Smash hit

A lawyer Britney secretly contacted last year, asking him to free her from the conservatorship, has filed a number of lawsuits trying to get it lifted. In one, he stated that the control exerted over her medication and every other aspect of her life was a “near total deprivation of civil rights”. The singer seems aware she is paying too heavy a price for the problems she suffered last year. “I think it’s too in control,” she complains in For the Record, bursting into tears. “If I wasn’t under the restraints I’m under, I’d feel so liberated. When I tell them [her father and managers] the way I feel, it’s like they hear, but they’re really not listening. I never wanted to become one of those prisoner ­people. I always wanted to feel free.”

Is it possible, as one pop insider suggested to me, that she is only doing the tour to free herself from the cage of the conservatorship and regain custody of her sons?

Steve Lunt still has the audio cassette an unknown 15-year-old singer from Louisiana called Britney Spears sent to a number of record com­panies 12 years ago. Lunt was on the A&R team at Jive Records in New York, responsible for finding and developing new talent. “I heard one of her demos — a cover of a Toni Braxton song,” recalls Lunt, a boyish 58-year-old who is originally from Birmingham. “It had been done in one of these karaoke recording studios, and it was in totally the wrong key for her. But there was one part, when her voice went up into a higher register, and suddenly she sounded really soulful and appealing. I thought maybe there was something there.

“Then I saw a photo of her, sitting under a tree in cut-off shorts, holding a puppy dog. It was too American for words, but you could see where the appeal would be.”

The Spears family lived in Kentwood, Louisiana, a small, close-knit town. Their home was a quarter of a mile from the Baptist church where they were regular congregants and Britney sang in the choir. The tabloids have billed the Spears family as “trailer trash”; but Britney’s mother was an elementary school teacher, while her father worked in construction.

“I had to go down to Kentwood and meet her parents,” says Lunt, who worked with Britney until 2005 and has stayed in close touch with her family and manager. “I’ve met a lot of stage parents, and they were not stage parents. This was all because Britney wanted it. She was highly ambitious in a very quiet, Southern-girl way. It wasn’t abrasive and in your face, like Madonna’s ambition. But she was driven for one so young. She really had the eye of a tiger.” Although most people were stunned when Britney’s first single, ...Baby One More Time, went to No 1 in November 1998, Lunt wasn’t. “It was a one-listen smash,” he says.

Her debut became the biggest-selling album by any teenager in history. Within a couple of months, at a mere 17, Britney was an international pop sensation. But it wasn’t only because of the music. There was the astonishingly inflammatory combination of her apparently virginal innocence and her burgeoning, jailbait, pubescent sexuality.

“When we took the first bunch of publicity shots, she looked more like a Lolita, that sexy look without trying to look sexy that girls just have at that age,” Lunt recalls. “But Clive ­Calder, who owns Jive Records, said, ‘No, I want this to be girl-next-door.’ Hence the image on the cover of the first album, ...Baby One More Time. But you can’t keep the sexiness away from someone like Britney.”

The reaction to “the schoolgirl-on-heat per­sona”, as one writer described it, especially in the ...Baby One More Time video, which featured the 17-year-old Britney dressed in a schoolgirl outfit with her shirt tied up revealingly, was explosive. Britney’s manage­ment was accused of exploiting her underage sexuality. “It wasn’t us force-feeding this teenage girl sexual ideas,” Lunt insists. “It was the other way round! We were trying to stop it. It was Britney who wanted to wear the sexy schoolgirl uniform. She was the one who tied up the shirt to show the belly.”

A few months later, the cover of the April 1999 issue of Rolling Stone magazine caused even more controversy. It showed Britney lying on her childhood bed at home, a telephone to her ear, a Teletubby clutched to her breast, her shirt open to reveal polka-dot silk panties and a black bra that appeared to be doing little to contain her swelling breasts, which many people believed had been surgically enhanced. Britney later denied this. “I did not have implants,” she said unconvincingly. “I just had a growth spurt.”

Lunt draws an interesting parallel between Britney and Elvis Presley. “They both have that unique Southern blend of sex and the church. Elvis could be a Bible-thumping Christian boy and the biggest sex symbol on the planet. As Elvis was in his time, so Britney became.”

Dr Drew Pinsky, an addiction specialist in LA who works with chemically dependent celebrities, says you can trace the roots of Britney’s calamitous downfall last year to this flaunting of her teenage sexuality.

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