Birdy spreads her wings: We catch up with the 17-year-old singer-songwriter, whose career is certainly taking flight

By JANE GORDON

PUBLISHED: 00:01, 29 September 2013 | UPDATED: 00:01, 29 September 2013

Two albums, a star performance at the Paralympic opening ceremony and a recording on The Hunger Games soundtrack - extraordinary achievements for a girl of only 17. So why does singer-songwriter Birdy reckon she’s 'just a normal teenager'?

Music was a big part of Birdy's upbringing and it seemed 'normal' to be writing her own material aged only ten

It isn’t until you come face to face with the artist known as Birdy (AKA Jasmine van den Bogaerde) that you believe that she really is only 17. On the way to interview her I am openly sceptical about the singer-songwriter who was ‘discovered’ aged just 12 and had, by the time she was 16, not only produced an album of haunting covers (most famously Bon Iver’s ‘Skinny Love’) but had also captured the nation’s hearts with her breathtaking performance of Antony And The Johnsons’ ‘Bird Gerhl’ at last year’s Paralympics opening ceremony.

Indeed, there has been so much hype in the run-up to the launch of the second album from Birdy (even her name sounds just a little fake) that by the time we meet I am expecting a precocious and glossier younger UK sister of Taylor Swift or Selena Gomez.

'I grew up hearing my mother practising for her concerts – and loving it'

But within minutes, it’s obvious that this isn’t your average manufactured music industry 17-going-on-27-year-old. She is hiding – like any ordinary teenager – behind a wall of extension-free hair. It is almost impossible to believe that this slight, hesitant girl could be the same person whose singing voice entranced the 80,000 spectators in the Olympic stadium last year and dazzled a worldwide TV audience estimated at one billion. What did that feel like?

‘Before the ceremony started I was terrified, but going out there to perform was the most amazing thing. You couldn’t see anything very clearly – it was just colours and dancers – and it was very emotional and beautiful so I didn’t really feel nervous because I felt no one could see me. There was so much going on in the stadium that, thankfully, I wasn’t the focus of attention so it was like I was playing to myself – I was just happy to be there. It was probably one of my favourite things ever,’ she says.

'It's so cool being compared to Adele - I love her'

Anything but precocious, Birdy – granddaughter of the 20th Baron Teynham – seems just a little bemused by her fame, and is horrified at the suggestion that anyone but her parents could have come up with the nickname that has become her ‘brand’. ‘Birdy is what I have always been called. My parents may have put Jasmine on my birth certificate, but when I was a tiny baby they nicknamed me Birdy because of the way I opened my mouth to be fed, and it just stuck. The only people who ever called me Jasmine were the teachers at my old school, so now whenever I hear the name I feel like I am being told off.’

It is, she insists, her school friends (several of whom text her during the interview) and her family who have kept her grounded and ‘normal’ despite her astonishing talent and recording success. How do they react, I ask, when they hear about her recording a track with Mumford & Sons (for the soundtrack of the Pixar film Brave), having a song on the soundtrack album of the movie The Hunger Games or working with producer and OneRepublic front man Ryan Tedder, who likens her talent to that of Adele and Beyoncé?

‘I read The Hunger Games books in about a week and I was so inspired that I wrote a song, “Just a Game”, and Lionsgate – who made the film – put it on the soundtrack. That was really cool. Then Mumford & Sons needed a female singer, and they had heard me on the radio and got in touch, which was incredible because I love their music,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what my friends think because I never tell them. They find out afterwards and they are really cross that I don’t say anything. 

SCROLL DOWN TO HEAR ALL ABOUT YOU

Birdy's great-uncle Sir Dirk Bogarde

Birdy's debut album

I don’t know why I don’t tell them – it’s just…well, embarrassing.’

Birdy’s insistence that she is ‘just a normal teenager’ is touching and, in some ways, totally true. Ask her what she likes doing most and she answers, as most 17-year-olds would, that she loves ‘being with my friends and having fun’.

Ask her what her favourite TV programmes are and she admits to watching Neighbours, Home and Away and EastEnders. Ask her what her favourite food is and she confesses to loving McDonald’s and pasta carbonara. But however ordinary her tastes, her background is as extraordinary as her voice.

The daughter of concert pianist Sophie Roper-Curzon and writer Rupert Bogarde, Birdy has two full siblings – Jake, 15, and Caitlin, 14 – as well as two elder half-brothers, Moses, 24, and Sam, 22, from her father’s first marriage to the late Jacqueline Bond. All five children were raised in a mill house on the Pylewell Park estate of Birdy’s maternal grandfather Lord Teynham. With most of her mother’s nine siblings also living in houses on the 1,500-acre estate adjacent to the New Forest – and her uncle David, her grandfather’s heir, in residence in the main 18th-century house – she enjoyed a ‘wonderful’ childhood growing up with ‘lots and lots of cousins.

‘It was an inspirational place, with all my mum’s family living very close on this old, run-down estate. Most of her brothers and sisters had a child of about my age, so there was always someone to play with. There was lots of space to run around and do things like go swimming on the beaches that border part of the land. I do know how lucky I am,’ she says.

