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By Angharad Williams

Usher's latest video, 'Yeah', plays on a huge wide screen TV, at one end of the boardroom, and at the other an 18-year-old girl from Tottenham, North London, is sitting in a black executive chair ready for a media onslaught. Despite being on stage for the launch of a new TV programme the night before, Keisha White seems wide awake and smiling. This has been quite a roller coaster ride yet she comes across as a girl whose feet are firmly on the ground.

Those in the industry, particularly, 'Warner', who have signed, 'The great White hope', as she has been dubbed, have commended her vocal talents. Blues & Soul wrote, 'That Keisha vibe - 'A voice that oozes quality from the first verse.' DJ Magazine wrote - 'Advance warning: we can’t hold it down any further - you had better go discover this sure player...(5 stars). Although she's had a high profile in the underground for a number of years it has taken up until now for Keisha's talents to be embraced by the mainstream. The budding star claims to have been aware of her ability for a long time; "I think I was always capable of singing, but I didn't really take it seriously until I was about thirteen or fourteen. It was around then, that I tried to develop on it [music] and find my Keisha sort of vibe." It wasn't long before progress was achieved. "From about 15 it started to kick off for me. I got the guest vocal to sing for the children's programme 'Tracey Beaker' and that was my first bit of publicity. Then when I was 16, I got two guest vocals to sing on 'Desert Eagle Disc', and I did the video for that, and it blew up in the underground, not really well mainstream. Then I featured on the Paul Oakenfold single 'The Harder They Come', but I didn't get to meet him. It was one of those ones where Nelly Furtado was originally meant to sing on it but she couldn't, so they got me on it. I went and did the video and it was a good experience."

By this time, Keisha had been approached by a manager who took her directly to the big labels to showcase her extraordinary talent. "My management didn't want to go the demo way 'cos they knew I could sing. They took me into all the big labels and 'cos I had a big profile from the Paul Oakenfold thing, there was quite a bit of a buzz." Keisha signed with Warner Music a week before she turned 17. "It was a feel good thing, They [Warner] understood exactly the route I wanted to go down and when you get that feeling, there's no hesitation or doubt."

At only 18, Keisha comes across as a lot more mature than her age. "The album's practically finished and I called it 'Seventeen' because that's when my life changed. It's been a whole new experience for me. It's like in the album I'm explaining what seventeen means, y'know, making me remember that this was an important time in my life. Whether I do well or if everything falls then I'm just a normal person again, I'll be able to look at that and think 'Wow!'"

According to Keisha the album has a mixture of sounds, "There's some soul, 'cos that's my foundation - I was brought up on soul music. It's just my vibe really, you can expect funk, R&B, everything, and just great songs - they're catchy with attitude, whatever the songs about you tend to get into it. Music wise it's quite original, it's not produced led - it's got live music. I don't want people to underestimate me 'cos I'm still learning, and lord knows what I'll be doing on my second album!" Contributing their skills to her album are high profile US producer Scott Storch (Dr Dre, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Janet Jackson), writer Balewa Muhammad (Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera) together with Storch, Marko Rakascan (Maxwell) and Lucas Secon (P. Diddy, Tweet, Sugababes).

Her debut solo single is the recently released, 'Watcha Gonna Do' which has been on heavy rotation on MTV and Channel U; "It’s [the song] describing what a lot of young people are thinking about nowadays and how sometimes adults don’t understand us. We don’t have a lot of guidance, and you know you can’t tell us anything because we don’t listen!" She laughs. "But then the bridge is saying that we need to chill and concentrate on achieving our goals instead of trying to be what others think we should." Although the media hype around the single has been amazing, Keisha is quite sedate about it; "It is my first single. I have no high expectations of it. The press coverage has been good, letting people know that I'm coming out different. That's what I want. So, it's already achieved what I wanted it to do. Even if doesn't do well, it's not a downfall 'cos all the coverage has been so good."

Having co-written so many songs for her debut album, Keisha has a much more personal attachment to her material; "That's why I don't see myself as a single person, I really do see myself as an album person. It's personal and I can't really explain that in one single. You need to listen to the rest of the songs to understand were I'm coming from." Keisha's song writing ability became evident later in life after a push in the right direction; "I didn't even know I could write, and that was really good of my management to get that out of me. I was at his [manager's] house and he's like 'Stay here, just write a song', and I was like 'I don't know how! Left alone, I just wrote about things I've been through, or things I don't understand and stuff like that...I was surprised when I heard my album, I was like 'Oh my God, I wrote that!"

Having worked long and hard on her album, Keisha realised she has had to give up many of the things her friends enjoy. "Sometimes I'm like, I really wanna go out, knowing that I can't because I know that I've got a TV appearance. There was a time when I tried to do both of them at the same time and that just caught up with me and I realised I had to make sacrifices. A lot of people don't realise that I'm still young and there are a lot of expectations and lot of pressure on me - not bad, just knowing they're putting a lot behind me." With all this pressure on her the support of family and friends has been important. "I've got two really close friends and I've got my other good friends as well, and they're really supportive. They treat me the same and are always telling me '"You're not no superstar to me. That's what I love."

If you were at the recent Mis-teeq and Jamelia or Black Eyed Peas UK tours, you would have barred witness to the amazing response Keisha received as a supporting act.“That’s been really good, they’re really cool," she said of the Black Eyed Peas tour, "I think they were really surprised when they heard my stuff. The girl [Fergie] was like ‘You’ve got a wicked voice’.” In only a year the laid back but grounded girl who sits in front of me, has come from relative obscurity to one of the most spoken about upcoming talents. Daughter of a professional soul-singer, Keisha White was born into music and is ironically now set to cause a storm within the UK urban music scene. If it's not with this single then as she says in her own words "The next single will be the big one, I reckon." Is this the saviour of UK urban music? Maybe. Is Keisha White gonna make some waves - definitely!

Keisha White - Watcha Gonna Do - Out Now!

www.keishawhite.co.uk