Showing posts with label The Guardian profile. Show all posts

Friday, October 23, 2020

Tilda Swinton: collaborative chameleon who doesn't court Hollywood

Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton: collaborative chameleon who doesn't court Hollywood

She feels like a tourist in Hollywood and apologises for not being ‘a proper actor’, but that doesn’t stop her landing big roles and winning Oscars

Emine Saner

Friday 24 July 2015

t tells you a lot about Tilda Swinton that the transformation which has rendered her unrecognisable is the one in which she appears most conventional.

In the forthcoming comedy Trainwreck, Swinton plays a monstrous magazine editor, Dianna, and pictures released this week show her looking far from the Swinton – all shorn hair, pale scrubbed face and architectural clothing – we have come to expect. Dianna has blow-dried, highlighted hair, nice makeup and a tan, which has prompted some to note that Swinton, who has played men, robots and an octogenarian, has “never been more disguised”.

The Guardian profile / Margaret Atwood / A high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age

Margaret Atwood
by T.A.

Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age

The Handmaid’s Tale’s rapturous reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic author’s spooky prescience

Claire Armitstead
Friday 19 May 2017

nce or twice in a generation, a novel appears that vaults out of the literary corral to become a phenomenon, familiar to people the world over who have never read the book: George Orwell’s 1984 is one and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is another.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that a new 10-part TV series based on the novel has struck a chord. Starring Elisabeth Moss as handmaid Offred, the series launched in the US last month and comes to the UK later this month trailing superlatives.

How Kevin Spacey brought Hollywood to the West End

Jonathan Yeo portrait of Kevin Spacey as Richard III, 2013. Photograph: Jonathan Yeo/

How Kevin Spacey brought Hollywood to the West End

Artistic director of the Old Vic will receive an Olivier award next month for reviving the theatre’s fortunes. But when he took over in 2004 he had no idea the gamble would pay off…

Steve Rose

Friday 6 March 2015

Kevin Spacey once met Laurence Olivier. “I was a Juilliard student at the time. I met him in a hallway. I was very nervous,” he divulged during a Guardian webchat last year. If there’s more to the anecdote, we’re unlikely to get it out of an actor so notoriously tight-lipped that it was once remarked: “We know more about the surface of Mars tihan we do about Kevin Spacey’s private life.” But the encounter is an intriguing prospect. Did they talk? Did irascible old Olivier offer advice, or brusquely shove Spacey out of his way? In the biopic version of the scene, their eyes would meet with a glimmer of fateful recognition as they passed in opposite directions.

The Guardian profile / Yoko Ono / "She really believes in love as the transformative energy in the world."

Yoko Ono

The Guardian profile: Yoko Ono

"She really believes in love as the transformative energy in the world. That's her faith."

Alexandra Munro

An artist for the age of Occupy is given a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London

Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer

Fri 8 Jun 2012 16.40 BST

The most famous thing anyone ever said about Yoko Ono was, inevitably, said by John Lennon, and for years it held true. He called her "the world's most famous unknown artist, everyone knows her name, but no one knows what she actually does".

As the artist, musician, film-maker and peace activist nears 80, that could be changing. After decades demonised as the witch who destroyed the Beatles she is emerging from the shadow of that complicated personal history.

Yoko Ono

Since a groundbreaking exhibition in New York in 2001 re-established her reputation, she has come back into focus as a significant artist, winning the accolade of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 2009 Venice Biennale. New generations of artists have discovered her as an inspirational figure.

Basement Jaxx, Flaming Lips andLady Gaga have collaborated with her in recent years. Younger visual artists as different as Jeff Koons,Pipilotti Rist and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster cite her as an influence; the photographer and film-maker Sam Taylor-Wood even jokingly calls herself an "obsessed fan".

This summer the artist – a tiny figure, usually to be seen wearing trademark sunglasses and hat – will be the focus of a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

According to Julia Peyton-Jones, co-director of the gallery, it is her prescience as an artist that makes her an intriguing figure for today. "As her relationship with the Beatles fades into the past her own reputation is crystallising. What is so extraordinary is that her work chimes with the times we live in now. Her activism is immensely relevant for today, in the age of Occupy."

Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim, organised the 2001 exhibition at New York's Japan Society. She says Ono's importance is only just being fully appreciated "after 40 years of her being dismissed – either as a Japanese artist, or a woman artist". She adds: "What makes her so slippery is that she is so wide-ranging. She is a musician and a poet, a peace activist and a performance artist, a maker of objects and a conceptual artist – and married to John Lennon."

