Sound check: Meet Ellie the MySpace stalker

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Friend request: the startlingly-voiced Ellie Goulding has collaborated with Frankmusik, Burial and Starsmith for her debut album, due next year

Just after we speak, Ellie Goulding is off to what she calls an “emergency meeting” with her management team. In the past week, the Hereford-born singer's first single, Under the Sheets, which was planned as a low-key release on an indie label before a proper promotional push in the new year, has started to look as if it might become a genuine hit. It has been made a daytime record of the week on Radio 1 and she was invited to perform it on Later … With Jools Holland this week, making her live television debut in the show's regular introductory slot.

Plus people like me keep phoning up for an interview. “Things have gone a bit mental over the last few days,” she tells me. “It's going a lot quicker than I was expecting.” As emergencies go, it's a nice one.

A year ago, Goulding, 21, was dropping out of a drama degree at the University of Kent, where the self-confessed fitness freak was concentrating on ways to incorporate physical theatre into her exercise regimes. After she was spotted by her future manager singing and playing acoustic guitar in a campus talent show, she decided to devote herself to songwriting.

She could have become an accomplished folk stylist — her quivering icicle of a voice would be striking against a sparse backdrop — but she felt that something was missing. To find it, in a multi-pronged pursuit worthy of the most dedicated stalkers, she set about hunting down musicians she admired through their MySpace pages.

First she chased Vincent Frank, a Croydon electropop musician whose debut album as Frankmusik reached the top 20 this summer. “It felt like fate, I felt pushed towards him.”

Together they wrote Wish I Stayed, a gorgeous twinkle of a song that unites acoustic guitar with wisps of synth and a drum machine. “It took my music in a completely different direction.”

She has also worked in the studio with the Mercury-nominated dubstep producer Burial, though no song has yet been completed. However, it's another MySpace hook-up, with the DJ and producer Starsmith, that has become the most fruitful of all, yielding most of the songs on her debut album. Starsmith is now doing so well, remixing hits by Katy Perry, Mika and Little Boots, that he's about to leave her band to prepare a debut album of his own. Her first London headlining show, at Cargo next month, will also be his last as her bassist and keyboard player. “We're like brother and sister. We work so well together,” says Goulding. “I used to be so frustrated because I didn't know what was missing but now I've found it and I'm so grateful.”

Together the pair have crafted an electronic pop sound with real depth, avoiding the sterile coldness of much synthesised music as well as the forgettable frothiness of pure pop. She should also win over the indie fans with soulful cover versions of Passion Pit's Sleepyhead, Wolves by Bon Iver and Roscoe by Midlake.

Lines such as “We're under the sheets and you're killing me”, from the single, suggest it's not all flowers and sunshine in her world. A big fan of the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, she mentions a line from his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: “An unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.”

Goulding isn't quite cut out to be the new Lady Gaga — she's more likely to be spotted jogging around a west London park than stumbling out of a nightclub, has a posh speaking voice that's the result of a concerted teenage effort to erase her “terrible Herefordian accent”, and no otherworldly stage name. But one listen to that startling voice should convince that she's something more special than that.

Later … With Jools Holland, tonight, 11.35pm, BBC2; Under the Sheets is released on Neon Gold on 16 Nov; Ellie Goulding is at Cargo, EC2 (020 7613 7731) on 1 Dec. www.myspace.com/elliegoulding  

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