Bob Dylan gets thousands of requests a year from musicians seeking permission to sample his work. He routinely turns them down. A few months ago, however, the British soul singer Gabrielle sent him a demo of a song she had written called Rise. In the letter Gabrielle explained how using a sample of his Knockin' On Heaven's Door track, would really round off what she had written. Dylan wrote back saying how much he loved the song and to go ahead and use whatever part of his song she wanted. The first time he had ever done so.
That, however, is not the most remarkable thing about Rise, which was sitting pretty at the top of the charts until Oasis bumped it off last week. The song is written about a nightmare scenario that the singer found herself involved in five years ago. The boyfriend and father of her son, Tony Antoniou went missing shortly after she gave birth. A few months later he turned up at her flat explaining he was "on the run". Shortly after, Antoniou was charged and convicted of the murder of his step-father (who had been decapitated). He is now serving a life sentence for the crime.
"It was the darkest time of my life," says the 31-year-old singer, "When I first met him (Antoniou), he was very cultured. He was a good person when I knew him . . . Obviously people change." More than a bit rattled by the experience, she stayed away from the music world for a while but feels now that writing about her experiences (however indirectly) in the hit song Rise has helped her passage back. "I think writing that song was a sort of exorcism for me. I finally managed to let all that stuff from a few years back go. I just let it all out in the song. It's really quite deep, because it's a very personal song for me. What I'm really trying to say in the lyrics is that I'm going to be positive about things and not let what happened in the past get to me."
If it all seems very "triumph over adversity", it's because it seems to be the motto she lives her life by. The strikingly beautiful Gabrielle was born Louise Bobb in south London with a malfunctioning left eye which meant she had to wear unflattering glasses as a little girl. It was this which prompted her to wear an eye-patch during the first phase of her career - back in 1993 when Dreams was a massive hit - and although she's since had an operation to correct the eye, she's rarely seen without a pair of dark glasses.
As a teenage girl, she was acutely self-conscious of her size-eight feet and what she describes as her "huge" hands. Despite thinking that she could never look the way a singer should, she successfully got a small time singing job in a club in Soho. After being told by some unkind people that she would never progress beyond singing Luther Vandross covers, she walked home in tears from the club and along the way wrote the lyrics for Dreams - one of the biggest selling singles of the 1990s.
"Initially the lyrics for Dreams were put over the Tracy Chapman song Fast Car, but we couldn't get the clearance to use Fast Car so instead Dreams came out as a song in its own right," she says. "Although I was trying to make the lyrics of Dreams into a love song, it's actually about my fight to become a singer." She went on to pick up two Brit Awards, a MOBO and an American Music Award for the song. Other hits have followed, like 1997's Give Me A Little More Time but it's not until this current album that she feels she's back on the pop tracks again.
"I have a strange musical background in that growing up I only listened to pop music like Adam and The Ants, Duran Duran, Culture Club and Wham! and then I discovered my mother's record collection and really got into Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack and Bob Marley. I still see myself as a pop singer, although with a soul background. Wherever people want to place me, they can place me because my influences are so diverse. What I like, I write and sing about."
Saying that a lot of the tracks on her current album, Rise, are autobiographical, she says she doesn't mind if that's taken as an open invitation for people to dig up the events surrounding her ex-boyfriend. "Doing autobiographical music allows people to nosey into what I'm about, but that's how I've always written. It's not deliberate and it's not disloyal, it just happens. It's just a case of feeling something, then writing about it. I really think this album is a natural progression for me. I'm a person who will never allow myself to be put down by any circumstance - or person."
The album Rise is on the Universal label.