The sheer breadth of her output, says Munroe, has taxed curatorial and critical skills. But, she says, Ono's originality cannot be underestimated, even though it has often been unrecognised.

"She was the first artist, in 1964, to put language on the wall of the gallery and invite the viewer to complete the work. She was the first artist to cede authorial authority to the viewer in this way, making her work interactive and experimental. That was the radical move of art in the 1960s."

Ono's energy remains undimmed and she continues to make new work and harness new technology. Her Twitter followers number 2.3 million. Recent works include her Imagine Peace tower (2007), a column of laser-light on an island near Reykjavik, and My Mummy Was Beautiful (2004), an image of breasts and vagina that was exhibited on posters around the city of Liverpool, causing controversy in some quarters.

She was born in 1933 into a wealthy Japanese family firmly ensconced in the ruling classes; her father was a banker. She began piano tuition at two and was educated at a specialist music school as her family shuttled between New York and Tokyo. War brought unfamiliar deprivations to the aristocratic family. In 1945 she took charge of her siblings, at the age of 12, when they were evacuated to the countryside after the capital's fire bombing. They struggled to eat. Her father was imprisoned in a Saigon concentration camp.

Yoko Ono and John Lennon

After the war Ono completed her education, becoming the first woman accepted to read philosophy at Gakushuin University. The family moved to New York, where she studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and, in 1956, she married the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. By this time Ono was discovering a downtown scene of musicians, composers and artists, with John Cage and La Monte Young key figures.

After the collapse of her relationship with Ichiyanagi she married the American producer and art promoter Anthony Cox, and they had a daughter, Kyoko.

By the early 1960s Ono was working on the periphery of the neo-Dadaist Fluxus group, organising performances and happenings in her Chambers Street loft in Tribeca.

A key work was her book Grapefruit, first published in 1964, which has artworks framed as sets of instructions, or "event scores"; as such it is an important early example of conceptual art. (One example, entitled Painting to Exist Only When It's Copied Or Photographed, runs: "Let people copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the originals.")

Another significant work of this period was Cut Piece, a performance work in which Ono invited the audience to take scissors and snip away her clothes as she sat, silent and still. The critic Michael Bracewell notes: "It is amazing how well that piece has lasted. When you see film of the piece done originally, she seems so vulnerable as a young woman, especially a young Asian woman. There are extraordinary undertones – submissiveness, the idea of the geisha. Enacted, it becomes incredibly tense."

Bracewell saw the piece when it was re-done in Paris in 2003. "The piece had automatically updated itself. It had become a piece about celebrity. The place was crammed to the gills, a couple of rows full of gilded young people, and absolutely no security. There she was, this elegant woman in her 70s and anyone could approach her with a bloody great pair of scissors."

For Munroe, Cut Piece was "absolutely revolutionary. "The idea that the artist's body in time and space is itself a work of art was totally radical."

In 1966 Ono held a show at the Indica Gallery, London. John Dunbar was the gallery's director. "I introduced John and Yoko," he recalls. "I was a friend of John and Paul, and suggested they come in; I thought John would enjoy it. Yoko had never heard of John. I had to explain that he was a rich person who might buy something … It wasn't immediately clear that anything was going to happen. She is a strong woman. John had never met anyone like her."

After two years they got together. But the corollary was that Cox, after a custody battle for Kyoko that Ono won, effectively kidnapped the child, and Ono did not see her at all between the ages of eight and 31.

Yoko Ono in New York City, February 2012. Photograph: Wendell Teodoro

Ono's union with Lennon of course represents the pivotal moment in her life. According to Bracewell an immediate effect was her artistic influence on Lennon – which also served to damage her, since she was "regarded as the demon face of the avant-garde and, particularly in Britain, what she did was largely seen as unintelligible".

Sean, Lennon and Ono's son, was born in 1975, five years before his father was gunned down on the street outside the Dakota Building in New York . Ono still lives there with her superb collection of art that includes Magrittes and Warhols. And mother and son have collaborated on music projects in recent years.

An often expressed doubt surrounding Ono is that the peace-and-love mantra she expresses through her art and through her activism can look like a relic of a lost time, a statement stuck in the era of the 1960s.

For example, her Wish Tree, which she has instigated in various locations and will appear outside the Serpentine this summer, is a tree on which members of the public are invited to attach labels on which they have scribbled their wishes.

