What Katie did next

Katie Melua and her mentor are trying to crack the US without the support of a major label. So is this close to crazy? They talk to Andrew Purcell about the go-it-alone approach

Katie Melua is on stage, in front of a packed house at BB King's club in Times Square, New York. "Anyone here from Belfast?" she asks, to initial silence. Then a middle-aged man shouts back, enthusiastically, "I'm from Southampton!"

The man, whose response is delivered like a proud father distracting attention from a fluffed line in the school panto, spends the show wandering through the crowd, leading applause, anxiously gauging the audience's reaction to each song. He's not a paying punter, he's Melua's mentor, Mike Batt, and he's in the middle of his campaign to make Melua a star in the US.

For three months now, Batt has been living in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, overseeing the American campaign for Melua's second album, Piece By Piece. If he can sell six million of her records to Europe from the back room of his house in London, he reasons, he can do the same in the US.

Melua is staying a few blocks further south in midtown, in the chic sterility of the Blakely Hotel. When she steps out on to 55th Street each morning, the back door of Carnegie Hall stares back at her, gently mocking her aspirations to succeed where Robbie Williams failed. "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere," hum the yellow cabs. She spends her days working the phones - interviews with radio stations in Cincinnati, Seattle, Austin and Des Moines - and her nights recording new material with her touring band, under Batt's supervision.

"Promo? It's a f**king nightmare," she says, when I meet her and Batt in Manhattan, but it's as far as she gets before Batt takes control. "Forgive me answering on your behalf. Contradict me if you don't agree," he says. "Although you said it's terrible, I've never known anyone work so hard on promo without complaining. She's a real trouper."

The minute the F-word has left her lips, Melua is back on message. "It's quite exciting to be introducing my music to people who haven't heard it before," she says, "because in England there's an attitude of, 'So what are you going to do next?' There's a bit of pessimism that you can feel, but over here it's completely fresh. It's like going back in time."

BATT'S IMPULSE to protect his protege is understandable. Few managers have so much invested in their charges. Few label bosses also write the songs. Melua's career has become his personal crusade and a believer's love shines in his eyes. The combination of his industry skills and her face and voice has taken them to number one in Britain, The Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, but this next leap is the Evel Knievel jump. Batt's label, Dramatico, has a staff of 10. He's not quite staking his fortune, but the risks are enormous.

"It would be very easy to go, 'Who needs America?', and it's costing a shedload of money setting up a label here - paying for a full-page advert in the New York Times, a cover advert in Billboard, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in radio advertising. I've always been a bit of a bungee jumper, but I have been known to not check the length of the elastic before jumping off the building. I've had quite a few high-profile failures, when the elastic was a bit longer than I thought and the pavement was nearer."

So why is he taking the plunge himself? "This first couple of months in America will definitely have cost us over one million dollars, if not one million pounds," says Batt, "but that's what we would expect a record company to do [ if they] really wanted to break Katie. The best offer I had was for a worldwide marketing budget of one million dollars. A million dollars worldwide? You might as well not bother. Major record companies, however good they are, have got a priority list and you're not always top of it. You might be top of it when your album comes out, but six weeks later they've lost interest."

Melua interjects: "Six weeks? One week. Two weeks. I've got loads of friends on major labels and all they ever do is diss them. It's a shame. Some of them are happy but you just know that they aren't working their records as hard as Mike is ours." She is also, she says, suspicious of the "control freakery and the whole boardroom thing".

Batt used to be Melua's bandleader as well as manager and co-writer, until the strain of promoting her record all day and performing it every night became too much. "I've got an absolutely wicked piano player," he says, "but when I sacked myself, on the night that he took over, I had to stand at the back with my arms folded by the sound desk. Half of me was thinking, 'I hope he's brilliant,' and half of me was thinking, 'I hope he's shit.' "

At BB King's club, he lets the pianist get on with it. The gig kicks off a tour of small venues, designed to impress tastemakers. It follows a month supporting Il Divo in 5,000-seat arenas. Melua describes their audience as "wanking housewives", but she means no disrespect to Simon Cowell's operatic Chippendales, likening the hysteria they inspire to Beatlemania. The Beatles were great and Il Divo are shite, I respond.

"Anyone looks shite compared to the Beatles," says Melua, sending Batt into raptures.

"I don't think you're shite compared to the Beatles," he says, "I really believe it, I totally believe it. I actually think she's going to be one of the greats."

Melua shifts nervously in her chair, but Batt shows no sign of stopping.

In moments like these it's tempting to write Batt off as a delusional middle-aged man, drunk on record sales and a young woman's elfin beauty. It's not the most flattering portrait, but it's an improvement on the widespread notion that he controls Melua's every move.

"He is more terrified of that image than anything else," she says.

"Do you mean, enough to conceal it if it's really true?" Batt asks, "Or enough to avoid it actually being the case? I hope you mean the latter."

"Mike definitely has a controlling streak," Melua says, "but so do I, and I don't mind having a perfectionist working with me because I'm the same way."

