When details of the lineup for Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown were announced last month, the former lead singer of Pulp’s hipster credentials were reinforced. The bill for the mini-festival at the Southbank Centre in London that Cocker has curated includes psychedelic legend Roky Erickson and US doom rockers Sunn O))); cool, left-field names you would expect a taste-maker like Cocker to endorse. More surprising is the inclusion of the hippie princess Melanie Safka, known simply as Melanie. Melanie is best known for her 1971 hit Brand New Key, a song about roller-skating, which became an even bigger hit for Somerset’s cider-drinking comedy yokels the Wurzels when they changed the title to Brand New Combine Harvester. What’s going on?

Once hailed by The New York Timesas the female Bob Dylan, Melanie fell out of favour by being so closely associated with the hippie movement – her set at Woodstock [[ was one of the festival’s high-lights – and by being so pretty.

“They thought she was too cute to write serious songs,” claims Peter Schekeryk, her manager-husband of 38 years. Then came the 1980s and the destruction of everything Melanie held dear, from wearing kaftans to writing songs about peace, love and understanding. It has taken this long for the dust to settle and for a new generation to accept that, while not as poetic as Joni Mitchell or as raw as Janis Joplin, Melanie and her perfectly constructed songs still have a place in the world.

Before speaking to Melanie, I receive a call from the fast-talking Schekeryk to tell me how excited she is to be playing a concert in London. He recalls the time she was booked to perform at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983, when the concert was cancelled because too few tickets were sold. “She decided to do a concert anyway, right there on the steps of the Royal Albert Hall, for the fans who had turned up. The police chased her away and the press made fun of her and she was really upset. I thought you should know this because we don’t want it to happen again.”

That seems unlikely this time round. Melanie’s Royal Festival Hall concert is already sold out, and she has become the latest in a stream of long-neglected singers who have undergone a critical reevaluation and rediscovery. But it has taken Melanie longer to get there than most.

“Everything becomes kitsch in the end, doesn’t it?” says Melanie, who is preparing for her forthcoming London visit by enjoying a few weeks of spiritual calm in a log cabin in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. “It happened to me in the 1980s when I started getting booked on Woodstock reunion tours. The stage would be hippiefied with incense and candles and on I would come, this leftover from another time. You know Fonzarelli from that TV show Happy Days, which was a kitsch version of the 1950s? I was Melanirelli. It was embarrassing. But then a lot of my life became embarrassing in the 1980s.”

From the very start of her career, Melanie was a reluctant star. Born in 1947 in Astoria, upstate New York, she was 17 when she did as so many sensitive, artistic types did at the time and descended on the early 1960s Greenwich Village scene, busking in Washington Park and doing floor spots in the area’s coffee shops. “I had no intention to be a singer,” she claims. “I wanted to join the Peace Corps or be an archaeologist, and I knew I couldn’t be a celebrity because I was so very shy. Then I hooked up with Peter and he made me a famous person. It’s taken me a long time to forgive him.”

Melanie claims she met Peter Schekeryk when she went into the wrong room for an acting audition and saw her future husband making a record. Schekeryk convinced Melanie to come into the studio with him where together they recorded Beautiful People, her song about the Greenwich Village scene of which she was a part. The producer landed Melanie a deal with Columbia Records that, according to the singer, “lasted for about a minute and a half. [The music business head honcho] Clive Davis had just taken over the company and he ushered in the era of lawyers running the record business, and he didn’t hold out much hope for me.”

Melanie’s big break came with the 1969 Woodstock Festival, and she has been associated with the gentler side of the great hippie gathering ever since. “I thought I was booked to play at a picnic,” she claims. “I took my mother along. It only dawned on me that this was something bigger when we arrived at the hotel and there was Janis Joplin. I went through the lobby and somebody said: ‘OK, your helicopter is waiting. And no Moms are allowed on it.’ So I waved goodbye to Mom and we flew over this sea of people. I felt like I was being taken to my execution. It was absolute terror.”

