Say my name, says Beyoncé's little sister Solange

At The Shacklewell Arms, a dilapidated hipster pub in Dalston, the crowd in the cavernous downstairs club were going wild for a remix of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’.

The girl behind the decks, grinding with The xx’s frontman Oliver Sim and recklessly flicking her dreadlocks, that hot Saturday night last July was none other than Beyoncé’s little sister Solange Knowles and she had East London in a frenzy. Solange is no stranger to the arty, underground scene. She lives in Brooklyn (her sister in conservative midtown Manhattan), she hangs out with indie bands such as Grizzly Bear (her sister with squeaky-clean Gwyneth and Chris) and she is widely credited with introducing her sister and Jay-Z to new music (last year she insisted they watch The xx at Coachella and now they’re big fans).

When we meet, six months later, in a small restaurant in the Carroll Gardens neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Solange, a DJ, singer, Vogue blogger and It-girl, has become an omnipresent figure in the fashion world thanks to her unique style. She has been tapped by designers including Alberta Ferretti to walk in their shows and is a front-row staple at fashion weeks and in the DJ booth at fashion parties all over the world. Today, despite the torrential rain, she’s wearing an aqua green oversized sweater, flared hot-pink Armani trousers, brown Fendi heels and a decidedly unwaterproof leopard-print faux-fur coat. ‘Wow,’ she says, smiling. ‘Really not the best day to ride my bike here!’

While Beyoncé is the better-known Knowles sibling (there are just two), with the more famous husband, baby, and everything else, Solange, 25, has quite a story of her own. She’s released two albums, working with producers including Timbaland, Pharrell and Cee-Lo Green, toured the world as a dancer with Destiny’s Child and has written album tracks for Kelly Rowland and four songs for her sister, including ‘Upgrade U’ and ‘Get Me Bodied’ (when she was just 15). She has starred in two films: Johnson Family Vacation (2004), and the cheerleading flick Bring It On: All Or Nothing (2006). And at 17, she married her high-school sweetheart and had a baby.

She’s happy and contented, living with her new boyfriend, the video director Alan Ferguson, putting the finishing touches to her third album, which she hopes to release in June, and raising her son Julez, now seven. Recently, of course, she also became an aunt: ‘That was really, really insane,’ she says of the press coverage of her niece Blue Ivy’s birth. ‘Such an invasion of privacy.’ Has she offered Beyoncé any parenting advice? ‘No, I really feel like because I had my son so young, I didn’t want everyone’s help,’ she says. ‘I think people felt entitled to give advice, so I’m always very sensitive to mums and letting them feel their way out. But there have been times when she’ll ask, “Did Julez do this? Did this ever happen with Julez?” And I’ll gladly give her advice. I’m in a really good place, and I think things are evolving because of that. Professionally, personally, I think that over the last three years I’ve just had a lot more stability, a lot more clarity about where I want to be and how I want to get there.’ Finally, it seems, Solange is ready to step out from her sister’s shadow into a spotlight very much her own.

The Knowles sisters grew up in the affluent Third Ward neighbourhood of Houston, Texas, with a record-manager father and costume designer mother. One of Solange’s earliest memories is being two-and-a-half and going with her mother to collect Beyoncé from ballet class. ‘I really fell in love with dance. By the time I was seven, I had dance class six times a week. I was obsessed.’ By then, her sister was already in a pop group – Girl’s Tyme – with, among others, Kelly Rowland, who moved into the Knowles household when Solange was five. ‘Her mother was a nanny for another family, so Kelly lived with us when they first moved from Atlanta. She was like a second sister,’ Solange says. ‘It definitely was tough, having your sister have a built-in BFF, and me being five years younger. But my sister was very protective of me, and we were very sweet with each other. I’m sure if we were closer in age we wouldn’t have gotten along so great. But we’ve been super-close ever since I was about 13.’

When she was nine – with her parents now working full-time on her sister’s new group, Destiny’s Child – Solange began quietly writing songs. ‘I grew up seeing my sister in the studio. I would go to recording sessions and take notes.’ More publicly, she was still dancing and one day, when she was 13, a pregnant dancer pulled out of an imminent Destiny’s Child tour (supporting Christina Aguilera) and Beyoncé asked Solange to come on the road with her. A few weeks later, Solange found herself on a world tour: ‘I was just totally blown away,’ she says.

Solange stayed on the road for two years, but when she was on the MTV TRL tour with Destiny’s Child, aged 15, she collapsed during a soundcheck. Her knees, so used to ballet, had given in under the strain of complicated hip-hop routines, and she was told not to dance for six months. Her father arranged for her to host the tour instead, introducing the band to sold-out 40,000-seat amphitheatres. ‘I had no experience,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t ever have a fear of people as a teenager. Now it’s a different story.’

One night, she sang some of her songs to her father. ‘And he told my mother, who said, “Oh, no. We don’t want you doing this, too. You can do anything in the world! You’re so smart.”?’ But why would her mother say that, when she’d been grooming her sister for stardom from day one? ‘I think she was nervous about me losing my childhood,’ says Solange. ‘My sister started at such a young age that this was her life for as long as she could remember.’ Did seeing the extremes of celebrity and success first-hand discourage her? ‘From a very early age I decided that I wanted to be able to do my music but still be able to live a normal life.’ She recorded a song and sent it to Columbia Records, who offered her an album deal. ‘I went into the meeting and said, “I want it to be clear that I want to write all of my music. I want to have control of that.” I had grown up around this.’ After a disagreement with the label, Solange had to promote the album, Solo Star, on her own. ‘I didn’t care. I didn’t need the money…’ She pauses. ‘It wasn’t very successful.’

She had started dating a high-school football player called Daniel Smith (her son’s full name is Daniel Julez Smith Jr) when she was 13, but although he had visited her on tour, it was only when she moved back to Houston that the two were able to spend a lot of time with one another. ‘I just loved being at home and being domestic,’ she says. ‘We would have gotten married for sure anyway, but then I found out I was pregnant. We were crazy, impulsive teenagers and I was obviously craving some sort of stability.’ Her family, she says, ‘were alarmed and frightened that their 17-year-old daughter wanted to get married and have a kid, but I’d been working since I was 13. I was making my own money. I wasn’t really asking permission, and once they found out I was serious about it, they were supportive and amazing.’ When Smith accepted an offer to play college football in Idaho, Solange went, too. In the space of a year, she had gone from recording with Timbaland and touring the world, to being a mother living in the sticks. How does that happen exactly? She laughs. ‘If I could help you figure it out, I’d have all the answers.’