Electronic popster Imogen Heap found a path out of debt and obscurity when the price of her flat doubled, she tells Dorian Lynskey
Thank-you lists on albums tend to follow a predictable pattern, offering frenzied hosannas to God, family and record company. Imogen Heap's Speak for Yourself, however, might well be the first to express gratitude to a property surveyor. Two years ago, Heap was broke. Frou Frou, the duo she formed with producer and songwriter Guy Sigsworth, had been dropped by their record label; she had no income and her credit card debt totalled £10,000 (€14,500). Walking despondently to her London home one day, she noticed a neighbouring flat for sale and found that the price of her own had doubled.
"So I got a surveyor in and he turned out to be a Frou Frou fan," she remembers with delight. "When I told him what I needed the money for, he was like: 'How much do you need?'"
Last week, sales of Speak for Yourself, the collection of intimate, dramatic electronic pop she recorded with the remortgage money, passed the 100,000 mark. In February, she licensed it to Sony's new White Rabbit imprint, nearly 10 years to the day since she signed her first deal. It was one of her songs that played over the closing credits of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Quite by chance, Heap finds herself in the vanguard of a new and disparate wave of independent musicians, including Arctic Monkeys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Nizlopi and Sway, who have managed to find an audience while bypassing the major label machinery.
In the flesh, Heap is a gangly, voluble 28-year-old who looks, in the best possible way, as if she has been dragged through a theatre wardrobe backwards. Her studio, in an insalubrious corner of south London, seems like an extension of her personality: a treasure trove of creative clutter. Lights shaped like dragonflies dangle from the ceiling; a cello and guitar hang from the wall; flight cases litter the floor.
Against one wall stands her mother's piano, the same one at which she spent most of her Essex childhood. She also plays cello, clarinet and a Zimbabwean thumb piano called a mbira.
"I wanted to be either an astronaut or a composer, and gradually I decided that a composer was more likely," she says.
THE FRICTION BETWEEN her elegant first name and blunt surname is telling; her mother is an art therapist and her father sells rocks for construction. When they separated, they dispatched their 12-year-old daughter to boarding school. Unfortunately, she clashed with the music teacher. Fortunately, his idea of punishment was to exile her to the room that housed the school's music technology, where she taught herself the rudiments of sampling and sequencing. She says her music tastes were polarised between classical music and hardcore rave; singing was the least of her passions.
None the less, Heap signed her first record deal straight out of school, with a division of Sony called Almo Sounds. It soon went sour. Almo cut funding for her UK tour to support her 1998 album, I Megaphone, and gave her a month to deliver songs for the follow-up. When none of them sounded like hits, the company left her in limbo. In 2000 she formed Frou Frou with Guy Sigsworth - who produced I Megaphone and has worked with Madonna, Britney Spears and Björk - but that didn't work out either. After disappointing sales, Island Records told her that Frou Frou's option would not be renewed, but that it would happily offer her a solo deal.
"If you had taken a shirt into a dry cleaners and they burned it, would you then go 'thanks very much, I'll bring in my other dry cleaning tomorrow'?" Heap asks witheringly. "You wouldn't. So I didn't take the deal."
She did go it alone, however. With Frou Frou, she had got tired of people assuming she was just the singer, so this time she did everything herself.
"There were times when I thought it would be good to have somebody in the studio to help put things together, but I knew if I invited anyone in just for a day, people would immediately be asking: 'So how did you find this amazing guy?' So I couldn't have anyone," she says.
When making the album got too claustrophobic, she started a daily blog, airing all of her frustrations and ideas. You can still find it on her website, imogenheap.co.uk. And rather than shop for a record deal, when the album was finally finished, she opted to set up her own label, Megaphonic.
Fortunately for Heap, the recording process coincided with the rise of a new generation of young, clued-up music supervisors in TV and movies. Before she had even finished Speak for Yourself, Heap was signed to an agency that places songs on soundtracks. Before long, her haunting, Vocoder-ed a cappella ballad, Hide and Seek, was chosen for the season finale of The OC, the teen soap that has become the US's most influential showcase for new bands. It became an iTunes sensation, although the song is so unusual that only the bravest radio station would have playlisted it.
"It's just a magic thing that happened one evening," she says of Hide and Seek. "One night the computer died on me and I wanted to leave the studio having done something positive. I just played the first thing that came out of my head, and four and a half minutes later everything was there."
The noise at the end is a train rattling past the studio window.
In another stroke of luck, the supervisor on The Chronicles of Narnia film used to manage a band that Heap once toured with, so when the theme song that Dido submitted didn't make the grade, Heap's name came up.
"I didn't realise how desperate they were," she says cheerfully. "I walked in and there was a committee of them - the producer, the director, the accountant, everyone. They gave me a really hard sell and I said: 'Okay, so when do you need it by?' And they were like 'um, next week'."
Still, it has been a hard slog. Did she ever consider giving up and trying something else?
"Never," she says. "I've always been doing this; I've just not always been on people's radar. Ten years is a long time. I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere. This is what I do."
Speak for Yourself is on Megaphonic