total:spec: Alesha

There was a point towards the end of girlband Mis-Teeq’s short but memorable career that it became obvious that unofficial frontwoman Alesha Dixon had the potential to become a super-sized solo star in her own right. It was at the beginning of 2004, when Alesha found herself on the set of the video for N*E*R*D’s hit-to-be She Wants To Move.
The resulting video made Alesha the star of the show; a podium-straddling star attraction in a futuristic club on a spaceship. While Pharrell Williams and his bandmates performed around her, Alesha proved herself more than just another bit of music video totty, exuding both the old school sass of Tina Turner and the booty-shaking skills of Beyonce. A star was born right there. Not, Alesha insists, that you’d have known it if you spent any time with the singer off camera.
“I was so nervous because I wanted to make sure I did a good job,” says the 27-year-old. “I felt sick throughout most of the day. You know when you’ve got adrenalin, excitement, nerves all flying around? And the fact that I’m standing on this podium and it was spinning around didn’t help. I actually heaved at one point and I had to have a break. They gave me this oxygen mask thing. How funny is that? It sounds dramatic but it was just because I was giving it so much and exerting so much energy. People that know me, know I’m normally quite talkative and confident, but if you just met me on that shoot you’d think I was a really quiet girl.”
Anyone that remembers Alesha from Mis-Teeq will not think of her as quiet. Her unmistakable shouty rapping style gave Mis-Teeq its distinct sound and marked the girlband out as a more interesting pop act than their contemporaries. The band’s bridging of the worlds of pop and garage, at the time a hot and innovative musical genre, gave the three-piece - also made up of Sabrina Washington and Su-Elise Nash - a credible angle that contributed to their success.
As such Alesha (the Dixon has been dropped since she married former So Solid Crew member MC Harvey and launched her solo career), who was always the driving force behind the band, was always going to be an interesting prospect as a solo star. Thankfully she’s delivered on her unspoken promise with an eclectic and adventurous debut album called Fired Up. You’ll already have heard the sassy guitar funk of debut single Lipstick, which livened up the otherwise colourless summer charts. Alesha delivers more funk on the title track, this time horn-driven, then there’s the jazzy ska of second single Knock Down, the dancehall floor-filler Ting-A-Ling, and the sprightly, sumptuous ballad Free, to name just a few.
“My main thought before I went into the studio was that I didn’t want to work with any producers I’d worked with in the band,” says Alesha. “Not because we didn’t have good relationships, just because I needed to have a different sound. So that was a conscious decision. I knew, as well, that I wanted funk, reggae, and pop in there. I did try a load of R&B songs but it’s not me. I can appreciate R&B and I love it but it’s not right for my personality. I wouldn’t want to do it just because I did it in Mis-Teeq, or just because I’m a black girl and people might expect me to do that. It wouldn’t be true to who I am. I’m in touch with many different styles of music and I think it was important to make an album that says that. And I wanted to go slightly more leftfield as well.”
Fans of Alesha’s signature rapid-fire hollering will be relieved to hear that her rapping has survived the change of direction, however.
“That is always going to be part of it as long as I enjoy it,” says Alesha. “My husband would say to me when I was recording the album, ‘Don’t you think you should do some more rapping?’ But I’m not calculated with it. If it suits the record then I’ll put it on. I won’t just put it on because people expect it and might be disappointed if they don’t hear it. The songs on the record where there’s rapping it felt right, and that’s what I’m like with everything I do. Come the second record if I’m in a place where I’m not rapping any more and not feeling it, I won’t do it. So it’s there but toned down. I’m not so shouty any more,” she laughs.
Alesha discovered she could rap quite by accident. During the late 90s she was at a family house party where her uncle was MCing. She joined him and kept repeating his lines. The reaction she got got from those watching got her thinking she wasn’t too shabby at this rapping lark and she started writing her own lyrics. But she found it tough getting hold of a mic at parties and clubs.
“I’d go to clubs like Twice As Nice and the guys wouldn’t give me the mic,” she recalls. “They’d look at me in my sexy dress and think, what the hell can she do? They were so dismissive. But there were no other female MCs round then.”



