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Private Eye recently published a cartoon depicting a father and son visiting an enclosure at a zoo. Inside it were two animals, one jumping for joy, the other cowering, head in its hands. The sign on the enclosure read: “Bipolar Bears.” I’m reminded of this when I meet Ida Maria Sivertsen, a 23-year-old Norwegian singer who is about to take pop music by storm. As if mindful of the exhibitionist streak she is, as an already infamously larger-than-life performer, expected to display, Sivertsen is wearing a black top hat and a coat trimmed with fur. Yet the person inside this apparel looks anything but confident. There’s something both sulky and shy in her demeanour; as if, away from the stage she says is her natural habitat, she feels at odds, both with herself and the world around her.

“People describe me as very energetic, enthusiastic, open,” she says, over the first of several glasses of wine. But I never see myself like that. Even though at gigs I run around and bite people and knock things over, I keep myself to myself.” Writing songs and performing is, she says, a form of expression, “but it’s conceptual expression. If I were to follow my instincts, it wouldn’t sound that nice. That is a deliberate choice”.

The tracks on her remarkable debut album zoom by like skiffle on speed, over which Sivertsen alternately coos, cajoles, berates and screams. “Oh my God,” she sings, on the song of the same name, “you think I’m in control?” Her burgeoning fan base would probably say that such a question, even asked rhetorically, is unnecessary. Put simply: no, we don’t think that, not for a minute. Past live appearances have seen the singer head-butting a guitar and bleeding profusely as a result; cracking her ribs so severely, she couldn’t walk for weeks; and attempting to beat up the front man of another band she’d taken against. Doesn’t she worry that such stories will blind people to anything else that may be (and, to my mind, is) going on underneath? “That’s why I write pop music,” she parries. “I don’t want to explain myself too much, I just want to write it out like a printer, put it into pop-music patterns, and see what happens.”

And the drinking: is it good for her? “Yup,” she answers, without hesitation. “Very much. People say, ‘She’s a self-harmer, she’s self-destructive, depressed.’ But you can’t go through life without expecting, or welcoming, downfalls or how life crashes into you.” Life, in Sivertsen’s case, was spent in Nesna, a tiny university town in northern Norway, as the eldest child of parents who are both teachers and musicians. “My voice was very, very thin and girlie,” she says, recalling her first attempts to sing. It was much later, when she’d gone to boarding school in Bergen, that she discovered the vocal beast within her. “Erlend from Kings of Convenience had just given this solo performance at an open-mic night, him and his guitar, and it was so boring, it pissed me off. So when he went off, I sang and let it all out: the anger, the emotions.”

At the time, Sivertsen was studying music at a school run by missionaries. “I’d read the small print,” she laughs, “and I thought, ‘No problem.’ I went, ‘Yeah, I’m a Christian.’ But I’m not. You weren’t allowed to dance - that was seen as having sex standing up. The rest of my class is now either married with children, or missionaries. They’re on another boat.” She looks suddenly dejected.

Sivertsen continued her music studies at university and with the Norwegian Youth Choir, but writing and performing her own songs was claiming more and more of her time. The moral strictures of the church; the enveloping discipline of a choir; the adrenaline rush of gigs: we could have a field day, I say, sifting through that for clues. Wasn’t that a scary mix? “For who?” she cackles. “For me? I feel it’s my weapon and my shield.” Later, more woozily, she reflects: “If you play music to get laid, it’s the same as playing music in order to not go mad - it’s expression. That’s what I’m trying to do: send out my arrows, just to not carry too much myself.”

She was diagnosed as a child with synesthesia, a condition that makes you experience sensations together, rather than separately, as most people do. In Sivertsen’s case, this means she sees colours when she hears music .

“It’s wonderful,” she says.

“And it probably saved my life a couple of times - life looks so rich with patterns and colours.” Before her diagnosis, she wondered what was wrong with her. “I was so enthusiastic about things, so emotionally extreme. I thought, am I mad?”

Like much great pop, her breath-taking songs dress melancholy in life-affirming, major-chord progressions that should, their writer says, “make you laugh through your tears”. So, what does Ida Maria’s music look like? In one sense, it’s a riot, an overwhelming tidal wave of primary colours, big, bold and beautiful. But in another, it’s as black as her hat. “As black,” she says, “as hell.”

The single Stella is released on RCA on March 10

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