Jamelia has faced many crises in her short career — accidental pregnancy, family tragedy, an abusive ex. Now, after her huge hit Superstar, she is ready to take on the world. Next is a song with Coldplay’s Chris Martin. By Dan Cairns
Two days after Jamelia Davis won a Mobo award, four years ago, the Birmingham-born singer’s world collapsed around her. A leak to a tabloid newspaper meant that her record company, Parlophone, fresh from celebrating her success, woke up to the news that one of its prize assets — a then 19-year-old vocalist hailed as a homegrown R&B talent to rival America’s finest — was five months pregnant. The game, as far as Jamelia was concerned, was up.
“I was crying my eyes out,” she recalls, “going, ‘I’m so sorry’. I was literally saying goodbye to them. At the time, I was, like: ‘How and why did this possibly happen?’ I was taking precautions and everything, but I still got pregnant. Then I got a call from the head of the label, and he said: ‘Don’t think that we’re letting you go. We really want you, and whenever you’re ready to come back, just let us know.’”
Trouble, as Jamelia’s idol Mary J Blige once noted, loves company, and it duly got what it wanted when, shortly after the birth of Jamelia’s daughter, Teja, the singer ended an abusive relationship with the child’s father. Her mother had had Jamelia when she was a teenager and raised her on her own; Jamelia was now fated to do the same. To make matters worse, one of her stepbrothers was charged recently in connection with the killing of two Birmingham women on New Year’s Eve, 2002. (Another stepbrother was stabbed to death during a fight when Jamelia was 14.) Scenting carrion, the hacks hovered, and Jamelia seemed increasingly in danger of being defined by events outside her control — except that she failed to play the role such circumstances demanded of her. Two key decisions mean that the 23-year-old is now in a position where she can look down on the world from a position of great strength.
The first of these was her agreement to the release, last autumn, of the song Superstar as the second single to be taken from her comeback album, Thank You (it’s important to note that the first, Bout, had recently flopped). As Jamelia sees it, this required a willingness on her part to compromise. Yet, unlike most people in the notoriously stone-casting world of urban music, she sees this as a sign of maturity and integrity, not weakness.
“It’s an out-and-out pop record,” she concedes, “and I did think to myself, ‘I’m going to lose a lot of respect from the urban crowd, this isn’t what I want my image to be.’ But then I sat down and said, ‘But Jamelia, do you want to appeal to just one crowd?’ And I don’t. I have a lot of respect for the uncompromising artists, I think it shows strength; but I think I’m just as strong for compromising.”
The gamble paid off. Indeed Superstar, which rose to No 3 in the charts, was so successful that it began to be a bit of a headache for Parlophone. Almost six months after its release, the song still shows no sign of shifting from the national radio airplay charts. Its success may have silenced those who doubted that Jamelia could repeat her first flush back in 2000, when hits such as Money propelled her to stardom. Yet the album from which Superstar was taken has failed to catch light. And the time-honoured promotional tool with which Parlophone might have remedied this situation was another single — a tricky proposition when the previous one refuses to budge.
The second decision was the one Jamelia made in 2001, when she parted with her boyfriend and began trying to put down in words her anger and pain about the things she had endured in their relationship. The song that resulted, also called Thank You, has now sorted out her label’s conundrum: the single zoomed in at No 2 last week, denied the top spot only by Peter Andre’s grimly predictable career revival. Far more importantly than that, the track is one of those (very) rare examples of a lyric shot through with torment being married to an undislodgeable melody — and ripping up the charts. Gloria Gaynor did it with I Will Survive.
Abba set their dying marriages and subsequent divorces to some of the catchiest pop music ever written. Now Jamelia has converted that pain into gain with a song that spits defiance at her ex — “You hit, you spit, you split every bit of me … You broke my world, made me strong/Thank you” — without descending to sarcasm. It was, she says, never about that.
“People have misinterpreted it as a revenge song,” she says, “but it really is about me feeling strong after going through such an awful situation. Nobody would have known unless I’d written it; nobody knew for years. People have listened to it and said, ‘You’ve gone through this, but you seem so happy’, and I’m like, ‘I’m not going to let something like that affect me for the rest of my life’. I’m out of the situation and I’m thankful, because I’m so much stronger.”
