Ketevan Katie Melua (; , ; born 16 September 1984) is a British singer. She was born in Kutaisi, Georgia and raised in Belfast and London. Under the management of composer Mike Batt, she was signed to the small Dramatico record label. She made her musical debut in 2003 and within three years, she was the United Kingdom's best-selling female artist as well as Europe's highest-selling female artist.
In November 2003, Melua released her first album, Call Off the Search, which reached the top of the United Kingdom album charts and sold 1.8 million copies in its first five months of release. Her second album, Piece by Piece, was released in September 2005, and has gone platinum (one million units sold) four times. She released her third studio album Pictures in October 2007.
According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2008, Melua had amassed a fortune of £18 million, making her the seventh-richest British musician under the age of 30.
She possesses a mezzo-soprano vocal range.
Early life
Ketevan Melua was born on 16 September 1984 to Amiran and Tamara Melua in Kutaisi, Georgia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. She is also partly of Canadian and Russian ancestry. She was baptised into the Georgian Orthodox Church. Melua spent her first years with her grandparents in Tbilisi before moving with her parents and brother to the city of Batumi, where her father worked as a heart specialist. and according to her, "Now, when I'm staying in luxurious hotels, I think back to those days". During her time in Northern Ireland, she attended the Roman Catholic schools St Catherine's Primary School and Dominican College, Fortwilliam, while her younger brother attended state schools.
Nationality
On 10 August 2005, just before she turned 21, Melua became a British citizen along with her parents and brother. The citizenship ceremony took place in Weybridge, Surrey. Becoming a British citizen meant that Melua had held three citizenships before she was 21; first Soviet, Georgian and currently, British.
After the ceremony, Melua stated her pride at her newest nationality. "As a family, we have been very fortunate to find a happy lifestyle in this country and we feel we belong. We still consider ourselves to be Georgian, because that is where our roots are, and I return to Georgia every year to see my uncles and grandparents, but I am proud to now be a British citizen". She has skydived four times and taken several flying lessons, and in 2004 she was lowered from a building in New Zealand at . When asked about Melua being an 'adrenaline junkie', Mike Batt said, "she enjoys extremes, but in life her emotions are always in check".
In September 2010, Melua was ordered by her doctors to stop working for a few months after suffering a nervous breakdown, resulting in her hospitalisation for six weeks. As a result, all touring and promotional activities were postponed until the following year.
Melua opened up about the breakdown years later in an interview with The Independent, saying that it ended up being one of the best things that had ever happened to her, as she said it helped to quash a feeling of superiority she felt by being a successful musician in the music industry. "It was petrifying, but it put a stop to fantasies of being able to do anything. The oddest thing about this job is the sense of superiority you get. It was a huge wake-up call. I was completely out of it for two weeks, and in hospital for six. There was a bunch of things going on, things at home and crazy work schedules, and you really believe the world revolved around you and it doesn't."
In January 2012, Melua confirmed her engagement to World Superbike racer and musician James Toseland. The couple married on 1 September 2012 in the Nash Conservatory at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, southwest London. A 2020 interview with the national Swedish news agency TT revealed that the couple had separated. Interviewed on ITV's Lorraine live from West London on 16 October 2020, Melua confirmed that the couple had divorced.
In August 2022, Melua announced her pregnancy with her first child and gave birth to her son, Sandro, in November. Speaking to ITV News in March 2023 ahead of her European tour, Melua said that she should not have to choose between childcare and her career and that Sandro would accompany her throughout the tour.
Career
Early stage
After an upbringing in politically unstable Georgia, Melua planned initially to become either an historian or a politician. This changed in 2000, at the age of 15, when Melua took part in a talent competition on British television channel ITV called "Stars Up Their Noses" (a spoof of Stars in Their Eyes) as part of the children's programme Mad for It. Melua won the contest by singing Badfinger's "Without You". The prize was £350 worth of MFI vouchers, with which she bought a chair for her father. Had she lost the contest, she would have been gunged.