If Terry Wogan hadn't played Melua twice a week on his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show all summer in 2003, she might still be performing at open mic nights in North London. Wogan's endorsement turned The Closest Thing to Crazy into a hit, and later, an advert for a retail furniture giant. But that counts for nothing here. And the regional nature of American radio rules out finding a Woganesque patron saint.

"That's why so many British acts that come over find it so difficult," says Rolling Stone writer Eric Boehlert. "Literally just the geography. If someone takes the lead in LA, and starts playing her music, what happened in the UK could happen in the LA market, but then the record company has to take that and move it to San Francisco and Seattle and Chicago and Dallas and Atlanta and New York and Boston. There are very few people in the United States who can pick a song out of left-field, add it to rotation, and turn it into a hit."

The exception is NPR (National Public Radio), a network of 800 stations that share programming. It has enough reach to have turned a recording of Gorecki's Third Symphony by the London Sinfonietta into the biggest-selling classical CD of all time. More pertinently, it also made a star of Norah Jones, picking up on her debut album and supporting it for almost a year before anyone else was interested. "The key there is the listenership, which is a little older and more affluent," says Boehlert, "and for record companies that is such a great market, because they're willing to spend money, but it's so difficult to reach those people because they are not watching music videos, they don't read record reviews any more."

NPR stations choose which syndicated shows to broadcast, and fill the gaps with local programmes, so artists hoping to benefit from NPR still have to work the circuit. Unfortunately for Melua, senior producers at the network are not convinced by her. Ben Roe, NPR's director of music initiatives, says: "One of the reasons perhaps Katie Melua hasn't had much exposure on public radio is what I'd describe as the 'Norah Jones effect', which is that there are a lot of singers around in that vein, and fairly or unfairly they all get lumped together. My two cents' worth is that Norah Jones records are going to be better written and better produced, musically, than Katie Melua's. Someone like Melua, who's very easy on the ears, can be almost too saccharine. James Blunt is similar, he's gotten virtually no coverage on NPR. Melua may find a larger audience outside traditional public radio."

BLUNT IS AN example of what can be achieved, even without the support of NPR, but he had two things Melua lacks: major label support and a monstrous radio hit. You're Beautiful topped first the airplay, then the singles chart, and turned Back to Bedlam into the most successful album by a British solo artist since Dido's Life For Rent. "If it weren't for people stuck in traffic, American radio would be on its last legs," says Boehlert, "but it's still the big beast, and if you want a hit record you've got to be on FM radio coast to coast."

Blunt was, but will Melua be? US commercial radio is dominated by conglomerates such as Clear Channel and Infinity, which each own hundreds of stations.

Five years ago, small labels were virtually excluded from their playlists by a prohibitively expensive culture of payola. An aggressive investigation by New York district attorney Eliot Spitzer has put an end to cash payments for airtime, but the major labels still have leverage that is simply unavailable to an independent such as Dramatico.

Terrell Brown-Clemens is the investigation's lead attorney. She says: "The public is looking at the charts and seeing that this song is a number one or a number two hit and assuming that's based on the song's popularity, when it's based on the labels' purchasing spins, providing flyaways, providing contests. If you have an artist from an independent label that doesn't have access to these things and to money, where's that song gonna go?"

Melua's spectacular European sales figures give Dramatico some leverage, but maintaining a network of US radio promoters is a severe drain on its finances. Television remains the cheapest and easiest way to grab the attention of millions of American consumers at once. "I ran into Simon Cowell in Los Angeles," says Batt, "and he said, 'Mike, don't believe anything they say here. You don't have to tour for two years, you don't have to work radio slowly, you just have to get on a lot of television.' And I said, 'Yes, Simon, you can do that because you're already a star, but we have to work at it.' If we could get on 10 TV shows within two weeks, well, of course, like anyone, we'd break."

Melua appeared on Good Morning America and the Jimmy Kimmel Show two years ago, during the campaign for Call Off the Search, but this time Dramatico has set its sights higher, on David Letterman and Jay Leno. Sheila Rogers, chief booker on The Late Show With David Letterman, says Melua's appearance is "just a matter of scheduling", and adds that artists on independent labels stand an equal chance of appearing on the programme.

"It's not just major label acts," she says. "We had Antony and the Johnsons. He was somebody we believed in and we took a chance on, and he was great on the show. We break new bands all the time. Actually, I shouldn't say break, but we present new artists quite often."

Melua's commitment to her improbable American dream means turning down lucrative European festival slots for a pencil mark in Letterman's or Leno's diary, but Batt is determined. "If another person says 'Robbie Williams' to me, I'll hit them. I'll scream," he says. "It's become a thing for Americans to say just to knock you down a peg or two, but for every Robbie Williams there's a James Blunt. There's every chance it'll happen this time, but if it doesn't we'll be back. Relentlessness is the key."

Katie Melua's new single It's Only Pain is released in September.

- Guardian Service