Lark ascending 0
At four she was singing duets with her mother in church; at 22 her debut album has gone platinum.
By Christa D’Souza, Daily Telegraph
24th Aug 2001
Nelly Furtado. What a name. Thank goodness she is so maddeningly beautiful. Although, to be honest, ‘beautiful’ is not necessarily the word that first springs to mind when Furtado, a short, clompy thing in jeans, trainers and thick-lensed specs, comes bouncing across the lobby of her west London hotel. The only indication that she is who she is and not a student illicitly using the hotel’s ladies room is the heavy-looking entourage she has in tow, one of whom is her manager, Chris, the other two being members of her backing band.
‘OK, you guys,’ Furtado says to the two dreadlocked musicians who will be performing with her at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, ‘I’ll catch you later. After some high-fiving and elaborate Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger-style hand signals she finally gets to me, and it is at this point, when she fixes me with her pale green eyes - ‘Hey, wanna get something to eat?’ - that I realise there is something about the 22-year-old’s vulpine features and wide smile that brings to mind the Friends actress Courteney Cox.
Rather nosily, I ask if she is here with her boyfriend (there had, after all, been that rumour linking her with Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit), but she tells me she doesn’t have one at the moment, and that her social life revolves mainly around the band, her best male buddy at the moment being her ‘turntablist’. ‘Single, yeah, unlucky,’ she says, mock ruefully. ‘Tell London I’m looking.’
If you have not yet been touched by the Nelly Furtado phenomenon, you soon will be. Her debut album, Whoa, Nelly!, released in February, has already gone platinum in the US and Canada; her single, the sweet yet anthemic I’m Like a Bird (which she describes as her ‘freedom song’), went straight into the top five. By the time you read this she will have toured the US with David Gray, supported Moby in New York and U2 in Dublin, and travelled across Brazil and Australia. Somewhere in between, she caught up on songwriting in Toronto, where she has an apartment.
Her manager has already pronounced her the new Madonna. Everyone else is dubbing her the new Alanis Morissette. She has also been described as the Latin equivalent of Natalie Imbruglia. She is not like any of these singers, really, but you can see why everyone is tempted to make the comparisons. For she draws on such a huge crossover of influences: hip-hop, samba, Asian qawwali music and Portuguese fado, to name but a few. Accessible, but at the same time not in the least bit lowest common denominator, Furtado has effortlessly found a niche in the oversaturated market of female vocalists. And she writes all of her own songs. No wonder record maverick David Geffen went down virtually on his hands and knees to persuade her to sign with Dreamworks (the company he set up with Steven Spielberg). No wonder Elton John hired her to sing at his lavish post-Oscars bash in Los Angeles last year.
‘Yeah,’ Furtado recalls in her clear, Canadian-accented voice, ‘it was surreal performing for all of Hollywood, having Tom Hanks and Whitney Houston, Kevin Spacey and Donatella Versace all dressed up and watching me. ‘It’s funny,’ she adds, ‘until then I’d been pushing away the stardom thing. But I remember going to the Vanity Fair party later on that evening and thinking, there’s no turning back now. But you know what? I bet I was the only person at that party wearing running shoes!’
Born in Victoria, Canada, in 1978, Furtado is the youngest of three children of blue-collar Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. Her father was a stonemason, her mother a cleaning lady, and one of her earliest memories is of romping in the playpen of a laundry room while her mother was washing linen. ‘I didn’t have any toys,’ she says brightly, ‘but there was a rock garden out back, so I played with rocks. They were like my dolls.’ Attributing her love of music to her parents, she remembers making her singing debut at the age of four when she performed a Portuguese duet with her mother in their local church in front of 300 people. ‘I didn’t feel nervous at all - it was more like wonder.’
By the age of 12 she was a ‘chubby, nerdy kinda kid with great big coke-bottle glasses’, taking ukulele and trombone lessons and earning extra money by working with her mother as a chambermaid at the Robin Hood Motel. She spent a lot of her time writing scores on the back of laundry slips (’It was a great place to dream, to let my unconscious roam’) and making up soundtracks to musicals during the car ride home. ‘I’d have a string section, an orchestra,’ she reminisces.
