And now for song number 801 (original) (raw)

Already, the Brit school for performing arts and technology in London has produced Amy Winehouse, Adele, Leona Lewis, Kate Nash, Katie Melua and Luke Pritchard of the Kooks; you'd be forgiven for thinking it couldn't possibly bring forth any more successful twentysomething musicians. Enter 21-year-old Polly Scattergood, an atypical graduate of the Croydon institute.

Scattergood is not a big-voiced, neo-soul belter, and she's no exhibitionist. In fact, with her unsettling little-girl voice, which ranges from a semi-whisper to a full-throated yelp, and her songs about loathing and despair, Scattergood is closer to a tradition of female singer-songwriters that includes Kate Bush and Björk - the sort of artists who are usually dismissed as "kooky" and "ethereal". One recent review described Scattergood as "away with the fairies". "I thought that was a fair comment, really," she laughs, sitting cross-legged in a London pub. "Maybe I give off those vibes. I don't mind."

She doesn't want to talk too much about the Brit school because, she says, it gets too much bad press. "I mean, where else in this country is there a free facility for people who don't have a lot of money to learn about popular music?" She made friends with Pritchard, Melua and Lewis while she was there, but still felt like an outsider among all the self-possessed R&B kids. "I was the funny, slightly odd white girl sitting by a piano," she recalls with a smile.

But Scattergood - she chose the name herself, she says: "it means 'here today, gone tomorrow' or 'spendthrift waster'" - isn't the fragile naïf her music might lead you to expect. In fact, she's quite tough. Here is a girl who was dropped off by her mum at a grim suburban bedsit, aged 16, to fend for herself. She took part-time work to pay her way through school. "I worked on a stall in Borough market," she says. "I know everything about tomatoes." She also worked in an ice cream factory, where she got the sack for gorging on lemon sorbet.

Scattergood grew up in Wivenhoe, a fishing village just outside Colchester. She hated school:

"Everything about it. I never understood the point. I wasn't rude or cheeky, I was just uninterested."

She learned her most important lesson - at least as far as songwriting was concerned - when she was 12. "I was sitting in a French lesson and my friend Lois and I were talking about how much we liked Suzanne Vega's song Luka. I thought it was such a fun summer tune. And she turned to me and said, 'Didn't you know it's about a girl being beaten up?' So I listened again and I realised ..." That music doesn't have to be strident to carry a strong message? "That you don't have to shout. You can say things and people will listen if they want to."

By the time she left the Brit school, Scattergood had written 800 songs, and she caught the attention of Daniel Miller, the label boss at Mute, home to Depeche Mode and Nick Cave. Miller put Scattergood together with a producer, Simon Fisher Turner, a former child actor and 1970s teen idol turned eccentric performer, soundtrack composer and abstract soundscape artist.

"I was always very protective of my music, and I never wanted to work with other people because I thought they'd take it to where they wanted," she says. But, after an initial "scary, nerve-racking" period, she and Turner hit it off. Not that it was plain sailing. "It was six months of creative struggle. I believed words and melody were most important, and he came from a very soundscapey place, so we battled it out. Eventually, something clicked."

Scattergood is keen to point out that not all her songs are about her own experiences. "I'm a storyteller really," she explains, adding that her favourite lyricist is Leonard Cohen. "If I say [in a song] that I'm going to take pills, that doesn't mean I'm going to take pills. I write about emotions and moments, some of which I've just witnessed."

The "sweet, rotting memories" she sang about in her summer 2007 debut single Nitrogen Pink refer to "a friend of a friend who was really sick from cancer, this young guy who was only 30 and had a great, happy life but was slowly deteriorating. It's about the fragility of life."

This is something Scattergood knows about. A few weeks ago, she says, she was crossing the road with a friend and got hit by a car. (It happened outside a pub, so they recovered with a drink.) A couple of weeks before that, she was electrocuted after turning on a light with wet hands. "My life flashed before me," she says. What came to mind? "My family."

Did she have a happy childhood? "It was a childhood," she says curtly. "It had its moments." So where does the dark stuff in her lyrics - the references to pain, even suicide - come from? "Well, I do go massively into dark spaces. I'll go from here to here," she adds, demonstrating "high" and "low" with her hand, "in the space of 10 minutes. Everyone as a teenager is in torment with themselves." She was unusually preoccupied with death. "I'm petrified of it. That was always my biggest fear. And birds and witches."

She begins to consider whether putting pen to paper during those quietly creepy night hours is such a good idea. "My mind does tend to go to places it shouldn't at 3am," she says. "Sometimes it would be easier if it was cut off at 9pm. Maybe I should just go to bed earlier."

· The single I Hate the Way is released by Mute on September 22