Precious Stone

Off-stage, she talks like a typical teenager; in performance she sings with a passion and a conviction that are almost uncanny. Joss Stone, the 17-year-old soul singer, talks to Craig McLean

Joss Stone is an ordinary teenager. She hangs out with friends, chats with them on the phone. One, who's a bit older, keeps an eye out for her, asks after her emotional wellbeing, proffers career advice.

When she was looking for new management, he offered to check out any candidates. Recently, she went round to his place. Her mum and her friend Amy came too. They got in a Chinese takeaway, then went to the cinema. But since his name is Tom Cruise, it was probably a private screening.

"It is weird," concedes Joss Stone, that she, a school-age girl from Devon, is friends with the most famous actor in the world. Cruise got in touch after being bowled over by her debut album The Soul Sessions, last year's collection of covers that was meant to act as a low-key introduction to her vocal talents but has gone on to sell 2.5 million copies worldwide.

For a moment, Stone reverts to what she is: a 17-year-old child, gushing, enthusiastic, giggly. She may have spent much of the past two years in the US, recording and touring, and indubitably she is a golden-voiced and beautiful singer who has established herself as a hugely successful new artist.

But, in many other respects, she's still a child. Little wonder, she says, that Cruise is looking out for her.

Gutsy, soulful voice

Stone's astonishingly sophisticated, gutsy, soulful voice can have this effect on people. People such as Mick Jagger, who concluded his recent Abbey Road recording session on his knees before her, a theatrical finale to their recording of songs for the soundtrack of the remake of Alfie that will star Jude Law.

Other musical legends have been similarly overwhelmed by Stone's talents, notably songwriter Lamont Dozier, of Motown hitmakers Holland/ Dozier/ Holland. He's one of several stellar contributors to her first "proper" album, Mind, Body and Soul. Dozier's son Beau also succumbed. He is now Stone's boyfriend.

In her few years, Stone has come a long way from the West Country village of Ashill. Today she's in New York, for a rare one-on-one interview; tomorrow it's Los Angeles, to take part in a tribute to Quincy Jones.

In 1999, aged 12, and using her given name of Joscelyn Stoker, she sent an audition tape to a talent show Star For a Night. "I wasn't really thinking I was going to do it," she says.

At the audition, she had more problems. She had planned to sing Carole King's Natural Woman. "I've been listening to that song forever, but I forgot the whole thing. The people at the audition had to tell me the first line."

Stone passed the audition and, singing Donna Summer's On the Radio won the show. News of her abilities reached Steve Greenberg, an American record company executive. He flew her to New York to audition for him in February 2002.

He recognised this was raw vocal talent of an improbably vintage hue, and signed her to his S-Curve imprint. She was placed under the tutelage of veteran singer and producer Betty Wright and, accompanied by a bevy of experienced session players, recorded a series of covers.

Her way with wrenching ballads such as The Chokin' Kind and Victim of a Foolish Heart showed that here was a viscerally affecting singer in the tradition of Dusty Springfield.

Then there was the name change: she didn't want to do it, she says, "they" made her. But, in the end, it helped her with her adolescent embarrassment and shyness.

The night before my interview with Stone, I watched her launch Mind, Body and Soul with a show at New York's Irving Plaza that was also being filmed for a DVD. Musically, she has also advanced.

Mind, Body and Soul, which she considers her "proper" debut, is a convincing, if overlong, modern soul album. It features several Stone co-writes, with help from the likes of Portishead singer and fellow Devonian Beth Gibbons.

On the big stages of the Glastonbury Festival in June, and in the small club atmosphere of Irving Plaza, Stone was a revelation, a supernaturally gifted performer who can feel and even inhabit a song, summoning up an intensity that vocalists twice, even three times her age are pushed to match. When her talent fully matures, the sky's the limit.