Bracewell, who believes Ono has suffered from "a sexist and racist response to her from people who regarded her as a giggling, inscrutable Japanese woman who had stolen one of our national treasures", argues that to regard such works as childish is unfair.

"Why would we have a problem with Yoko doing peace and love when we are quite happy for the Beatles to sing All You Need Is Love?" he says.

Perhaps Ono has, in the end, more right than most to tackle hatred and violence in her own way. She experienced war in Japan firsthand; her husband was shot down; her life was clearly soured by hatred directed at her from some Beatles fans.

It is her resilience in the face of disaster that, for the musician Antony Hegarty – who has collaborated with her on performances – makes her a personal as well as an artistic model. "She has shown me, by her power of example, how to stand by one's values, even in the face of fear," he says. "She has endured brutal storms and never surrendered."

Munroe agrees. The peace-and-love message, she says, is authentic. "She really believes in love as the transformative energy in the world. That's her faith."

Yoko Ono

Potted profile

Born 13 February 1933

Age 79

Career Ono has worked in the avant garde of the art world since the 1950s, her practice taking in music, film, poetry and performance – including her two famous week-long "bed-ins" with her husband John Lennon, a twist on the sit-in.

High point Meeting Lennon at a preview of her exhibition at Indica gallery, London, in November 1966; also her 2001 retrospective Yes Yoko Ono, which cemented her work's reputation.

Low point Ono was vilified for decades for breaking up the Beatles and even after Lennon's death in 1980 attracted little public sympathy. Also suffered the abduction of her daughter Kyoko by her second husband, Anthony Cox.

What she says "No one person could have broken up a band, especially one the size of the Beatles."

What they say "I learned everything from her … That's what people don't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil." John Lennon, 1980

THE GUARDIAN

Friday, July 30, 2004

The Guardian profile / Woody Allen / "Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely"

Woody Allen

The Guardian profile: Woody Allen

"Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely"

If ever a film-maker represented a city, the Brooklyn boy Woody Allen represented New York. Now he's working in London. Can he achieve one more surprise and confound the legions of critics who are begging him to leave the stage for good?

Xan Brooks

Friday 30 July 2004

he 1979 film Manhattan opens with a breathless Woody Allen voiceover: "He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat ... New York was his town, and it always would be." Cue a crash of Gershwin on the soundtrack, a blaze of fireworks over the Central Park skyline, and a rash of romantic misadventures on the Upper East Side.

So far, so predictable. Through a 34-film career, Woody Allen has invariably cast the city as his chief supporting star. New York was his town. One assumed it always would be. And yet the director can currently be found at Ealing studios in west London, shooting a British romantic comedy with British money and a cast of homegrown talent.

Allen's London visit can be seen as the latest in a series of increasingly desperate manoeuvres to safeguard an ailing career. Ever since Orion Pictures folded in 1991, he has found himself shuttled nervously between studios, from Columbia Tri-Star to Sweetland Films (a consortium of foreign investors) to DreamWorks to Fox, as the box office shrank, the audience dwindled and distribution grew spotty.Despite their modest budgets, many of his recent films (Sweet and Lowdown, Hollywood Ending, Curse of the Jade Scorpion) have struggled to break even.

The latest production (snappily billed as "Woody Allen's Summer Project") comes bankrolled to the tune of £9m (peanuts in Hollywood terms, but a substantial sum for a British film). David Thompson, the head of BBC Films, admits that he is taking a gamble. "What we're doing is backing a hunch that the combination of Woody Allen and the UK might be a real treat," he says. "If you're going to take a punt on anything, it might as well be someone with the track record of Woody Allen."

Certainly Allen has earned his place in the pantheon of film-makers. Born Allen Konigsberg to a working-class Brooklyn family, he wrote gags for Bob Hope and Sid Caesar before becoming a standup on the 1960s comedy circuit, where he would fumble with his glasses, gulp in faux-terror and deliver devastating one-liners with a boxer's timing.

Shifting into movies, he pioneered a new brand of romantic comedy, installing himself as an emblematic urban everyman; the nerd who gets the girl (and then usually loses her). He pursued a flighty Diane Keaton in the Oscar-winning Annie Hall, romanced a teenage Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, and fell foul of the Mob in 1984's Broadway Danny Rose.

The melancholic Hannah and Her Sisters was galvanised by his turn as a hypochondriac TV producer, while in 1989's peerless Crimes and Misdemeanours he played a luckless documentary maker who laments that "the last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty".Throughout his 1970s and 80s heyday, Allen's patented blend of borscht-belt comedy, psychoanalysis and the tenets of the European art film was an intoxicating brew.

