David Steele knew his five-year search for a singer was over when he heard Jonte Short sing in New Orleans, writes Dave Simpson
In the mid-1990s, former Fine Young Cannibals/Beat man David Steele wondered where all the great singers had gone from pop music, so he set out to find one. He travelled all over London, Birmingham, the Midlands and the States. He figured it would take a "year, maybe two". It became an obsession for five years.
A man who always viewed the pop industry as a means to make music, travel and afford "an extra pair of trainers", he started booking holidays in Mexico and Venezuela, purely to check out singers or follow up the latest lead. Then Steele, who had co-penned some of the biggest-selling British pop songs of the 1980s, started writing songs. Word got about and before long a "couple of very famous" singers wanted to do them. (He has to be thumbscrewed into revealing that one was Macy Gray.) But he kept on searching for this mythical, perfect voice.
Steele headed for the 2001 New Orleans jazz festival, where he found the voice he'd been searching for in the elfin body of a young mother called Jonte Short. He nails the extraordinary, liberated feel of Short's voice by saying she sings "totally free, without a safety net". Meanwhile, the little unspoilt lady with the big lungs - the first artist to greet this writer with a hug - puts her heart-tugging chops down to "always going to church and having a good mother".
Together they make up Fried, and they are in London's trendy Soho area where Steele lives, the day after a showcase gig that had hardened professionals muttering words like "best voice since Aretha Franklin". Their début album - simply Fried - is a modern soul record with the emotional swoops of the old classics. If the buzz around the industry is replicated by the public, they will be huge.
Although they share an obsession with soul music, there's a cultural grand canyon between the dry, deadpan, hungover English 43-year-old and the giddy 24-year-old from a "church, church, church", upbringing who, for the interview, stepped into a bar for only the third time in her life.
Short grew up in a New Orleans family of five. From the age of four, she sang with her siblings in the Landrum Singers group and in her mother's choirs, but at 18 she announced that she wanted to sing Motown songs. Her mother told her to leave home.
She plays down the family's poor background. However, Fried's Sugar Water Days (including the killer line "I never slept alone 'til I left home") reminisces about times when the family added sugar to water when they couldn't afford Coca-Cola.
In London, she couldn't believe how nice everybody was to her after growing up amid prejudice. When Fried shot a video by the Mississippi, locals erected a Confederate flag. Short didn't bat an eyelid.
"My neighbours fly a Confederate flag," she explains.
But surely not like that, provocatively? "Just like that."
Steele, meanwhile, was on the hoof from the fallout from two of Britain's best-selling bands, particularly Fine Young Cannibals. The band was "never set up to be huge" but in the US, particularly, went supernova. "We all lost our minds," he says, a calm, dry man who has long put normality over fame.
Steele - who rarely mentions his pop past ("Not even to people in bars") - was introduced by Short's uncle as just "an English guy looking for a singer". Much later, she realised that her sister liked the Cannibals's She Drives Me Crazy. "I think her sister was more impressed than she was," he laughs.
The hook-up sounds mythical, but their progress wasn't. For starters, the singer Steele encountered was "huge, pregnant" with her second boy, "enough to make my voice an octave higher!" Things grew more surreal when their songs turned into self-fulfilling prophesies. They wrote It's Too Late - about a fracturing relationship - when Short was "lovey dovey" with her husband, but she was divorced by the time it was recorded. When they wrote Get Out of Jail, Short's ex called her from the police station after he'd been arrested over parking tickets.
"We had drama after drama," sighs Steele. Short corrects him. "No, I had drama after drama!" Childbirth, divorce, tears . . . and no record label.
Steele had been signed to London Records since FYC days, but the label was swallowed up by Warner, and its A&R team had disappeared. The pair recorded in houses in London and New Orleans but, with little money, the whole thing nearly went to the wall several times. But then the label was so pleased with the results it paid for strings to be added in Abbey Road.
They got by with the help of friends-of-friends, like Portishead's Beth Gibbons, who co-wrote Stranger. "She's tough," smiles Steele. "If she likes something, you know it's good. She was here last night actually, which is probably why I'm so hungover." Fried took their name from southern cooking and, they admit, the state of their brains by the end of this arduous process.
Short confesses to being "game for anything", as long as she can bring up two kids. "I just love to sing," she smiles broadly. "I could sing all day." - (Guardian Service)
• Get Out of Jail is on London Records. The album, Fried, follows in September