Better than a reality TV star…

The day I call Nerina Pallot, I get through to her for a minute. And then – boom – the connection is gone. Eventually when I do get back through to her – after speaking to her husband/producer for a few moments, and having to call back once again for good measure – she tells me that she’s been “having a very long Monday.” She’s not the only one by this point.

Nerina’s been busy getting ready for this month’s tour of the UK, and the release of her new album The Graduate. Currently, she’s deciding on the support acts for the tour. In her home town as a way of picking the support act she’s been working on a contest alongside a radio station, and surprisingly, she says, “the standard’s really high.” The fear that she’ll have to share the stage with a complete wacko – akin to the worst support act she ever saw – isn’t even in her mind. She won’t name the worst support act she’s ever seen at a gig – feeling that’s slightly too mean – but she does say that, “they proceeded to bitch and moan at the audience, and abuse the audience, which is the last thing you should do if you’re not entirely experienced.”

Clearly, Nerina has some experience under her belt to ensure she doesn’t get drunk and start abusing her own crowd - the drunken abuse is left for her one time A&R manager, who around eight years ago after “doing too many margaritas” she abused on an online industry message board. Amazingly, it didn’t take too long for members of the industry to work out that it was her.

However, thankfully, that wasn’t the end of her career - only one album to show for herself. She’s been nominated for the Brit Award for Best Female Solo Artist (of which she was “gobsmacked”) but she is definite that her new album isn’t being released with an eye on more awards.

Lately, she’s been working with Kylie Minogue, which she says has been “fun.” Nerina says that she doesn’t mind the fact that when it comes to media reports this is the main thing they focus on: not her music, or her producing skills, but the fact she’s been working with Kylie, of whom she’s a “massive fan”. In fact, she says, being mentioned alongside Kylie is “actually the biggest complement ever”

However, getting to work with Kylie Minogue might not have even happened after a freak plane trip home to London. A few years ago, Nerina was on a half empty plane rom Miami when someone attempted to strangle her. “It was a fairly empty plane and, you know how you get a row of four and a row and a row of three on either side of a jumbo. I was sitting in the middle of a row of four and there was a few other people settled around the plane and the meal came, and the next thing I know a guy from – I don’t know where he was sitting – came up, and he was obviously somebody who was on meds or used to be on meds. He moved my fish away and just tried to put his hands around my throat.”

She says that the experience was, “really, really strange, and scary, because you can’t, in those instances get a word in. You can’t scream; it’s really hard to make any commotion, especially on a fairly empty plane. But luckily one of the stewards came and sorted it all out. It was so scary, it was horrible.”

Once she touched down the man was arrested and was dealt with by the local transport police, but it didn’t go any further than that. And while she thought the man who tried to strangle her was “obviously a bit ill”, it was still a “very weird, odd experience” for her.

On her last album Fires, Everybody’s Going To War got a lot of attention as a full blown anti-war song, but on her new album which is “much happier,” she says she’s stayed clear of writing another one. “I think once you’ve done something like that you kind of can’t do that again,” she says. However, that doesn’t mean she isn’t still completely against the war. “The thing is, it’s still – we’re now on a covert war in Afghanistan that people don’t seem to count a war because there was no invasion as such, but we’re practically doing exactly the same as we did in part to a different country next door to them. And I think if the death toll keeps increasing, which unfortunately it is, hopefully soon people will start to question what we’re doing out there.”

As well as working on her new album, and with Kylie Minogue, she’s also been writing with Diana Vickers – a runner up on the last season of the X Factor – who she says is “so sweet, with a very old head on her shoulders”. She says that Diana’s “an eighteen year old girl who’s come from nowhere and she’s just being herself, you know. And thank God she’s being herself and not trying to be like a pole dancing hussy like half these birds on these shows.”

Does it scare her the amount of people who think they can sing on the X Factor but clearly can’t? “Well, the musician part of me goes yes then the other part of me goes, well, no, at a time when there’s less and less music on the TV. We no longer have Top Of The Pops. We don’t have any of the things you used to get on Saturday morning on ITV. The window for music on TV is so slim that at least there’s something in primetime with music – sort of – at its core.”

The problem Nerina has with these type of music shows is the barriers it puts in place for artists trying to get signed, particularly when Simon Cowell says that even The Beatles wouldn’t have been good enough for the X Factor. “I think one of the things – this is one of the problems with it now – is that it’s very hard to get signed without that kind of huge exposure… so no matter how great a singer Leona Lewis is, she’s not interesting enough of herself without that kind of coverage ‘cause there’s tonnes of girls who can sing like Leona, it’s just that she’s got a record deal… by appearing on a primetime show.”

She says that if she were starting out today that she probably wouldn’t have much chance of getting to where she is now through one of those shows. “I don’t think I’d survive. I appreciate those things for what they are, but my personality wouldn’t adapt to it. They encourage you to sing other peoples’ songs and that isn’t something I’d want to do.”

The fact she has a personality, alike Diana, probably has something to do with that as well. “I think the people like Leona and Alexandra – they’re all technically phenomenal R&B singers but they’re a dime a dozen… they all sound like Beyonce of course, but people seem to want that.”

Nerina toured with James Blunt last year, and when I ask her how the hell she managed to cope being around him for a prolonged period of time she says that he is “misunderstood” but then goes on to clarify that it’s “not quite the right thing [to say]. But he’s really great, a really interesting character and I learnt quite a lot from touring with him and just listening to him, and his take on things.”

She says that she doesn’t know how he manages to stay so calm when he’s about to go on stage, and that she couldn’t do what he does. “I have terrible stage fright for a long time, and I still had it when I was on tour with him and then one night we were in somewhere, like, I don’t know, Hamburg and he was about to go on stage to 15,000 people and I was opening for him so I was as well. I don’t know how he did it, how he stayed so calm and didn’t get terrified. To put it bluntly, I felt like I was going to go out there and be shot at or fired at or my house was going to be blown up.”

Before the interview is over, and most likely, her phone dies again, I ask her what she thought of the media circus that surrounded Michael Jackson’s last days given she was in America during the funeral.

She say that she feels the whole thing was disgusting in every way. “It’s just really horrible. I was in America, actually, for his funeral and what I thought was really distasteful – I was making a video that day – and I could see the telly with the memorial thing going on, and the sound was off, and it took me a good half an hour to realise they were doing all of this in front of a casket. And it was loads of people who’ve never met him, will obviously never meet him, who probably couldn’t give a toss, that wanted to use him for their five minutes of fame on primetime telly. All these people milking it. Five minutes before he died he was a paedophile and then suddenly he wasn’t, and it’s just disgusting in every way.”