Try to amuse Alesha and you might expect a demure titter, accompanied by a manicured hand to the mouth. Such, after all, is the way of incalculably beautiful pop ladies who sip chilled white wine in country-house hotels. So when you cycle down the driveway to Tewin Bury Farm in Hertfordshire, and hear a ripe cackle coming from the swish terrace, you naturally expect it to come from one of the beefy East Ender fishwives who are said to live around here. And yet the only woman laughing is Alesha Dixon — at the sight of an overweight, slightly late journalist frantically pedalling towards her. “You came on a bike? Hyurgh! Not all the way from London, surely? Can I have a go?” A minute later the 27-year-old singer is unsteadily circling the restaurant, making a noise that sounds not unlike a drain in dire need of attention.
Back when it was a key constituent of those R&B songbirds Mis-Teeq, it was a voice you didn’t forget in a hurry. Unlike all the wretched homegrown R&B girl groups who preceded them — remember Eternal, Cleopatra, Honeyz? — Mis-Teeq had a Unique Selling Point, and Alesha was it. When not toeing the harmonic line, she would deliver low, scattergun soliloquies in a voice that she appeared to have borrowed from a Jamaican man. On her forthcoming album Fired Up, new cuts such as Knockdown and the Shabba Ranks-inspired Ting a Ling reveal that it’s a trick that still works.
Quite how you acquire a voice like that growing up around here is a moot point. And yet rural Welwyn — yes, there is such a thing — is Alesha’s patch. She tells you as much, and then enjoys registering your surprised reaction. “All we could see at the end of our road was fields. In the summer we used to have these long, idyllic days that never seemed to end. We would always escape to the river near by. I used to have a dog, Shep, that would chase behind — and if it was a sunny day like today, my mum wouldn’t see me till 10pm.”
Scratch the surface though, and a less bucolic picture emerges. If memories of Alesha’s childhood are coloured by a desire to escape, it’s hardly surprising. Her parents parted when she was just 4. As they went on to form other relationships, Alesha — their only child together — found herself acquiring more and more brothers and sisters, six in total. “I can’t pretend it wasn’t confusing,” she says, “Having people at school ask me about my family and having to draw diagrams. Being mixed race as well, you get asked why one of your brothers is white and another one is black. Tell that to some kids and it just doesn’t compute.”
Such a complex upbringing might affect children in one of two ways. Assuming that the resentment doesn’t force them to reject the family entirely, the need to adapt to different environments can make diplomats of them. “That’s me,” concurs Alesha, “but I always put that down to being Libra. You weigh everything up and you don’t make impetuous decisions.” Isn’t it likely, I suggest, that these qualities are a self-taught survival mechanism? The normally quick-witted singer pauses for a second as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. Then she tells a story that appears to underscore the point. “My mum and dad don’t really like each other, so when Christmas came along, that could be a bit stressful. It almost became a political thing, who you were going to spend Christmas with. My mother was cool about it. But my dad got a bit funny if I stayed over and it was time to go back. You would spend your whole life juggling.”
Unwelcome though he was in her mother’s house, her father, Alesha recalls, always came to collect her on the first day of Notting Hill Carnival. “Always. Without fail. Was he educating me? Yeah, in a way, I think that was probably the idea.”
And it worked. “All the dancehall records I saved up to buy — Shabba Ranks, Buju Banton — I heard them at Notting Hill.” That said, she doesn’t know if she’ll be going there this month. What she remembers about the carnival in her childhood is a feeling of being “protected” because she was with her father. Going there at 17, she realised that she didn’t enjoy “the attention that comes from being with your girlfriends and having guys approach you”.
Neither was that something she warmed to when she joined Mis-Teeq. Not even when her husband, the sometime So Solid Crew cohort MC Harvey, first made a move on her. “We first met in a club in Watford,” Alesha recalls, “where both our groups were doing PAs. I didn’t really like him. He just seemed a bit too confident. But maybe that was a result of too much alcohol.”
With both groups’ careers taking off at that time, further chance encounters at nightclubs and TV studios gave Alesha plenty more chances to revise her opinions. “So Solid were being vilified at the time,” she remembers, “but Harvey’s not a violent man. He didn’t want to be tarred with that brush. That’s why he left before they made their second album.”
As he took stock and Mis-Teeq’s career went from strength to strength, Alesha says he helped to broaden her horizons. He encouraged her to keep nurturing her MC skills, despite the nonexistence of female MCs at the time. “I used to go to clubs like Twice As Nice and the guys wouldn’t give me the mike. They’d look at me in my sexy dress and think, ‘What the hell can she do?’ With Harvey, it was the opposite. He was proud of me.”
As Harvey, now an actor, prepares for his West End debut in the forthcoming Boney M musical Daddy Cool, Alesha readies herself for a return to pop as something of a veteran. Lest we forget, Britain was going crazy for Hear’Say when Mis-Teeq released their debut single.
“Sometimes I feel like an old fart,” she chimes, seemingly delighted by the idea. “Nearly ten years ago I was bunking on trains to get to rehearsals, and incurring fines that my poor old mum would have to pay. It used to be nightclubs till 3am; now it’s Sunday roasts at my local pub. I think that probably reflects the music I listen to. Guitars! Five years ago I couldn’t have imagined listening to the Zutons or Razorlight. Now I love them.”
Mercifully, Alesha’s indie rebirth doesn’t dominate her new album. Fired Up was put together over a year with a variety of producer-writers, including Richard X, Xenomania and Anders Bagge, and the singer’s scattergun patter has been reconfigured for a wider sophisti-pop fanbase. If all those who bought recent albums by Gwen Stefani and Sugababes plump for this, the record company high-fiveing will be audible all the way back in Welwyn.
Alesha emphasises the need to do something unexpected. That will probably account for her decision to go with Lipstick, a powerchord-laden, sisters-unite anthem, as the first single. Elsewhere though, her background is very much in evidence: the plaintive roots reggae of Everybody Wants to Change the World; the febrile soul of Free; and best of all Knockdown, which combines Alesha’s ad-hoc soliloquising and the kind of bouncy reggae rhythm that has served Lily Allen so well. “Brian (Higgins, from the Xenomania team) encouraged me to sing the first thing that came into my head while the backing track played. After the fourth time, we had a finished song.”
Invoking astrology again, she says that a solo career was “in my stars but not necessarily on my cards”.
I take this to mean that destiny alone isn’t enough to get you what you want: you need a few lucky breaks. She nods. And yet, the more she talks about her life, the more it seems that she has made her own luck: the social skills learnt in a dysfunctional environment; bunking on trains to get to rehearsal; extending her vocal repertoire to MC-ing.
Momentarily, she seems touched by the notion.
Then, slowly, another pungent gut-laugh begins its journey upwards, briefly startling the birds into silence. “And my raw musical genius, of course! Hyurgh! Hyurgh! Don’t forget to put that in now, will you?”
Lipstick is out Aug 14 (Polydor)
