Jay Sean on the up with his Down album

You can't help feeling that Jedward, Stacey and the other X Factor wannabes could learn something from Jay Sean. The 28-year-old R&B star seemed to come from nowhere to twice take the No 1 slot in the US singles chart in the past few weeks. First he deposed the Black Eyed Peas, then he retook pole position from Britney Spears with his song Down. The track is currently holding fast at No 5 after 16 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.

Actually, Jay Sean real name Kamaljit Singh Jhooti is a privately educated former medical student from Hounslow, UK, the son of a second-generation Sikh businessman father and a Delhi-born beautician mother. And his "sudden" success is the result of seven years of hard graft and attention to detail. His meticulous management of his own sound and image has seen him walk away from a £1 million (Dh5.97 million) record deal with Virgin, set up his own record label and change his musical direction .

"It's a name with a ring to it, but it could be anyone," says the singer when I meet him at Gilgamesh in Camden on a flying visit from New York where he now lives. He is slight, energetic and handsome, with the longest eyelashes I've ever seen on a man. "I always wanted a stage name that was ambiguous and universal. I used to be called Nicky Jay when I did hip-hop. The Sean part came from a pet nickname I was called at home, Shan, which in my dialect means ‘shining star'."

Success

Having achieved considerable success on the UK club scene and as an international touring act, he set out very deliberately to conquer America with what he calls "Jay Sean version two" a couple of years ago. "I didn't want to be a big fish in a small pond," he says. "There's a danger in that. So, you can walk around Hounslow and everyone knows who you are, and you feel like a big shot? Well, take a walk through Louisville, Kentucky, and see if anyone gives a sh** about you. That's what I did to myself by going to America. I wanted to be in the home of R&B."

Quite. Jay first got "seriously into hip-hop" at the age of 12 and began emulating the raps and rhymes of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, soon graduating to writing his own words and tunes, mixing rap beats with tabla samples. "I wrote a song called One Minute and played it to some friends, who played it to some of their friends, and that's where the interest in me started."

So for a while Sean's music was just "a hobby", albeit one his parents and his younger brother, now a photographer and music-video director, supported. "They've always been my biggest fans and supporters, always come to my gigs, and my brother has always done all my pictures for me." In 2003 another of his tracks, Dance With You, became an underground hit on the club scene, and Virgin came calling. He was signed to a £1 million record deal.

"That was pretty good," he says, "but actually the advance from my publishing deal for songwriting was better" He toured and recorded constantly — he thinks he's done 2,000 gigs in seven years but by 2006 things had started to go sour.

He drew the line, though, when Virgin started trying to turn him into either a James Blunt-style balladeer or a rock act. "I thought, ‘That's an insult, man.' You don't walk up to an Italian and say, ‘Right, you're gonna be speaking German for the rest of your life, just because I say so,' do you? I wanted to stay true to my roots and the music that I believe in. So I thought, ‘Right, I'll do this myself'." He left Virgin in 2006, scraped together the money to launch his own label, Jayded, to record his second album and produce his own videos. A year later he set off to launch "Jay Sean version two" in America, armed only with contacts he'd made on previous tours.

‘Super-super-stars'

"I had a clean slate in America. They didn't know anything about my background. They didn't care and they didn't ask. They listened to the music first, which is what I wanted." Rapper Lil Wayne's record label Cash Money, a subsidiary of Universal, signed him up.

Sean had always aspired to be like what he terms "super-super-stars" such as Justin Timberlake, Rihanna, and Ne-Yo, and as the buzz grew about him, he found himself in their orbit. "I'd always gone on about those same people, and bizarrely, the universe delivered them to me," he says. "I've done a show with Justin, another show with Ne-Yo in Japan, bumped into Rihanna in a bar and swapped some ideas, Lil Wayne signs me. It's all a bit bonkers."

Down, which features guest vocals from Lil Wayne, is on course to sell 250,000 copies in the UK, but Sean doesn't mind if it doesn't reach No 1. "It's scary if that becomes the barometer of your success. If my next single goes in at No 2, I won't have a breakdown." Nor, he says, will you see him "stumbling out of a nightclub pissed with a couple of lesbians on my arm. I'm totally not that kind of guy."

What of the future? The album, All or Nothing, was released last month and he talks vaguely about getting into film-acting, but more cogently about being a role model. "I'm a super-ambitious person. I won't stop until fate tells me I have to. You've got one shot, one life, so make the most of it. Now I'm on a path to make some sort of positive impact, create some change or awareness. "

Upgrading his image

Jay Sean had already ditched his Indian samples and his old, spiky-haired urban look and adopted a poppier R&B vibe and a smoother image. "Not because I was ashamed," he stresses, "but like a mobile phone, I wanted my music and my image updated, with upgrades." He wore, and still wears, a bangle proclaiming his Sikh heritage and belief on his wrist. "I'm proud of my culture and my heritage but I don't need to scream about it. All I ever wanted was to get out there and show people we're just the same as everyone else, that we can do more than the stereotypical roles you expect Indians to do."