She’s the Anti-Britney--Sort Of

I don’t know how many 15-year-olds have published an autobiography, but I’m guessing the number is small.

Then again, the number of singers who make a best-selling album of semi-classical sacred music at age 12 is probably not much bigger.

Charlotte Church has done both. She is also the star of a PBS special filmed in Jerusalem.

In addition, she seems like the kind of kid who cleans up her room without being hounded.

In short, Charlotte Church has established herself in the past three years or so as the kind of teen performer even a parent or grandparent could love.

Which explains why many of her most ardent fans are women who are, in fact, old enough to be her mother or grandmother. Church is also popular among preteen girls.

But for all her success, Church is derided among some critics for being merely a novelty act, an oversold piece of precocity whose celebrity owes more to her perky wide-eyed countenance than the depth of her musical interpretations.

To which she shrugs.

“Yeah, I have had some bad press, especially in Britain,” Charlotte said recently from the kitchen of her home in Wales. “Some of it has really insulted me, and what’s worse is that some of it has insulted my parents, which is not fair because they don’t know my parents. It’s much worse in the U.K. The American press have been angels. But the bad stuff, you just get used to it.”

Church is among the more visible specimens in a rapidly rising tide of child performers.

In the classical world especially, the business has discovered that children sell well. Beginning with violinist Midori almost two decades ago, there has been a steady march of moppet-artists, of various skill levels but all certifiably cute.

Church is unusual in that she is a singer of mostly “serious” music, a category that the youth brigade has not, as a rule, attempted.

There have, of course, been some young pop vocal phenoms such as LeAnn Rimes and, slightly older, Britney Spears.

But Church has carefully cultivated a cherubic good-girl persona both with respect to her musical repertoire (much of it religious) as well as her decidedly innocent and well-scrubbed physical appearance.

Nevertheless, she is careful not to diss her more overtly sexual show-biz colleagues.

“I think Britney looks great, and so does Christina [Aguilera], but I think in their videos they don’t need to do all that stuff they do. Christina especially, I think, has an amazing amount of talent that she doesn’t have to do that. But ultimately that’s the market that’s been created, and that’s just what’s going to happen. It’s not something you can blame on them, really. It’s what has been created, and you can’t stop it now.”

The effort to cast Church as a healthy antidote to the provocative image of her pop counterparts has been unstinting.

*

For instance, take the autobiography, which is titled “Voice of an Angel: My Life (So Far)” (Warner Books).

An almost random excerpt, from the chapter titled “My Bedroom”:

“What are the most important things in my room? Definitely the two sofa beds that my friends sleep on at weekends. Then there’s all my makeup that, right now, I keep on top of my chest of drawers. My favorites at the moment are Poppy lip-gloss called Shine and black Maybelline mascara.

“I have to confess I adore shoes. I have at least 20 pairs. . . . I’ve got a pair of strappy sandals from Singapore that cost nothing and I love them to death. Oh, and my favorite shoes at the moment are a pair of mules with diamante toes and wooden heels. They are lush, which means gorgeous.”

Church bristles, politely, at the suggestion that she is not in control of her life and career.

“From the beginning, really, I’ve been old enough to make decisions for myself. Of course, I take people who are older and wiser, like my parents, and seek their opinions. But at the end of the day, I have the final say on things, including what I sing.”