Heartache making Kate a star

Her music is now attracting worldwide attention: the album she recorded in the Brighton home of her producer, Tim Bidwell, using velvet curtains from Debenhams as sound insulation, is about to enter the American and Canadian charts, too.

There is nothing predictable about this success. Walsh's music is unassuming and poetic. To call it lo-fi is misleading, but most of the work is done by her voice; a breathy, bird-like instrument, which sounds conversational, but is actually a model of controlled emotion. When she accompanies herself on guitar, most of the noise is made by the chords she doesn't play. Her influences are Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos, but her music will appeal to those who inhaled the airy melodies of Jose Gonzalez.

She sings about heartache, mostly. It's tempting to surmise that emotional pain is what's making a star of her. Her best tune, Your Song, is a wispy ode to her "greatest love", the man who broke her heart two years ago. "That was a happy relationship," she says. "It was lovely. But he didn't love me. Don't Break My Heart is the aftermath. I wrote that when I was about to meet up with him for the first time afterwards."

Other failed romances are alluded to. Fireworks recounts her misery at being dumped last November. French Song celebrates a French boy she was "momentarily" enthralled by. "I'm always heartbroken. I fall in love about 10 times a day. And I fall out of love just as often."

Pretty much the only thing on the album that isn't about old boyfriends is Walsh's dedication, which is to her former music teacher, Sue Hazelton. Walsh started playing the piano when she was five, and took lessons until she was 16, when Hazelton died of cancer.

"We were very close," says Walsh. "She even ended up living next door to me at the end of her life. My piano at home was so out of tune and she used to listen through the walls to me playing it. I used to go round and show her my poetry when I was 13. She was wonderful. She always said I reminded her of her when she was my age."

Walsh grew up in a music-loving household in Burnham-on-Crouch on the Essex coast. "I never had to be told to do my piano. I always loved it." Her two older brothers listened to Orbital, the Utah Saints and psychedelic 1960s music, while her father liked prog rock, and tuned the radio to Classic FM. Her mother played piano, and had a fondness for Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. "She's great. About a month ago she came down to Brighton because she was going to go on a shamanic drumming weekend. She's not a shaman, and she doesn't drum, but she just thought she'd give it a go."

Walsh's memories of Burnham are reflected in the lyrics of Talk of the Town. "It's like any small town. It's not that I dislike the place, I just didn't fit in, and I couldn't hide the fact that I was frustrated being there."

I ask her to describe it, and she pulls a face. "There's a Co-op and a petrol station on the outside of the town. There's no Dixons or Boots. But it's very pretty. There's a couple of bric-a-brac stores. Quite good ones, actually. You can get some nice vases."

A shy adolescent, she recalls sitting alone in the fields with her black eyeliner on, smoking roll-ups and writing poetry, while listening to Radiohead's The Bends. She says she "went off the rails" as a teenager and, lacking the discipline to do well at grammar school, elected to go to the local comprehensive, where her grades deteriorated further. She got into trouble - "just small town jollies" - and decided to sort herself out by going to boarding school in Bishop's Stortford.

"You're locked up, you can't go out, and every night there's an hour-and-a-half of supervised prep. So you do all your work. My grades were amazing when I left, and I was a more confident person. And I cherished my family. It changed me. It really started to make me who I was.

"I had no reason to go off the rails. My family are lovely. I grew up in this really pretty town. Maybe it was just my frustration at not having an outlet, or not being with like-minded people. I just rebelled, and it's always the ones closest to you that you hurt the most."

It's fair to say that Walsh looks happy today. As a small concession to her sudden popularity, she has handed in her notice from her job "selling posh soap to posh ladies" at Crabtree & Evelyn in Brighton. Today, her manager Jonathan sits at the next table, fielding calls from record companies, anxious to explain how they can take her career to the next level. But Walsh, chastened by a bad experience with the Newcastle label Kitchenware, is in no rush. "It would be silly to jump into anything. We know that people like it regardless of who's backing it, so we'll just keep doing it ourselves if we have to. We've got the choice. We can do that."