At 17 Nelly left home for Toronto and moved in with her elder sister, Lisa, who found her a job as a customer services representative for an alarm company. ‘At lunchtimes I’d have to cover reception and there’d be 20 lines going, with all these rich people yelling at me,’ recalls Furtado. ‘I was the youngest person there. It totally sucked.’ In her spare time, however, she was busy writing fan letters to Kriss Kross and Liam Gallagher (’I sent a graduation photo of myself with the letter, but he never wrote back’) and assembing her first band, Nelstar, a trip-hop duo who played in local clubs and bars. Her prodigious talent was soon spotted by record producers Gerald Eaton and Brian West who, after much persuasion -
‘I was 17, and I didn’t think my songs were good enough. I didn’t even know how to play the guitar!’ she pleads - convinced her she should make a demo tape. Almost immediately she found herself the focus of a huge bidding war. One of the bidders was David Geffen, who was so desperate to sign her that he invited her to Los Angeles for tea.
‘I thought it was all nuts,’ says Furtado. ‘I’d already almost signed with another company, Interscope, and here I was with Chris in this house with all these Tang Dynasty artefacts in glass cases. Then David said, “Oh, so you’re Portuguese, huh? Well, my maid’s Portuguese, too!”, and he got her to say hello to me. Then he had his personal chiropractor come and give us all free adjustments. Can you imagine? Getting your back realigned in the middle of David Geffen’s living-room? I thought, oh, the irony of this is hilarious, but at the same time I knew the moment I walked in that this could be a good musical home for me at this point in my career.’
It was the beginning of her ascent into the world of fame, the beginning of having more money than she had ever dreamt of, but Furtado, as canny and grounded as ever, didn’t let it go to her head. When, for example, soon after she signed with Dreamworks, she was offered $3 million for her publishing rights, she immediately turned it down. ‘Hey,’ she shrugs, ‘there’s this thing that Albert Einstein once said that was really true. He said intelligence was forsaking immediate pleasure for long-term gain. That’s what that was all about.’
And she didn’t go out and blow all her pay packet on Versace either. Consider the night when VH1 booked her for the prestigious Divas Live show at Radio City Music Hall last year. ‘It would have been so easy for me to go, wow, I’m gonna get a chiffon dress, wear my hair up and high heels,’ she says. ‘But then I thought, they’ve hired Nelly Furtado, they want Nelly Furtado!’ So she turned up in jeans.
This, Furtado is keen to point out, is very much thanks to the way she has been brought up. When she gave her parents a VCR for a present, they were so insulted that they almost gave it back. ‘You wouldn’t believe how unmaterialistic they are,’ she says, ‘but they’re getting used to everything. A lot of my inspiration comes from being totally working class. Chris makes fun of me. He says, “Look at you! Working class? You’ve got a mansion!” My parents’ house isn’t a mansion, it’s just a house in a nice little suburb.
‘And I remember occasions when my mum had to take time off work, and she would line us all up and apologise because we wouldn’t be getting as many Christmas presents. I connect with Oasis because they are blue-collar and proud of it. My Portuguese background, my working-class roots, define me totally. They’re what make me feel different, what make me me.’
I ask her if she is nervous about her first live appearance in the UK, but no, she is just slightly concerned about the state of her throat. ‘I’ve been sick for two months, so I’m going to try not to talk too much between now and tonight.’ To get her in the mood before show time, meanwhile, she will sip on some ‘throat coat’ (slippery elm tea), burn some incense and maybe meditate a little. ‘I’m really into all that metaphysical stuff and the placement of energy,’ she explains. ‘Our theory in the band is that if the party’s not on the stage, people aren’t gonna be having fun.’
By nine o’clock there is an impressive gathering of ticket touts outside the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and the bar inside is heaving. When Nelly skips out, looking more tiny and vital than ever in a white handkerchief top and red hipsters, she segues straight into Well, Well (’a typical Nelly song. It captures a feeling of Nellyness and it’s short - like me!’) and the crowd break into rapturous applause. When she straps on an acoustic guitar and starts singing the doleful fado-style Legend, you can almost feel the collective goosepimples rising. As for the future, who knows, but judging from the reaction of her fans in London, it’s looking pretty good.