It’s Tuesday March 10, and two days before Elly Jackson’s 21st birthday. It will be an occasion, she promises, unmarked by any significant celebration, because on Friday the 13th she needs to have a finished debut album ready to be “delivered” to Polydor, her record label. So today she’s ensconced in a North London recording studio while ten members of the London Community Gospel Choir lend their voices to one of her songs.

Finishing the album means a few things: practically, it means she’ll be able to fly up to Glasgow on the Saturday to join Lily Allen on a nine-date tour. Financially, it means she’ll receive the final instalment of the sum agreed upon when she signed with Polydor. More than anything, though, Jackson hopes that a finished album will move her out of the giddy realm of “hype” (“People building up their hopes and expectations without knowing what they’re really expecting”) and allow her to start work on “proper publicity” (“When you’ve actually got something and people have heard it”).

Hype, though, is why we’re talking. Operating as La Roux, January saw Jackson feature consistently in the annual auguring of which new artists will soon find fame and fortune. On January 9, it was announced she had come in the top 5 of the BBC’s “Sound of 2009” poll (previous top 5 finishers include Franz Ferdinand, Razorlight, Duffy, Kaiser Chiefs and the Ting Tings, all of whom have subsequently enjoyed number one albums). Though at the time La Roux boasted only one limited-release single and hadn’t yet played a gig, the consensus was, and remains, that she’s odds on to finish the year a blinding success.

But nothing is nailed-on. While any pop ascendancy can, from the outside, seem preordained, fame is a coalface that needs working. Over the course of three months The Times Magazine followed La Roux, not because she is a pop star, but because she is trying to become one, working through all the practicalities and pitfalls that come with it – from internet gossip to basic accounting to the dangers of over-exposure to hairspray (“Elnett lung”). This is her story so far.

STAGE ONE 2001 to July 7, 2008

Elly Jackson is not overtly girlie. She has a drastic crop with a sculptural quiff, only wears trousers, and talks with the faint husk of a schoolboy toying with puberty – a tone at odds with the cool, crisply enunciated singing voice you’ll find on La Roux’s electronic pop songs. There’s more than a little panto Peter Pan about her, but she’s engaging, quick to chuckle and talks on most topics with the authority of an elder teenage sister. Despite the haircut and the hype, she isn’t, personally, cool, as a music monomaniac can never really be: she doesn’t read, she doesn’t see many films, she’s never been in a relationship.

She grew up in Brixton, South London, the daughter of actor parents, and at 12 wrote her first song. The briefest of stints in a “Caribbean-electro-punk” act aside, she was never one for bands and playing “other people’s music”. Instead, she was happy “just waiting it out. Waiting for… I don’t know what. But I always knew what I was going to do.”

At 17, two things happened. Firstly, she had a disastrous meeting at Universal Records with “the guy who signed Amy Winehouse”, after being prompted by her manager at the time to sing to him through a bout of tonsillitis. Secondly, someone heard her singing at a New Year’s Eve party, and put her in touch with one Ben Langmaid, a writer, producer and, soon after, the silent partner in what would become La Roux. By the time her MySpace page was created in May 2007, gone was her earlier folksy strumming, replaced by sharp, synthesizer-led pop in the vein of Eighties acts such as Human League, Eurythmics and Depeche Mode.

By the start of 2008, word of Jackson had begun to spread among label A&Rs, and on July 7, she signed with Polydor. In doing this, a signing-on fee was agreed – a figure Jackson insists is under six figures; her manager, though not being specific to La Roux, admits that £75,000 could today be considered fair. Twenty per cent of this goes to management, the remainder is then halved between Jackson and Langmaid, before being fed to them in one-third instalments: one when they signed the deal, one when they start the album and one when they “deliver” the album. Hardly popstar riches, then – they’ll need to sell more than one million for royalties to start kicking in, and won’t make any serious money from singles. Jackson lives at home with her parents in Brixton, pays them some rent, pays herself a small weekly wage from her signing-on fee and collects receipts daily because “pretty much every lunch you eat is out. But you never feel like you’re getting the money back, because you just send [the receipts] off. Do you know you get, like, 50 quid for being on the radio? No wonder everyone wants to get played.”

STAGE TWO July 7 to December 15, 2008

In October, Jackson gave her first interview, to Amelia’s Magazine, a small style publication. To date, she’s given “about 50”. She’s forthright in expression, which this hasn’t been without its problems. When a piece in London’s Evening Standard in November gave the impression that Kylie Minogue was a musical influence, Jackson wrote a refutation on her blog, “just saying, ‘By the way, I don’t like Kylie’. Then suddenly, I had this string of people saying, ‘She hates Kylie, the f***ing bitch!’” she scowls. “I don’t hate her as a person, I just don’t like her music. But it’s almost as if they want you to be a bitch, and, what, I’ve been in the music industry for an hour?”

The result is that Jackson now tries consciously to be La Roux, rather than Elly, during publicity, the former being a slightly more austere, less scurrilous, less silly model of the latter. It’s designed to let her “hold back a bit of my personality, because I don’t want it to become about that. Some people’s careers are based around that. Lily Allen is a fantastic example, not that there’s nothing to say about her music, but it is a lot about her, and people being interested in her life.”

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