canzone di Katie Melua

LONDON (Billboard) - A chance encounter at school set young pop singer Katie Melua on the path to international stardom.

Melua was attending the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in south London the day that writer/producer Mike Batt came for a visit in search of musicians for a jazz band. By luck, he heard the teenage Melua performing her own song, "Faraway Voice," and snapped her up for his Dramatico label.

Melua's debut album, "Call Off the Search," arrived in the United Kingdom in November 2003. She has since become the country's best-selling female artist of 2004 -- and 2005. Her sophomore album, "Piece by Piece," has scaled the charts across Europe and sold some 3 million copies, according to Dramatico.

And the singer still is only 22 years old.

On June 6, "Piece by Piece" will be released in the United States by Universal, which has a North American distribution deal with Dramatico. Universal also released "Call Off the Search" in the United States, but, as Batt notes, expectations are higher now.

Melua was born in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where she listened to Queen and Led Zeppelin on bootleg cassettes. When she was 8, the family moved to Belfast and five years later settled in London. Melua entered the BRIT School, a performing arts college funded by the British record industry.

Students at the BRIT School have no shortage of ambition. But it would have been beyond any student's wildest dreams to achieve Melua's level of success, so soon and so fast.

When Dramatico released "Call Off the Search," the album's initial sales came largely via word-of-mouth. Within weeks, she had a surprise U.K. top 10 hit single with the ballad "The Closest Thing to Crazy" thanks to key radio support.

A televised appearance on the annual "Royal Variety Performance" -- 40 years after John Lennon told his regal audience to "rattle your jewellery" at the same event -- boosted Melua's profile, and she signed a U.S. booking deal with Creative Artists Agency.

By the end of January 2004, "Search" had hit No. 1 on the U.K. album chart, unseating Dido's "Life for Rent."

The title track from "Call Off the Search" entered the top 20 of the U.K. singles chart and, thanks to Melua's extensive promotion and touring, her debut album remained on the chart and earned quadruple-platinum certification for U.K. sales of 1.2 million before the end of the year.

In the United States, via Dramatico's deal with Universal, "Search" spent just one week on The Billboard 200 at No. 161 in June 2004.

"There are people (in America) who know my music, but it's definitely on the underground," Melua says. "If you ask people who Katie Melua was, they definitely wouldn't know. The interesting thing is we struggled, just like we have everywhere else, with radio play."

Melua meanwhile spent early 2005 recording a second album that would put any doubters firmly in their place. "Piece by Piece" sold 120,000 copies out of the box in Britain on September 26, and reached No. 2 on Billboard's European Top 100 Albums chart.

The album's lead single, "Nine Million Bicycles," was a substantial hit, and "Piece by Piece" was double-platinum in Britain within two months, helping Melua achieve that distinction as the market's best-selling female artist for the second straight year.

From January into April of this year, Melua toured Europe, performing for more than 150,000 people at some 50 shows.

Of his hopes for the album in the United States, Batt says: "It would be fantastic if we broke Katie wide open and sold millions of albums. I think what's more likely is that we'll get her two or three more steps up the ladder."

Reuters/Billboard