Click here to listen to Gabriella Climi

If I hadn’t been a singer, I was going to be a museum tour guide,” says the 16-year-old Italian-Australian Gabriella Cilmi (pronounced “chill me”). She is escorting me around the Kent studio where she and her writing partners, Brian Higgins and Miranda Cooper – who between them have written all of Girls Aloud’s hits, many of the Sugababes’ smashes and Believe, for Cher – are attempting to pen one more knockout song for an album that has been three years in the making.

Fittingly, Xenomania, Cilmi’s home away from home, is housed in the former home of Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s muse for Alice in Wonderland. Walking through the studio described by Q magazine as the UK’s “biggest and hippest hit factory”, where writers and arrangers create beats and melodies amid the rock-star-chic-meets-Dickens interiors (there is even a resident ghost), you get the feeling that Cilmi has fallen down a rabbit hole in more ways than one.

Plucked from the Melbourne suburbs, where Michael Parisi, president of A&R for Festival Mushroom Records, discovered her, aged 13, singing Jumpin’ Jack Flash for her uncle at an Italian festival, Cilmi has only the barest concept of the miracle of music-business good fortune that has come her way. For a long time, she didn’t tell friends that she was spending her school holidays auditioning for hard-nosed label executives in LA, New York and London, and, after she was signed by Island Records, penning potential hits with Britain’s hottest songwriting duo. “In case it didn’t work out, I didn’t want them to know what I was doing,” says Cilmi, who is Kylie-small and wholesomely pretty – enough to be the new face of Boots No17 make-up. “I told them eventually. They didn’t really react, because a lot of them have their own hobbies. They’re cool with it.”

Arriving in LA for the first time in 2004, Cilmi was copiously sick in the airport bathroom, leaving her manager, Cassandra Gracey, wondering what exactly she’d taken on. It turned out to be a virus rather than nerves. Cilmi, whose singing experience, until a few weeks before, had been confined to the shower and a failed audition for a school production of Fame, showed her mettle, impressing jaded music execs with a voice that will inevitably draw comparisons with Amy Winehouse. “It’s really strange, because there are three people in a boardroom, their faces are right there, and you have to sing to them,” she says. “It was a bit terrifying, but it was really cool, too, because, like, I’d never been overseas before, apart from Fiji.”

The writer/producer Higgins met her at the time and thought her voice “wild and loud, but certainly not trained”. If it were tamed, he believed, it could be stunning. A year later, when Cilmi was 14, she returned to LA and spent three days writing with him and Cooper. “With a voice like that, she had to be involved in the creative process because it would be difficult to write something for her,”Higgins says. At that point, Cilmi was obsessed with, as she puts it, “screaming”. She wanted to be a rock god like her idols, Led Zeppelin. Higgins’s philosophy was to allow her a free rein, in the hope that she would get that out of her system, then gradually redress the balance. Cilmi recalls him playing her Rain Song, from Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, and saying: “You’ve got to experiment with different parts of your voice and show your sensitive side.”

The trio wrote 60 songs in three years, then whittled them down to 12. The result is an album as fresh as the Australian beach hut in which tracks such as Don’t Wanna Go to Bed Now were written, but one lent an edge by the darker blues of Awkward Game and youthful, in-your-face rock such as Save the Lies, which Cooper describes as having a “1970s, Rod Stewart strut to it”.

“It was the happiest album-making experience I’ve ever had,” Cooper says. “It was brilliant to do something organic and not be up against a deadline. I thought I’d have to write kid songs, but it wasn’t like that at all.” Many of the ideas came from Cilmi herself. The rather serious Einstein, with its line, “You put a man on the moon, but you can’t save that baby”, came out of a maths lesson on pi.

The first single, released in March, is Sweet About Me, the B-side of which is the theme song to ITV’s Echo Beach. In fact, almost everything is sweet about Cilmi, a refreshingly grounded Catholic girl. The Winehouse comparisons lie purely in the voice and retro sound of her album, due out in the summer. “That’s just unfortunate timing,” Higgins says. “Gabby’s first version of the album was delivered to me in September 2006, which meant I hadn’t even heard Rehab. Now Amy’s done that, there’s a comparison – the dark hair, the slight 1960s influence.”

Before she has properly registered on the public radar,Cilmi has already made her mark: her UK debut on Later ... with Jools Holland sent prerelease album sales into Amazon’s top 10. If there is a weakness, it’s that she has little road or stage experience. At gigs, she can come over as slightly self-conscious, clean-cut rather than sultry. She may have to up the sass. Higgins has no fears on that score. For him, she has charisma enough to be an old-school star, and her voice sounds like a “missing voice from years ago”.

“She’s special in the sense that she has a maturity belying her age,” he says, “but that doesn’t imply dullness. She’s tough. She holds her own and has never lost her composure, even under someone as overbearing as me. When I’ve said something like ‘You’re not trying here’, she obviously wants to strangle me, but in a really good way. She’s able to deal with my intensity and demand for results. That, to me, is the most striking thing about Gabriella.”

Cilmi’s mother travels everywhere with her, which helps her to survive being away from her father, brother and close-knit extended family; and, at Xenomania, they’ve practically adopted her. “She’s as much a part of it as we are,” Cooper says. “One thing about Xenomania is that it’s a family environment. Tea and cakes at the cafe across the road is as rock’n’roll as it gets. It’s about as wholesome a studio as you could find.”

When she’s not listening to Jeff Buckley or Kings of Leon, or reading Roald Dahl or Dr Seuss, which she sometimes uses to inspire her before a songwriting session because “it takes your mind to different places”, Cilmi does schoolwork by correspondence, which she plans to continue for another two years. “I just want something to fall back on, though I might not get the greatest grades.”

Which would she prefer: good grades or a No1 record? Cilmi laughs. “Well, probably a No1 record.”

Sweet About Me is out on March 10

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