The story of Katie Melua is inexorably linked to Mike Batt, a man who has had a varied and formidable career post-Womble but who, until Melua, seemed to have disappeared from the public gaze; to have escaped somewhere underground, overground, Wombling free…
I am meeting them at Euston station and we will be travelling to Manchester for a concert Melua is giving with the BBC Proms in the Park. Leading up to it is a full day of promotions – pre-recorded interviews, live radio shows, a TV appearance and a rehearsal at the BBC studios.
Everyone tells me she is “refreshing”. When we meet she smiles sweetly. Wearing a black Topshop overcoat, black jeans and trainers, with her guitar slung over her shoulder, she has – and cultivates – the kind of fame that allows her to walk through Euston station without a fuss. She comes across as balanced and steady, someone who at just 22 has adjusted to being well known, even though, at times, it’s still all a little bit embarrassing. Though not as embarrassing as having been a Womble.
We’ll come back to that.
Melua was born in 1984 in Georgia, when the country was in chaos. Doctors earned less than taxi drivers, so despite the fact that her father, Amiran, was a heart surgeon, the family had a weekly coupon for a loaf of bread and often lived without heating or hot water. As a child she watched Eddie Murphy films and Home Alone, and gleaned an impression of the West as a place where everyone was happy and shiny and the children had tons of toys. At nine years old, she, her mother, Tamara, and younger brother, Michael, moved to Belfast and thought it was “heaven”. Her father was working there as a surgeon at the Royal Victoria hospital. “The day we arrived, I remember seeing the terraced houses. I’d never seen houses that close together. I stared with wonder. The most special thing was going to school and being struck by the colours, and that the desks weren’t paint-chipped.”
We are on the train and she is reading a copy of Skydiving magazine. Her band members chat nearby and Batt sits across the aisle, BlackBerry in hand. Later he tells me he thinks Katie is an adrenaline junkie (she loves rollercoasters, takes flying lessons, and has skydived twice) because she enjoys extremes, but in life her emotions are always in check. He seems to be thinking out loud when he says this, while acknowledging he’s the more scatterbrained one.
Melua continues to talk about how much Belfast made an impact, how she found the people in Northern Ireland welcoming and warm.“People have no idea how lucky they are to have been born in the UK,” she says. So she never complains? “No, not really.” How is this possible? “I don’t mind things. I really don’t.” I stare at her in disbelief. Not because I don’t believe her, but because I do.
“My view of the future changed so much when I moved. I knew it wasn’t going to be marrying some bloke at 18 and having kids. I was going to school and thinking about my career at 15; that gave me hope.”
Belfast is where Melua had her first official Christmas. “They didn’t celebrate Christmas in Georgia,” she says, without sounding sentimental. “Santa Claus didn’t really exist. People knew him from watching the western films, but presents weren’t given. The country was too poor.”
After five years in Belfast the family moved to Redhill, Surrey. At 17, when Melua was studying at the Brit School for Performing Arts and Technology in Croydon, she encountered Santa Claus mark two: Mike Batt. Batt had gone to the school looking for musicians to join a jazz-band project. He tells me he kept the bit of paper he’d written comments on from the audition. It read: “Small girl. Good voice. Sang her own song”. He knew he’d found something way beyond what he had been looking for.
When we arrive at the hotel in Manchester, he tells me how he liked Melua’s modesty and knew she had something special from the start. “I realised she was not just an excellent singer but could have a touch of greatness.” This is something he has said many times before (it’s even on her website), but he delivers it genuinely.
Batt is endearing but carries a weariness from years of being a serious musician who has had to struggle to be taken seriously. But when I use the word “zany” to describe him, he bristles. “I don’t like the sound of the word. There is a slightly ridiculous, slightly Pythonesque side to me,” he concedes. “I’ve got a very highly developed sense of humour. But then I’m sure Mozart had a sense of humour too.” I can’t tell if he’s joking.
His website reveals that he has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, written the music and lyrics for Art Garfunkel’s Bright
Eyes, composed and produced Vanessa-Mae’s album The Violin Player, launching her career. There is also mention of a novel he’s written about a slug called Ergo who likes George Formby records. It is unpublished. In 1980, aged 30, he took off with his family in a boat, heading for Australia. He returned via France, the West Indies, South America, Hawaii and Fiji, returning to the UK in 1983.
