Like every true star, Amy Studt is a glorious tangle of contradictions. She may be just 16 years old, but her lyrics betray a wise worldliness that tells you this teenager doesn’t wait for life to come to her. Though she can conjure up chart-slaying choruses in a matter of minutes, she’s more interested in Marilyn Manson or Korn than whoever’s passing by number one. And while she can certainly sing like an angel, soaring between notes with the clear precision of a chorister; she can then tur...
Like every true star, Amy Studt is a glorious tangle of contradictions. She may be just 16 years old, but her lyrics betray a wise worldliness that tells you this teenager doesn’t wait for life to come to her. Though she can conjure up chart-slaying choruses in a matter of minutes, she’s more interested in Marilyn Manson or Korn than whoever’s passing by number one. And while she can certainly sing like an angel, soaring between notes with the clear precision of a chorister; she can then turn round and tell you a story of school days from hell that leaves you open-mouthed. They’re the same complexities that form the backbone of her stunning, raging new single ‘Just A Little Girl’. From angelic beginnings featuring just Amy’s gorgeous voice and a lone piano, the track explodes with the fury and determination of a young, staggeringly talented woman out to shatter your preconceptions. You have been warned. This is someone who will make you sit up and pay attention. Even growing up in her home town of Bournemouth, Amy was never someone you could simply ignore. From an early age, she started teaching herself the piano, playing the guitar (“very badly”) and learning the oboe. “I tried the violin too,” she adds with a grimace, “but I gave up after about a week ‘cause I was so awful at it.” There was no escape from music at home either, as Amy’s dad is a violinist and conductor who has toured with Roy Orbison and played on films including ‘Mickey Blue Eyes’, while her mum was head of music at a school. “Music was something that was always there,” she says. “I can’t even remember getting into it. I think if you’re from a musical family, you either absolutely loath music or you give in and do it yourself!” She duly gave in, writing her first song at the ridiculously early age of 9 years old. “I was playing Chopsticks on the piano and my dad came in and said ‘why don’t you try singing with it and put words to it. It may sound really nice’. So I did and it did.” From there, the songs never stopped and Amy spent most of her time working on them on her own in the music room at school “and being constantly teased about it”. At 13, she decided not to move on to the same strict school as all her friends, but attend the area’s rival school instead. “At that school you got a lot of freedom,” Amy smiles wryly, “and with freedom things start getting a little bit more interesting. You didn’t have to wear a uniform and there was a lot of free time and when you get to a place like that, you start bending a few of the rules.” Sharing a room (“crammed in like sardines”) with eight other girls she had nothing in common with, Amy was picked on and started to rebel. “I was really unhappy and always crying and basically at the end of it my family agreed it was just not right for me.” After a short stint at what Amy calls “another all-girl Christian prison, Amy began to study at home for her upcoming GCSE’s. Her recent troubled history has, at least, provided plenty of lyrical inspiration. “For some reason,” she shrugs, “I just seem to have had an insane amount of experiences in a short time so that’s why I think I needed a release. I write more now than ever because I needed to get it out. And punish those people! Revenge is mine!” In fact, by the time Amy was 14, she’d written around 42 songs. Her dad, who regularly works in studios, suggested she came along one day and recorded some for fun, and Amy gave or sold the finished CD to various friends, and by a strange twist of fate, one landed on the desk of Simon Fuller. Simon got on the phone to Amy before the day was out. “I never wanted to be famous at all. I genuinely just loved writing, just like if you love tennis you play it all the time, same with writing songs. You want to write something better, you want to say everything in one perfect song but it never happens, so you keep writing.” ‘Just A Little Girl’ is certainly an excellent start. Sounding like a fervid clash between Tori Amos (“I’ve not heard any of her music but I hear she’s really good”) and Courtney Love, the three entirely different tracks on her single are pop music without the froth, choruses you can sing along to but lyrics barely containing their annoyance, frustration, sadness. “I like real music with things in it you can relate to when you’re going through things in your life. You want to relate to something. It’s that simple” she says.
