naimsydtimeint

Natalie Imbruglia: There goes the neighbour

She's gone from the girl-next-door in Australian TV soap opera to international singing star. SUSAN CHENERY talks to a woman who followed a familiar route to stardom, but with an individual talent.

"MY MIND is keen but my body is not dealing with it," says Natalie Imbruglia huskily. It would be Torn. "Nothing's fine/I'm torn." Torn is a song. Girl meets boy. Boy turns into dropkick. Girl is majorly disillusioned. As per usual. "There's nothing where he used to lie, I'm all out of faith." Torn has sold, to date, 2million copies worldwide. There are many, many dropkicks out there in the world of girlie angst. And torn she most certainly is. Every which way. Torn in every conceivable direction. Natalie Imbruglia is a big star in the making. Such a little girl, so many miles. Hurtling across the globe. Burning up. Happening so fast.

"It has just been crazy, overwhelming, I am still pinching myself. I feel like someone is lying to me and it is not real." London, Japan, Europe, Australia, New York, round and round. "I keep thinking, "Whoa, slow down, let me catch up'." Talking and singing. Non-stop. Staggering. Dizzy. Get used to it. This is Success.

"She is very tired and stressed," says an acquaintance. "She is still learning to cope with the pressure of it all, not always handling it all that well. She needs to be protected a little bit." "You're a little late, I'm already torn."

Natalie Imbruglia is a fragile soul. A porcelain waif with huge eyes and luscious lips. She is a child of the sun. She grew up in that adolescent wasteland of beaches and bush, the Central Coast of NSW, where so many kids fall by the wayside, drifting, lost. But not Natalie, no. "It can be a hard place to get away from; there is a beach mentality, kids get bored. I felt different and isolated. I was so ambitious. You have to make your own fun there."

Natalie did. The sister is doing it for herself. And look, now she is England's Sweetheart. And she is only getting started in America, breaking big time. After three months at the top of the charts in Britain, her album Left of the Middle has sold 850,000 copies in the US in a mere three weeks since its release. She is doing Letterman, Leno, Saturday Night Live; mega-ratings, being beamed to the greater majority of the American public.

She is 23 years old.

"I have calmed down a bit but I am a worrier like my mum. I am such a pessimist I keep thinking, "Wow, I am going to mess this up'. Even after all that wanting, wanting, wanting. I was quite familiar with panic attacks before I even got to this point. I still have that insecurity. And now with all these expectations it feels like there is much further to fall. You never feel that you can relax."

Natalie Imbruglia is an alumna of that strange sorority called Neighbours. Australia's most recognisable exports to the UK would appear to be our golden children. Fresh, sun-kissed, protein-fed adolescents. These small showgirls and boys. Open, optimistic and full of hope. So refreshing dear boy. A bad soap that brings half an hour of warmth into the black winter afternoons.

"It is the Australian way of life. Blue skies, sunshine and a supportive community; everybody knows everybody else's business," says Jane Russ, who has cast Neighbours from its inception, thus generating a small but lucrative industry that is thrust, teetering, onto the world's stages.

Natalie is not, however, a programmed brainless popette, manufactured and marketed, fluffy and lucky, lucky, lucky. She is altogether darker. For a start she can sing. Now there's a novel idea. "People don't expect you to be good if you come from a soap," she told Interview magazine. "They expect you to make a dance record, wear a miniskirt and be cheesy."

And Natalie definitely doesn't do cheese. Natalie has street cred. Natalie has Suffered. Natalie has been down and out. It is there in her lyrics, most of which she co-wrote. Pain. Ennui. The pseudo-tough modern girl striding through a world of faithless men and dropkicks. Cynical and disillusioned and taking no prisoners.

"Leave me alone/I'm going home on my own/You like me to stroke you/careful I don't choke you." Quite. Looks like little Natalie has learnt a thing or two about Life on her way to the top. If you can have a Past at 23, Natalie appears to have managed enough dark nights of the soul for quite a lot of world-weary anguished introspection.

"I find comfort in those kinds of girlie songs. Ever since I was a kid I have liked emotional songs. Happy is harder to write. It is very hard to write a happy song with intensity and emotion. I don't know where the anger comes from. I'd like to be able to write a happy, poppy song, but I just can't. What comes out, comes out." Just like Alanis Morissette before her, and to whom she is insistently compared, her music has a resonance for the pre-menstrual, the angst-ridden, the lovelorn and, well, the bloke who just plain likes a good perve. All delivered in a high, clear tone.

She has been doing this stuff since she was approximately two. Taking dancing lessons six days a week until she was 12, and then acting and singing lessons. The second of four daughters ("they all sing in the shower"). Her Italian father, a parking inspector whose fortunes have ranged up and down over the years, and her mother, a teacher, went along with it all rather sceptically until they came to an open day and realised that their tip-tapping little girl might have real talent. "Then they didn't have to keep taking my word for it any more" - husky laugh.

