Eva wouldn't accept she was beautiful or talented..all she ever wanted was to sing; EXCLUSIVE: SONGBIRD EVA CASSIDY BY THE MAN SHE LOVED.

Byline: TANITH CAREY US Editor, in Rockville, Maryland

IT WAS hardly a prima-donna entrance by the woman who would be hailed as one of the world's great singers.

Inside the basement studio, a group of musicians were tuning up for a rehearsal.

But there was one person missing: singer Eva Cassidy.

"It was the first time I was to meet Eva and I had heard great things about her," says producer Chris Biondo.

"It was winter. The temperature was freezing and it was dark. I asked where she was - and was told she was waiting outside because she was nervous.

"So I went looking for her. I found her huddled up against the side of the building with her arms crossed."

Chris's meeting with the cripplingly shy Eva, then 23, was the beginning of an intense and fruitful 10-year relationship. During that time they were colleagues, then lovers and, in the years before her death, the closest of friends.

Eva - whose album American Tune is now top of the UK album chart - was just 33 when she died from cancer.

But even though the walls of Chris's studio are now decorated with her awards, during her lifetime she never sold more than 400 copies of her own records.

Eva's incredible posthumous success is mainly down to Chris, 47.

Without his encouragement, her perfectly pitched voice would have been lost for ever in the smoky clubs where she played for as little as pounds 20 a night.

As Chris listens to the rise and fall of Eva's voice at the mixing desk where she recorded many of her songs in Rockville, Maryland, he is torn between pride in her achievements and inconsolable grief of her loss.

"That first meeting, we did not hit it off," he says. "I tried to loosen Eva up by making jokes and she didn't like that.

"But as soon as she opened her mouth I knew this was the most extraordinary voice I had ever heard."

He formed a band to showcase her talents and went out looking for a record deal for her.

"But Eva never felt comfortable with me jumping in front of her like a cheerleader," he says. "It made her feel awkward.

"She had a bad self-image. She did not think she was as attractive as she was. She did not think she sang as good as everyone told her. But I don't think she could have sung as good as she did if she was any other way.

WE fitted together because Eva had no ego and I had complete confidence that she was the greatest singer in the world.

"But although she didn't agree with me, she loved the fact that someone cared about her like that."

At first the relationship was platonic. "We spent time in the studio and we did things that friends do together, like go to movies, and dinner," says Chris.

"Then my marriage broke up and I started to look at Eva differently. I fell in love with her.

"One night at dinner, I said: 'I want to be your boyfriend.' She looked at me and said: 'What do you mean?'

"I got in my car and drove home. I felt covered in slime.

"The next day she called and asked what we were doing that night. Not long after, she asked me if I would go on vacation with her. I said: 'Hell, yeah.'

"It was the turning-point. We went to the Caribbean and it was paradise - Eva singing in the car, being the last people on the beach, snorkelling in the sea. At the end of the vacation, she drove home and then she got back in the car and drove straight over to my house. It was then we started living together."

Chris was as bold and brash as Eva was reserved and introverted.

"We were really in love," he says. "But we had a different sense of humour. We were different people.

"While I say what everyone is thinking, Eva would say nothing bad about anybody."

But her solitary spirit and feminist views meant that ultimately she was not happy living in a man's house.

"I asked her a couple of times to marry me and she said if we stayed together four years she would," says Chris.

"As it got nearer, she needed a get-out clause. The types of things that happen when two people live together in a relationship did not agree with her.

"It worked better for her when we were just friends.

"She told me she wanted her own place and I got upset. Eva had a pretty hard switch. Once she made up her mind, that was it."

The pair had been a couple for almost four years and Chris was badly hurt.

He told Eva he wanted to stop working on the band with her - but he soon relented and they continued as friends.

"We started hanging out again," he says. "Soon we were doing together everything that two people who love each other do - except for the adult stuff."

Eva's best friend, Ruth Murphy, 40, says Eva's independent spirit meant it was hard for her to be truly happy with any man.

