Katherine Jenkins is lovely. Welsh songbird, international artiste, voice of
an angel (Mark II), forces sweetheart, startlingly pretty blonde — what's
not to like? And yet, I spend our evening together feeling incredibly
guilty, because I know that pretty soon I'm going to get back to my desk,
sit down, and type the words “but her new album is horrible”.
But her new album is horrible. Or, at least, very much not to my tastes. Believe
is “crossover”, that curious, nay abhorrent form of music that takes
ordinary, inoffensive pop songs and re-jigs them to make them sound like
part of an opera. Weird thing to want to buy, in my view. Weird thing to
want to do.
“What I really didn't want it to sound like,” Jenkins says sweetly over
flickering candlelight in a West London restaurant, “is that French and
Saunders sketch. Did you see it? They are in a recording studio, and she is
singing ‘I SHOULD BE SO LUCKY, LUCKY, LUCKY LUCKY’ and it just sounds ... .
ridiculous.”
Oh dear. That’s exactly what it sounds like. Not all of it, perhaps, but quite
a lot. Certainly track eight, which is, no really, a cover of Bob Marley’s No
Woman No Cry. When Georgie first made dat fy-er light, I’m thinking this
probably wasn’t quite what he had in mind.
Look, it’ll sell. They always do. Jenkins is not the 13th richest musician in
Britain under 30 for nothing. The point of this album, as she freely admits,
is America. Jenkins, 29, has her eye on transatlantic success. Accordingly,
she has signed up Madonna’s famed PR Liz Rosenberg, she has recorded a
Christmas special with Andrea Bocelli for the Public Broadcasting Service
and she has this album.
“Usually we’d have a big meeting at the record company and I’d put forward the
songs I wanted to do,” she says. “This time, I went to LA to work with David
Foster [the producer] and I had no idea what I was going to do. We’d call up
songs on iTunes and then I’d try them at the piano.”
The average American listener, Jenkins concedes, might not have the same
classical awareness as a Brit. “You mix in the classical themes,” she says,
“or what people would deem classical, like The Godfather, and
you make people feel they have had a classical experience, even with pop
pieces.”
Jenkins liked Los Angeles, wouldn’t mind moving there one day, but not any
time soon because she’s got a house in North London and she’s quite happy,
thanks. All bases covered there, you’ll notice — not offending the
Americans, but keeping the Brits sweet, too. There’s a lot of this. Often it
feels as though she’s taking too much care not to put a foot wrong. She’ll
say she was swiftly adopted by the resident Welsh crowd in LA, and invited
to the house of somebody very famous to watch the Wales v Ireland rugby
match, but she won’t say who the person was. When I say it must have been a
Jones — Tom, Catherine Zeta or, at a push Vinnie — she just smiles and very
sweetly waits for me to ask something else.
Presswise, she’s had a scarring year. “Yes. I’ve started to read more and more
things that just aren’t true. And there are things I just don’t think should
be public knowledge. I recently found out that I had half-sisters, which I
didn’t know about. I can deal with that, but they shouldn’t have to.”
The stupidest thing she’s read was that she and her boyfriend Gethin Jones (Blue
Peter, Strictly Come Dancing) were bidding against Tony Blair for a
house in Gloucestershire with its own dance hall. “I was not,” she says,
“even house hunting.”
Until last year she was starting to find her own depiction in the press a
little stifling. “They talk about this saintly Katherine who had never made
a mistake,” she says. “And that’s really hard to deal with.” The niceness of
Katherine reached its most unbearable during an interview with Piers Morgan
for GQ. He asked if she had taken drugs. She said that she hadn’t.
After it had run, she called him up and said that, actually, she used to
take drugs quite a bit. He wrote about that, too, in the Mail on Sunday.
The next week there were pictures — Jenkins wide-eyed, coke around the
nostrils — with testimony from “friends” about how she used to bake hash
cookies. “It’s a difficult question for anybody in the public eye,” she
says. “Because if you say you have, are you saying its OK to do this? But
look, I’ve made tons of mistakes, and actually, people amazed me. They said:
‘We’ve all done stupid things, we’ve all got skeletons in our closets. At
least you were honest about it’.”
Too much regret, I say. It’s not like you were Whitney Houston. Can’t you just
say, “Yes, I went clubbing a bit”, and leave the fake self-loathing to
politicians? “Image is important to any person in the music industry,” she
says, slowly, then she just sort of stops, and waits for the question to go
away.
Some have called Katherine Jenkins a control freak, perhaps with good reason.
