A DUMPY little girl with a dimply little face is proving something the British pop scene should have realised a long time ago--that girls don't have to look great to have hits. She is the sort of girl grandma would love on sight. No stunner for sure, but that hasn't stopped people calling her sexy, lovely. sweet and innocent looking.
Even she has admitted she is not much to look at. And she giggles while she tells all who care to listen that she worries greatly about perspiring too much. Not many girl pop stars would do that you must agree. And Melanie knows that.
They call her the female Bob Dylan.
A complement, depending which way you take it.
If you take it the way Melanie would like to, but doesn't want
to say she does, in reference to her songs, the description fits.
There is no room for "Moon and June" or latter-day
'Na Na Na" equivalents where they are concerned. Instead,
this strangely pretty girl sings about "truthful" things.
"Funny thing is." she told me, "England was the
one place where everything I did was criticised at first."
The English. apparently, were really nasty to her before she bad
a bit here. But once her recording of Ruby Tuesday
rocketed into the charts, the pattern changed.
Where once somebody wrote asking her to "Stop acting like a child," the tune has changed. Now who it called the "princess of pop." "What nobody yet understands about me," said the tiny singer, who has two LP's in the album charts. "Is that I don't write about complicated things. My songs are simple, like me."
Melanie, a 23-year-old New Yorker, best known as composer of "I
Don't Eat Animals", wrote that song because she is a vegetarian.
"I don't eat animals. And animals don't eat me." she
said, quoting part of her song almost word or word.
She is a very thinking young lady, not at all the flashy type
most successful girl singers become.
For a start, she is not one of the vodka and tonic brigade. Ask
what she likes to drink and she says, simply, "Hot water
with orange juice."
Music is the only love in her life. Personal love relationships,
it seems, don't fit into her scheme of things at all. Music, she
pointed out, has been her "life" since she was 15. 'That's
when I wrote my first song. And since then music has been everything
to me."
In her way, she has a love affair going with the thousands who
go to see her in concerts. "And I have lots of good friends,"
she said. Little, she might be. And her small pleasures may mystify
many. But that doesn't stop her being a giant in pop.