In 2010, after a gig in Denmark, Katie Melua was hospitalised for six weeks after a breakdown. The Georgia-born singer-songwriter – who moved to the UK aged eight and became one of the biggest successes of the Noughties with easy-going jazz-pop hits like “Nine Million Bicycles” – has been open about the ordeal in the past, but kept the details private.
Recently, for the first time, Melua revealed just how horrific the experience had been. Speaking on the Crisis What Crisis? podcast, Melua detailed how her mind broke down into “waves and waves” of catastrophic psychosis – after days without sleep, she became convinced the pre-gig rain was poisoned and the nearby river was a sign she should kill herself; she thought that her fans were going to turn into monsters, and that the venue’s sound man was going to stab her onstage.
She somehow managed the finish the gig, but after a traumatic night – she believed the medics attended to her were giving her pills to kill her and that her hotel room was haunted – she was flown home the next day and admitted to hospital in London. After the episode finished a whole two weeks later, she was diagnosed with an acute psychotic breakdown.
It is a blisteringly cold yet bright morning when I meet Melua at the quiet upstairs café at the Design Museum in Kensington, London, the 40-year-old dressed accordingly in chunky burnt orange knitwear, sitting with a cup of tea and an almond croissant that remains untouched until we finish chatting. She is here to promote the release of her latest album Live at the Royal Albert Hall, a delightful recording of her 2023 concert. It is Melua who first brings up what she calls her “mind collapse”; she feels it’s important to talk about.
“It was extreme, and sudden,” she tells me. “A collapse and then really bad for two weeks, like living in the apocalypse. It was weird because I never actually saw things that weren’t there, but I was on the verge of terror, thinking things were about to happen, the worst things you could possibly imagine. When you feel it in your body, it’s horrible.” She says she used to love horror films as a child, which she believes could have played its part on her psyche. “But it’s the worst horror film you’ve ever seen, it lasts for two weeks, and you’re actually living it.”
She says the six weeks after were spent “realising what had happened, and then the panic attacks started, because it was such a shock.” She would have episodes where her “heart rate would rush, lips would tingle, knees might shake, I’d be unable to breathe and thinking I’m about to die.” Recovery, she says, took more than two years, and even then, residual anxiety attacks would last a decade.
In hindsight, she sees how things had built up. “I did have mood dips beforehand.” The pressure to maintain her success in the face of a changing music industry – “the CD market crashed two years before” – and her own compulsions – “I am addicted to elements of the work” – were huge factors.
She had been to hypnotherapy sessions for a year before: not to help her relax, but in order to maintain an unhealthy work ethic. “What I was trying to do with the therapy was, ‘how do I work harder, survive on less sleep, achieve more, I’m too tired and I need to strengthen myself.’” At the same time, one of her best friends – the musician Charles Hadden of electro-pop band Ou Est Le Swimming Pool – took his life. “A number of things collided. If I’d had a break, it might not have been as bad.”
It’s all got too much, but she says now “I sometimes think I almost feel like I got away with it. It broke so badly, but then to survive and to come back from it and be able to see the world as it is, the same as everyone else does, was such a gift.” She beams when she realises how long she’s been healthy. “Gosh, it’s been nearly 15 years now!”
Melua had phenomenal success with her first two albums, 2003 debut Call off the Search, released when she was just 19, and 2005’s Piece by Piece, selling eight million copies; by the age of 24 she was reportedly worth £18m. But it was in many ways an uneasy triumph. In an era of big pop and R’n’B hits and a resurgent indie scene of The Strokes and The Libertines, Melua’s easy listening music and prim and proper image – a sharp contrast to the drug-fuelled age of Doherty and Winehouse – made her an outlier.
As Melua says, songs like “Nine Million Bicycles” and “The Closest Thing to Crazy” became embraced not by her peers, but a middle-aged “generation and culture in Britain of Terry Wogan listeners, the Radio 2 listeners. But it was also a bit weird that that culture wasn’t one that I really belonged to, both in age and my background.”
Melua spent the first eight years of her life in Georgia during its Soviet era, the latter two when the country was in the middle of a civil war.
