Click here to listen to Amy Studt

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved music. She hated school, where she was bullied, was stricken by a series of illnesses and resorted to self-harm. Then, when she was 14, she put her feelings into song for her friends. A CD found its way to the man who managed the Spice Girls. By the time she was 16, Amy Studt had become a pop star.

While her teenage tormentors were studying for GCSEs, Amy was being flown to LA for video shoots, and her poster was on thousands of teenage girls’ bedroom walls. She had a handful of hit singles, sang on Top of the Pops and talked to teen magazines about her pets (Anna the anaconda and Gordon the gecko), her sporty youth (she played hockey for the South of England) and her phobia of fruit (“especially bananas and pears”). Even grown-ups had nice things to say about the smart lyrics of songs such as Misfit, Just a Little Girl and Under the Thumb. To top it all, in late 2003 she was placed at No 14 on a rich list of young people predicted to be multimillionaires.

Then, after only 18 months, it came to an abrupt end in early 2004. The bean-counters at Amy’s record company, Polydor, decided that 200,000 sales of her debut album were not enough, and she was dropped. Just weeks before her 18th birthday, when her friends were starting to find jobs, Amy was out of work, without any qualifications, and wondering what to do with the rest of her life. To make matters worse, she was one of the last to hear the news. “One day, I called my management, and they asked me if I’d seen the article in The Sun about me being dropped,” she recalls. “I laughed and said, ‘No – but that’s ridiculous! Why would they print that?’ And they said, ‘Well, actually, it’s true ...’”

That could have been the end of the story, as it has been for so many child stars who had their 15 minutes of fame, then disappeared. But, almost four years later, a new Amy Studt is back. At the age of 21, she’s older – but still young enough to have written the time and place of our meeting on the back of her hand – wiser and surprisingly buoyant after her flirtation with fickle fame. She’s still with Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, where she is a label-mate of Emma Bunton, Rachel Stevens and other manufactured pop idols from his television franchises in the UK and USA. But the girl once dubbed “Britain’s Avril Lavigne” is no longer little.

She adopted an unusual strategy to pave the way for her comeback. Before recording her soon-to-be-released second album, My Paper Made Men, Studt made a cautious return to live performance by playing a series of low-profile club gigs, followed by a support slot with Razorlight. What was unusual was that she performed all of them under an assumed name, Jane Wails. The idea, she says, was to rebuild her confidence, distance herself from her previous teen-idol persona and find an audience of her own before shedding her disguise.

“I wanted fresh ears,” she says. “I didn’t want people’s opinions to be decided before I came out on stage. I wanted them to listen to my songs and make up their own minds.”

Even when she was recognised, she did her best to maintain the subterfuge. “Some people asked if I was Amy Studt, and I always said no. After one show, I met a couple of girls who said, ‘You’re just like Amy Studt – but don’t worry, you’re much better than her, she’s f***ing shit.’ Afterwards, I owned up, but they wouldn’t believe it was me until I showed them my driver’s licence.” Now she has lifted her mask completely, releasing, under her real name, an extraordinary song called Furniture. It is matched by an equally arresting video, shot in a single take, of Studt hunched naked in a bath, baring her soul. Against a gently building accompaniment, she sings from the heart: “I am only flesh and bones/Splintered glass and tattered clothes/Behind the skin, my fragility.”

It’s a fitting start to the more mature approach of her second album. The songs chart the painful end of a relationship and the emergence of an independent woman. Furniture is about a woman becoming an ornament to her partner. “There comes a point where you’re constantly together, but you may as well not have been there,” Studt explains. “You have your uses – you cook, you clean and someone has sex with you – and you just become part of the furniture.”

While there was always more to her songs than met the ear – Misfit is a smart kiss-off to those school bullies, and there’s a sharp sense of irony in Just a Little Girl – this is deeply personal material, even though Studt still works with co-writers. Musically, it should keep Kate Bush fans happy during the wait for their heroine’s next album. Sad Sad World, in which the victim turns predator, would even sit well on a PJ Harvey album, and She Walks Beautiful, whose narrator finds strength in solitude, echoes soul-searching female singers from Fiona Apple to Tori Amos.

Studt looks almost unchanged from her first brush with fame – although her hair has reverted to its natural dark brown, her gothic/boho-chic style is intact. She ponders the effect of her whirlwind journey from schoolgirl star to scrapheap before she was old enough to vote or buy a drink. “It was a weird experience, and I think it killed my confidence,” she confesses. The best thing was making videos, “because I love dressing up and performing”; the worst was “losing my privacy and anonymity”.

Throughout her period as a pop star, Studt lived in a separate flat at the top of her parents’ house in west London – her father, Richard, is a respected conductor and violinist, her mother a primary-school music teacher – but dreaded the daily sound of the bell at the secondary school down the road. “I learnt not to go on the Tube after school, because you’d suddenly get 30 screaming school kids going, ‘Sign my face!’” She thinks her debut album struck a chord with young girls because they identified with her personality as a confused teenager. “I’ve always felt like an outsider, and I suppose it represented people who didn’t fit in, and that hadn’t really been done before in that mainstream way,” she reflects. “I can look back on it now with embarrassment and pride, because I’m proud of what I achieved at such a young age, but that was me then, a snapshot of me growing up.”

There’s a steely look in her blue-grey eyes. “I’m not completely grown up yet – but I have a better grip on who I am.”

Furniture is out now as a download; My Paper Made Men will be out in the spring

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette