Caro Emerald dazzles as world takes a shine to going Dutch

Sales of more than 2.5 million records may have made Caro Emerald a famous face across Europe.

But the 32-year-old singer admits she has been taken aback by just how warmly her music – a fusion of big band jazz with modern dance beats – has been received beyond the borders of her homeland, the Netherlands.

“It was also quite hard for me to monitor even. They would tell me stuff and I was, ‘OK...’,” she says quizzically. “At the beginning it did not sink in. You only experience that when you go out on tour.

“But success is really hard to measure – do you measure stats or airplay or if people know you? But it’s, like, huge. I’m humbled and grateful for that. It’s hard to believe, actually.”

The icing on the cake came in May when her second album, The Shocking Miss Emerald, topped the UK charts.

“That must have been the highest thing to achieve up til now,” she says proudly. “Incredible. We saw it coming from the midweeks but I was very afraid to think it might happen; I was afraid it would not. When they called me on the Sunday I was completely happy but I did not realise I should celebrate something.

“I got some text messages from people saying they were drinking champagne on my behalf. I said to my friend, ‘I should drink champagne. This might might be the only week in my life where I drink champagne.’”

So uncork a bottle of bubbly she duly did.

If Emerald’s first album, Deleted Scenes From The Cutting Room Floor, was inspired by Hollywood glamour from the 1940s and 50s, its follow-up tooks its cues from pre-war Paris.

“The way we work when we are writing is very visual,” Emerald, born Caroline van der Leeuw, explains.

“We think in terms of scenes and atmospheres. We collect some inspiration by collecting images to inspire us.

“The images were all of women, they were very fashionable, from that period. A lot of them were from Paris.”

The interest was not just in Paris “as a city”, she continues, warming to her theme. “It was also the fashion scene, things were imagined around it. It was not just a history lesson. When you start from there you can think of anything.”

As shown by the size of venues she’s now performing in, Emerald’s music – with its combination of eras and genres – has cross-generational appeal. It’s not that she minds songs such as That Man and Liquid Lunch appealing to an older generation for whom electronic music is anathema.

She is, however, amused by purists hailing her songs as “real music”.

“It makes me laugh,” she says. “We also work from computers and samples, copy and paste.”

Having reached “a certain age where you only aim for people who are like you”, she’d assumed her songs would find a niche audience. “I thought it would be interesting for music lovers,” she says. “I did not think it would reach the mainstream.”

By her own admission Emerald has “travelled a long way” as a singer. “I started when I was 12 at singing lessons. They were in group form, I did not try to be a lead singer at that point. It was clear I was musical and fit for studying music.”

Her initial inspiration, she says, was Mariah Carey. “It’s something you should be ashamed of,” she chuckles. “It was not cool music but she’s a phenomenal singer.”

BEATING MICHAEL JACKSON’S THRILLER

Caro Emerald was born Caroline van der Leeuw, in 1981 in Amsterdam.

She studied as a jazz vocalist at the Amsterdam Conservatoire.

Her debut album Deleted Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor spent longer at Number One in the Netherlands than Michael Jackson’s Thriller. She has 15 platinum discs and a string of awards including an Echo, Goldene Camera and MTV Music prize.

Caro Emerald, Sept 6, Sheffield City Hall, 7.30pm, www.sheffieldcityhall.co.uk March 15, 2014, First Direct Arena, Leeds, www.firstdirectarena.com