BRIT School and Mike Batt
After completing her GCSEs, Melua attended the BRIT School for the Performing Arts in the London Borough of Croydon, undertaking a BTEC with an A-level in music. When studying at the school, Melua began to write songs and met her future manager and producer, Mike Batt. and a singer capable of singing "jazz and blues in an interesting way". After hearing Melua sing "Faraway Voice" (a song she wrote about the death of her idol Eva Cassidy) Batt signed the 18-year-old Melua to his small Dramatico recording and management company and took her into the studio, producing her first three albums during the subsequent years, plus her fifth and sixth albums.
William Orbit
For her fourth album, The House (2010), Melua worked with producer William Orbit. She said about the experience: "The whole thing has been really exciting. It was the same feeling I had the first time I went skydiving. I was really quite nervous, but I knew all I had to do was let myself go and it was going to feel amazing. I wasn't trying to get away from anything. It was more about going towards something. I wanted the music to be inspired by the future, something unknown that's never been heard before, but at the same time hold on to the values of the music of the past, to try and tap into something that's so ancient and old that it's kind of forgotten. I thought that, if we went far enough in both directions, we could end up in the same place". Melua would collaborate again with Orbit over a decade later on Orbit's 2022 album, The Painter, on the opening track "Duende".
Recordings
thumb|150px|left|Melua at a signing in 2004
Call off the Search (2003)
Melua's debut album, Call Off the Search, was released on 3 November 2003 and featured two songs written by Melua: "Belfast (Penguins and Cats)", a song about Melua's experience of her time in the troubled capital of Northern Ireland, and "Faraway Voice", a song about the death of Eva Cassidy. Melua also covered songs by Delores J. Silver ("Learnin' the Blues"), John Mayall ("Crawling up a Hill"), Randy Newman ("I Think It's Going to Rain Today") and James Shelton ("Lilac Wine", originally a UK hit for singer Elkie Brooks). The other six songs on the album were by Mike Batt.
It was initially difficult for Melua and Batt to obtain airplay for the album's lead single, the Mike Batt song "The Closest Thing to Crazy". This changed when BBC Radio 2 producer Paul Walters heard the single and played it on the popular Sir Terry Wogan breakfast show. Wogan played "The Closest Thing to Crazy" frequently in the summer of 2003. Wogan's support raised Melua's profile and when Call Off the Search was released in November 2003 supported by a TV campaign financed by Batt, it entered the top 40 UK albums chart. The single achieved the number 10 spot in the UK chart. After an appearance on the Royal Variety Show the album was further boosted and Batt continued a relentless marketing campaign which saw the album hit the number one spot in January 2004. Call Off the Search reached the top five in Ireland, top 20 in Norway and top 30 in a composite European chart. In the UK the album sold 1.9 million copies, making it six times platinum, and spent six weeks at the top of the UK charts. Subsequent singles from the album did not repeat the success of the first – the second single and album title track "Call Off the Search" reached number 19, and the third single "Crawling up a Hill" got to number 41.
Melua released a 20th Anniversary Edition of the album on 3 November 2023.
Piece by Piece (2005)
Melua's second album, Piece by Piece, was released on 26 September 2005. Its lead single was the Mike Batt song, "Nine Million Bicycles", which was released a week before the album on 19 September and was number three in the UK singles chart. The album contains four songs written by Melua, four by Batt (including "Nine Million Bicycles"), one Batt/Melua collaboration and three more songs described as new versions of "great songs". The band line-up was the same as on the first album. The album debuted at the number one spot on the UK Albums Chart in the week of 3 October 2005. This album broke Melua across Europe where it sold 1 million copies in Germany alone and achieved the number one position in Billboard's "European" albums chart.
On 30 September 2005, Melua came under criticism in The Guardian from writer and scientist Simon Singh for the lyrics (written by Mike Batt) of the track "Nine Million Bicycles". Batt's disputed lyrics were:
They were interpreted by Singh as an assault on the accuracy of the work of cosmologists which sparked a series of letters from other Guardian readers, agreeing or disagreeing. On 15 October, Melua and Singh appeared on the BBC's Today programme, and Melua light-heartedly performed the song during the interview, including Singh's tongue-in-cheek amendments to the lyrics: