Gabriella Cilmi: Meet the teen queen who is the sound of summer

Gabriella Cilmi spent most of the day before our interview being photographed on the Thames by the Australian press, the Oz media keen for a glamorous snapshot of the girl from Down Under making a splash on the other side of the world. Given that this is the most unpredictable British summer since that of 2007, it wasn't quite the pleasure it perhaps should have been.

"In the space of a couple of hours we had practically every season of the year flung at us," she says afterwards, eyes as heavy as a panda's (she is still in full make-up) and looking, in this light at least, not unlike Desperate Housewives' Eva Longoria. "I was rained on, blinded by the sun, battered by the wind, and then it got really cold." She laughs incredulously. "I've never known anything like it."

But then it was a day of firsts for Cilmi (it's pronounced, incidentally, "chill-me"), as she was also aggressively papped, something that had never happened to her before. There were several

photographers, all muscling one another for a better shot. She couldn't think why it was occurring now. She has, after all, only had one hit single to date ("Sweet About Me") and has yet to fall out of a nightclub sideways or into the lap of any married footballer. Later, it was revealed that the paparazzi had actually been trailing the Hollywood actress Reese Witherspoon, currently in London with her actor boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal. But Witherspoon had proved elusive, and the paparazzi were getting restless. They saw Cilmi, all windswept and gorgeous, and thought, "she'll do".

Judging by the following morning's papers, however, it seems their efforts were in vain. She didn't make any of the showbiz pages.

"Oh well, so it goes," she shrugs. "Maybe next Perhaps somewhat presumptuously dubbed "the new Amy Winehouse" by an excitable press – not, it should be pointed out lest her elderly grandmother is reading, for any partiality to hard drugs but rather because she also has a terrifically powerful jazz and blues voice – Gabriella Cilmi has arrived in the spotlight still in full possession of her precocious youth. She is just 16 years old. From afar, she could pass for older – 17 at least – but in the bar of an opulent central London hotel at which the rest of the champagne-quaffing clientele likely knows little of any credit crunch, her youth is all too evident. Dressed exclusively in emo-friendly black, her neck and wrists weighed down by gothic jewellery, her fingers littered with the kind of chunky rings one would expect to find in Camden Market, she orders a hot chocolate, and when it arrives doesn't drink it from the glass but rather scoops out spoonfuls of froth, licking the spoon back and front. Her smile is a mile wide.

"Delicious," she coos.

"Sweet About Me", lifted from her smart and sassy debut album, Lessons to be Learned, is a predatory slice of black-stiletto'd pop that has spent the better part of three months in the UK charts. Initially, Radio 1 wasn't much impressed and refused to A-list it. But the song hung around the Top 20 for ever, refusing to budge. Then, when it was used to soundtrack an advert for underarm deodorant, it became ubiquitous, and Radio 1 finally acted accordingly. It has now been Top 10 for six full weeks, its insidious rhythm and a purring vocal not a million miles away from a young Eartha Kitt making it the hit of the summer. Its accompanying video has been viewed almost two million times on YouTube.

"I wrote that song last year during my first ever trip to Paris," she says. "I was already living in London by this stage, but I couldn't believe that, like, it was possible to get to a whole other country within three hours, by train! In Australia, it takes 24 hours to get anywhere."

And her verdict on the French capital?

"Oh, I loved it! But there were riots that day – no idea why – and we were ordered to leave the city by police. I wasn't very happy about that, to be honest. I hadn't finished my shopping yet..."

Cilmi was born in Melbourne in 1991, her mother a fashion designer, her father a hairdresser. Mum was Italian, Dad second-generation, and though neither ever quite managed a pilgrimage to their homeland during their daughter's childhood (due mostly to geography and finances), they remained an intrinsically Latin family nevertheless, surrounded by voluminous Catholic relatives, every last one of them hot-headed, effusive and a demon in the kitchen.

"Mum and Dad both originate from the south of the country," she explains, "and so what they spoke with their relatives could hardly be described as proper Italian." This wasn't something she realised straight away, however. "I decided to study the language at school because I thought, having heard it every day at home, I'd be a natural. But when the teacher heard me talk, all she said to me was: 'I don't quite know which language you think you are speaking, but it certainly isn't Italian.' Turns out both my parents speak in a very heavy southern dialect, and my mother's even has a bit of Albanian in it. I never stood a chance."

There was always music at home, emanating mostly from the family stereo, and Cilmi would methodically go through her parents' record collections. "All the greats," she says without even a hint of sarcasm. "Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Suzi Quatro." There was also a piano in the front room, bought by her father not for anyone to play upon but simply because it looked good. She liked sitting on its stool, her small fingers reaching for the black and white keys, and fancied that she would like to learn it one day. When the opportunity presented itself at school, she jumped at the chance. But within weeks, her music tutor had pronounced the eight-year-old Cilmi as having no sense of musicality at all, and that she should cease all attempts to prove otherwise forthwith.

"Perhaps I should send her a copy of my album now, all wrapped up in a pretty pink bow," she says archly. "What do you think?"

She, of course, ignored such criticism, and though she did ditch the piano lessons, became increasingly convinced that music was to become her life.

