Gabriella Cilmi: “I felt like a puppet.”

Gabriella Cilmi was a teen star. Now, aged 21, she’s back with dark, sophisticated noir pop album The Sting.

“I figure I’ve been stung a few times in this business, so far,” claims Cilmi. “But I’ve only had an allergic reaction. I haven’t died yet.”

Interestingly, given the current controversy over teen star Miley Cyrus’s overtly sexual new image, Cilmi admits to feeling pressurised and manipulated to present herself in a sexier style.

“Somehow, it wasn’t about music anymore, it was all about the way I looked,” she explains in an interview on Needle Time on Vintage TV. “It was about stylists and choreography and photo shoots, having to wake up and do my hair every morning and look glamorous.”

Cilmi was just thirteen when she was discovered singing with a neighbourhood garage rock band in Melbourne. She was signed by Universal, relocated to London, and groomed for stardom. “Rock was my first love, Janis Joplin was my hero, I always imagined being like her one day. I used to sing Led Zeppelin covers.” But she ended up making an album with Brian Higgins, the songwriter behind hit production team Xenomania. “He used to sit me down and say, ‘You can’t be Robert Plant because you have no Jimmy Page!’ He’d worked with the Sugababes and Girls Aloud but, to be honest, I didn’t know much about them, it wasn’t my world.” Finding common ground in soul music, they wrote Sweet About Me together, which became a global hit in 2008, selling over two million copies. By the time she turned 16, Cilmi was a star but a second album of disco pop, Ten, pushed her right out of her comfort zone, with dance routines, a sexy new image and topless photo shoots for FHM.

“I remember locking myself in the loo, balling my eyes out and thinking how did I end up here? I come from the garage and here I am looking like a baby … I’m not going to say it. It was a hard time for me, I just kind of felt like a bit of a dolly, a puppet. And that’s not ever what I envisaged for myself. Maybe being on the cover of Rolling Stone one day but not being on the cover of FHM. It wasn’t my dream. So that’s when I kind of broke up with my management and the label.”

Her new album (released on her own label, Sweetness Tunes, in November) is the first that she feels really represents her own music and personality. Not that she’s gone back to Zeppelin. The Sting is a trip hop influenced set of lush, emotional songs with a dark, downbeat undercurrent. “It’s about trying to let the past go”. She cut off her long locks of hair for the video for her comeback single, Sweeter Than History, which she describes as “a bit of a symbolic act.”

Cilmi’s experience is not unusual, and she is determined to express “no regrets” but it is a reminder that, while many pop stars insist they are calling the shots and essentially exploiting themselves, much of this business is built on the manipulation of young people in a very public forum, often before they have really worked out what their own boundaries are. “It’s the oldest story in the music business,” sighs Gabriella. “I don’t want to get bitter about it. I learned some lessons the hard way. I felt everything was taken out of my hands. Everyone had an agenda, management, label, co-writers. I brainwashed myself into thinking that everything was OK but you keep on running into yourself when things aren’t right.”

This article was first published in The Daily Telegraph and is reproduced with their permission.