with Katie Melua

By Mike Hume

Katie Melua’s voice sounds like a James Bond movie — a sweet and smoky silhouette made all the more alluring by a veil of international intrigue. And as she lets fly with that sugary rasp that reminds equally of a summer crush and a dame at the end of bar, smoke-laced and three whiskeys deep, the seduction is complete. Her audience, like that at Monday’s show at 9:30 Club, is enthralled.

It doesn’t hurt that Melua is a drop-dead gorgeous 20-something either. Her most impressive feat on Monday was likely tap dancing around the male tongues, lolled onto the stage from the mouths of their owners in the first-row.

There’s far more to Melua than sweet serenades and sex appeal though. A woman of the world already, Melua hails from London, by way of Belfast, and her birthplace in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her songs, like “Spider’s Web” and the simply-named “ Belfast,” speak volumes of her insights into issues larger than love, destiny and all other clichéd topics of the American pop scene. She’s got the humanitarian angle down as well, involving herself with Save the Children, Nelson Mandela’s AIDS Foundation and even performing at the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Now do you see where the international intrigue bit comes in?

One of the most mysterious bits of her own life came at age 19, when she performed at the Royal Variety and afterwards met the Queen. As she filed through to shake Her Majesty’s hand, the Queen let fly with this revelation.

“She said that she had heard my record and that she enjoyed it very much,” Melua says during a Friday phone interview. “The only thing is, it hadn’t been released yet.”

See, even in her teens she was discovering the secrets of world leaders. Who knew that the Queen had an underground music pipeline? Intriguing, yeah?

With that kind of royal endorsement, it’s no wonder that three years later, Melua is the top-selling female recording artist in Britain. Weaving a few elements of Georgian and Irish music into her records, Melua’s sound is uniquely bolstered by wooden flutes and a sitar. The amalgamation has had a widespread appeal and helped make Melua an international sensation. Her debut album Call Off The Search was certified gold in Hong Kong and Switzerland, platinum in Holland, Denmark, New Zealand and Australia, twice platinum in Germany, Ireland and South Africa, three-times Platinum in Norway and received the IFPI Double Platinum Award for two million European sales. In March 2005 the album hit the top spot in Denmark, a year after its initial release and became a top five album in Japan.

With a soft, bluesy style to her music, Melua will no doubt elicit comparisons to Norah Jones, though Melua may be more similar to her idol, Eva Cassidy.

“I heard Eva for the first time at a point in my life when I felt that there was no good music out there,” Melua says. “When I first heard her, I gave a sigh of relief. Finally someone to make music that can touch people’s hearts. Then when I told my friends about her, they told me she was dead.”

From there, Melua immortalized her inspiration with the song “Faraway Voice,” Melua’s first-ever composition on guitar. In her other works, that include philosophical questions about current events and songs inspired by Georgian folk tales, her compositions show off her intellect in addition to her obvious singing talents. Although there have been some who have questioned that intellect.

“In short, Katie Melua has no right to call the age of the universe ‘a guess’ or quote it as 12 billion years when we now know it to be 13.7 billion years old,” cosmologist Simon Singh griped in an article printed in The Guardian. His complaint refers to the second verse of Melua’s single “Nine Million Bicycles” that states: “We are 12 billion light-years from
the edge / That’s a guess/ No one can ever say it’s true / But I know that I will always be
with you.”

He then suggested the verse be altered to “We are 13.7 billion light-years from / the edge of the observable universe / That’s a good estimate with / well-defined error bars / Scientists say it's true, but / acknowledge that it may be refined / And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.”

After meeting with Singh on a radio show and performing the re-mixed, scientifically correct version of the song, it was decided that Melua’s initial estimation would suffice.

Singh isn’t the first man to succumb to Melua’s wisdom and charm — just look at the sales figures — and he certainly promises not to be the last.

Just like the flashy super agent in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Melua seems more than capable of recruiting the world into her following. Perhaps the only thing that separates the two would be the lack of a flashy Bond-like title that states a theme in some super chic way. Something to herald her bright future. Something like: “Glory on the Morrow,” or “The World Was Yesterday.”

Of course, with a voice like hers, Melua is more than capable of her own heralding.