These days it seems to have lost its fizz. Critics say his films have grown complacent and overfamiliar, while a certain peevish quality has percolated his comic worldview. His public image, too, has taken a battering. Over the past decade Allen's films have sometimes played a distant second fiddle to the cacophonous noises off, be they from a protracted legal battle with his former producer and longtime friend Jean Doumanian, his messy break-up with Mia Farrow, or his eventual marriage to the actor's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

Anything Else, on general release from today, is widely viewed as another below-par effort. In the US (where it the was released a year ago) reviews ranged from the exasperated to the desolate.

According to the Village Voice, Anything Else plays as "an infinitely running spool of Allenian repetitions that could serve as entertainment in a relatively mild circle of the Inferno". For Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times, "the title seemed like a taunt. Is there anything else, Woody? Please?" Over at the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell claimed that the man once hailed as the voice of his generation was now "increasingly out of touch with contemporary America".Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound magazine, would second that. "The last few films have been pretty disastrous," he says. "All the things we've come to expect just aren't there any more. The quality of the scripts is not as good. The comic timing is very rusty. My gut feeling is that he no longer has anyone around him who can be critical. In a way it's a King Lear moment. He's become so venerated and isolated by celebrity that he no longer connects with an audience. Perhaps it's a case of finding some new collaborators - or considering the dreaded word, retirement."

For his part, David Thompson is hoping that a change of scene will do him good. "I think that everyone is hungry to see him do something in a different key or colour palette. He has a singular voice, and a consistent vision of the world and how people relate. What's interesting is to see how that works with British characters, who are perhaps less prone to psychoanalysis, less up their own navels and more buttoned-up. So I can't wait to see his approach to that buttoned-up British way of life."

Uncharitable types, however, might suggest that BBC Films has snapped up a director who's past his prime - like buying up an ageing Premiership footballer and then shipping them overseas.

"Yes, they might say that," Thompson concedes. "To be fair, a lot of people were quite critical of Robert Altman when he came to the UK to make Gosford Park. But in the end it seemed that the fresh territory inspired him."

And in any case, insists Nick James: "Woody Allen was never a Premiership footballer. He was always an indie, art-house person. No one ever made a Woody Allen picture to make lots of money. They do it to say, 'I made a Woody Allen picture.' There's still a residual prestige that comes with the name."

For the time being, at least, Allen can take comfort from the fact that there is no shortage of actors still clamouring to work with him, often for a cut-price fee. The current Ealing production casts star-du-jour Scarlett Johansson among its British players. Other recent outings have found room for the likes of Charlize Theron, Will Ferrell and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The rising British star Chiwetel Ejiofor recently completed work on the latest Allen film, Melinda and Melinda (currently in post-production). A long-term fan of the director's work, he did not hesitate when offered the role.

"He's such a forceful character that you just want to be around him," Ejiofor says. "And collaborating with him leads to a much freer process, because everyone understands what a Woody Allen film is, so to a certain degree you just play on that. It creates an environment that's so much more fun than other film sets."

In Ejiofor's view, "Woody Allen is quite different from his public image. Having grown up with his films, I was expecting this nervous, neurotic guy who's constantly twitching. But instead he's a very shrewd and intelligent man who has a twin persona that he puts in his films. Woody Allen knows exactly what he wants. It's always been his particular strength to push the independent ideal as far as it will go, and he gets away with it because his writing is so extraordinary. He's the living proof that talent will out."

Woody Allen will be 69 next birthday. If he were to bow out tomorrow, his reputation would be assured and his detractors silenced, and we could all sit back and revere him from a distance.

Yet Allen seems ready to confound us. At an age when most film-makers have already been shunted into enforced retirement, his workrate (two pictures a year) remains as fierce as ever. He never revisits his films once he's finished editing, and is forever moving on - the jungle cat in the black-rimmed glasses racing hard against the ticking clock.

Posterity has no attraction for Woody Allen. "I don't like the idea of living on in the silver screen," he once told an interviewer. "I'd rather live on in my apartment."

Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg, December 1 1935, Brooklyn, New York

Education Midwood High School, Brooklyn; New York University (one semester)

Family Married Harlene Rosen, 1956 (divorced 1962); Louise Lasser, 1964 (divorced 1969); Soon Yi-Previn, 1997. One adopted son, three adopted daughters, one son by Mia Farrow

Career Scriptwriter and gag-writer and standup comedian,1953-64; had his debut as a writer and actor in What's New Pussycat?, 1965

Plays and films include Don't Drink the Water, 1966; Annie Hall, 1977; Manhattan, 1979; Hannah and her Sisters, 1986; New York Stories, 1989; Husbands and Wives, 1992; Manhattan Murder Mystery, Deconstructing Harry, 1997; Small Time Crooks, 2000

On comedy "Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes; comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue."

THE GUARDIAN

Friday, July 23, 2004

The Guardian profile / Joss Stone

Joss Stone

The Guardian profile: Joss Stone

With her astonishingly mature, emotive black soul voice the Devon teenager is an R&B sensation in the US and a talent that knocks 'reality-pop' for six. But would a Mercury music prize for cover versions add to the respect she's won?

Carolina Sullivan

Friday 23 July 2004

oscelyn Stoker, as her parents know her, made a minor bit of history this week, as both the youngest person ever nominated for the Mercury music prize and the first nominated for an album of cover versions. Therein lies the source of a debate that has divided critics since Stoker - who took Joss Stone as a stage name in her early teens - was launched last year by Virgin Records.

Her album, The Soul Sessions, crept into the chart in January and has hung around the Top 10 ever since, selling 670,000 copies in the UK and a further 1.7m worldwide. This is the sort of result underperforming Britrockers rarely achieve. But Stone is considered by some to have cheated a bit by falling back on covers; in her case, on covers of obscure old soul tunes.

Covers are deemed the lazy woman's way out, almost karaoke. "[Her nomination] detracts a bit from others on the list who spent a long time writing their album," says the journalist Hattie Collins, who wrote a story about the singer for Blues & Soul magazine. But because Stone is a trifling 17 years old (and, by happenstance, a photogenic little pixie) she has also had many springing to her defence.So for every reviewer who griped that Stone was just retreading old tunes by the Isley Brothers et al, another maintained that The Soul Sessions was a startling, almost-great, debut. The Mercury judges, for instance, excused its lack of original material, describing it as "a remarkable showcase of classic soul power".

The secret of her success - and this is where opinion is unanimous - is a voice that should not belong to a white, Devonian teenager (from Ashill, near Tiverton). Stone has somehow been endowed with the pipes of a black American 25 years her senior.

"When I found out she was white, I said, 'I can't believe it'. She was totally amazing," says "Shabs", the head of Relentless Records, the Virgin subsidiary that sells her CDs. "I've never worked with someone I've believed in so much." As his other star act is his old friends, the trouble-magnet rappers So Solid Crew, this is saying something.Stone's deeply emotional style, which compelled Shabs to drive to Devon the day after he heard an early demo, has elicited comparisons with Patti LaBelle, Mavis Staples, and even, rather overheatedly, Aretha Franklin.

On which subject Collins, who writes about British urban culture, sounds a slight cautionary note: "She is amazing, but it's premature to be comparing her to Aretha. Mary J Blige gets that, and she's been around 10 years. Maybe in 30-odd years ... "

Premature or not, Stone is currently seen as an antidote to the poison of reality-pop, which has devalued the singles chart and discredited the music industry. The only young British singer with a similarly incongruous sound is fellow Mercury nominee Amy Winehouse (William Hill's odds are Winehouse 6-1, Stone 10-1). But although Winehouse is arguably more accomplished, writing her own material, Stone has attracted more media attention.

Her camera-friendly blonde freshness has something to do with it, but she has also benefited from something looks can't buy: the respect of the black American music scene. Across the Atlantic, Stone has been welcomed as an R&B sensation. Her album, recorded in Miami and New York, was produced by the veteran belter Betty Wright, and features guests such as Angie Stone and Timmy Thomas. Wright introduced her to Stevie Wonder, who was generous in his praise ("I didn't know what to say," admits Stone, offstage the archetypal, ineloquent teenager).

Style-setting magazines such as Vibe embraced her. The upshot is that she was known in America first, and by the time Virgin was ready to launch The Soul Sessions here, the label had a fantastic back-story on which to build.

The girl from "the English village of Devon", as the Philadelphia Inquirer put it, got a US recording deal, with EMI, before a British deal. This is notable because the US music business customarily looks askance at UK acts, who have a reputation, not undeserved, for being snide and uncooperative. The handful of young Brits who have been successful in the US, such as Dido and Coldplay, are those who have not been imposingly English in their dealings with Americans.