At 16 she got an agent's number from a friend, swiftly departed school, caught the train and rolled into the bustling metropolis of Sydney. She was goin' into showbusiness. Six months later came Phase One of her career. She was doing commercials when she cracked the Neighbours gig.

Jane Russ, who has ambitious youngsters flinging themselves at her from all directions, saw the secret ingredient, the magic chemistry, instantly. "She was a gorgeous looking young girl. She had a wonderful, natural quality, a lot of charm, a lot of self-confidence and an inner determination. She exuded this magical component. She played a girl from a small town and she had that sort of naive quality. Believe me you get some world-weary 16-year-olds, and this industry makes them grow up fast."

Natalie, was, naturally, "ecstatic" about this teen queen development. "I was jumping all around the living room. It changed my life overnight. I had a brilliant time at Neighbours; I learnt so much."

But by 19 the soap suds were foaming without her. She had moved out, left the neighbours back home. She was in the big pond, London, having a non-stop party. The long lost weekend. "For the first six months she was still on television and she was one popular teen queen. "Everyone wanted to hang out with me. I thought I was pretty cool because the show was so popular. I wanted to do stage work and plays but I couldn't get a work permit. It was scary. I had been working incredibly hard and now Neighbours was over and I didn't know what to do. I found myself down and out.

"The money was running out and I had to worry about going home with my tail between my legs. I was terrified. London is a tough city. But it is a fantastic city for someone my age because it is internationally immediate."

It was during the lost year that she posed with cigarettes and knickers for a dodgy men's magazine and it seemed that young Natalie might have been a has-been.

And so to phase two: her metamorphosis into pop star came courtesy of that great ol' time-tested motivator: poverty.

"I had always wanted to do it but I was so scared of making a record that I was my own worst enemy. I thought that making a record if you were on TV would make me a joke. But I had no money left; I had no work. That is when I started writing songs. It was a turning point." The point, it seems, is still turning.

Going to a record company and getting a deal was, she says, "the hardest thing I have ever done. I was really going out on a limb, I was very fragile after getting that deal." But still determined to do it on her own terms; she was not going to be a victim, puff pastry, in an industry that eats its young.

She struggled mightily for credibility on her album Left of Middle. "you have to be yourself 100per cent all the way. Otherwise I would rather not do it at all. It has taken me a while to swallow that there are no more big battles to fight. I know how it is to lose everything and I think I have got a grasp on this second phase. I used to get anxious about not having anything to do. Now I am anxious about my album being released in America."

There is though, a severe downside to being England's Sweetheart. The tabloids start paying attention. They paid close attention to her affair with the Friends star David Schwimmer, for example. Now over but still, er, friends. And then they went feral in January over the ridiculous "Torngate". She was, get this, Naughty Natalie. It was a Scandinavian scandal, no less. It emerged that Torn had been recorded by a Norwegian called Trine Rein who had taken it to number one in her homeland. Another Danish version had been recorded five years previously. The delightful Sun even set up a number where readers could listen to the "original". Even though she never claimed to have written the song she was pilloried on radio. Well it was a slow month in a fast city. Innocent of all charges as she was, as an authentic singer-songwriter she was sullied.

"It was a whole big palaver," she says now. "I never said I wrote it. I knew about Trine Rein; I had heard of two other recordings, but it didn't bother me. I felt so passionate about it that as soon as I heard it I had to record it. I thought I had something to add to it. Success is a funny thing and it was just really boring, the power of the media. Whenever you are successful you get this depressing stuff. And really it was just an indication that this is success."

It is lonely at the top, as somebody once said, and as Natalie is finding out. Even in that superlative world where everybody loves you, flatters you, wants a piece of you. All that whirling around the globe. No time. "I have not got a boyfriend. I have no time for boys, it is a Catch-22. I don't get a chance; I honestly don't get out much, I am such a workaholic. I have to get to bed early. I have to try to chill and relax. When I am at home in London I just pull the blinds down. It is a lonely job."

"Illusion never changed into something real", goes a line in Torn. They are like dancing, prancing workhorses, these kids, as they capitalise mightily on their catchy tunes. So young, so little fun in her life. Will she be a one-hit wonder? Discarded and forgotten at 25? Down the slippery, sliding slope to obscurity? A "where are they now" pop singer who did not have the talent for longevity?

She has already been a has-been once. Fought her way back. And in the best tradition of real songwriters, hard times made her what she is, coloured her life, gave her weight, gave her something to write anguished songs about. Now we will see if illusion changes into something real.