"I remember being 10 years old and sitting on the sofa watching television," she says. "There was old footage of Cat Stevens singing 'Father and Son', and I don't know why – and I don't want to sound cheesy here either – but I felt some kind of weird connection, that singing was what I wanted to do as well."

By the age of 12, she was in her own rock band with four young boys from the neighbourhood. They'd rehearsed endlessly in the drummer's parents' garage, their set very rarely veering away from heavy rock: Kings of Leon, Jet, her beloved Zeppelin, her voice already a feral roar perfectly suited to the genre. Its volume, she explains now, came courtesy of a bad back.

"I've had back trouble my whole life," she says, colouring self-consciously. "Apparently my spine is curved [she doubles up into a hunchback, as if in illustration] and it pushes things inside me. Organs. I went to see an osteopath once, and he said that the way it was arched was the reason why I could sing the way I did. He didn't go into detail, but he seemed very sure of it. Actually, he offered to correct my posture." She smiles. "I declined."

Every year in Melbourne, one of her many uncles organises a festival to celebrate the birthday of the Virgin Mary. Called La Festa de la Madonna, it draws several hundred locals who come to hear music, dance a bit, raffle off cheese for charity and indulge in the odd glass of red wine. When she was 13, the uncle requested that Cilmi get up on stage to sing a song, the usual Abba tribute band having failed to turn up.

"I was very reluctant but he didn't give me much choice in the matter," she says. "I sang 'Jumping Jack Flash', but I don't think the crowd were much impressed. How do I know? Well, a woman came on after me to sing an opera song. She got a much better reaction."

But at least one person in the crowd was impressed. A representative of Mushroom Records, one of Australia's biggest independent labels, promptly offered her a development deal. Suddenly, Cilmi was no longer your common or garden teen, but rather one whose talent was about to take her places.

"I told no one at school for fear of boasting," she says. "It was my summer holiday secret."

Intent on making her a global concern, Mushroom introduced her to a selection of international record companies, one of whom, Island, signed her to the UK and paired her up with Brian Higgins of Xenomania, the man behind Girls Aloud and Sugababes, and perhaps one of the most successful pop producers of the modern age.

"I came to meet her in Australia to see if we could get on creatively," Higgins says, when I speak to him the next day. "At that stage, she had a very wild, untamed voice, and I loved it. But I wanted to see whether there was some songwriting talent to back it up. Fortunately, there was."

Over the next three years, they would meet perhaps four times a year on songwriting and recording sojourns in Los Angeles, New York and London, Cilmi intent on transforming herself into a rock chick, Higgins adamant she focus more on what was clearly becoming a burgeoning pop sensibility.

"Let's face it," he says, "a 14-year-old girl trying to sound like Led Zeppelin is always going to look ridiculous. That said, you should hear her version of 'Whole Lotta Love', which she plays live and which is amazing, but for me Gabby works best as a pop singer, and a very good one at that. Her voice is like nobody else's."

"Sweet About Me" has already been number one in Australia, while the album is taking off swiftly across Europe. There are now plans afoot to launch her, amid much fanfare, in America in early 2009.

"Gabby is remarkably self-analytical," Higgins notes. "'Sweet About Me' took a long time until it became the hit single it deserves to be, and in that time I just watched her become increasingly self-analytical, determined to raise her game, to become a better live performer, to really dig in and give her very best. I've not seen that in many artists, especially such young ones, but Gabby has a champion mentality. And it's this that is going to turn her into a major star. We've signed her to a five-album deal at Island. I confidently expect every one to be a smash hit."

For the past year, Cilmi has lived in London with her mother, while her father remains at home in Melbourne raising her 13-year-old brother. Phone calls home, she admits, are getting terribly expensive, and she misses the family unit. That said, her mother never leaves her side, fiercely protective of her daughter in what is a very adult world.

"She watches over me like a hawk," Cilmi laughs drily. Perhaps as a consequence, the young woman whose life has been a treadmill of writing and recording these past three years has never had a proper boyfriend. She rarely drinks ("although I do like wine," she pipes up, almost poignantly), and has yet to locate anything even resembling a rebellious side.

"So I guess it's unlikely I'll be falling off the rails any time soon," she laughs. "I think it shocked my family when the Amy Winehouse comparisons started, and each one of my relatives in turn called to warn me never to end up like her, or else..." But later, in an aside that isn't entirely unconnected to this, she says: "I'll be 18 next year, so maybe everything will change then, in all sorts of ways."

What she is referring to here is that which any 18-year-old craves, a little freedom. She wants her independence...

"Well," she says, and now she falters, "I do and I don't. I'm not sure I'd like to be in London all by myself just yet, but I am getting used to the place. When I first arrived here, I was convinced that people were trying to knock me off the pavement on purpose, perhaps because they hated Australians. I eventually realised it was simply because there are so many more people here than there are in Melbourne. But I stand my ground now, and I'm getting used to the city. I like it. It's much friendlier than I expected."

She offers an example. When she moved into her flat, which is located above a French restaurant in south-west London, one of the waiters presented her with a free baguette.

"I've had to pay for them ever since, though," she points out, "but the shop next door did offer me a discount on olives the other day, so I shouldn't really complain, should I?"

'Lessons to be Learned' is out now on Universal Island Records