Privileged though her upbringing sounds, it did not involve a private education. Birdy did her GCSEs (her parents made sure that she kept up her academic work alongside her music) at Priestlands School, the comprehensive closest to her home in Lymington, before going on to Brockenhurst Sixth Form College to study for her A-levels. ‘But I left college a few months ago before actually taking any exams because I had reached the stage where I needed to concentrate on my music – and my parents agreed,’ she says. ‘I really enjoy studying, though, so maybe one day I will go back and take my A-levels.’

Leaving school has in no way estranged her from her tight-knit group of friends, many of whom appear in the evocative video for ‘Wings’, the first single from her new album Fire Within, which is shot in and around Pylewell House and also stars many of her cousins and her younger sister Caitlin. ‘The song is about having a wonderful time and the memory of being with your friends and kind of wishing you were back there, so I wanted it to feel like a festival, and then the director had the idea of putting everyone in carnival clothes to make it a bit weirder and more interesting. We had a brilliant time making it, everyone just looked so amazing. My little sister Caitlin and two of my cousins are the ones riding the horses, and in the shots of me on the swing I am with my best friend Becky.’

Birdy with Mumford & Sons

Performing at the Paralympics opening ceremony

If Birdy’s background on her mother’s side of the family isn’t colourful enough, her father Rupert is the nephew of award-winning actor (and bestselling writer) Sir Dirk Bogarde, who died in 1999. Rupert has taken the abridged surname adopted by his uncle, and it’s under that name that he published a disturbing memoir of his early life with his first wife Jacqueline. In 1993 Jacqueline vanished from the holiday home for diabetics that the couple ran near the French Pyrenees and her body was not found for six years. Rupert’s book Daybreak Into Darkness is an account of the tragic events leading up to her disappearance. ‘I haven’t read it yet. He is always saying “wait a bit longer”, because he thinks there are subjects that I might find hard to understand until I am a bit older,’ says Birdy.

There is no doubt that the slightly bohemian environment in which she grew up has influenced Birdy’s own creativity. She has, she says, no memory of life before music and cannot confirm at what age her mother began to teach her to play the family’s Bechstein piano. ‘I grew up hearing my mother practising for her concerts – which she did for hours on end – and loving it.

I learned a lot by ear and, looking back, I was quite naughty: my writing came out of my mum telling me to practise, and instead I would sit at the piano and find something else to do,’ she says with a grin.

Music was such a part of their family life that it seemed perfectly normal to be writing music at the age of ten and entering a national singing competition at 11 (she didn’t win the Open Mic UK competition until she was 12, but she had tried to audition the previous year). ‘My whole family is musical. My elder brother Moses is a drummer with the band Native Roses – I used to sing a bit with them – and Sam is very talented musically, too. Then Caitlin – she is definitely the most feisty of all of us – is an amazing singer.

My brother Jake, who is the sweetest thing in the family, is more artistic – he paints and draws brilliantly,’ she says.

Some of the tracks on Birdy’s beautiful new self-penned album are heartfelt love songs. Was she, I ask, inspired to write them by anything in her own romantic past, or even present? ‘I am so busy with my music that I don’t have time for boyfriends. I think it would be unfair if I was in a relationship so I guess I will have to wait a while.’

She is equally unworldly when it comes to the other thorny subject of money. With industry insiders comparing her talent to Adele’s, how does she view the idea of massive album sales boosting her pocket money? ‘It’s so cool being compared to Adele – I love her – and, of course, it would be nice if I were to earn a lot of money, but it’s not my motivation. Money and fame have never been a part of this for me – I love what I am doing and I would do it anyway, even if I didn’t get paid,’ she says.

Since she has so far managed to remain grounded despite the kind of success few other 17-year-olds achieve (in April she performed three sellout concerts at the Sydney Opera House), it seems unlikely that any future achievements will turn her head. In fact, her main worry as she prepares to go on tour next month is how she will cope on stage when performing songs that won’t allow her to hide behind a grand piano.

BIRDIE'S BONUSSES

Latest music download High Hopes by Kodaline. 
Musical inspiration Tracy Chapman.
Favourite TV The Vampire Diaries.
Surprising secret ambition To be 
a hairdresser. 
Guilty pleasure Deal Or No Deal.
dog or cat? Both!
Currently reading The Kingmaker’s Daughter by Philippa Gregory.
All-time top film The Shawshank Redemption.
Night owl or early birdy? Night owl.
Can't leave home without? Music!
Saving up for A piano.

‘I am a bit scared because some of the songs are more upbeat, so I am going to be standing on the stage and there is pressure on me to sort of dance. I don’t think I could be taught to do any proper “moves” but I am going to have to learn how to sway and not look weird. I am terrified because I am so clumsy. I try to hide it sitting behind a piano and, so far, it’s been OK,’ she says. ‘But I play the guitar as well for the first time, which is cool – and maybe that can take over from the piano as my prop, so people aren’t focusing on my dance moves.’

Fire Within is available now on 14th Floor/Atlantic; officialbirdy.com

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2430719/Birdy-spreads-wings-We-catch-17-year-old-singer-songwriter-career-certainly-taking-flight.html#ixzz2gglpbRy9
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook