Source: DailyMail.co.uk

Is Leona Lewis too sweet to be a star?

A winner of X Factor in 2006: Leona Lewis possess an inner core of steel and self-belief

Leona Lewis is posing for the camera. Her normally corkscrew hair has been ironed, and thickened by several long shanks of hair extensions. Thick caterpillars of false eyelashes frame her vivid green eyes. (Her eyes are amazing, by the way, like lamps.)

Her feet are bare beneath her blue jeans: she became a vegetarian on ethical grounds at the age of 12, and eschews leather, preferring to slop around in Ugg-like boots from Primark.

She is, as she cheerfully admits when we sit down to talk, a typical British “pear”: she is tiny on top, with fabulous shoulders, and deliciously curvy below.

I ask whether her record company, during the year she spent away from the public eye putting together her debut album, made her embark on a boot-camp training regime.

It is common for young, female aspiring pop stars to be subjected to a regime of diet sheets and personal trainers that would shame an Olympic athlete: I was shocked when I interviewed the up and coming members of All Saints at the amount of time they were supposed to spend in the gym.

Myleene Klass, too, once told me how she was made to watch her videos just to see how fat she looked on camera. But Leona, despite the painfully shy, nervous demeanour we saw on TV when she won The X Factor in 2006, has an inner core of steel and self-belief.

“I don’t let people push me around. I have to feel so comfortable in what I’m wearing, I have to feel comfortable about what I’m singing.

Leona at this week’s Brit Awards where she performed her number one hit ‘Bleeding Love’

“Totally. I’m trying to stay as healthy as possible but there’s no pressure to be really skinny. No. That’s just a bit wrong. Anyway, I find the gym boring.”

It would be easy for Leona, the 22-year-old from Hackney, East London, who is in possession of “the greatest voice of all”, according to none other than record producer Clive Davis, who discovered Whitney Houston, to turn into a diva.

Budding stars all say they are never going to forget where they came from, but they all do, sooner or later.

“I think if there was any change, I’d be quick to know,” Leona says.

“I haven’t found myself changing. I’ve remained exactly the same. I don’t allow people to do everything for me – not at all. I try to do as much as possible for myself.”

She says she hasn’t had time to spend any money, other than to buy her first car, a black Mini Cooper; her favourite stores are still Topshop and H&M.

When we meet she is about to go on holiday to the Caribbean with her boyfriend Lou Al-Chamaa; they met when they were both ten and started going out aged 17.

I wonder if she splashed out on Christmas presents for her family on a recent trip to New York and she shakes her head.

“I bought Lou a PlayStation game, I bought Dad a chain, I got everyone bits and pieces, like perfume.”

Leona says: ‘My parents saw that I loved to sing and that I was really, really passionate about music’

She still has the same group of girlfriends she’s always had. “My friends are the ones I’ve had since primary school.

“They’re really cool and such a good bunch of people. They came to every one of my gigs before all of this happened, you know; they were there in the smoky pubs, wherever.”

And while I’d been imagining Leona holed up in a pile near the Beckhams in Los Angeles, where she spent a lot of time recording her album, working with the likes of Dallas Austin (who produced Michael Jackson), Soulshock & Karlin (Brandy, Monica, Whitney), Jam and Lewis (Prince), Walter Afanasieff (Mariah Carey, Destiny’s Child), and Salaam Remi (Ms Dynamite, Amy Winehouse), she says she is “still renting: it’s a nice, normal flat in Hackney.

“I love being near my family: I’m just around the corner. I know there are other places in London that are lovely but, for now, I’m quite stable where I am.”

When I ask how she has resisted shopping for designer clothes, she rather sweetly talks about the difficulty of finding accessories that aren’t leather, insisting, despite her multi-million-pound record deal, that those by Stella McCartney are “way too expensive. I’ve got Stella McCartney shoes for when I’m doing shoots like this but I don’t own them”. (One of her ambitions is to launch her own vegan range of accessories and an ethical clothing line.)

Leona also stays away from diamonds as she “cannot be sure of their provenance”.

She adores animals – she grew up aching for a pony, but had to make do with riding lessons. Her mum has a yorkie, while Lou, who accompanied her to our shoot, has just left with their rottweiler.

Leona says whenever she arrives at yet another hotel, she will look on the internet to find out where the nearest vegetarian restaurant is.

“I like to cook for myself…it’s hard when you’re travelling.

“I’d love to be able to rescue animals one day and be able to home them – stuff like that

Simon Cowell claims that unlike Whitney Houston (far right), Leona has her feet on the ground

I read out a remarkable list of statistics. Her album Spirit sold 1.5 million copies in just two months.

Her song ‘Bleeding Love’ – which she sang for the first time on last year’s X Factor, looking heartbreakingly lovely in a £30,000 Roberto Cavalli dress – became last year’s biggest selling single.

Her Christmas number one ‘A Moment Like This’ sold over half a million copies in its first week, the fastest selling female debut of all time.

She was nominated in no fewer than four categories at last week’s Brit Awards.

She is on the brink of conquering America: ‘Bleeding Love’ is set for release there next month, and she’s already been photographed as one of the new faces of 2008 by American Vogue.

Does she still pinch herself to make sure this is all really happening? “Almost! When I’m doing stuff like this photo shoot or making a video, I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’ and I just think that I’m so lucky to be able to do this because it’s what I’ve always wanted.”

I wonder whether she is worried her relationship won’t stay the course, that her meteoric fame will leave her boyfriend behind.

Lou is still studying, and is an electrician; nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s so easy to have your head turned by, ooh, I don’t know, a man with a yacht.

“Well,” she says slowly, “the thing is, with me, my family life and my private life are very important, and my management and the people around me know that, so I’m not away from home for really long periods.

“I manage my time well. Me and Lou are good friends and I think that’s the important thing, that we’re friends and that we have a laugh together.”

Leona grew up with two brothers – Kyle, now 21 and a mechanic, and Bradley, 26, who works at MTV – in the Stamford Hill part of Hackney, a decidedly downwardly mobile part of London which has a reputation for street violence (I too lived there for ten years and was often afraid to step outside my front door, fearful of being mugged or eaten by a pit bull).

She recently spoke about stabbings and shootings involving friends, but today seems determined to play down the dangers of inner-city life. “If you grow up there you get used to the rubbish that goes on,” she says.

“I don’t remember ever being scared because I knew so many people around there.”

Whether this is because she led a very sheltered life, having been ferried at an early age to stage school, or whether she has just been very well schooled not to stoke controversy by her PR company, I have no idea.

But her experience growing up does sound too good to be true.

Although the tabloids made much last year of the fact that a young friend of hers had been murdered, it turns out she never knew him at all.

It seems very little that was real was ever allowed to touch her – apart from when her cousin Billie died from leukaemia when she was 14; Leona sang ‘Over the Rainbow”‘ at her funeral.

When I ask what her house was like, she says it was “just a normal house”, with posters of Take That and the Spice Girls on her bedroom wall.

Her mum Marie, a social worker, and dad Joe, a youth offenders’ officer, scrimped and saved to send her to the Sylvia Young and Italia Conti stage schools, but there was a brief period when the money ran out and she attended the local comp.

Ah! Was she bullied for being a stage brat, with a far from East London accent?

“No, they were like… ‘What did you do again?’ and I would be like, ‘I did singing and dancing in the afternoon and normal lessons in the morning.’ And they were like, ‘That’s so cool!’”

Your parents must have seen something special in you to work so hard to send you to stage school?

“They saw that I loved to sing and that I was really, really passionate about music.”

Before The X Factor, Leona already had some small parts in commercials and TV, most notably as an extra in EastEnders, under her belt.

She had also studied at the Brit School, whose notable alumni include Amy Winehouse (no, she didn’t really know her, and doesn’t have an opinion on her) and Katie Melua (ditto, and ditto).

I venture that her teachers must have heard her voice and realised what an enormous talent they had on their hands, but Leona is too reticent to say yes.

“I think it was all about learning and that’s what I did. I was just there to sing and learn.

“I trained classically from when I was eight, and studied opera.

“I went back to the Brit School yesterday and it was so sweet. One of the boys was like, ‘I’m trying to get into music and it’s really hard,’ and I remember when I was his age, and I had that dream.

“I told him, ‘You just have to keep going for it because there will be one door that will open, and you have to grab the opportunity.’ That is what happened with The X Factor – it was the one opportunity I had to take.”

Would she have made it without The X Factor?

She had already been contacted by one of the producers who ended up working on the album just because he had heard her sing on MySpace.

“I hope I would have. But it’s so hard to get into the music industry. I worked part-time as a waitress so that I could pay to go into the studio and it didn’t matter if I was getting paid money to sing. As long as I could survive, I would do it.”

I ask how strong she was academically at school. Did she have a backup plan? “Not really. No!

“My favourite subject was English literature and I still write loads of short stories and stuff like that.”

Who is your favourite writer? “Um, I really like Jodi Picoult.”

Her half-Irish, half-Italian mother and Guyanese father met through their youth work. Did they encounter any prejudice as an interracial couple?

“Not at all.”

Who does she take after?

“I am sensitive, like Mum. But I’m also ambitious, like Dad. I look like both of them. I’ve got Mum’s eyes and Dad’s nose. I don’t know where I got my eye colour from because my mum’s got blue eyes.”

Are you into beauty products?

“I love bronzer – that’s my best friend! I pile it on! I think that just keeping your skin hydrated is the best thing you can do, but I do love eyelash curlers.”

I tell her I love her album (”Thank you, thank you, yay!”), and that her cover of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ (a brave choice, given Roberta Flack’s definitive version) made the hairs on the back of my neck not only stand on end but perform somersaults.

But I don’t know. I want the artists I love to have suffered a little, and to have lived a lot.

Soul singer Mary J Blige’s voice might crack with emotion occasionally, but there is no mistaking that she has experienced genuine pain (an emotion Leona’s voice fails to put across; one critic in The Observer noted that “it’s all goo, all the time”).

Dear, sweet Leona, who doesn’t even drink coffee, let alone alcohol, isn’t about to do a Britney or an Amy or a Whitney (”The difference between Whitney and Leona is that Leona has her feet on the ground, she is very quiet and respectful,” commented Simon Cowell, her champion on the talent show), and while the fact that Leona is so nice and normal might not make great headlines, it sure as hell means she will have a much better, happier life.

And that is far more important, isn’t it?

• Leona’s double-sided single ‘Better in Time’/'Footprints in the Sand’, sold in aid of Sport Relief, will be released by Syco Music on 10 March.