Sports Calendar

Pallot’s musical aptitude revealed itself early, though she never geeked out: her mother insisted on a rounded education, and she felt sorry for the more autistically driven child prodigies she met at competitions.

But it does mean that, in live performances now, Pallot owns the stage. It’s not just that she swaps from guitar to piano with ease, and that her voice sounds, if anything, better than on record. It’s that she’s having fun, bantering between songs with the crowd. “Is anyone here called Heidi?” she calls out. A pause. “Good,” she smiles, “because she is a f***ing bitch and this song is about her.”

So, I ask later. What did Heidi ever do to you? “This covers some dodgy personal territory I can’t reveal too much of, but Heidi is somebody who, whether inadvertently or purposely, meddled in my personal life and caused a not inconsequential amount of injury.” (Pallot speaks like this, in proper sentences.) But whatever pain Heidi and others have caused, it’s done wonders for her writing. The songs on Fires, unlike on her debut, are never twee, and threaded through with love, and longing, and loss.

One achingly poignant song, Mr King, repeats: “Birds fly, trees sway, why can’t I be like that?” Pallot confesses that she spent a while in a “horrible depression” after her first record failed: “Not because it was tanking, but maybe because I had no career I had too much time to think. That line ‘birds fly, trees sway’ — it was like that every day for six months. I would sit out in the back room where I had my little home studio, with lots of trees and lots of birds around — and that would be my day.”

Affairs of the heart contributed to the depression, of course, but it was also a kind of midlife crisis — evidently that hits you early in the mayfly world of pop. “My life was just not how I imagined it would be. There comes a point when you realise that you’re in the future, you’re in that thing you had sketched out, and it’s nothing like the blueprint. You have these bizarre plans when you’re 18, you have your life mapped out: ‘When I’m 24, I’ll have a multiplatinum record; at 26, I’ll be married; at 28, I’ll have my first child; at 30, I’ll have my second child ; and of course my husband will be rich and fabulous and I’ll be living in a mansion and the world will love me!’”

Blimey. Even in my dreams I aspired to nothing higher than second-rate science-fiction writer. But funnily enough, the Pallot masterplan seems to be back on track, if a bit behind schedule: isn’t that an engagement ring on her left hand? Indeed it is; her boyfriend proposed on Valentine’s Day — a date she had decried on our first meeting as “absolute bull****”. “I’m sure he did it just to spite me!”

Which just leaves a platinum-record-shaped hole in the plan. But if K.T. Tunstall can crack it, why not Pallot? A decade ago Q magazine was so scared to put on its cover any woman who was not Madonna or Kate Bush, that it did three at once — Tori Amos, Björk and Polly Harvey — under the coverline “Hips. Tits. Lips. Power”. The music industry may not have moved on much, but you’d hope the public has.

Nerina Pallot plays Crawdaddy in Dublin on April 17, with Edinburgh, Birmingham, Stables and London in May (www.nerinapallot.com). Fires is available now from internet sites, and officially re-released in May

Singers to watch

Lily Allen Citing influences as diverse as the Slits, Kate Bush and Kris Kross, Allen is the archetypal singer-songwriter for the iPod Shuffle generation. Imagine, if you can, the Streets doing Calypso with guest vocals by Kirsty McColl. Brilliant.

Belle Signed at 14, and now only 16, the Devon teenager’s debut album has a Morcheeba-style shimmer. Out in June, expect to hear it washing out from every gastro pub in the country this summer.

Sol Seppy The classically trained Anglo-Australian and former member of Sparklehorse recently went solo, with pleasing Mazzy Star-style results.

Netsayi Born in Camden and raised in Zimbabwe, Netsayi’s impassioned debut Chimurenga Soul, out May 22, is a striking mix of African pop, jazz and folk, soul and reggae.

Margo Buchanan The backing vocalist for everyone from Paul McCartney to K. T. Tunstall, Buchanan recently appeared as a vocal coach on the BBC’s duets reality TV show, Just the Two of Us. Despite that late career blip, the title of her debut solo album, out next month, says it all: I Should’ve Done This Years Ago. A masterclass in mature MOR.

Times recommends

• The Boxing Day tsunami: five years on
• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?