Something to say

Nerina Pallot put her head above the parapet with her hit single Everybody's gone to war. It was a stand she felt she had to take against the war in iraq, she tells Kevin Courtney

AFTER the public mauling the Dixie Chicks suffered over the past couple of years, you'd wonder is there anyone brave enough to pick up their guitar and criticise the war in Iraq. Sure, there's no shortage of snotty punks and big-booted metalheads willing to snarl and spit at Bush and Blair, and an endless supply of beardy peaceniks plucking out vague, folksy tunes about living together in harmony while studiously avoiding direct mention of the war. But what fearless wildcat dares put out a song that targets the heart of the military effort - the young soldiers lining up to go to Iraq, and giving them a piece of her very sharp mind? She'd want to be some tough cookie altogether.

The pale, frail-looking English rose sitting demurely in front of me in the Clarence Hotel, Dublin does not look like the kind of girl who would diss the squaddies in song, but Nerina Pallot is no shrinking violet, even though she looks as delicate as the lace dress she's wearing. The song, Everybody's Gone to War, smashed into the UK Top 20 last month, and has woken America up to this talented singer-songwriter who's not afraid to stand up for her beliefs. The song paints a picture of a nation gripped by war frenzy, where no one has stopped to ponder the possible human toll. It's not a universal anti-war anthem, insists Pallot, leaving herself no space to backtrack should there be a backlash; this song is specific to the current situation, and she sings it with the sincerity of someone who really cares what happens to British soldiers being sent to their possible deaths.

"The song came about once we had invaded Iraq, but primarily because I have a lot of friends who are serving in the army. So, it's anti this war, but I'm not a pacifist in the strictest sense of the word. I grew up in one of the few places in the British Isles that was occupied by the Nazis, so believe me, I think the second World War had to happen. Sadly, I believe that sometimes the only thing you can use is force. But I also know how well-trained our own servicemen are, and they go over with a real sense of honour and duty, and they want to do the right thing. But I'm not convinced that this conflict is the place to risk their lives.

"There's times like Bosnia, it was right to risk our servicemen's lives. Rwanda, it was right. But this doesn't feel right to me."

Pallot is in Dublin doing some belated promotion for her second album, Fires, originally released last year on her own label, but now getting getting a well-deserved second push from her new label, 14th Floor Records. It has always been thus for the exotic Jersey girl of French-extraction. Ever since her 2001 debut album, Dear Frustrated Superstar, was released on Polydor, Pallot has always flown under pop's radar, her intricate, classical sound largely ignored except by a small, devoted coterie who call themselves the Cult of Nerina. The album spawned a couple of minor hit singles, Patience and Alien, but she quickly dropped out of view again, and seemed destined to be dismissed as just another wan-faced Tori Amos wannabe.

Pallot grew up with dreams of Joni Mitchell-style stardom, but up to now has been on the Laura Nyro-like fringes, respected but kept at a respectful distance. The success of the single, however, could well change all that, and thrust her into the forefront of a new wave of sassy-but-sensitive chick rockers.

"Actually, it's the way I like it," insists Pallot about her slow rise to recognition, "because I'm quite a cheesy record buyer, and with new acts who come up all of a sudden, they just seem to go nowhere straight after. I like to see things live before I get into something, and although it's a slower way of doing things, I like to build up a live following, or a word-of-mouth following, because I think those kind of fans stick around. And it's funny to me and to a lot of my friends the kerfuffle when my single charted, and the album was doing really well. They were all so excited, but then they were also very scared, 'cos they were like, 'everybody knows about you now'."

Pallot's chosen route to fame is markedly different from the currently accepted way of putting your name about. The music biz is a hothouse environment where an artist can gestate from bright-eyed amateur to world-famous face in the time it takes for an e-mail to orbit the Earth. It's a world in which a small bedsit gig can be hyped up to a global audience, and where having a good song is secondary to having a page on MySpace. And stoking up the fever are music journalists, desperate to appear cool and beat the other hack to the punch, writing feverishly about anything that moves before it has had a chance to develop into something worth writing about.

"It's very throwaway as a result. I was talking to a friend of mine and he said when will the media stop thinking that just because something is all shiny and new it's automatically great. It can be shiny and new but crap. And so it's really hard to sift the wheat from the chaff."

She recently supported ex-Squaddie James Blunt at the Point Theatre, but don't hold that against her. She also did her own show at Crawdaddy, accompanied by a string section (she's classically trained, does all her own string arrangements, and believes her classical training gives her a broader sense of melody and tone), adding more Irish fans to the Cult of Nerina. And the video for Everybody's Gone to War, in which Pallot negotiates her way through a supermarket that's been turned into a food-throwing warzone, has gotten her enough plays on MTV to make people remember her "funny name". With her waifish looks that evoke Fiona Apple, and her elegiac piano style that conjures up Joni, Tori and Carole King, it's easy to expect Pallot to display a certain kookiness and disengagement, but thankfully she's as normal and un-neurotic as you'd expect any good-looking, talented 31-year-old living and working in London to be.

"I've already been labelled kooky," she observes. "But I think it's just a need to, when you tell people about something they haven't heard or seen - and I'm guilty of it too - you tell someone, there's this great band, they're called blah blah blah, you've got to hear them, and they go, Okay, what kind of thing is it? And in order for them to understand we will reference all these other things. But the idea of someone's persona having something to do with the music is a bit bonkers to me. 'Cos I've found out things about some of my favourite artists, and they're nothing like I imagined them to be. I have no concept of who they are as people."

She met one of her biggest heroes, David Bowie, while working a menial job in Mute Records (she had to make him a cup of tea), and was pleasantly surprised to find he was "just a down-to-earth bloke, and not Ziggy Stardust", but she baulked at an offer to meet her all-time musical heroine, Joni Mitchell.

"I was managed by a guy who once managed her who kept saying to me, you must come and meet her. They've known each other for hundreds of years - he had moved into the house in Laurel Canyon where she wrote Ladies of the Canyon - and he said: 'oh, she's fabulous, you'll love her. She can be a bit funny, but. . .' and I thought, I don't want to meet her, 'cos I have this image of who she is. She could be amazing and completely live up to it, but I can't risk it."

Fires is out now on 14th Floor Records