MARINA & THE DIAMONDS

Marina Diamandis has been waiting all her life for this moment. Her debut Marina & The Diamonds album The Family Jewels has just hit the UK top five and her talents look set to keep her in the public eye throughout 2010. Driven by a lust for fame from a young age, the fire to succeed spurred Diamandis on despite multiple impediments (not least playing no instrument until teaching herself piano at 19).

Listening to the lyrics of The Family Jewels, it almost sounds like a diary the 24-year-old has kept her whole life; Are You Satisfied? opens the album with a tale of an outcast distanced from potential friends in the name of chasing fame.

“Each song is made up of fiction and truth, because I only have my own experiences to draw from,” Marina says. “I think it documents how I got here and why I wanted to get to this point, which is probably the last five years of my life.”

A psychologist would have a field day with these lyrics, so was she concerned about people poking and prodding her about the meanings?

“Yes, but I can’t do anything about it now!” Marina chuckles. “Some of the songs I can’t relate to any more, but that’s good because the songs on the next album won’t be the same.”

It will be hard to capture the mindset of the wide-eyed ingénue now that she has the fame she craved.

“Yeah, and then you’re left with one big fat nothing!” the vivacious singer laughs.

Born to a Greek father and Welsh mother in the market town of Abergavenny on the Welsh/English border, Diamandis moved to London at 19 in an early attempt to fulfil her starry-eyed dreams.

“My parents were really worried, obviously. I refused to go to uni when I was 19 and instead moved to London, so they were worried like any supportive parent would be, but they knew I wanted to do it. I don’t know if they thought I’d be a singer but they knew it would be something like this.”

Her initial band auditions and minor acting roles amounted to very little, but Diamandis doesn’t rule out returning to other creative mediums in the future. 

“I used to love acting and I did do it for a while, but I think you should concentrate on one thing at a time. Maybe I’ll go back to acting when I’m older, but I really just want to write songs for the next 10 years before I move on to something else.”

Marina’s first EP, Mermaid Versus Sailor, was a homemade creation that only sold 70 copies. It has since become a highly sought after rarity on eBay.

“It was a very DIY way to do the EP – I did it in my bedroom and set it up like a CD factory. I spent three days just making them, because they took quite a while to make. I remember Rough Trade and Pure Groove telling me that they wanted to stock my record and it was such a big thing for me. I wasn’t signed and I wasn’t managed, so it was crazy… And it paid my rent for two weeks as well!”

The Family Jewels is an astonishing album that merely hints at the reservoirs of talent within this charismatic beauty. Triple J have already put Mowgli’s Road into high rotation, with Hollywood and I Am Not A Robot destined to follow the debut single onto the airwaves. So what are all the cool sampled sounds in the intro to Mowgli’s Road?

“The toy sounds are a wind-up plastic doll in the beginning and the rest of the sounds are from <freesoundscape.com> where you can type in ‘rainforest’ and get all these sounds that scientists have uploaded from real rainforests. We went a bit mad on there and then I did all these things to bring the song to life and make it more of an adventure for the listener.”

For Rip It Up’s exclusive cover story with Marina & The Diamonds, check out this week’s issue.

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