Welch describes herself as "not great at logical thinking" and her slightly dreamy air comes to the fore over coffee in the pub next door. After that, she lasted a year at the nearby art college… before being discovered, singing in a club lavatory. School years were spent bunking off lessons in favour of reading scary stories in the library, and not helped by being diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia. The condensed version goes something like this: bohemian upbringing in Camberwell, south London – mother a professor of Renaissance studies, father in advertising, with the whole family once attending a fancy dress party, each dressed as a different Beatles song. She's game despite the cold, happy that the setting chimes with her own aesthetic, not to mention the personal backstory. "I'm a Victorian ghost!" she says, cackling and hopping from foot to foot on vertiginous heels, the Observer photographer having persuaded her to brave the onset of winter down an authentically grubby, Dickensian side street with nothing but a minidress and clouds of dry ice for warmth.
Today, when I meet her at Spitalfields, east London, she's taking her now trademark obsession with, as she puts it, "Victorian gothic" as far as it will go, out of the corporeal realm and into the spirit world. Stalking the Earl's Court stage dressed as a doomed pre-Raphaelite heroine, she looked pleasingly incongruous amid the rigorously drilled and well-scrubbed X Factor graduates, the Alexandra Burkes and JLSs. And the critics were right: the 23-year-old is now a bona fide star after her debut album, Lungs, spent five consecutive weeks at No2 over the summer, denied the top spot only by the inevitable greatest hits package that followed the death of Michael Jackson.Īt last month's T4 "Stars of 2009" concert, its bill comprised entirely of regulars from the year's charts, she was thoroughly enjoying her new-found star status.
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