“We were experiencing electricity blackouts, no hot water. That was daily life for two years.” It sounds like hardship – and it was – but in interviews Melua has a way of romanticising it. “Yeah, that’s interesting you point that out. I’m sure my mum would say something different,” she smiles. “But to have that sort of identity at that time, it was kind of exciting, living by candlelight, mum playing the piano, listening to music and singing in darkness, then the rush and excitement of the lights coming on quick. But the reality was it was bad. Getting the opportunity to move to the UK was like winning the lottery.”
The family emigrated to the UK in 1993, first to Belfast after her father, a heart surgeon, got a job at Royal Victoria Hospital, and later to Surrey. At 18, Melua attended the Brit school where she was quickly discovered and primed for stardom by songwriter and producer Mike Batt, famous for his hits with The Wombles and work with Cliff Richard and David Essex.
“I got picked by one producer, and that was it,” she says. Again, it was an unusual situation. Batt wrote all Melua’s early hits and, having signed her to his management company, pushed her onto the album/tour treadmill and tightly controlled her image: Melua would spend two hours in hair and make up for every single engagement against her wishes. “I struggled with the visual thing. That glammed up aspect was… tricky.”
“I mean, look, he wanted a young face and voice to sing his songs,” she says. “But it probably wouldn’t happen now.” She says she views her early career as “an amazing work experience”.
It was doubled edged. The financial rewards meant she was quickly able to buy her parents a flat in London. “That gave me so much pride and joy. But I knew I was sacrificing my vision as an artist. All my friends were telling me, you’ve got such amazing songs, you’ve got an amazing voice. Why are you working with someone who’s a totally different generation?”
It was no wonder she got tagged as uncool. “I remember my ex-boyfriend who was in a band [Luke Pritchard of Kooks], his team weren’t really keen on us going out, because I was this middle-of-the road, Terry Wogan girl.” Fellow Brit schooler Amy Winehouse inevitably had a pop, once stating she “would rather have cat Aids” than work with Katie Melua.
Melua smiles when I bring it up. “Well, she’s such an icon. I wound her up, which I didn’t do deliberately. We never met, but I did watch the documentary [Amy]. I was amazed to see how much she was prodded by the record companies about the competition out there. It was such a tragedy.”
She says the barbs didn’t really bother her (“I know that it bothered Mike”). Ultimately, it was not having creative power that took a toll. “I won’t deny the fact that it was really tough not being able to express myself. That was definitely one of the reasons why I had a mental collapse.”
Live at the Royal Albert Hall is the culmination of a decade of Melua taking back control. First of her own life: after her six-album deal with Batt finished in 2013, she changed management (ATC’s Sumit Bothra) who told her to do things at her own pace. “I never thought that was possible. I was like ‘what about the money?’ I always thought everyone’s job was my responsibility.” It allowed her the space to not just start a family but reconfigure her work around them: the Royal Albert Hall show saw Melua gig as a new mum, taking her then-six-month-old Sandro and her partner Ollie, who she met during the Covid pandemic, on tour.
“To have my son there was beautiful and emotional. I just felt so incredibly proud.”
Musically, she took some unexpected paths. Her folky 2016 album In Winter reconnected her with her roots, made with the Gori Women’s Choir in Georgia, where she’s maintained strong bonds. The experimental soundscapes of Ariel Objects (2022) were borne out of improvisations with composer Simon Goff. Her last singer-songwriter albums, 2020’s Album No.8, written after her divorce from World Superbike star James Toseland, whom she married in 2012, and 2023’s Love and Money, made in the glow of her new relationship, were the sound of an artist totally at ease – if you stopped listening after her initial radio omnipresence, or have even been snooty about her music in the past, you might be pleasantly surprised at the authentic depth and strength of songs like “Golden Record” and “Darling Star.”
“I had to really work hard to get the sort of authority, even within myself, to assert and go for that sort of artistic control.” She even excitedly tells me about her current experiments with AI, allowing her to make demos in musical styles “where I wouldn’t get in the room”, like trip hop. “Who knows!” she says when I ask if we can expect a daring new reinvention. “I just feel lucky about the fact that I can choose what lane to go in.”
‘Live at the Royal Albert Hall’ is out now