Ultimately Alesha’s rapping would prove the key to her and her band’s success, but becoming a pop star wasn’t initially on the agenda for Alesha when she was growing up. Although she was inspired by watching the likes of Madonna and Janet Jackson on TV to go to dance classes, she never thought it within the realms of possibility that she might one day perform for a living herself.
“I didn’t think I could be a pop star,” she says. “I thought they were from Mars or something. It was out of my reach. So I thought I’d become a teacher instead.”
Born and raised in Welwyn Garden City, the greenbelt town situated in Hertfordshire, just north of London, Alesha was the only child of her English mother and Jamaican father. That said, she grew up with a number of half-siblings and stepbrothers and sisters. As such she doesn’t put her aptitude for performing down to a craving for attention.
“I grew up in what I would call a very dysfunctional family,” laughs Alesha. “My irony was that I had lots of siblings, but sometimes I felt like an only child. So that was interesting. But I never craved attention. I never felt I lacked in it. I have a great relationship with my mum, she’s my best friend.
“The only problem was, when I was younger, I was embarrassed to tell people about my family, because at school most kids had the 2.4 children set-up and I always had to virtually write out this family tree to explain it to people, it was so complicated. Being mixed race and having an older brother that’s black and an older brother that’s white, it was confusing for me, let alone other people. But now I actually like the fact that I’ve come from that family. It shaped who I am.”
Alesha’s ambition to become a teacher was forgotten on one fateful trip into London. On the train on the way there and on the way back she was approached by two separate music industry types who asked if she was a singer or in a band. This was all the encouragement Alesha needed and the next few years were spent trying to put together a band. In 1999 she met Sabrina at Dance Attic, a popular dance class school in West London. Not long after the duo got together with Su-Elise, whom they’d met auditions. A fourth member was added, Zena McNally, and the band signed to Telstar, cleverly touting themselves as a garage girlband just as the genre was crossing over to the mainstream.


Their debut single Why? went Top 10, and, although Zena left just after the song was released, the band went on to score a further six Top 10 singles taken from two Top 10 albums. In 2003 Scandalous, easily their biggest, and most memorable, hit started to make waves for the band in the US. Everything was looking good for them when disaster struck. Their label Telstar folded under the weight of recording a Victoria Beckham album that would never be released, leaving the girls out in the cold.
“At the time the Telstar contract ended, our management contract had also expired,” says Alesha. “We were sitting there having a meeting and literally, for the first time in six years or so, we were free. It was a weird feeling. We had to think, do we sign another deal and take the risk of it maybe not working, or do we walk away now with no debts and no legal problems. It was a great position to be in and that’s the decision we came to. I don’t have any regrets.
“The only thing I sometimes look back on and think, what if...?, is that things were just starting to come good in America. But our deal with Warners was through Telstar so that ended when the label ended. We were just starting to make waves in America. But in a way it’s actually given me hope, shown me that it’s possible. Scandalous doing well there has given me a hunger for it now. It’s made me want to go back now and do it again, because I really loved it out there.”
With her appearance in the She Wants To Move video, Alesha proved that she could cut it in the wider world beyond the UK music scene. As taste-making trade mag Music Week has already pointed out, Alesha is a pop star with “truly global potential”.
“Am I thinking big? I’m thinking wherever the music wants to go I’ll go with it,” laughs Alesha. “That’s how I’m thinking. I don’t see why I should stop at any country or why I shouldn’t try it out. You can only try, and you get to experience life along the way.
“Just the fact that I did that She Wants To Move video was really good for me in tackling that whole perception that America is untouchable by British artists. I think it was good for me and for other British artists to see someone from Britain merging with an American artist. Just from that point alone I’m glad I did it.”