"Chris was the best thing that ever happened to Eva," she says. "He was very tolerant of how she wanted to do things. But Eva was sort of asexual. Sex was not a drive for her, which gave her a different perspective.

"She was very relaxed with women. But she felt men had certain expectations of her which she was not comfortable fulfilling."

Throughout her life, Eva's dream was to make a living out of singing.

BORN into a musical family in Washington DC, she was an unhappy teenager who felt she didn't fit in anywhere except in her high-school band.

When she dropped out of art college after a few months, she decided to see if she could be paid to do what she loved best. Often she was on the poverty line, earning no more than pounds 6,000 a year from gigs and working at a local plant nursery.

Despite her talent, she made a living as a professional musician for just one month before she died.

Chris says: "She got her first house where she was paying rent and no one could tell her what to do."

Then, in 1996, Eva was diagnosed with cancer.

She had failed to go for follow-up checks after a mole had been removed from her back two years earlier. When she was found to have a broken hip, the cause was the melanoma which had spread cancer throughout her body.

Despite extensive chemotherapy, she died only four months after the diagnosis.

Chris says: "When she got the cancer it was so quick. She would have had more chance of surviving a real bad car accident."

For him, the discovery of Eva's illness was the start of a mission to preserve her music. He immediately went into the studio to finish off the tracks they had started together.

After her death, he handed over all the tapes to Eva's parents, Barbara and Hugh.

Chris says: "She called me when she got the X-ray back which showed how the cancer had spread.

"She was mad. I was the one crying. She told me to come and get her and asked me to do something normal with her.

"So we went to the mall. I walked her round in the wheelchair and we talked about us and how it had turned out."

Then Chris took her to the studio to try to record one last time. "I laid her on the couch and hung a microphone down in front of her mouth and we tried to do the song California Dreaming," he says. "It was so bad that afterwards I just erased it. I didn't want anyone to hear it.

"Eva didn't like me being upset. She had a rule that no one could cry in her bedroom.

"So you would go over to her house and there would be seven or eight people sitting in the driveway, trying to get themselves together, taking turns to see her.

"She had lost all her hair. She got sick just watching the video of her last performance because the camera was so shaky. She wasted away.

"The morphine meant she was in a daze a lot of the time.

"You would walk into her room at home and she would say: 'I love you', and I would say: 'I love you.' Then she would say: 'Don't cry in here.' And you would have to go back out."

Modest to the end, Eva tried to talk Ruth out of naming her unborn daughter, now six, after her.

"Around the time she got sick, I found out I was pregnant," says Ruth. "I told Eva I was going to call the baby Cassidy.

"She said: 'But I don't like that name. Why don't you pick something else?' I said: 'Because I love you, Eva.'"

Since Eva died on November 2 1996 four posthumous albums have been released.

With virtually no money spent on marketing, their success was initially word of mouth until Radio 2 DJ Terry Wogan played her version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow on his morning show.

Now her recordings have sold more than six million copies worldwide, a third of them in Britain.

Chris remains modest about his contribution to her legacy. He credits another singer, Grace Griffith, who sent Eva's songs to her own record label, Blix Street, for the career break Eva had been waiting all her life for.

But he is angry at any suggestion that Eva achieved success only because she is dead.

"Most people don't even know that she is dead when they hear her," he says. "If she is put on a pedestal, maybe that's a good thing.

The fact remains that thanks to his efforts millions of record buyers get comfort from the songs he encouraged Eva to sing in the studio and in public.

But there is no comfort for Chris.

"Once, I craved music," he says. "But because there is no one better than Eva and no one can compare to her I can't listen to it any more."

CAPTION(S):

ALBUM: Eva's chart hit; TALENT: Eva died never realising fame was coming; TWOSOME:Chris spurred Eva on to live her dreamTRIBUTE:Friend Ruth named her girl after Eva; Pictures courtesy of Chris Biono, Wiebke Sanda and www.evacassidy.org; JESTER: Eva shell hunting by the sea