The feminine touch

Whether it's KT Tunstall on prime-time or Joss Stone serenading the President, it is British women who are all of a sudden lighting up the American music scene. Craig McLean hits New York and LA to meet the four female stars at the forefront of a new UK invasion
KT Tunstall, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lily Allen, Joss Stone
LA women... (from top right) Brits KT Tunstall, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lily Allen and Joss Stone. Photographs: Dave Hogan/Getty/Max Nash/AP Getty

It's stupid o'clock in the morning and in the Washington DC studios of National Public Radio, a tired yet chipper KT Tunstall is busy wowing seven million listeners across America. First she enraptures the DJ - an avuncular, 'Whispering' Bob Harris type - with engaging banter about how she was in Montreal the other day. It was so cold, minus 15 in fact, 'that I left my lips there'. The greybeard chuckles indulgently.

She tells him that when she started out, she wanted to avoid the 'stigma' of the girl-with-guitar. 'Phoebe from Friends has a lot to answer for!' KT Tunstall didn't want to sing 'Smelly Cat', nor strum politely. 'That whimsical, fragile stuff ... I thought, I can be louder than that.'

So, with a thump of her boot on the studio floor and a big fat grin, Tunstall launches into 'Black Horse and the Cherry Tree'. The rhythmic, stomp-folk hoedown caused a huge fuss when she played it on Later ... With Jools Holland in October 2004, two months before the release of her first album, Eye to the Telescope. Many months later, on the other side of the Atlantic, it's working its magic again. After she's finished the DJ can barely contain his enthusiasm. He urges the folks listening to his syndicated show on 83 radio stations across the US to check out the record.

Job done, Tunstall packs up and heads to the railway station. Next stop, New York. Yesterday she'd dropped into the Manhattan studios of breakfast TV programme The Today Show. She wanted to say hello and show them what she, her acoustic guitar and her effects pedal ('Wee Bastard') could do. One impromptu floorshow later, the producers offered her a slot on the show two days hence. For Tunstall this will mean, the day after Washington, getting up at even-more-stupid o'clock, and the wearing of an eye-frying red dress at breakfast time. No matter: 26 million people watch The Today Show. Beat that, GMTV

That was January last year. Two weeks after I met Tunstall in Washington, Eye to the Telescope was released in the US, 14 months on from its British release. The week after that, she won the Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist - in part a recognition of the fact that, in 2005, she'd outsold every other woman in the UK. 'Ladies!' she had shouted from the podium at Earl's Court, 'disregard your limits!'

When I met Tunstall at the other end of 2006, I asked her: what did she mean by that?

'I meant, don't let conditioning stop you from doing something,' she says as she sips a cuppa in a photographic studio. She's in New York today, taking part in the OMM cover shoot with labelmate Joss Stone.

'Don't let your parents telling you that you shouldn't do something stop you from doing it,' she elaborates. 'Don't let no one else doing something stop you. I mean, I was totally shocked when I played Glastonbury and me and Abi from the Zutons were the only girls on the Other Stage all day on Saturday. And there's bands on from 10am until midnight - and it was all boys.'

One year on, it seems that many ladies heard - or indeed were busy echoing - Tunstall's Brits clarion call. In early 2007, British women are the pop noise that is being heard around the world, notably in America. Tunstall, unknown in the States at the beginning of 2006, had to visit the country every single month of last year, including six weeks on tour in September and October. 'Black Horse and the Cherry Tree' has been sung on American Idol. 'Suddenly I See' blared over the closing scenes of the first episode of Ugly Betty. Primetime shows Grey's Anatomy and Will and Grace have also given her mass-media exposure.

Tunstall has managed that rare and elusive feat that few British artists have achieved since the heyday of Duran Duran and Depeche Mode in the 1980s: the 31-year-old singer from Edinburgh has seeped into the ether of US culture.

It's much the same with Joss Stone: the Devon-born 19-year-old was 'discovered' in America. She's sold seven-million copies of her two albums, and has appeared on a host of high-profile engagements, singing with Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Smokey Robinson. She's good pals with Tom Cruise. She sang at last year's Super Bowl, and has performed - twice - in front of President Bush. Her third album, Introducing Joss Stone, out next month, is a huge priority for her American label.

Same with Natasha Bedingfield. Last year 'Unwritten' ('Live your life with arms wide open/ Today is where your book begins') was the unofficial anthem at high school graduation ceremonies across the States. It was the most played song on US pop and adult contemporary radio stations in 2006. It reached number one on the Billboard charts, the first time a British woman had achieved this feat since Kim Wilde 20 years ago.

Then there's Corinne Bailey Rae. She also spent much of 2006 jetting in and out of the US. Late last month her self-titled debut album shot up the Billboard charts to number four. On the American iTunes and Amazon charts it made number one. As British trade mag Music Week reported, that Billboard triumph afforded her 'the highest-placed UK debut album by a Capitol artist' since Meet the Beatles hit number one in 1964.

Why did this happen like this, months after Bailey Rae's album came out? It's Oprah Winfrey's fault. If the multi-media queen backs you, the American public follow suit. The Leeds-born 27-year-old says Winfrey's support dates back to a show in Chicago last summer. 'Fifteen people from The Oprah Winfrey Show came along. The producer was talking to me afterwards - it was like she was giving me an interview! She was just trying to suss me out. They did a write-up on me in the Oprah magazine. Then I didn't hear anything. Then after the Grammy announcement, we got the call .... I did a gig in New York, got three hours' sleep, and took a private jet to Chicago and performed on her show.'

Ah, the Grammy Awards. Of the five artists nominated this year in the Best New Artist category, two were British women: Bailey Rae, and technologically-savvy multi-instrumentalist Imogen Heap (hard-grafting Heap was a beneficiary of exposure on The OC and the Narnia soundtrack). Tunstall says she just missed the cut. 'It's amazing that three British artists were in the running. I'm just glad I was part of it.' In any case, Tunstall can console herself with a nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, where she's up against Bedingfield. Bailey Rae also received two other nominations, for Record of the Year and Song of the Year (a songwriter's award).

As fans of the new single by Lily Allen - also beginning to make serious waves in America - might wonder: what's it all about, Alfie? Why are our women doing so well internationally? Do they have an identifiably British sound that's striking a chord in the US?

'No,' says Richard Ramsey of Empire Artist Management who look after, among others, Natasha Bedingfield and Allen. 'But all those women have the talents to make it work in America: they all write or co-write, they can all perform live, and they're willing to go there and work hard.'

'A lot of Americans do like the English accent, though,' says Natasha Bedingfield.

It's now late January 2007, six weeks after OMM's East Coast Tunstall-Stone shoot. This time we are with the Lewisham-raised Bedingfield on the West Coast, by the swimming pool of a gorgeous home in the Hollywood hills. The 26-year-old has been living in Los Angeles while she works on her second album, NB. Indeed she's spent most of the past 18 months in America, touring, writing and recording. She cashed in on her rather pukka speaking voice by appearing as the voice of a posho Bond girl in an 007 computer game. She was also picked as the first Artist of the Month by XBox; clearly Microsoft saw her as embodying values in sync with a mass-market consumer product.

'There's a general appreciation of English things right now in America,' continues Bedingfield. 'We're more polite. We're understated. We're not over the top. As a nation we value modesty, not bigging yourself up too much.'

Bailey Rae agrees. 'Americans like things that don't sound American,' she tells me during a brief stopover in London. She's just back from the US en route to Japan. 'I was really conscious of that when I was making my album - I thought they might be alarmed by the fact that there weren't street references. But subtlety and melancholy is something that American audiences are getting into. They like variation.'

Indeed. After all, the other two biggest radio songs in the US last year were singer-songwriter laments by an Englishman (James Blunt with 'You're Beautiful') and a Canadian (Daniel Powter and 'Bad Day'). The well-turned out songs on Eye to the Telescope and Corinne Bailey Rae are, similarly, a refreshing antidote to the music from the rump of American pop culture.

'There's a realism to these artists,' says Marty Diamond, president of Little Big Man, a US concert booking agency which looks after a host of British artists. 'Corinne Bailey Rae seems very real to me. I think she lives the way she sings. Lily Allen certainly, she's spirited and she's got an attitude that comes across in her music. These artists also have a global sensibility - in the UK you're only 45 minutes away from Europe. We can be guilty of becoming very insular here in the States. American artists can be huge here but they cross the pond and they can't do shit. Their music doesn't transcend. There's nothing that speaks to the soul of a fan.'

'American music has become really heavily stylised and focused on production,' says Bailey Rae. 'With producers like the Neptunes and Timbaland, it's so much about the backing track rather than the song.

'But a lot of the American public are still interested in songs, which is why people like KT and Natasha have done well in America. The first Joss Stone album is loads of great songs that were written in the Seventies - have someone with a great voice singing them and you're not gonna go far wrong.'

'Music in England is a lot more creative,' offers Stone in the New York photographic studio as stylists, assistants and hair and make-up people bustle around. While Tunstall grabs a quick lunch, Stone smokes rollies ('don't tell my dad!') and plays with her miniature poodle, Dusty (named after her heroine, Ms Springfield). 'And the music is real, rather than all this choreographed miming bullshit.'

Still, Corinne Bailey Rae thinks that, even if you're not bumping and grinding like a well-drilled dolly-bird, it's difficult for women to escape being viewed in a lascivious light.

'I definitely think in rock music, with the female-fronted guitar band, there's almost a fetishised element - a sexual element. People love Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but they're always going, Oh look at her haircut, look at her clothes. I went to the UK Hall of Fame ceremony and was asked what I was wearing. I walked up with Johnny Borrell and no one asked him what he was wearing.' In the indie and alternative rock world, thinks Bailey Rae, 'there are different levels of respect for what men do'.

But not, it seems, in the charts of heartland America. Maybe that's one of the reasons for the ubiquity and success of Tunstall, Stone, Bailey Rae and Bedingfield. None, by any stretch of the imagination, is 'cool' as defined by the keepers of the hipster flame. Arctic Monkeys' 'assault' on America last year was, perhaps, doomed to (relative) failure by the hype from their homeland: American audiences have grown long used to - and tired of - overexcited proclamations of next-big-thing genius emanating from these shores.

When they're confronted with a gang of surly British youths with guitars who seem to resent having to start the hard work all over again, Americans will gladly switch off. It famously happened with Oasis, who really couldn't be bothered with the effort of 'breaking' America. They showed their displeasure by either fighting with each other, dribbling beer on stage (as Liam Gallagher did during a high-profile gig in New York), or by refusing to travel there in the first place.

It's very different for the British women currently wowing America. For one thing, a solo star will find it hard to fall out with herself. Richard Ramsey: 'As a solo artist you're focused on one thing. If you're a band, a couple of you like to get fucked up, a couple don't ... You're pulling in different directions and there comes a point where it becomes too difficult to keep going over there.'

'It's harder for bands,' says Rick Krim, VH1's New York-based executive talent and music programming vice-president. With the music channel's backing, Keane and Snow Patrol have made great inroads into the US market. 'But I don't think the average American knows who Gary from Snow Patrol or Tom from Keane is. But these solo women all have a distinctive look.'

Furthermore, these women are mainstream artists whose music works well on TV and radio. And they will also put in the hard work. As much was apparent during our New York shoot with Tunstall and Stone. Coordinating their schedules so that both were in the same city at the same time with a free afternoon had proved a major trial.

Stone, 19 now (she signed her record deal when she was 15), spent most of last year in seclusion in the Caribbean, working on her third album. She said she was calling her new 'rekkid' (dig that streetwise American accent) Introducing Joss Stone because it was the first time she'd been able to fully express herself. She was, at last, doing things her way: writing more of her own material, taking charge of her considerable fortune (her parents looked after it until now), and touring more strategically. She'd gigged so much in support of her first two, back-to-back albums that she'd developed nodules on her throat. Which, when you're only a teenager, is surely not right. But she's playing Glastonbury this summer. 'I'd like to start my own stage there - if you're gonna do something you might as well do it big!' she announced with a gum-chewing grin.

She sounded like a gushing teenager - but she was also displaying the kind of steely resolve that courses through Tunstall (knocked back by record labels for being 'too old' at 25), Bailey Rae (ex-member of failed indie band) and Bedingfield (studied psychology, the better to understand how to write lyrics with some meaning).

As for Tunstall, 11 months since our Washington rendezvous, two years since Eye to the Telescope had first come out, she was still on tour. For God's sake, woman, why?

'The perils of staggered release dates on your album!' she said with a slightly crazed cackle. 'I could easily tour for another six months to a year in America with this album 'cause it just takes so long for singles to filter in. Radio stations are still saying, "Oh we love your new song, Black Horse ..." I'm like, "My God, it's only just got to you?"'

Her six-week US tour last autumn had been gruelling. 'That nearly killed me, man!' She had felt 'diminished' and 'lost', she said. Our December meeting came in the middle of another tour. She was playing arenas in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Florida, Hartford, New York and Boston as part of the - wait for it - 'Radio Jingle Jam Crazy Christmas' package tour. It was well and good doing your own headline gigs. But these multi-artist shows were all about keying into the pop market: crossover appeal is integral to serious 'break-out' success. And it's certainly easier to have crossover appeal if you're positioned, as all our women are, plum in the middle of the road.

Marty Diamond of Little Big Man is in the UK this month to speak at trade publication Music Week's Making it in America conference. He thinks these female artists can find a 'wider berth' across heavily formatted American radio. 'They have tremendously wide demographic appeal. And there are so many more style magazines and places like that, alternative outlets, available to women. That can't be taken lightly.'

As these talented, career-minded womenattest, it's about keeping your head while all those around you are losing theirs. America is a big place, with big risks and big prizes. Bedingfield still looks shell-shocked at the memory of the period when, like a Presidential hopeful, she was in a different state every day. Or the time when, for the winners of a radio competition, she had to sing at a 'Bedingfield Barbecue' - held in the lucky punter's back garden.

It will be an interesting test for the next wave of British female artists. The signs are that Amy Winehouse mania is about to kick off in the US. But will the hard-livin' singer survive the soul-sapping meet'n'greet circuit? Even saintly KT Tunstall found her bonhomie tested by breakfast engagements in radio stations - 'you and 20 competition winners in a conference room at eight in the morning. You're playing, and they're eating pizza and videoing you on their phone!'

'It's insane!' says Lily Allen of the meet'n'greets. She is in Los Angeles in early February. Her sold-out show at the 1,200-capacity Henry Fonda Theatre is the hottest ticket in town. 'I don't really understand what the point is - and it makes it embarrassing when you come back somewhere and you've already met someone and they expect you to remember who they are. I'm terrible with names and faces anyway. It's people from radio, from the record company, from ... I don't know where!' She puts on a whiny American accent. 'We're really happy to have you here, we're really excited about the album, my kid really loves that "LDN" song ...'

Allen is a month or so ahead of Winehouse in the US - Alright, Still was released there earlier this month and is already number three in the iTunes charts. 'Smile', her first US single, was the highest new entry in the Billboard charts two weeks ago.

'I try not to think something like Saturday Night Live is a big deal,' Allen says, 'because otherwise my nerves really kick in. But it's kind of difficult when you have a million people running around saying, "You should be really happy you're doing this." It's like, Yeah, maybe I would be if I'd wanted to be a huge international superstar my whole life ... but I don't!'

It's a conundrum KT Tunstall, Corinne Bailey Rae and Natasha Bedingfield were due to come up hard against at last week's Grammys. Bedingfield was presenting an award, the other two were performing. Whether they won or not, they now find themselves in a whole different league. Tunstall remembers with some horror the LA photocall when the Grammy nominees were announced. She had to take her position in a line-up with Justin Timberlake, Mary J Blige and Christina Aguilera.

'I thought, Oh my God, do I have to do things differently now? 'Cause the Timberlake/Blige/Aguilera stuff, that's a lifestyle, that's not just mega-stardom music. And I don't want it. It's fun to read about it. But I'm not interested in moving out of Harlesden. I'm not interested in getting a new bunch of friends. I'm not image-obsessed. Then I thought, Shit, should I be? Because I don't want shit pictures of me everywhere! Every magazine will be saying, What does she look like? Is that Christina Aguilera's mum?

'Then the lightbulb came on. And I just thought, Well, I got here by doing what I'm doing. And it's ridiculous to think I should do anything different.'

It is, says Corinne Bailey Rae, about being true to yourself. It's not about selling yourself on the tightness or the whiteness of your trousers. Of course women can't do cock-rock. That's anatomically impossible.

Why so many successful female artists? It's a reflection of the fact that they're women who are bored with being sexualised, are duly making music on their own terms, and who are being greeted with grateful hosannas from music fans (male and female) hitherto ill-served by a phallocentric, patriarchal, exploitative music industry.

It's the washing machine cycle of pop pushing loads of women to the top - after all, there were a few female-fronted indie bands in the Britpop years (Elastica, Sleeper, Powder).

It's coincidence.

Or it's evolution. Women, more in tune with feelings and less afraid to be candid about human frailty, living longer than men, are coming out on top in these troubled times.

'Writing about relationships is political,' says Bailey Rae. 'The personal is political. What do I have in common with those other artists? Songcraft, I hope. Words that mean something and a melody that's infectious.

'But still,' she says with a sigh, in an industry that's stubbornly predicated on the phwoar-factor, 'you definitely don't get the same respect. Look at that girl with the guitar, wonder what she's like in bed .... That's why I like KT. You're not gonna be seeing her in stilettos, not gonna see her bra poking out. She's a troubadour, she can take her guitar and play anywhere, with no funny sex noises. Long may she reign.'

And likewise, her female peers.

Natasha Bedingfield: 'You don't have to sleep your way to the top'

OMM: Your first single was called 'Single', because you were. Now your comeback is titled 'I Wanna Have Your Babies'. It's another bold Bedingfield statement ...

Natasha Bedingfield: It's just a cheeky song. About how us girls can't keep our plans to ourselves and we sometimes scare guys off. Most girls, if they really like someone, they'll put his surname after her name or think about what their kids would like. It's a secret look into what girls really think.

OMM: You travelled around India last year, in support of anti-slavery organisation Stop the Traffik, and as an ambassador for your mum's own charity, Global Angels. Why did she set that up?

NB: She just saw a lot of need for help for children all over the world. The general public have started to notice that [with] a lot of charities, the money they give goes back into their advertising and to pay their staff. So Global Angels is set up to raise money and give it directly to very specific projects worldwide.

OMM: Is the music industry now more encouraging of female artists who aren't content to be sold as objects of lust?

NB: A lot of things have changed - you don't have to sleep your way to the top. I didn't have to anyway. I try and work as hard as the men. When I'm working with the producers - they're all male - my jokes are rude. You have to be one of the boys. You have to be stronger to get things done, otherwise other people will decide it for you.

· Natasha Bedingfield's new single is out 30 April

Corinne Bailey Rae: 'it winds me up!'

OMM: As well as your three Grammy nominations, you were also a triple nominee at the Brit Awards. That's a major achievement barely a year after you released your first record.

Corinne Bailey Rae: There were loads of great new acts this year, so just to be included in the five who were seen as important or promising was brilliant ... And the Best Female Category was really strong - just to get a look in, especially alongside someone like Amy Winehouse. This time last year I didn't even have a ticket to sit in the audience.

OMM: Is it important for you to be validated as a songwriter?

CBR: Definitely. I read someplace that when I was signed to EMI, they reeled in the 'hit-makers'. The presumption is that 'cause you're a young girl, black, smiley, with curly hair, you can't have written the songs. It totally winds me up.

OMM: Have you had time to write any new songs in the past few months?

CBR: I've had some ideas on planes - you're so bored when you're flying, and all the craziness is pushed away. I'd say that I've got fragments ... But I haven't written three big radio hits. I love the writing phase, the pottering and sitting in cafes and dreaming. I'm taking the summer off to do that - I'll play some festivals, but not as many as they want me to.

· Corinne Bailey Rae's new single 'I'd Like To' is out now

KT Tunstall: 'Blatant sexism'

OMM: Is the music industry sexist?

KT: There was an obvious display of blatant sexism when I couldn't get signed. They didn't say I was ugly. They didn't say that they didn't like the music. They said I was too old! At 26! So Badly Drawn Boy, Doves, Elbow, James Blunt - you can be a gnarly old beardy bloke with a bit of a paunch and that's all right? The only reason they see someone wanting to listen to female music is because you're a model? Pathetic.

OMM: A highlight of America in 2006?

KT: At one radio station, for my vocal warm-up, they said that they were going to put me in the lactation room. You what? There actually was an official plaque outside saying 'lactation room' - and it was in Braille! For blind mothers. It was a windowless cupboard with a waterproof bed in it.

OMM: How's the difficult second album coming along?

KT: I've written all the songs, but we had a false start last year. I'd said I didn't want go to a big fancy studio, but I had my arm twisted. But I still like gnarly studios ... So we went into this little one in London before Christmas and slammed down half the album.

· KT Tunstall's new album will be out this summer

Joss Stone: 'I'm not a nun!'

OMM: You made your new album with no interference from your record company, or from your parents. How come?

JS: They had no choice. Otherwise I was going home, 'cause I was so miserable. [With the first two albums] I would say to the label, Please don't put this song on the record, I hate it. And they were like, [breezily], Well, Tina Turner's biggest hit, she hated it, too ... I'm like, Well then, you're still arseholes! So this time I just shut everybody out.

OMM: Is the song 'Not Real Love (I Wish I'd Never Met You)' about your ex, Beau Dozier?

JS: Yeah, of course! I'm a very honest girl. I'm still friends with him, and we wrote a song together. But I still feel the pain from the things that he did. There're so many stories I could tell that I probably shouldn't because I don't want anybody to see him in a bad light.

OMM: The single, 'Tell Me 'Bout It', is fairly upfront about your desires.

JS: This is the person I am at this point in my life. And I'm not celibate. I'm not a nun. I have feelings, and I write about them. And on this album I've expressed everything that I feel. J

· Joss Stone's new album 'Introducing Joss Stone' is out 12 March