The speed of Walsh's arrival would have been scarcely imaginable until recently, and is a further sign of how the internet is revolutionising the music business. A year ago, in circumstances that have been the subject of some dispute, Sandi Thom won a record deal and a worldwide hit by broadcasting a series of concerts from her Tooting basement.

Thom's popularity on the net may have been exaggerated in order to attract record company interest, but Walsh's story seems simpler. Her distributor did a deal with iTunes to release the music, and iTunes offered her song Talk of the Town as a free download, thus creating interest in the album, which is available at a reduced price. "It was an experiment they wanted to try, and it works. Instead of raising your price and selling fewer albums, reduce it and get more people listening to the music.

"It makes sense. People just bought the record. There's no marketing, no hype. It's lovely for me because I know that people love the record just because it's there. They're not being told it's good."

This is actually Walsh's second career break; she had her fingers burned by the music business when she was 18. Her classical piano-training won her a place at the London College of Music and Media but she deferred entry to work on her songs when a producer called her and asked: "What do you want to do with the rest of your life?" She recorded her first album, Clocktower Park, in 2001, and spent a fruitless year living in Newcastle, but the album wasn't released until 2003. She now considers it to be soulless and undeveloped.

"I was still learning to be a singer-songwriter. I'm still finding my sound now. Back then I was young and it got taken out of my hands. I didn't trust my own judgment. The production is so polished and it's not like anything I listen to." Walsh says she wasn't dedicated enough to be a classical pianist. "Classical musicians are playing like a job all day every day. And when you're 15 you don't want to be playing piano all day." Still, hints of her training can be detected in her music. The melodies come from her love of Debussy, she says, and she considers his First Arabesque to be her signature tune. "It takes you somewhere else." She imagined she would work on film scores, or songs for other singers, never dreaming that she could use her own voice. "For me, being a singer on stage was like jumping out of an aeroplane; it was never going to happen. I'd never do public speaking. I'd never jump out of a plane, I'd never bungee jump and I'd never sing on stage. But now I love it."

On stage, amid the sofas and the lampshades of the Electroacoustic Club, in the basement of the Slaughtered Lamb, Walsh betrays no nervousness. She closes her show with Your Song. On the record, the tune is augmented by strings. Live, there is just a girl and her slightly out-of-tune guitar. Then, in the silence before the final chorus, someone sends a glass smashing to the floor. In that moment, as she prepares to share her pain, Kate Walsh can't help laughing.

GIRLS ON SONG: FIVE MORE TO TRY
Bat for Lashes A Brighton dweller, the eye-catching Natasha Khan released a spectral, soulful debut album, Fur and Gold (Echo), last year as Bat for Lashes. Her breathy intensity and unusual soundscapes call to mind Kate Bush - but her assurance, like her dress sense, is all her own. She headlines the Homefires Festival at Conway Hall, WC2, on 3 June.

Laura Veirs The specciest singer since Nana Mouskouri, this kooky Seattle songstress plays literate, guitar-led folk-rock. Her first album, Carbon Glacier (2004), was an icy delight, while the accessible follow-up, Saltbreakers (Nonesuch), was out last month and should push her towards a mainstream audience.

Cathy Davey Signed to Parlophone in 2004 on the basis of a handful of charming home-recordings, Dublin-born Davey should come good on her second album, Tales of Silversleeve, due this summer. The internet has been buzzing: listen to the bright, breezy demo Sing for Your Supper on her Myspace page to find out why.

Joanna Newsom Scritchy-voiced harpist Newsom released last year's most ambitious album, the sprawling, poetic Ys - and blew a lot of minds, too. A live EP from her recent tour, Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band, is out on 24 April (released by Drag City), and proves why she's the most exciting female since, ooh ... Bjork.

Joan As Policewoman A New York pal of Rufus Wainwright and ex-girlfriend of Jeff Buckley, Joan Wasser sings dark, strident, jazzy tunes at the piano. Her debut album, Real Life, is a sad, swinging affair; "Beauty is the new Punk Rock" is her motto. Her latest single, Flushed Chest, is out Monday on Reveal Records.
RICHARD GODWIN