Melanie’s set became a quiet triumph, and it made her famous. She invented a new genre – hippie gospel – by collaborating with the Edwin Hawkins Singers on the glorious Lay Down (Candles in the Rain), an uplifting ode to the spirit of Woodstock, and had a No 1 hit with Brand New Key. But fame proved to be a curse. “All of a sudden the writing was being ignored while there was intense interest in the tiniest details of my life,” she says of the time. “I was told not to make jokes on stage because that didn’t fit in with my persona. And I was expected to have an agenda, when in reality I never wanted to tell people what to think or do.”

Worse was yet to come. Enraged by Melanie’s cover version of Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones, a crazed fan tried to kill the singer in 1975. “He followed me right into the 1980s,” she recalls. “He wrote me threatening letters every day. I tried to reason with him once, but it was no good. It didn’t give me a great sense of safety.” The hippie spirit has never left Melanie. She talks devotedly of Amma, an Indian guru who hugs as many people as possible every day, and the songs on her new album, Paled By Dimmer Light, have her trademark blend of self-deprecating humour and light spirituality. With her guitar virtuoso son Beau-Jarred joining her on stage at the Royal Festival Hall, she has become something of a benign mother figure of the folk music scene. What does she think of Jarvis Cocker, the man who is helping to resurrect her career? “Jarvis who? I’ve never heard of him. But I’m glad people are interested in the 1960s again. A long time ago I wrote a song called Some Day I’ll Be an Old Record. Well, here I am, still doing it after all these years.”

Melanie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (www.southbankcentre. co.uk 0871 6632500), Jun 16

Cult singers of the Melanie generation

Bobbie Gentry

Raised in poverty on a farm in Mississippi, the glamorous Bobbie Gentry had a huge hit in August 1967 with the haunting Ode to Billie Joe, the story of a teenage boy’s suicide and the singer’s involvement with him. Gentry went on to make a handful of uniquely soulful country pop records, but never reached the heights of Billie Joe. She became a fixture on the Las Vegas club circuit, but, after two failed marriages, she retired from public view in 1976.

Dusty Springfield ( left)

Dusty had all the makings of a camp icon: the tragedy and triumph, the beehive, the excess of mascara. She launched herself as a solo singer with 1963’s I Only Want to be With You, the first of a string of hits that dried up after the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper put girl singers out of fashion. In search of new material, Springfield took off to Tennessee to mine a new white soul sound, but by 1987 she was living in LA motels, broke and into self-harm. Pet Shop Boys relaunched her career with What Have I Done to Deserve This. Springfield died of breast cancer in 1999.

Nancy Sinatra ( far left, with Elvis)

Nancy Sinatra has had a lifetime of not being taken seriously and she has responded with good humour, posing for Playboy, releasing double entendre-filled pop hits and accepting her status as a slightly camp star for a younger generation. Nancy cemented her image as a bad girl with 1966’s sadomasochistic These Boots are Made for Walking, and a role in the biker movie The Wild Angels. In 2003 Nancy’s daughter told her that Sonic Youth and Jarvis Cocker were among her fans; she promptly roped them in to write songs for her self-titled 2004 comeback album.

Julie Driscoll ( main pic)

This striking fuzz-haired former secretary of the Yardbirds fan club was a part of London’s early 1960s blues boom when she teamed up with the Hammond organist Brian Auger to release hits that captured the sophisticated groove of Swinging London such as Indian Rope Man. Never comfortable with fame, Driscoll moved to a farm in the early 1970s with the jazz pianist Keith Tippett, reappearing sporadically to perform “challenging” vocal pieces, including Tibetan throat singing, in jazz clubs.

Marianne Faithfull

The Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham spotted Marianne Faithfull at a party in 1964. At the same time he was forcing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to start writing their own songs, providing Faithfull with her first hit, 1965’s As Tears Go By. It was downhill from there – scandal, suicide attempts and heroin addiction led to her recording Broken English in 1979, revealing a totally different woman from the polite former convent girl. The grand dame of survivors, she is currently on a world tour after recovering from breast cancer.

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