She signs off every aspect of her “product”, from album covers to
photographs to the smallest leaflet. At times like this, when she’s on the
edge of what she can control, it very obviously bothers her. She’s much the
same when we talk about her father.
Selwyn Jenkins was 55 when Katherine was born 29 years ago, and a retired
factory worker. She’s often willingly told interviewers about how he died
when she was 15. This time, she’s obviously worried I’ll ask about her newly
discovered half-sisters (a pair of middle-aged twins from Neath) and,
perhaps as a result, barely mentions him. How calculated this is, I have no
idea. She has another bout with Piers Morgan this weekend on ITV1 in which —
it was revealed yesterday — she breaks down while talking about an attempted
rape she suffered as a 19-year-old student.
Morgan’s show will also provide the first public outing of a video of
Jenkins’s first performance, on stage at Alderman Davies Primary School in
Neath, aged 4, singing Going Down the Garden to Eat Worms. “My mum
taught me the actions. It was all very cutesy and everybody was laughing and
it was just, from then on, what I wanted to do.” The interest in classical
music came through singing lessons and choirs. Her parents owned almost no
classical records. “When I look back,” she says, “I didn’t do much of the
going out and playing in the street, like my friends did. I’d be in until
eight o’clock having piano lessons and all that. It was what I wanted to do.”
Jenkins moved to London when she was 18 to attend the Royal Academy. She lived
in Paddington because it was easy to get the train home to Wales, and kept
saying hello to people on the Tube. Two years later she won a modelling
competition, became the Face of Wales and sent Universal a demo tape. She
came in for an interview and, after an hour, they offered her a six-album
deal, which has just come to an end. “When I got the contract I didn’t tell
anyone except my mum,” she says.
For a while, she says, she moved on in her career without properly thinking
about it. The first time it sank in was when she was on Parkinson.
“My mum was just staring at me,” she says. “With her mouth open. And I was
like, ‘Mum, why are you looking at me like that?’ And she said: ‘How did
this happen? You’re my daughter and you’re an international superstar!’ She
really freaked out.” Accusations of diva behaviour enrage her. “That’s the
thing that bugs me the most,” she says. “I do do stairs. You just saw me
come up here. I could easily be a diva, but that is not the way I’ve been
brought up. My mum would kill me.”
Her mother prefers not to know when she’s off to a warzone. She’s had scary
times. On one flight into Basra she was in a helicopter and was woken by a
voice saying, “Missile alert rear”. The helicopter, she says, “dropped like
a stone”. Another time, when she stayed at a base overnight, they were
expecting a mortar attack and she was instructed to hide under her bed. “And
then I got to my room”, she says, “and my bed was flat on the floor.”
On her first trip to Afghanistan, she was worrying about the flight out — an
uncomfortable military plane and no food. Then, in the airport lavatory, she
met a woman who had taken the same flight back. “She’d come in with the
wounded,” she says. “She’d heard them cry all the way back. I didn’t need a
wake-up call after that.” She takes her role as a forces sweetheart — the
new Vera Lynn — very seriously. “I wish more artists would do it,” she says
of her trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. “I suppose maybe they think there’s a
political thing attached and they don’t want to get involved. But the troops
don’t decide where they go.”
Unsurprisingly, she is studiously nonpolitical. She was asked to sing at the
Labour Party conference this year, but she couldn’t because she was busy.
And if she hadn’t been busy? “I’d rather not say.” She met David Cameron the
other week, when she sang on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC One.
Afterwards he told her that, right through his interview, he’d been able to
hear her singing next door.
Ask Katherine Jenkins for her heroes and she’ll reel them off: Marilyn Monroe,
Maria Callas, Edith Piaf, Barbra Streisand, Doris Day, Whitney Houston,
Madonna. That’s probably why people often think there’s something slightly
fake about Katherine Jenkins. Unusually in the classical world, she sees
herself as a star, not a musician. When I ask if she ever writes music,
rather than just sing it, she’s baffled. “I never have,” she says. Not even
a wee tune, fiddling on the piano? “I don’t know if I’m capable. Maybe when
I was a child ... but nothing that sticks out.”
More than pop stars, in truth, she reminds me of sports stars. If there was an
Olympic gold for singing, she’d win it. Although not for this new album.
Like I said, it’s horrible.
Believe is released by Warner Bros on Oct 26. Katherine Jenkins is
interviewed in Piers Morgan’s Life Stories tomorrow (ITV1,
10pm). Also that night, she appears at G-A-Y@Heaven, London WC2, from
10.30pm (www.g-a-y.co.uk)
www.KJ.tv
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