She’s aware that the song, which has since been adopted by the NSPCC for its campaigns, may be used as another means of defining her — although, for someone who has been on what might be termed a life accelerator since she was signed by Parlophone aged only 15, it’s a danger she’s used to. Four years ago, after all, she was the “precocious Brummie teenager”; a year later, she’d been ambushed by a “career-ending pregnancy”. In the past 12 months, she’s felt the hot breath of the tabloids on her neck over the arrest of her brother; seen her comeback single fail miserably; been fitted up by a red-top for saying, tongue in cheek, that her bottom was better than Kylie’s (can there be a greater sin?); and been painted as a figure stalked by tragedy. Packaged in such a way — as a victim, as someone who couldn’t get the contraception right, as a keeper of dark secrets and now as a bruised but empowered survivor — doesn’t the real Jamelia get lost in the scrum? “Sometimes,” she says, “I’ve been on the phone to my manager, just crying, saying, ‘Why would people do that, why would they do that to me?’ You’re kind of a puppet for the media, and if they like you, then they’re going to push you up there. But they can drag you back down. I’m choosing to be in the limelight, choosing to put my face out there. But my mum isn’t; my brothers aren’t.”
She says that, four years ago, she would have spilled her soul to anyone who would listen. One of the advantages of her time out has been that she has had the chance to sit back and take a long, hard look at the business she’s in and how she operates within it.
“I’ve always been a very untrusting person,” she says suddenly, just minutes after a lengthy Miss World-like riff about positivity and the bountiful sweetness of her record company. “It’s just a trait that my mum has, of being quite negative. But for me it was a good thing, something I needed to make it in the music industry. I have the philo- sophy: don’t trust anyone and you won’t get hurt.”
This juxtaposition of outlooks is, I think, one key to understanding how Jamelia coped with becoming a star aged just 18, and why she is where she is today. Her conversation — its faint Caribbean lilt jostling for vowel space with a Brum twang that becomes more noticeable the more impassioned she gets — is a strange stand-off between strict adherence to the promotional script and the appearance, at unexpected moments, of the exuberant young person who shuns the London limelight and laughs at its absurdities. Thus, when she talks with potentially off-putting matter-of-factness about the machinations necessary in maintaining a pop career, instead of huffing about the stranglehold commerce has on contemporary pop, you come away refreshed by her flannel-free candour.
“I do see myself and my career as a product,” she says. “So the image that I give to the public is what I want them to think of me. It’s sort of being like an advertiser: I’ve got a product that I need to market.” Just don’t, on any account, mention the C-word. “Some people want to be celebrities,” she laughs. “People like Jordan and Peter Andre; they strive to be celebrities and that’s how they breathe, how they live. But as much as I’m famous, I don’t see myself as a celebrity, as anything so damn important. I don’t save lives or anything like that.”
She will, she says, do all she can to cement her comeback. “I really want to do this, and I know what’s required of me. I want to sell records internationally. I literally want to make it all over the world.”
Helping Jamelia in her quest are two recent developments, the first being the inclusion of Superstar on the soundtrack album for the hit American television series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. For all that the American R&B market is famously resistant to overseas talent trying to crash its famously closed shop, it is leg-ups such as these that can provide the tipping point. Jamelia will find out if it’s delivered when she flies there later this month. Perhaps of more significance, though, is Parlophone’s decision to rejig and repromote Thank You, the album, to include a new song Jamelia co-wrote with her label mate Chris Martin, of Coldplay. The track, See It in a Boy’s Eyes, is slated as her next single, and has huge crossover potential.
“The day before Chris called the label,” she says, “I’d been speaking to my A&R man, and he was going, ‘What ideas have you got for me?’ I told him I wanted to do some crazy things. The next day, he phoned and said: ‘You’re never going to guess what just happened: Chris Martin has called up. He says he’s a really big fan, and he’s got an idea for a song for you.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, shut up.’”
She tours Britain in the summer, by which time See It in a Boy’s Eyes should be near the top of the charts, and her superb album — overlooked in the frenzy of headlines and scandal-mongering — in a similar position. What’s more, the model agency Premier is wooing her for her signature, yet another sign that Jamelia is back with a vengeance. Recounting its suggestion that she sign up, she slips into Brum again to describe her first reaction: “I was like, ‘I’m already a sing-ga, so no, thank you.’” As if she’s ever been just that.