Photo:

It’s 10.45am when Santi White emerges, slightly later than planned, in a hotel suite in West London. Clutching her pink Blackberry, her coy handshake is accompanied by a waterfall of apologies. While some focus on her attire, most address the fact that, this morning, her mouth and brain are struggling to work together.

What happened, White reveals, was that following her showcase – under her alter-ego Santogold - in a pub in the east end of London, friends “convinced me to drink champagne, which I don’t drink at all.” White suddenly laughs, winces and then laughs again – it doesn’t take a doctor to diagnose that she’s suffering from a hangover. Her jumper is baggy, her baseball cap is pulled over her eyes and, if she had her own way, she would have arrived at the interview “in my pyjamas”.

“It was horrible,” White says, returning to the show. “As soon as I stepped up on stage I thought I was going to pass out. Crazy hot. Everybody was drenched – even people that were watching. It was like a pool party.” White’s show, timed to coincide with the UK release of her debut album ‘Santogold’, was a hot ticket. In the crowd, along with members of the Black Lips and Kaiser Chiefs’ frontman Ricky Wilson, was Mark Ronson – who White has collaborated with and knows well enough to dog-sit for from time to time in New York, where she lives.

For White, the show was a culmination to a barrage of hype that began last December when she released her debut single ‘Creator’. A fantastic example of her instinctive talent, the song unravels like an autobiography about its maker. “Me, I’m a creator / thrillers do make it up / the rules I break got me a place up on the radar,” she sings during the songs chorus. Very quickly, and thanks largely to the dub-inspired song, White found herself being heralded as ‘one of the ones to watch’ in 2008. It’s a position that most would find intimidating, but not, it seems, White.

“The hype is good. It doesn’t make me feel pressure, if that’s what you mean, at all,” she says, defiantly. “I just felt kind of excited by it and leading up to that point I hadn’t really let anybody hear much stuff so I didn’t know how it was going to be received, so I felt more excited and eager to want to press on and get it right.”

Is she the type of person, then, that thrives off expectation? “No,” she replies, even more convincingly. “I’m really a perfectionist anyway and really hard on myself so I already was, I guess, thriving off my own need to really capture exactly what’s in my head. So, it didn’t make me put more pressure on myself, I already just wanted to be really good.”

Few could argue that White hasn’t achieved her mission with ‘Santogold’. ‘L.E.S Artistes’ – which was originally the b-side to ‘Creator’ last year – blends fuzzy electro with muted guitars, while ‘Lights Out’, with its infectious chorus and guitar riff, has mainstream single written all over it. Although White regards the album as a pop record - because “I write pop song structures” - the singer has collaborated with producers that, on the whole, operate in the electronic underground. Switch, Freq Nasty, Diplo and Sinden – you name them and somewhere down the line White has spent time in the studio with them.

Despite their influence, the one genre that White admits runs “underneath everything” on the album is punk rock. Introduced to the genre at the age of eleven by her elder sister, who used to listen to everything from Led Zeppelin to Bad Brains in her bedroom, White developed an insatiable attraction to the music. “I think it’s just like the raw energy of it.” She pauses to search for an adequate description. “Yeah, it’s just very emotional and the sounds just seem so unpolished.” Suddenly her mind races back to the album. “Even if I am gonna add more electronic stuff I try to keep it more analogue like late 70s, early 80s, kind of grimey, if you know what I mean. And they (the producers) worked really well within that stuff and I feel like the tracks that they worked on or the ones that I picked from them were ones that I felt had that rawness, like ‘Unstoppable’ and ‘Creator’ were both very minimalist.”

Although White grew up in Philadelphia surrounded by music – her father, who died in 2004 during a government municipal case, providing her with her selection of “black music” – and admits to writing rap lyrics and poems from the age of nine because “not many girls did it”, she maintains that she never felt destined to work within the industry. “I didn’t, I didn’t at all,” White says, before listing off “gymnastics, ice-skating, field hockey, basketball and lacrosse” with great alacrity. “[I] Never really stuck to anything so I didn’t see myself as a musician, that was just one thing that I liked to do – I loved listening to music,” she adds, smiling.

It was during her time at college in Connecticut – where she double-majored in music - that White accepted a job as a talent spotter for Sony Records in New York and found the R&B singer Res. “I signed her to do a demo tape and ended up writing for her and then quit and wrote her record and after that I was like ‘I don’t like writing song writing for other people’ and then I started my band Stiffed, so it was kind of like through the backdoor,” White admits.

Indeed, those underling punk influences that infiltrate Santogold’s sound can be traced back to Stiffed. The punk-rock group released one album during their three-year history and White maintained her partnership with bassist John Hill on ‘Santogold’. “I learned so much for what I’m doing now,” she says, of her time in the band. “I really think that Santogold is really an evolved notion of that, all the same influences but just taken to the next level.”

Like most American artists, White comes as a complete package. She’s irrefutably self-confident – “I don’t need much,” she says, for example, of her writing requirements. “I really like it to be, especially at the writing part, just hardly anything there so I can just try and pull the melody out of nothing you know” – and dresses, like her music, in anything from “old vintage stuff” to “some crazy colours and patterns and a couple of high end pieces.” And of course, there are the animal prints, which round off every look. “I’ve got to have them all the time,” she says, pointing to her Leopard print plimsolls and emitting a loud cackle.

Unlike other artists, however, White, whose music has already appeared in television adverts, is not prepared to ignore “corporations” to achieve success. “You can’t anymore,” she says, seriously. “It’s like one of the mean ways to get our music heard now and so it’s stupid for artists to shy away from that.”

It’s not a surprise that, although White has only just released her debut solo album, the queue of people hoping to work with her is continuing to grow. In recent months, she’s written a song for Ashlee Simpson, channeled Mark Ronson’s thoughts on future ventures and contributed to a Pharrell Williams produced track for Converse – which also features The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas. At this rate, her only problem is going to be what to do with all the champagne.