And then there are the Wombles. You can’t say the word without smiling. Aged 25, in 1974, Mike Batt became a Womble (Orinoco) and wrote the music and lyrics for the TV series. To his dismay, he has been haunted by the furry creatures ever since. Has his association with Melua allowed him to transcend this silly social stigma? “I was not looking for credibility,” he says, somewhat unconvincingly. “I don’t think being involved with Katie has given me any more credibility musically.”
I’m not sure what he means. He tells me he has done many other credible musical projects, but they just weren’t known. “If I was hit by a bus, the headline would say, ‘Womble man falls under bus’. I’ll always be known as the Womble man. I’m a victim of my own success, really.”
He is acutely aware of how the association affects Melua. “It’s not always great for Katie,” he says. When talk turns to her, his ego vanishes and is replaced with pride. He boasts that before her debut album was released, she was offered five pages in Hello! but turned it down because it would make her a celebrity rather than a musician, and that she also turned down a record deal in America. “Here’s a girl who’d walk up five flights of steps carrying water when she was a little girl in Georgia – never had much money – and she turned down a record deal worth millions because she didn’t want to do the kind of music they wanted her to do.”
Watching Melua and Batt together, they function like good colleagues. Given the age difference, you’d think Batt would be more of an authority figure or a paternal presence. But it is often Melua who is the organised one, more on top of the details. And musically there is equity.
Two examples. On our way to back-to-back interviews at the BBC, Batt and I are walking towards the lift; neither of us knows which floor to go to. Melua, who is already upstairs in the dressing room, about to begin rehearsals, calls him. She tells him where she is and where to go. The next day, at the sound check, Melua is nervous because her bass guitar can’t be heard. But Batt, with his musical knowledge, knows how to take care of it. She leaves the sound check trusting it will be sorted out. And it is.
“People who don’t know me don’t know how much guidance I need,” Batt says. “I can be quite decisive – you have to be to decide to spend hundreds and thousands of pounds – but I need help through my decisions.
“It’s much more of a partnership than people realise. I run the record label, I write some of units, but you don’t have the clout to go further. That’s like a red rag to a bull,” he laughs. He spent more money, and in January 2004 his strategy paid off. The album reached No 1.
Melua and I meet up around noon the next day. She has already been out for a walk, checking out a vintage store. On her last tour she took a fold-up bicycle and would go cycling whenever there was a break. She tells me that Robbie Williams once called her management company to ask for her phone number. But they’d never met and she didn’t want to pursue
it. Even though she says he’s “lovely”, she didn’t feel right being asked out that way.
“I don’t think I could see myself with someone who’s famous. I don’t like the lifestyle and everything it stands for. Too superficial. That attention is too much. For me to go home and be surrounded by that sounds like a f***ing nightmare. But a musician or someone who’s into music is different.”
She’s reluctant to talk about her ex-boyfriend, Luke Pritchard, the lead singer of the Kooks, because she wants to spare him the connection. They went out for three years and the break-up, she says, was devastating. The conclusion is: she doesn’t seek a certain type. We move on.
Very little seems to rattle her. But surely some things get to her? “I do get angry at people’s misconceptions about what I am,” she says.
“It’s mainly in this country, because of Mike and what he’s known for. Someone said to me, ‘Do you realise you’ve turned his image around and rejuvenated his career?’ I’d never ever thought about it that way.”
She tells me that their relationship – which she also refers to as a partnership – has changed a lot since they first met. “The main way that
it’s changed is, the more we work together, the more we trust. There was trust before, but it was more reserved. Now we say what we think and we’re honest. He doesn’t risk alienating me. There are times when he’ll say something and I don’t agree, but the unwritten law is that if one of us feels strongly, we go with it.”
Melua gives Batt credit for how things have turned out. “Without him, none of it would have happened the way it has. I’d probably still be a musician, but maybe not at the same scale.”
That night, before she walks on stage to sing in front of the BBC Philarmonic Orchestra, she is calm and focused, thinking about a chord and whether the problem that occurred at the sound check had been resolved. Batt has it covered.
She looks tiny, seated on a stool with her guitar in front of a sea of cellos, violins, flutes and oboes. Then she sings. And her voice floats above the audience enjoying the last crisp night on the lawn for the BBC Proms.
