I ain’t afraid...

She co-wrote James Blunt’s biggest hit; now Amanda Ghost has the belief to go it alone, says Paul Sexton

Twelve months ago, Amanda Ghost’s career was on the critical list. She gave an unbilled South by Southwest performance that was attended by approximately three men, since even the dog didn’t turn up. For all her potential star quality, one wondered where she could turn next. Earlier this month, at Joe’s Pub, a chic establishment in New York’s Village district, that career was officially reborn. Ghost and her band played a gig that had some extremely grands fromages from the American record industry buzzing around her like bluebottles.

The captivated audience included two interested parties from the mighty Island Def Jam group: its chairman LA Reid, a respected writer-producer; and the label president, who also happens to be one of the top rappers in the world, Jay-Z. On stage, they saw an artist who immerses herself as compellingly in her strongly melodic and lyrically vivid songs in a club as she could in an arena.

Such is the sudden all-around desirability of this Enfield girl of Indian and Spanish parentage, fully six years after she first did sport with the music business. If it is unusual for an artist to be Tomorrow’s Next Big Thing on two separate occasions, then Ghost can quickly banish any feeling of Groundhog Day with the knowledge that this time she is more than merely a malleable young artist at the mercy of the majors.

Now, as singer, songwriter, producer, talent scout and label-owner, Ghost is preparing to release an EP on her own Plan A outlet, and seems highly likely to be snapped up again any moment now. Songs such as the thoughtful lead track Deep Water and the future smash Time Machine advertise a writing talent that has only matured by her bad business experiences.

Ghost had been chasing a deal for four years when she was signed to Warner Brothers by Andrew Wickham, who had signed Joni Mitchell, among many others. Her first album, Ghost Stories, was released in 2000 to plenty of hoopla but skimpy commercial response. Notable songs were overbaked in what Ghost describes as a “wedding cake of a mess”.

Her experiences of climbing the industry’s slippery ladders, only to come down its slimy snakes, are cautionary. “I was flown to LA in first class, picked up by a stretch limo, taken to the Warners lot in Burbank and driven around in a little golf cart. I felt like Judy Garland. You go in and you see pictures of Joni and Chrissie Hynde. It was, ‘I’ve arrived, I’ve made it.’ I guess as a girl from Enfield I had, because it was better than ending up on the checkout at Tesco.

“You’re made to feel so incredibly special, until the record comes out and fails. And when it fails, you don’t even get a flight, you have to buy your own, and get a taxi.” A period of stasis followed, as the label refused to release her second album and scratched its collective head wondering what to do with her, before an equally dispiriting divorce.

The transformation in Ghost’s fortunes was brought about by two events last year. The one attracting the attention, and for which she was nominated last week for two Ivor Novello awards, was that she was a co-writer of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. Happy to acknowledge the rejuvenating effect of a credit on what became the biggest song of 2005, she nevertheless says that her contribution consisted of tweaking its chorus four years ago, when Blunt was totally unknown.

The outbreak of vehement anti-Bluntism throughout the industry is not something Ghost endorses, and why would she? The astonishing success of that ballad has put her on the songwriting want-lists of several stars from the outer stratosphere of stardom, their identities to remain secret a while longer.

“Nobody thought I could write a song,” says Ghost. “‘Oh, she’s got a great voice but she can’t write a hit. We need to get her with somebody who can write a hit, then it will be fine.’ Now I’ve written one, and everyone’s saying, ‘Great songwriter, can she be an artist?’ I’ve been an artist all my life. I’m being asked to write with all these humungous stars, and I won’t do it unless I think they’re great. I’m not a musical whore. How soulless would that be? I’d hate to be called a professional songwriter.”

The other turning point last year took place during that sparsely attended show in Austin, Texas. “It was so weird, because I wanted to give up that week. But one of the people who did see me worked on (the American television show) Jimmy Kimmel, and through that I got booked to play on there. It was still tough, and there was still no money, but something wouldn’t let me quit.”

Plan A will not only release the album Ghost is completing amid the stellar writing commissions and her own gigs. She is also signing other artists, with whom she will write and record, adding to her new image as a sort of inadvertent renaissance woman. Her first discovery is a Charterhouse- educated member of the Thai royal family, Hugo Chakrabongse, an established recording and TV performer in his own country.

“All the things that I argue about in the music business, and that I’m unhappy with — no development of artists, no belief, signing acts because everybody else wants to sign them — that’s not going to be my label. It’s going to sign people that I believe in, that make me stop. I don’t understand why record companies need to be the bad guys. They used to be the good guys, who nurtured things and brought them to a wider audience.”

There is no danger that the great financial compensation of her famous collaboration will, as it were, blunt her edge. “I’m so not motivated by the money,” she says. “I haven’t made any yet: it takes ages to come through. But it’s made me hungrier — are you kidding? Now I’ve got to prove to everybody that I can do it as an artist.”

Whether or not Ghost’s second coming proves more fruitful than the first, she is calmer in the knowledge that, this time, she gets to do things her way. “When I first met Joni Mitchell, she said, ‘What do you want to be, a rock’n’roll star or an artist?’ I didn’t know what to say, and I totally misunderstood the question. It’s taken me six years to understand what she meant. I said, ‘Both.’ She said, ‘You can’t be both.’ For years, it bugged me. What did she mean? We all want to be successful, we all want to be good. What she meant was, you can’t want to be both.

“I want to do something that leaves a mark on the world. If I wanted to make money, I’d be a music lawyer. So now I’m standing on this precipice, looking down, thinking, ‘I’m going to jump’, and I’m either going to fly or fall like a stone. But it’s with my record.”

Amanda Ghost’s EP, Blood on the Line, is released on Plan A on May 22

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