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| Birth Name(s) : Ketevan Melua |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Musician |
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Full Katie Melua Biography
Ketevan "Katie" Melua (Georgian: ქეთევან "ქეთი" მელუა, surname pronounced IPA: /ˈmeluˌɑː/; born 16 September 1984) is a British-Georgian singer, songwriter and musician. She was born in the Georgian SSR, but moved to Northern Ireland at the age of eight and then relocated to England at the age of 14. Melua is signed to the small Dramatico record label, under the management of songwriter Mike Batt, and made her musical debut in 2003. In 2006, she was the United Kingdom's biggest-selling female artist and Europe's highest selling European female artist.
In November 2003, at the age of 19, Melua released her first album, Call off the Search, which reached the top of the United Kingdom album charts and sold 1.8 million copies in its first five months of release. Her second album, Piece by Piece, was released in September 2005 and to date has gone platinum four times.
Melua didn't attend University, though she has often stated her desire to do so, saying that English literature, history and physics would be her courses of choice should she get the chance to go to University.
Melua met Luke Pritchard, lead singer of The Kooks, when they were both studying at the BRIT School where they began dating. Melua and Pritchard rarely speak of the relationship, but what is known is that the couple dated for three years and discussed marriage. However, as Melua became more successful, the relationship came into difficulties and they split up in March 2005.
It was when performing at a Brit School showcase that Melua caught the eye of Mike Batt, an English songwriter and producer who was looking for an artist capable of singing "jazz and blues in an interesting way". After hearing Melua sing "Faraway voice" (a song she wrote about the death of her idol Eva Cassidy) Batt signed the 19 year-old Melua to his small Dramatico recording and management company and sent her into the studio.
Call off the Search featured two songs written by Melua: "Belfast (Penguins and Cats)", a song about Melua's experience of her time in the troubled city, and "Faraway Voice", a song about the death of Eva Cassidy. Melua also covered songs by Delores J. Silver ("Learnin' the Blues"), John Mayall ("Crawling up a Hill"), Randy Newman ("I Think it's Going to Rain Today") and James Shelton ("Lilac Wine"). A final six songs on the album were by Mike Batt.
They were interpreted by Singh as an assault on the accuracy of the work of cosmologists which sparked a series of letters from other Guardian readers, agreeing or disagreeing. On 15 October, Melua and Singh appeared on the BBC's Today programme, and Melua unveiled a re-recording of the song which included Singh's tongue-in-cheek amendments to the lyrics:“We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe; that's a good estimate with well-defined error bars, and with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.”
A double A-side of the Melua-penned "I Cried for You" and a cover of The Cure's "Just like Heaven" (1988), which is the theme song to the film Just like Heaven, was released in the UK on 5 December and peaked at number 35. "I Cried for You" was inspired by a meeting with the writer of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
A third single, "Spider's Web" was released on 17 April 2006 and peaked at number 52 in the UK. Melua embarked on a concert tour in support of Piece by Piece, the UK leg of which started in Aberdeen, Scotland on January 20, 2006.
Melua's third album, Pictures, was released on 1 October 2007. It will be the last of her albums in collaboration with Mike Batt as a creative team.
In November 2004 Melua was asked to take part in Band Aid 20 in which she joined a chorus of British and Irish pop singers to create a rendition of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" to raise money for famine relief in Africa. This was in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the original Band Aid.
Melua is a goodwill ambassador to the charity Save the Children, and in 2005 she went to Sri Lanka to see the work the charity was doing for children in the area after the civil war and Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2006 Melua donated all the proceeds from her single "Spider's Web" to the charity.
Melua is a supporter of the Oxfam charity shops, using them frequently to buy her clothing. However, she has stated that this is related as much to her dislike of spending and glamour as it is to her support for the charity, admitting that, when out in public, she looks "like a tramp" and that her hairdresser playfully calls her look "the Romanian window cleaner".
Melua has said on numerous occasions how Queen were a huge influence on her as a child/teenager, with one of her memories being buying Queen's Greatest Hits II and singing along to "Radio Ga Ga" in her home country Georgia.
In 2007, Melua announced that she would be appearing in a segment of the movie Grindhouse. The segment entitled "Don't", a faux trailer, was directed by Edgar Wright.
Won
- Melua was the best-selling UK female artist of 2004 and 2005.
- In 2006 Melua had a tulip named after her.
- According to VH1, Call off the Search is the 87th best-selling British album in history.
- At the 2005 Brit awards, Radio 1's Scott Mills tried to cause fights backstage during the build up coverage on his show by telling other artists including KT Tunstall, The Kaiser Chiefs and Hard-Fi that Katie Melua had been slagging them off. |
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