with it. “If love is a drug,” she sings on Everybody’s Going to War, “I guess we’re all sober.” Geek Love begins: “In the race to get out of this place I am checking my face in the back of a spoon.” Clearly, Pallot spends time crafting songs, honing and refining to get the lyrics just so.
“God, I’m really glad that comes across,” she says. “The reason the album is called Fires is because . . . do you know an American writer called Raymond Carver?” Very much so, I say. Your songs remind me of his short stories. She claps her hands together. “Really? You’re the first person who’s noticed. It makes me giggle when people go on about how I sound like Joni Mitchell or Tori Amos because actually the only person who makes me think about writing songs is Raymond Carver. Fires is named after a collection of his early poetry and essays, on one of which he says,” and here Pallot slows right down, as if conveying matters of life-or-death import, “that if you want to describe the world, as you see it, in the most honest way, to be who you are, and find your own voice, every word has to have the right note, the right sound. Whether you use ‘earth’, or ‘mud’, or ‘ground’, or ‘floor’ — these things are so . . . important. So important. Maybe I’m a bit nuts about detail, but I think that’s what makes great songs, even in pop.”
She can be quite bitchy about artists she feels are letting the side down. Coldplay are big culprits, writing big words that don’t mean anything, like “bad A-level poetry”. During the next couple of hours she will slag off Green Day, the whole “indie pain” genre that afflicts so much “boy” music, Madonna on Live 8, Live 8 itself, and, finally, young people generally: “Why is my generation so apathetic about everything? Like, ‘I’ve got a plastic band on my wrist — will that count?’ ”
She doesn’t spare herself, either, breaking off to laugh at her own diatribes: “Look at me, I’m like the Brian Sewell of pop! I always think I’m the arbiter of good taste, so you have to take me with a pinch of salt.”
Aside from a brief stint in a convent school in India — she is part Indian, on her mother’s side — Pallot grew up in Jersey, where she had three much older half-siblings and, later, a much younger sister. Pallot is as common a surname there as Smith, she says, though often mispronounced outside the island. (She laughs at the story of how Margot Asquith put Jean Harlow in her place when the Hollywood sex bomb kept getting her first name wrong. “No dear,” the Prime Minister’s wife corrected her at last. “The final T is silent — as in ‘Harlow’.”)
