Falling in love with the limelight

Carly Hennessy started modelling at four years old and hasn't looked back. Having grown up saying 'look at me', she is now 18 and being promoted by a major record label. Unfortunately, her album came out in the US on September 10th - but that won't stop her for long, writes Tony Clayton Lea

Oscar Wilde, that noted cracker of the fin de siècle one-liner, said that youth is wasted on the young. If the cravat-wearing, maxim meister had been around long enough to listen to 18-year-old Dubliner, Carly Hennessy, he might well have changed his opinion.

Hennessy has been in the public eye since she was four months old, when she began posing for print-media advertisements (her mother is a former fashion model who had her baby daughter in front of the studio cameras before the first box of nappies was used up); at the ripe old age of seven, she appeared in the film Fools Of Fortune, alongside Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. At nine, Hennessy nabbed the role of Little Cosette in the Irish début of Les Miserables and within a year, she had recorded her Irish début - Carly's Christmas Album (Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer and other family Christmas favourites recorded techno-style, and yes, it really is as bad as it sounds). By the age of 12, she had become one of the most recognised faces in the country when she was chosen by Denny's (ding, dong - does it ring a bell?) for a countrywide print ad campaign. By the time Hennessy was 15, she had finished school and was in Los Angeles with her father, scouting around for a record deal. Within months of her arrival, she had signed to MCA. Cor and, indeed, blimey.

"This is always what I wanted to do," says Hennessy, who is currently the Maybelline girl for Canada. "I didn't do anything else. I performed in the sitting-room, got up on the kitchen table, had pantomimes of my own in the bedroom.

"I was that little kid people don't like after a while. Everyone got tired of me. They'd be sitting down and I'd be going: 'Look at me, look at me!' It's just the way I was. I always wanted to be a performer."

The words "precocious", "little" and "brat" spring immediately to mind but she carries with her the air of a smart young woman who always gets what she wants, speaking with certainty and confidence.

Unusually, her parents, now separated, do not seem the kind who consciously pushed their daughter into show business. Her father is her personal manager; her mother sits patiently downstairs waiting for the interview to end. There is a feeling, however, that Hennessy's hyperactive, insistent nature caused them to say yes too many times for their own and their daughter's good. Why did she leave school and go to Los Angeles at the very young age of 15? She probably would have driven her parents mad if they hadn't given in, she says.

"I was quite hyper," she admits. "But it was great because, as my mum was a model, I was able to head in with her on photo-shoots - and then advertising jobs came along. It was easier to work with me than a five-year-old who didn't know how to pose for the camera. It was fun for me, like going to my friend's house."

Yet it seems that such persistence has paid off - at least in the immediate term. Reports of the demise of Hennessy's career have been exaggerated; in late February, the Wall Street Journal reported she was in trouble with her record label. MCA had spent more than $2 million to make and market her international début, Ultimate High, yet on its US release last November it sold fewer than 500 copies. Not only that, but MCA spent $350,000 making an earlier album with Celine Dion's producer, only to scrap all the tracks bar one. It then hooked her up with co-songwriter to the stars, Gregg Alexander, to shore up the damage.

All this doesn't necessarily make Ultimate High - released in Ireland and the UK at the end of the month - a bad record; just another one that has failed to reach its target audience. Full of radio-friendly hooks and catchy melodies - several of which were written by Hennessy - it needs luck more than anything else. She says that MCA Records president Jay Boberg signed her on the premise that she wasn't another Britney clone, yet the record smacks of hit singles the record company isdesperately hoping for.

Over the years, she has developed from a Celine/Whitney-style big-ballad singer to a more discerning pop/rock act. She says MCA didn't want her to be just another pop act.

"And I had no intention of being one, either," she adds. "I also didn't want another album of songs handed to me. I wanted to write my own songs and music, and the idea came up with working with Gregg Alexander. Yes, there were initial attempts at a Celine Dion vibe - I had a massive voice, but I looked weird and it wasn't really me. MCA didn't see me as pop fluff, so I went away and came back with Gregg and another songwriter, Danielle Brisebois. Finally, I found the area I wanted to work in."

Material came in from other songwriters, but, says Hennessy in a world-weary manner, "they were all wrong". Six months writing and recording in Jazzie B's studios in London resulted in Ultimate High, which was slotted in for US release last year on September 10th. Come the following day, all bets were off, with months of pre-publicity, marketing strategies and budgets necessarily floundering in the wake of a national disaster.

However, with her high-profile management (she is looked after by the highly regarded music biz manager, Miles Copeland) and an apparently unending sure-why-not attitude from her record company, we could be seeing and hearing more of Carly Hennessy than we might ideally want to. One thing is inescapable, however - you can guarantee she wouldn't have it any other way.

•Ultimate High is released on June 28th