Pop will right itself

Hailed as the antidote to dumb lyrics and cheap exhibitionism, New Zealand teenager Lorde is a new kind of ingenue. She talks to Bernadette McNulty

When Lorde - real name Ella Yelich-O'Connor - hit number one in the American Hot 100, she was the youngest solo performer to do so since Tiffany in 1987.

She also happened to knock Miley Cyrus from the top spot - a significant fact for those who have greeted O'Connor as a kind of Trojan horse, come to deliver us from the saccharine smiles and cynical sexual provocation clogging the charts.

O'Connor, 17, sings acutely observed lyrics about the real joy and boredom of being a teenager, over hypnotic electronic beats, a combination that has proved irresistible around the world.

Lorde's sharp narrative observations - on both the single, and her critically acclaimed follow-up album, Pure Heroine - have led her to be described as the voice of her generation, and mentioned in the same breath as everyone from Joan of Arc to the heroic Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai.

"Everyone has an opinion on me," she says. "I read that comparison with Malala and I am unworthy to be in the same sentence as her. I have done nothing." O'Connor, it seems, is happy just to be a new kind of pop star.

"I didn't expect to be in this world but I think it's kind of cool. For a long time, pop has been this laughable, shameful thing. But it's actually gratifying and fun and can unite populations, which I think is incredibly powerful. So hopefully I am showing that pop can be taken seriously."

She turned 17 in November. With her gothic- pale skin offset by dark crimson lips, black-rimmed, wide-set eyes and waist-length, mahogany curls, she could hardly be more different from the plastic Lolitas who have come before her. She looks much older than she is - a perception reinforced by the deep, commanding timbre of her voice.

O'Connor's success comes only weeks after her 28-year-old compatriot Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever winner of the Booker prize. It's quite a wake-up call for those of us who had assumed that modern New Zealand culture didn't stretch far beyond Hobbits, Crowded House and Jane Campion. Is something in the water in Auckland at the moment producing these freakishly talented young women? She laughs, "It is a little bit weird. Eli is so talented. I loved her first novel that came out when she was 22, it was so beautiful." She goes on: "I think maybe it is that we are just so far away. Growing up, I was like, I want to do something and get out of here. I love New Zealand, and going back there now that I have travelled, I appreciate it more. But as a teenager growing up in Auckland, I was like, "- this?"

On stage the previous night, O'Connor had betrayed no sign that she had only 20 live performances under her belt. While in photographs and videos she adopts the withering, unflinching glare of Kristen Stewart, star of the Twilight films, in performance O'Connor has a goofy theatricality: one minute she is indulging in Stevie Nicks-style witchy, closed-eyed singing, shaking her hair and flicking her hands out; the next, she's all broad smiles and wisecracks, jokingly heckling her audience.

Yet when she is not being Lorde, O'Connor is clearly a much quieter, more introspective character who could have easily taken a more literary path in life. The second-eldest of four children, O'Connor grew up in the North Shore area of Auckland. Her father is a civil engineer and her mother, Sonja Yelich, a published poet who encouraged her daughter's bookish tendencies. At age 12, O'Connor was reading Raymond Carver; by 14, she was editing her mother's master's thesis.

"Mum always made sure there were lots of books around. For a long time we had a TV but no DVD player. Then Mum got one but she only allowed us to watch old stuff like Wonder Woman, The Partridge Family and Little House on the Prairie. Those shows are so cool."

O'Connor found fame after a friend's father saw her, at age 12, performing a Duffy cover in a school talent contest. He sent out tapes of her singing that arrived in the hands of a Universal talent scout. "It was a strange thing for me to launch myself into the spotlight," she says. "I had always been the shy, bookish girl."

Her sound, forged with 30-year-old former punk musician Joel Little, is simple yet cinematic. She spins tales of penniless but happy nights out, full of longing and loneliness, that reject clichés of mindless fun and decadence.

"From the beginning, I have written about and for my peers and friends. It's a unifying thing, a call to arms," she says. "You never hear people making generalisations about adults, yet everyone will make them about teenagers. People forget that we are human beings and that we think differently from each other."

Her thoughtful take on teenage life is a million miles from the histrionic exhibitionism of Cyrus. O'Connor is a feminist who has attacked the pernicious effect of Photoshop culture on young girls' self-esteem, but she insists that she isn't setting herself up as an anti-Cyrus figure. "That is definitely an older person's reaction to my songs," she says. "I would absolutely take my clothes off if I wanted to and that would be my choice and I would be empowered by it." - ©The Daily Telegraph, London