Stevie loves her, Oprah's after her and Prince is always on the phone. As Alicia Keys prepares to storm the UK charts, Ian Gittins meets the classically trained pianist turned soul diva
Friday November 2, 2001

Clive Davis is a record industry colossus. A grizzled, hard-edged 68-year-old veteran of five decades in the music business, Davis is the man who recognised the raw talent of troubled songstress Janis Joplin and a gawky New Jersey teenager named Bruce Springsteen. He also discovered two very differing divas in Patti Smith and Whitney Houston and, in more recent years, launched Puff Daddy's record label. Unsurprisingly, Rolling Stone recently pronounced Davis "the greatest record man of the past quarter century".

Two years ago, the indefatigable Davis founded the New York-based J Records, an imprint of BMG, and shortly afterwards received a phone call from the worried manager of a young local girl. Alicia Keys, an 18-year-old singer-songwriter of rare talent, had a deal with Columbia Records but it wasn't working out. The label bosses were trying to change her material, forcing unsympathetic big-name producers on her, bruising her muse. "It was a hard, depressing, frustrating time," Keys recalls. "The record label had the wrong vision for me. They didn't want me to be an individual, didn't really care. They just wanted to put me in a box."

Davis had a rather more prescient view of Keys's future. Hearing her perform some self-penned material, he immediately sensed a "special, unique" artist. A call to Columbia secured her release, and the mogul signed Keys to J Records and gave her back her creative head. This summer he released her debut album, the languid, elegant Songs In A Minor. The record entered the Billboard chart at number one. In the US alone, it's now sold more than 3m. "Does my success feel like a dream?" she says now, in London on her first ever trip to Europe. There's a husky chuckle, then a honeyed drawl. "Well, it sure feels like a dream being fulfilled, you hear what I'm saying?"

Keys's triumph has been phenomenal even in a music industry that has grown increasingly sceptical about the staying power of supposedly world-conquering new soul/R&B divas. Erykah Badu, Macy Gray, Kelis and Angie Stone were all lauded as groundbreaking talents as the new millennium dawned, only to largely disappoint with rushed, underwhelming second LPs. Of all the recent pretenders, though, Keys looks the most likely to stick around.

Songs In A Minor is undoubtedly a superior debut. The precocious Keys, a classically trained pianist, is adept at merging the ruff hip-hop rhythms she absorbed during her New York youth into her sensitive, heartfelt, soulful R&B stylings. It's also likely to do her no harm that she has the luscious caramel complexion of Destiny's Child's Beyoncé Knowles, and sings with devastating allure.

Despite the obvious appeal of the album, Keys truly comes into her own when she plays live. A sell-out show at London's intimate Scala last week confirmed the arrival of an artist of effortless charm and preternatural cool. Still only 20, she won over an intrigued audience with a display of easy grace and spectacular charisma. She even managed to incorporate snatches of both Beethoven and Ol' Dirty Bastard into her erudite and articulate set. "Well, I like to draw from a broad palette," she laughs. "When I was a kid I'd practise Chopin on piano - and I love Chopin! He's my dawg! Then I'd go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I'm from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one."

We meet backstage at CD:uk, where among the licensed anarchy of Saturday morning kids' TV, Keys radiates a serenity beyond her tender years. She's not today's main attraction for the prepubescent audience, not with Hear'Say and Westlife also in the house, but her impassioned performance of the new single Fallin' demonstrates why Davis has described her as one of the best stage artists he's seen in 50 years. Today his opinion is shared: "That's the best performance we've ever had on CD:uk!" gushes gobsmacked host Cat Deeley as Keys vacates the building.

Up close, the diminutive Keys has exquisitely high cheekbones, a small layer of puppy fat, intelligent and expressive hazel eyes, and hair coaxed into braids beneath her trademark leather cap. Far from the moody, reluctant interviewee of US urban music stereotype, she's personable and large on eye contact. Despite her sore throat, she happily answers all questions in a soft, resonant purr.

Keys was born Alicia Augello Cook in 1981, to a white mother and a black father in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan, just off Times Square. She has few memories of her father, who left when she was two years old, although she's loath to discuss him for fear of feeding the stereotype of the absentee, irresponsible black father. "I'm not in contact with him," she says flatly. "That's fine. When I was younger, I minded about that. It made me mad, made me angry. But it helped show me what a strong woman my mother was, and made me want to be strong like her. Probably, it was better for me this way."

An only child, Keys spent her formative years exposed by her actress mother to the jazz of Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. By the age of seven, she was receiving classical piano training, an education she regards as invaluable: "When I had nothing else, I had my mother and the piano. And you know what? They were all I needed."

Teenage years saw Keys journeying from Hell's Kitchen to nearby Harlem, where she was first exposed to rap among the area's "underdogs, pimps, prostitutes and loonies". She quickly came to see her mixed-race heritage as a blessing. "Harlem had Hispanic, white, black, Asian and Dominican people," she says.

"I felt I could talk to all of them. My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that's how I regard myself."

Keen to learn and hugely driven, Keys was writing songs at 14 - one of her first compositions, Butterflyz, appears on her debut album. She graduated two years early from New York Performing Arts College, majoring in choir, and by 16 was signed as a solo artist to Columbia. There, she quickly discovered that even the most talented fledgling artist wasn't immune to the music industry's legendary sexism and chauvinism. "I had horrible experiences," she shudders. "I tried so hard to make it work, but it was all wrong. These big-name producers made me write with people I didn't like. They messed up so the music sounded awful. Then they'd say, 'Hey, baby, why don't you come over to my place tonight?' They were so disrespectful. It was a terrible time. I started figuring, 'Hey, nuthin's worth all this.'"

Luckily, she was rescued by Davis. Left to her own devices, the independent-minded Keys honed songs she'd worked on for years into the poignant, uplifting anthems that make up Songs In A Minor. She writes on classic, eternal themes of love and heartbreak with a simplicity suggestive of the best of Motown. The grace of A Woman's Worth, for example, is reminiscent of Roberta Flack, to whom Keys is frequently compared.

More striking yet is the debut single Fallin', a tremulous piano ballad about a turbulent relationship. "I was going through it bad," she says. "But it helped me work things out."

Her record company expects the single to top the UK chart next week, powered on its way by a risk-taking video in which Keys visits an errant lover who is banged up in prison: "I wanted to show the realism behind love," she explains. "I know people who've gone to jail. It don't mean you stop loving them! They deservin' love just as much in there, and maybe they needin' it more.

"I got the idea for the video from a magazine article I read in New York about a woman called Santra Rucker. It just broke my heart. She was dating a drug dealer. He set her up, she went to court and got found guilty by association.

She got sentenced to 13 consecutive life sentences: 390 years. I'm writing to her now, because I'm feelin' what she's goin' through. I've been like her. That could be me in there." Initially, Keys planned to make her video even more hard-hitting by playing the role of the convict herself, but was dissuaded by nervous label bosses who weren't keen on their photogenic new star's first television appearance being behind bars. "I still think that woulda been wonderful," she reflects. "That's OK, though. Next time, they'll do it my way."

They most likely will. Keys's quietly spoken yet unshakable confidence is compelling. She has little time for the bling-bling, ghetto-fabulous ethos of so many urban artists, declaring only that "material shit ain't important".

Her own ascension to the rarefied heights of celebrity seems assured. She's been lauded by Stevie Wonder, and the omnipotent Oprah Winfrey booked her for her US TV show the day she heard Fallin'. Prince, whom Keys covers on her album, speaks to her regularly by phone. The girl from Hell's Kitchen looks to be standing the heat just fine.

·Songs In A Minor is out now. Fallin' is out this week.