On the record

After enjoying several months of positive press reaction to her recent success and the ingenuity of her online world tour - which was webcast from her own basement pad in Tooting - the backlash has begun. Allegations have been circulating this week that her rags-to-riches tale is not all it seems, and that instead of the struggling artist who hit on an ingenious idea, she may simply have been the beneficiary of a practised PR machine all the while. Thom now stands accused of misleading her fans over the truth about her route to success. Talking exclusively to The Scotsman, she is keen to set the record straight.

"I have been amazed at the stories I've read about myself this week," says a decidedly husky Thom. "Ours is such an interesting story that I'm not surprised there has been speculation, but some of the coverage has been laughable. I've even read in one newspaper that my mum is a helicopter pilot, which is just hilarious. But I do wish people could come here and see what we're about. They could see my band's flat, and the basement where this all started. They would see the signatures on the wall from the people who were so excited about it all at the start, and they would see that we are genuine."

Thom has always been open about her roots and the journey which has taken her this far - which has involved PR companies, and she has indeed been professionally publicised. She insists, though, that all she has ever striven to do is play music.

Thom joined her first band when she was 14 and spent much of her teenage years touring Britain's pubs and clubs, playing live, before deciding to try to make a career in music after she left school. Earning a place at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in 2000, she then set about learning her craft, and it was there that she met the bandmates with whom she still tours today.

There has been little doubt cast on this aspect of her past, but from here on in, the picture becomes hazy. Until this week, the story went something like this: Thom's break came around July 2005, when Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker played Punk Rocker during an on-air interview with Paul McCartney. This was released as a demo by the independent Viking Legacy record label - which comprised only Thom herself, her bandmates and an entrepreneur backer - in October. Reportedly, the station was "inundated" with requests after its first airing, and Legacy Records rushed out an official release to capitalise on the buzz.

The single failed to chart in the top 40, and so Thom and the band continued to organise gigs in order to build a fanbase. In February this year she played two gigs, in East Yorkshire and Wales, and on the way home from one of these her car broke down. Thom's website states that this led to the decision that changed her fortunes: "An emergency repair enabled her to limp back to London with her exhaust pipe attached by a coathanger. 'Oh for God's sake, there must be a better way to do this,' she thought. At which point the idea of a webcam in her basement popped into her head."

The website continues to track the success of this inspired idea, saying that with a 60 webcam and a little help from her friends, Thom set up the 21 Nights from Tooting tour, to run over the end of February and the beginning of March. It says that she received an extraordinary reaction, and her online audience grew from 70 the first night, to 670 the next night, peaking at 162,000 in the second week - all without any advertising. And to top off perhaps one of the greatest underdog stories of recent music history, she was signed - live, online - to the RCA record label a fortnight after finishing the "tour".

Now. Call it cynicism or just plain jealousy, but this week the tide of media favour turned, and reports have been circulating that this is not the whole truth. Some commentators have proposed that, far from being the luck of a penniless artist, this was the work of a sophisticated PR machine creating an impression of miraculous success.

• ALLEGATION ONE: in the summer of 2005, Thom signed with a PR firm - Quite Great PR - which has also been linked to Sir Cliff Richard and Mariah Carey. This week, Quite Great admitted they employed a standard PR technique of placing articles in national newspapers and employing teams of paid and unpaid "enthusiasts" to spread the word about artists. They stress that this is standard practice for a new signing.

• ALLEGATION TWO: on her behalf, Quite Great announced the online tour in January 2006, a month before the car breakdown that was supposedly the catalyst for the idea. Allegedly, an e-mail ad campaign involving a million e-mail flyers was launched to publicise the gigs, and a radio plugger in the US contacted some 2,000 radio stations to promote the tour.

• ALLEGATION THREE: there was no increased internet "buzz" around Thom's website until 5 March - by which time the gigs had been written about in the press - suggesting that it was not the fans who spread the word about her music.

Earlier this week Thom's agent, Ian Brown, refuted claims that the Tooting gigs were simply part of a well-oiled strategy. "We had [people from] every major record company in this piss-stained basement in Tooting. If it was orchestrated we'd have done the gigs from Chelsea, not a flat two doors down from the Halal butchers," he said. He maintains the online tour attracted 48,000 fans before any press coverage.

But, so far, there has been no word from the woman herself. Until today.

"We did work with Quite Great PR, but given that we were a tiny label with no administrators or publicity staff, that is not remotely unusual," Thom tells me, with no hint of embarrassment. "When my single charted in October it got to No 55, which reflected what we had. Namely, not a lot. But we carried on gigging, and one show in Edinburgh was webcasted. It was the first time I'd ever come across that idea, and it just sat in the back of my mind. I realised my friends in the States could watch me, and the family at home could see my show, and it just seemed like a new avenue." The car breakdown incident was genuine, she stresses, but the idea of webcasting had already been planted in Thom's mind by the time it happened.

She is quick to refute the suggestion that her PR company had released promotional material about the online tour in February.

"I don't know what that's about," she says with a laugh. "It's completely fabricated. There has also been a suggestion that Sony - who own my current label, RCA - were behind the webcasting from the start, and that's just nonsense. The only advertising that I am aware of was my own website, which I've always been honest about, and my page on MySpace. Given that ours was such an unusual idea, it doesn't surprise me that people started talking about it. It wasn't done as a PR stunt, it was genuinely just another effort at trying to get my music out there.

"I remember sitting in my kitchen after the second gig, waiting to hear how many people had logged on. When I heard it was around 700, I was stunned. It then went on to attract thousands, and given that we had about 50,000 people [watching] before the press reports, it goes to show that it developed itself. Of course, when it appeared in the press more people logged on, but initially the buzz was just from people telling each other. It was out of my control."

Recounting the days when "every single record company" visited the basement, Thom is clearly still quite gobsmacked. Listening to her, I find it hard to believe that this reaction to the turn of events is anything but genuine.

"I have always been about the music. I am a singer-songwriter and that's what I do," she says. "But the internet is very relevant right now. It is seeing a shift in power, from the record companies to the people, and I'm not surprised people want to talk about it. When you choose to look at it in a positive way, we have been at the forefront of a change in the way we organise music. It is a kind of revolution, and, if it goes down in history, I will be delighted to have been part of it."

It's quite clear that Thom is refusing to let the negative hype rain on her parade. As she prepares to go back into the studio to lay down her latest material, she knows that today's news won't last: "I am quite happy, because I know exactly what went on. I know my band and I have worked tirelessly for years to get where we are today. I have had an amazing time on this journey, and I remember the excitement of when it all started and it was all new. We had no idea whether the webcasting would take off, it was the first time any of us had tried anything like it, and it has all been fantastic.

"I'm very proud and protective of the integrity of this band. At the beginning of all of this, way back when, the one thing I wanted was to keep intact the band members, the music, everything about our identity. I am so proud that we've done that, and I have an album coming out which is precisely the way I wrote it before all of this happened."

The record company, she says, hasn't changed a thing on the album, "not even the logo we've had since we were 19 - because this is the sound I wanted people to hear. That's enough for me. It's awesome."