Michele Hewitson Interview: Will Martin

Will Martin is chasing his dream of stardom with a little help from mum - she's put her house up as collateral for the loan he's taken out to produce his new album. Photo / Steven McNicholl

What very nice manners young Will Martin has. And what exhausting bounce. He is the very definition of the eternal optimist. He may have the blessing, or the curse, of the eternally youthful face too. He's 26 but looks 16.

This is a good thing, yes, and a bad thing too. He is always being asked for ID in bars. Really, if things had turned out another way, nobody would be asking him for ID - despite that fresh face they would know who he is. Some people know who he is.

"I have a small but supportive fan base." His fans are? "Well, I suppose the typical Will Martin fan would be a female someone who likes quality music. I think they would be slightly ... older than myself."

He said, "I don't think I'm cool!" A bit later, he said, "I don't think I'm sexy!" Both of these were statements of the obvious. He knows his audience. "I've got groupies of all ages." Groupies usually fancy the object of their affections. "I don't think I'm a 'ooh, I'd like a bit of that' type artist."

Will Martin, as you may possibly (or quite possibly not) remember, was supposed to be the next big thing - or as much as the next cross-over artist who is not Susan Boyle gets to be the next best thing.

He is the baby-faced singer of old-fashioned songs who, it was breathlessly announced in the hyperbolic way these things are always announced, had been "discovered" and signed a very big deal with a very big record company.

In his case he was signed to Universal Records for a five album deal for (and it depended on just how breathless the report you read was) either $3 million or $5 million. Somewhere in the middle, he says. His debut CD, A New World, was estimated to sell two million copies, said the record company, recklessly.

His image was, and remains, that of the nice boy from Devonport whose music may not be your cup of tea but who you could safely take for a cup of tea with your nana. He might be a bit cheesy. "I wouldn't say cheesy!" he said.

He might have looked a bit cheesy in some of those publicity shots: the sweet little grin; the puppy eyes; the carefully mussed hair; the suits in which he looks like a boy playing being a grown up.

"You've got to have the cheeky smile!" he said, turning it on. I said cheesy, not cheeky. "I know you did! But it's all very real. I'm not a cheesy individual." He is a bit.

He says things like: "I'm still chasing the dream" and "it's worth working incredibly hard if I can be in a position to not only do what I love, but if the thing I do makes other people happy too".

I may have wrinkled my nose, the way you might when you get a whiff of pongy cheese, at that. He wasn't offended. He has those nice manners, and I think, a little more self awareness that you expect from somebody who looks 16.

He looks squeaky clean. He says he'll have to clean the house before you go around and, from the state of it, you think he probably has. He claims he swears.

"Yes, I've got quite bad language." He is eager to please. He has boundless, appealing, puppyish self- belief. He could chase sticks forever, which in a way, is exactly what he's doing. He released his second album, Inspirations, on Monday.

So this is how this should have gone. I should have met him at a record company office. There would no doubt have been a PR person in attendance. He'd have had his hair done, and possibly a bit of discreet make-up, for his picture. His new CD would have been playing.

"Now that would be cheesy," he said, cheerfully, when I painted this other scenario - in which I'd have got a stern look from the PR person for calling him cheesy.

Instead we met at his mum's modest house in Devonport, the one he'd probably cleaned before we arrived. He hadn't done anything to his hair.

He didn't have a copy of the new CD lying casually around, and there was nobody to give me a copy. I really should have asked to buy one because he needs the money.

The house has financed the CD. He no longer has a deal with a record company. The money, such as it was, has gone. He won't say just how much he got from that deal except that it was an advance and he didn't get any royalties from the first CD which eventually sold a rather more modest 60,000 copies.

For all the hyped-up announcements of such deals, the reality of them is that the artist was unlikely to ever see that sum somewhere between $3 million and $5 million.

He was given enough money to live on for a couple of years but out of that he had to pay for all expenses involved in the making of his album, including the £1500 per song for the orchestral scores.

Has he got any money now? "Actually, I'm in the minus at the moment." He said that cheerfully too. Oh. And is he worried about that? "No, not at all." His mum might be.

"I haven't actually asked her." I know by now that he's relentlessly upbeat, but she put up her house for collateral so that he could make his album. He now owes the bank $400,000. If he fails to make the money back ... ? Did I mention that he has eternal optimism? "So I need to sell 40,000 units and will I sell 40,000 units in New Zealand? No.

Will I sell 40,000 units in the next six months? No. But I've got the rest of my life to sell this album." He put in a valiant plug, which I'm putting in for his mum's sake: "This album is a true representation of who I am as an artist."

Who he is as an artist is one of those cross-over artists many people are very rude about. He has old-fashioned taste in music. He likes Elton John and Billy Joel. He covers Sting and U2, with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra (whose fee ate a big whack of the house money).

There is a sort of sneering about this sort of music. He says about such sneering: "If you enjoy it, that's great. If you don't, that's great too and if you don't, you know what? Give the CD to your mum!"

He is doing a charity gig, for Look Good Feel Better (for women with cancer), singing at St Matthew-in-the-City on December 4. He did ask that his expenses be covered. His expenses are ... "Petrol! That's the extent of my rider: petrol, and water."

He's very serious about his career - "definitely" - so presumably he chooses charity gigs that are called, in the business, "a good fit". "You know what? It makes sense to me. I love to sing songs ... and in those moments there's the possibility that if I sing the songs right and if I sing the right songs, then I can make people feel good at that moment. I'm just in customer services."

You do have to ask: How well is his career in customer services going? "Right now, I think I'm doing the best I've ever done." He knows this because he sets goals. "I think if you are reaching your goals ... and I'm a very goal-oriented person ... I think a lot of my personal happiness comes from achieving those goals."

He has some rather odd goals. One is getting through the cans in his mother's pantry, which he claimed, in an interview, have been there "since the war". That may have been a slight exaggeration, he says, but, "well, I'll tell you what happened. I've been living in the UK for the last three years and, this is boring but ... I heard a statistic that all of the food bought in the UK, 20 per cent ends up being thrown out. So I sort of adopted a little philosophy, as silly as it sounds, which was whenever I made something to eat, I would use something that needed to be used."

That is as near to eccentric entertainer behaviour as he gets. The telling of this might be the oddest thing about him, but perhaps not. Using up cans of food from the war is just the sort of thing a good boy would do (he probably eats his greens up too).

You think: He must be disappointed about being dropped by the record company, given all that talking up and the shimmering allure of all that money even if it was always more oasis than reality.

"No, that's the incredibly exciting thing. Honestly, I'm not putting on a brave face. I'm the most excited and happy I've ever been because this is my album being marketed my way."

He seems like a good kid. His, he insists, is still a story of great expectations, undiminished. All you can do then - because who would deny the puppy another stick to chase? - is wish him, and his mum, all the best. And this could be his last shot at the big time. "Not at all. It's probably my last shot with the bank!"

So just don't let him near your assets. He said, "Hey, you haven't got a freehold house, have you?" He delivered this parting line with a not half-bad parody of a cheesy grin.