So imagine the delight of EMI America's Steve Greenberg when he came across the 14-year-old Stone via a video of her performance on a 1999 British TV show entitled Junior Star for a Night, her sole flirtation with pop cheesiness. Here was a talent young enough to be malleable - she wouldn't be pulling the typically Brit stunts of refusing to record "idents" for Midwestern radio stations, or of being narky to Des Moines record retailers - but sophisticated enough potentially to compete with heavyweights such as Beyoncé and Mariah Carey. He signed her when she was barely 15.

Shabs says of her place in soul music: "Her being white has made it harder to break her. It's very similar to Eminem doing what he's doing."

But Collins says: "I've been asked, are they putting more money into marketing because she's white? There does seem to be an awful lot of push behind her. Beverley Knight said recently that when she started, nobody was interested if you were black."

But Stone's age appears to be a greater sticking point. Can someone so recently a schoolgirl (she got three GCSEs last summer) really convey the cavernous pain of songs such as those in her opening album track, The Choking Kind? She does feel patronised by the doubters. She told the Guardian writer Alexis Petridis last autumn: "How old do you have to be to hurt? I think some people have forgotten what it's like to be a teenager."

Collins agrees: "You don't have to have experience to sing with heart. Whether or not she's had her heart broken, it sounds like she has. She might have gone out with some boy who wasn't nice to her." In fact, Stone's 22-year-old boyfriend is a Devon lad who worries that his constantly travelling girlfriend will run off with Justin Timberlake.But Q magazine's deputy editor, Gareth Grundy, who has just commissioned a lengthy Stone feature, sees her age as a positive advantage. "With the voice she has, her youth doubles the 'wow' factor. And she's done smart things like cover the White Stripes [whose Fell in Love with a Boy recently became her first hit single]. Who knows what kind of records she'll be making at 25?"

His enthusiasm is shared by Matt Mason, the editor of the urban culture magazine RWD, who ranks her as "an important artist on this scene".

"She crosses boundaries and is really inspired by old soul, but because she's so young she appeals [also] to young people. She could well be up for a Mobo [the black music awards, held in October], which would cause an outcry, but it's clearly music of black origin."

Stone herself claims she was barely aware of the singularity of her voice while she was growing up. "I don't think of myself as a great singer at all," she's said. "I only ever sang for fun, so I can't quite work out how I got here."

Her route to success involved Junior Star for a Night, which she entered "for a laugh" when she was 12. Her version of Aretha's Natural Woman so impressed the judges she won. ("God knows why, because I thought I was really shit.")

She attracted a bit of industry interest at the time, but life went on as normal for the Stoker family. Her father was, and is, a fruit preserver, and her mother, Wendy, who is now her manager, let holiday cottages. Joscelyn, who hated school, knew only that she would not mind singing professionally, but she suffered from a severe lack of confidence. Even now, on stage, she blushes, squirms and almost apologises for her presence.

After Greenberg's sighting of the Junior Star footage two years later, and his signing her up - after a five-minute audition - it became clear that Stone would not be staying on at school for long.

Although it feels as if she has only been around for five minutes, she's already preparing for the release of her second album, Mind, Body & Soul, in September. An advance press release makes a point of announcing that she has co-written nearly the entire thing.

To further ramp up her credibility, co-writers have been revealed as the venerated Motown producer Lamont Dozier and Portishead's ghostly frontwoman, Beth Gibbons.

Success has been nearly instant, as it often is in the Pop Idol era. The difference, however, is that those around Stone expect her to be a leading light of British pop when the Michelle McManuses of the world have become a mere footnote in the Guinness Book of Hit Singles.

Life stages

Born Joscelyn Eve Stoker, April 11 1987, Dover, Kent. Brought up in Ashill, Devon, where her family still live

Education Uffculme comprehensive school, near Cullumpton

Career

· In 2001, aged 14, auditioned for the BBC talent show Star for a Night which she eventually won singing On The Radio by Donna Summer

· After being spotted by two London producers she was signed by New York record label S-Curve, run by Steve Greenburg, in 2002

· Toured the United States to rave reviews in 2003, aged just 16. Sang in Canada and at venues in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego

· Released debut album, The Soul Sessions, in January this year, and appeared at Glastonbury this summer

Stone on chart music "It's got so image conscious and boring, I didn't want to go down the usual pop route - because it's not me"

THE GUARDIAN