Heaps of reasons to love Imogen

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SHE'S modern pop's greatest adventurer.

Imogen Heap's extraordinary journey has taken her from life as a teenage music prodigy in her home town of Romford to Hollywood - where she rubbed shoulders with stars like Al Pacino - and back again.

Along the way she's ditched her record company and set up her own label, been so deep in debt she's had to put her home in hock to pay for recording sessions and, slowly but surely, become a million-selling success on her own terms.

Imogen - whose art therapist mum is from Edinburgh - even trekked to the remote shores of Tanzania's Lake Natron to capture unique atmospheres for her music.

But it was a three-month voyage of self-discovery that helped her map out the foundations of her incredible third album Ellipse, which is up for two gongs at next week's prestigious Grammy Awards.

"For the first time," she confesses, "I really looked inside to see who I was and what I've been doing all this time.

"I signed my first record deal in 1996 when I was 18 and, for ten years or so, I felt like I was in a really fast race. I suddenly realised I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a holiday.

"So I decided to get away from it all, take my keyboard and a laptop, and go travelling on my own.

"I plotted the trip by spinning around Google Earth and decided, as a starting point, to choose the place with the most blue sea around it, because I wanted to get as far away from people as possible. That was Hawaii."

On her first day in the Pacific, on a borrowed grand piano, Imogen - who visits Glasgow's ABC on February 8 - wrote the song Wait It Out.

It's one of the many standouts on the brilliantly-crafted Ellipse. And ironically its first line asks: "Where do we go from here?"

The answer, in Imogen's case, was Fiji, Tasmania, China and Thailand as she criss-crossed the ocean for the next three months.

In the tiny town of Biei, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, locals pushed a piano up a hill to the farmhouse where she was staying so that she could continue working on ideas for the album.

"It was a good creative space," she recalls. "I loved it. I'd never travelled on my own before, but what happens when you're not with friends and you're alone with your thoughts for long periods of time is that you really start to delve deep.

"You write about things that are so much a part of you that, normally, you don't even need to think about them.

"Those things made their way onto the album. I wasn't so much writing directly about the places I was visiting, I was just putting myself in a different space to see what would come out.

"That's made Ellipse a deeply personal album but it also has a breadth that people can tap into."

IMOGEN Heap plays Glasgow's ABC on February 8. Call 08444 771 000 for tickets.

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