Katie Melua on her new fearless reinvention

The singer is back with a new album which addresses her personal life with a bold candour. William Hosie speaks to her about her early life in Georgia, past depression and new love

- William Hosie

KATIE Melua and I speak a day soon after it is announced that Gary Lineker is back in his role on Match of the Day after the kerfuffle over him speaking out against the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill. Melua calls the controversy over the BBC’s impartiality rules ludicrous.

An immigrant herself, I imagine she has choice words for the Home Secretary. “I’m no politician,” she cautions, “but it’s obvious that no refugee ever leaves their country by choice.” She confesses to feeling heartbroken when she left Georgia still a child — and guilty over the opportunities she had which relatives back home did not.

“There’s no doubt what Gary has said is right,” the songwriter tells me. “People shouldn’t be afraid to make their voices heard.”

On her new album, Love & Money, Melua explores this personal conflict with disarming candour. On the title track, she lays bare a vulnerability that has never quite left: “I was in the neighbourhood pretending to be someone good, sending love and money home.” Becoming a household name at 19 with her 2003 debut, Call Off The Search, Melua has long shouldered a sense of obligation common among the children of immigrants who believe it’s their job to become the family breadwinners. “There are videos of me at six or seven years old, laughing as I climb into old Soviet planes.” Melua says, recalling the abandoned airport near her grandma’s house in Tbilisi, Georgia — a land she fled with her family at the age of nine, in the aftermath of the civil war.