Interview: Emeli Sandé, songwriter

ONE of the first songs Emeli Sandé ever wrote was about an alien. She reckons she was around seven years old when she penned this particular opus. This was in the days before she appreciated that a song should have a verse and a chorus. That came later, when she was about eight.

Sixteen years on, she is Simon Cowell’s favourite songwriter, a double-edged compliment arguably, but not a bad position to be in. Sandé, however, is more than a jobbing tunesmith; she is set to become Scotland’s newest pop star, having laid the foundations on a number of chart collaborations with UK rappers.

This tip for the top in 2012 was born and raised Adele Emeli Sandé in Alford, Aberdeenshire. Her Zambian father was the choirmaster at her school and her Scottish mother is a keen writer, so her chosen career path was a no-brainer.

“I just always felt music – even before I learned anything about it, I could hear melodies and pick them up on the piano,” she says in an accent more mid-Atlantic than central Aberdeenshire. The first thing she remembers going mad for was a song on a party tape. Next, it was Mariah Carey – “just the tone of her voice and how high she could go” – and then Nina Simone, who remains her chief inspiration. Although she has “mucked around” on guitar, plays clarinet and started learning cello, piano is her instrument.

Sandé spent her adolescence performing at school concerts and entering local talent shows. “Any option I could get so I’d be on stage,” she says. But, despite growing up through the X Factor era, she was never tempted to enter a competition where she could not perform her own material. She received her first national recognition when she won a songwriting contest on The Lowdown, a music show hosted by respected soul DJ Trevor Nelson. Aged 16, she got her first taste of the music industry when she was whisked off to London to talk management and record deals.

“It was a bit fast for me,” she says. “There were people telling me what I should be, but they had no idea what to do with these really raw songs, so I didn’t go for it at that point.”

Her patience ultimately paid off. Last week, she appeared on The X Factor as one of its guest stars, performing Read All About It with Professor Green, while her songs have been recorded by TV talent show graduates Leona Lewis, Cheryl Cole, Cher Lloyd and Susan Boyle.

Still, she is sympathetic to the teenagers on these shows who seem to feel it’s now or never. “I did feel like, ‘I have to have it now’, and I was annoyed that things didn’t work out the way I thought they would. But now I’m so glad. It wasn’t the right time for me then at all.”

She opted instead to take up a place studying medicine – neurology, since you’re asking – at Glasgow University, where she was so consumed by her degree that songwriting went on the backburner. However, she continued to gig around the city and was a regular at open mic nights, bringing her into contact with bands and rappers and introducing her to the possibilities of collaboration.

“I love working with MCs because it’s so experimental,” she says. “They can do whatever they want, there are no real rules. I felt like I had a home in that kind of scene, although I loved working with a few alternative bands.”

Sandé has written plenty of songs by herself, but has made her name so far as a guest artist on other people’s tracks. Although she says she loves the discipline of collaborating, she is wary of the trend towards songwriting by committee, commonly used on big name pop albums, where as many as six different writers are parachuted in to produce just one song. “I really hate that type of songwriting because it just feels disjointed. There’s not one narrative because five people have chipped in.”

She prefers to work “old-school style” with one other writer. Her most recent writing partner was one of her idols, Alicia Keys, “which is nuts!” she laughs. But Sandé has already found her songwriting soulmate in producer Naughty Boy, with whom she clicked immediately.

One of the first songs they wrote together was a tune called Diamond Rings, which became their first hit when recorded by Chipmunk. Sandé sang the chorus hook but her part was lip-synched by a model in the video. Profile-raising guest spots with rappers Wiley, Tinie Tempah, Professor Green and Devlin followed, but Sandé has been careful not to get boxed in as the go-to girl for a touch of grime glamour. She would love to write a song for Björk or Lauryn Hill, but her music is set to reach an entirely different audience via her contribution to Susan Boyle’s new album. The emotive middle-of-the-road piano ballad This Will Be The Year is one of only two original songs in the collection.

“It’s a great position to be in where people will approach you and they’ll say what they want,” she says. “But my best songs are always written with nobody in mind. Because if you’re told Leona Lewis wants a song, it’s about this and that, you need to do this, it’s limiting, it just sounds contrived.”

Now Sandé is being positioned as a star in her own right, distinctive peroxide quiff and all. Her debut single, Heaven, reached an impressive No 2 in the charts when it was released in August, effectively launching her own career.

“I love being part of the songwriting community, I love getting respect for what I’m doing,” she says. “But if you brand yourself a songwriter, the whole industry will see you as a songwriter and they’ll stop seeing you as an artist. They’ll feel that they can just take songs that you were keeping for yourself. I’ve really had to be quite strong-minded when they wave a cheque in front of you. I’m glad I have a team round me that believed in me and said, ‘You don’t need that money now, just keep it and eventually you’ll do it yourself.’ ”

Sandé has been saving up all her most personal songs for her debut album, Our Version Of Events, which will be released at the end of January, and looks set to be a hugely commercial distillation of her contemporary R&B/trip-hop chops and the piano balladry which has propelled the other Adele to superstardom.

“I’m really excited about how it’s sounding so far,” she says. “It’s a very honest album. There’s nothing I’m hiding. I just want to make sure that, lyrically, I’m really proud of every song. I don’t want anything on there that I’m not going to like in five years time.” Maybe then she could reprise the song about the alien. v

Emeli Sandé plays Oran Mor, Glasgow, Tuesday, The Caves, Edinburgh, Wednesday, and Aberdeen Music Hall, 3 December

www.emelisande.com