CD REVIEWS AND MUSIC: GEORGIA ON MY MIND; HOW KATIE MELUA WENT FROM GEORGIA VIA BELFAST TO THE TOP OF THE CHARTS.

Byline: GAVIN MARTIN

When she knocked Dido off the top of the album charts with her debut Call Off The Search back in January, Katie Melua opened a bottle of champagne with her parents Tamara and Alex. "That was when it really hit home," she says. "Looking back I couldn't believe it had happened." The small but striking figure with exotic green eyes and curly brown hair has now sold more than 1.2 million albums and is the biggest seller of the year. It is a remarkable success story.

Born in the Black Sea town of Batumi, in the Soviet republic of Georgia in 1984, Katie and her brother Zarub were raised in a small one-bedroom flat in the final days of the Communist regime. Queues for bread and petrol were commonplace. Her father and mother often went without pay as the country's bureaucracy ground to a halt.

One of Katie's household tasks was to go down four flights of stairs to fill a bucket from the hosepipe in the communal garden as water and electricity were in short supply.

"We managed to get by," Katie, 19, smiles. "I go back every summer and I do have many happy memories of Georgia. I remember picking cucumbers and berries and eating them, always being covered in mud. It was a happy childhood.

"Not always having electricity just meant I didn't sit in front of the telly all day and play computer games. I started singing because I loved music."

When she was nine, Katie's heart surgeon dad secured a post at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.

"It was a huge achievement and the quality of life was certainly better in Belfast than it was in Georgia," she says.

Katie's musical career blossomed when the family moved to South London and she secured a free place at the Brits School in Croydon. Call Off The Search was made after producer-manager Mike Batt, the man behind The Wombles, spotted Melua at a school audition.

Turned down by all the major record companies, the album became a huge success when MOR DJs Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson championed it. From the outset Melua insisted on selling music, not looks or sex appeal.

"It was something I wouldn't want to do," Katie laughs. "Sex sells, but it's frustrating when you see that it fills the chart with music that often isn't that great. If the music of these people was amazing that would be fine, but it isn't. It's just not my sort of thing."

Melua has now amassed a small fortune but she's not a big spender. "I haven't really bought anything big," she says. "I got a Seat Ibiza for pounds 7,000, but that is it. I'm not very good at spending money. I guess my background has something to do with that."

When not on tour, she's at the family home in Redhill, Surrey, or with her musician boyfriend, Luke Pritchard, at his home in Brighton. The pair met at the Brits school but have vowed never to work together.

"Of course there'll be a bit of pressure, but we're really in love and that seems to transcend everything that has happened," says Katie. "He's a really balanced human being so it doesn't get to him at all. I'm not interested in playing the fame game so it's still the same, exactly like we were two years ago."

Like her music, Melua seems carefree and she's also totally untroubled by fame, but inside that small frame there's a steely determination. Last year she walked on burning coals to raise money for (BAPAM) British Association For Performing Arts Medicine.

"It was bizarre," she says casually. "You don't feel any pain whatsoever. We did a workshop beforehand and they wind you up to a psychological peak. Walking on embers then seems easy. I don't know if I would do it again. Next time I'd probably walk on broken glass. They say that's the next step up."

Considering how far she's travelled so far, anything seems possible.

l Katie Melua's new single Crawling Up A Hill is out now.

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MY LITTLE PONIES: Katie aged five