Sumner time: meet Sting's daughter Coco Sumner

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10 April 2012

There is something of a wild creature about Coco Sumner. She's not an air-kisser, not a people-pleaser, certainly not much of a hair-brusher.

She suffers the attentions of our make-up team quietly, then shakes my hand with the gruff politeness of a teenage boy. She spends our interview looking sideways at me through a protective mane of hair, but when she speaks, just as when she sings on her forthcoming album The Constant, her voice is beautiful, broken and, above all things, sincere. It's strangely familiar, almost like a singer from the 1980s.

Oh, yes. That would be Sting, her father. Being born the daughter of megastar Gordon Sumner and Trudie Styler is probably the least cool thing Coco has ever done, and she knows it. On her early demo, 'My Name Is A Stain', she laments that for most of her 19 years she has been fawned over and 'spied on'; she also rages about the mesmerising effect of her famous family name on 'party guests, the kind that I detest'. The song is clearly a cry from the heart, like an adolescent diary entry that has made it on to YouTube. 'Hmm,' she mumbles. 'Those demos haunt me.'

But life as La Petite Sting can't have been all bad. Being born with a silver lute in her paws must have had some advantages – a creative home life, a money-no-object education (she went to Bryanston and Hampstead College of Fine Arts), staff to do her mother's bidding (until an unfortunate employment tribunal was decided in her former chef's favour in 2007) and, surely, I say, music-industry contacts to help her launch her own career as I Blame Coco?

Young Coco plonks down her teacup and glowers into the middle distance. She looks beautiful when she glowers. 'It wasn't family contacts. Let's just get that out of the way. I keep family and business very separate, as I think you should in any situation.' And she has already achieved things that can't be done by nepotism alone, such as recording an album that is high-octane, catchy and makes you want to move. She has won praise from people such as The Stone Roses' Ian Brown, who described her work as 'mega'; she has a record deal with Island and is in demand as a collaborator with artists such as rapper Plan B and Sub Focus ('the new drum 'n' bass lord', as Coco describes him); she is about to tour supporting La Roux. And, as she says in her lyrics, 'forget my dad, you need to hear my band' – which seems like the fairest thing to do.

Coco has shut herself away in her room and made music for as long as she can remember. By the age of nine, she had all the bass guitar chords to the Sex Pistols' first album nailed and some of the attitude, too. 'I'm shy and socially inept, but behind it I've always had this burning anger, anger to get out of my shell, and music helps take me out of myself. When I perform, I become a different person.'

That person is called Coco – her middle name and now her stage name. 'After Coco the Clown,' she says. 'My brother was allowed to name me, and it was his favourite toy.' Her first name, the one she went by at school, and the one she uses on Facebook, is Eliot. 'After TS Eliot. That was my serious name, for my passport. Or in case I wanted to be prime minister.' The idea makes her snort. However, she likes being named after a writer, and has called her new Alsatian puppy Aldous, after Huxley, because 'Brave New World is just awesome'.

She was brought up at Lake House, her parents' Elizabethan home near Salisbury, which stands in 170 acres of farmland. With homes in Highgate, Queen Anne's Gate, New York, Malibu, Tuscany and the Dominican Republic, you would expect Coco to be well-travelled, a sophisticate, but it was clearly only Wiltshire that made an impact. She says her childhood was 'very rural. I was quite an odd child. Quite feral.' I laugh but she doesn't see what's funny. 'Me and my dog [a predecessor of Aldous, also an Alsatian] would go off and have adventures. Shooting chickens and so on. I used to make my own bows and arrows.'

No trips to the opera, or concerts or gigs, then? 'No, I was very countrified, not townie, not about parties at all.' Music wasn't something she shared with her family. 'We all got on with our own thing, there was no pressure to do music.' But surely music – discussing it, playing it – was just a fact of life at home? 'Well, as a little kid I used to dress up as Ian Dury and run around hitting people with drumsticks.'

She never toured with her father for long periods, but has certainly served her time waiting for concerts to finish. She used to make cheeky films with her half-sister Fuchsia (by Sting's first marriage to the actress Frances Tomelty) mucking about backstage. The footage shows them running around and playing with their father's gym equipment, oblivious to the fact that a huge stadium concert is going on just the other side of the wall.

'My dad hasn't even heard my album yet,' she says, proud of her independence. 'He's heard the single 'Caesar' and he said he liked it.' Is his approval important to her? She pulls a face. 'I can't go there.'

It sounds like her mother is the main parental authority. The lyrics to one song, 'I Blame Coco', describe everyone piling back to her room for a house party. 'It's getting light outside/But Jasmine wants to dance' There is 'talcum on the table' and someone is 'getting hot rocks on the sofa it's new Chesterfield you know'. The song ends with a cry: 'My parents got back early. What will my mother say? What will my mother say?'

It was at Bryanston that she found these friends, her 'wolf pack'. Her gang includes three girls called India (according to Facebook) and the model Jazzy de Lisser (stepdaughter of former racing driver Johnny Dumfries and founder of the Liver Good Life charity, which promotes renal health awareness among young people). 'I've got great friends and I keep them close. My friends are like my family.' She enjoyed Bryanston, finding it 'quite liberal', although she was dyslexic and never academic. 'I always worked hard but I found learning difficult. I have a really short attention span. I didn't do very well at all in music GCSE [she got a D]. But that's different to this pop malarkey, isn't it?'

From 'about 14' she started playing gigs, forming a band, not yet called I Blame Coco, but going by the name of Coco and the Ladyboys (one of whom, Ben Hudson, would go on to storm the charts with Kanye West). They played the usual circuit – 'clubs, pubs and hairdressers'. Hairdressers? 'The Flaxon Ptootch on Kentish Town Road – it's a salon where the owner, Michael Ptootch, would put on art shows and I'd play at them once a month. Darcus from Island Records came down and that was how I got found out.'

As only a 19-year-old can, she writes off the year before last as a lifetime ago, scoffing at the music she was making: ska-influenced, soulful acoustic tunes with a sprung calypso rhythm. As well as showing off her impressive talent in the raw, the songs were charming and moreish. Why did she drop that style? 'It was OK for a bit but I felt there's only so much you can do with ska music; you can't take it to another level.' There was another small catch: they sounded just like her dad's most famous work. 'Then I thought, "Why not mix it in with a bit of Swedish punk music and some 1980s disco?" ' Her face has come to life and she practically roars the word 'disco'. After listening to Swedish popstrels Robyn and Lykke Li and the edgy electro band Teddybears (who wear huge menacing bear masks during public appearances), she decided to set off on a pilgrimage to Stockholm, in search of the Scandi electronica scene. She turned up alone, with only some contacts from Island Records. It was a revelation. 'I just thought, "This is where I belong. These are my people!"'

There she met the producer Klas (pronounced with a short 'a' as in jazz) with whom she made her album The Constant. Souped-up electronica with 1980s rhythms, the album was a product of messing about at 'cocktail time'. Robyn, who contributed backing vocals, favoured Cosmopolitans, but Coco's drink of choice is a pint of Guinness. 'I can do girly,' she says unconvincingly. 'Sometimes.'

Just when her career was coming together, Coco had a serious injury. At dinner with friends in LA, she hit her head. 'I've no idea why it happened. I just stood up and fell to the floor.' The cause is still unexplained, but it appears she may have fainted and then hit her head. Her father, who was luckily also in LA, has described his anguish after Trudie rang to tell him the news. 'I assumed that once your kids get to about 20 you don't have to worry, they live their own lives. No, it is a life sentence,' he told the Evening Standard last year. '[Trudie] said, "You have to go to hospital, Coco is alive but she is in trouble." It was the longest drive of my life, I was just imagining the worst. I got there and Coco was fighting tooth and nail with the medics and refusing to cooperate.' He tried 'cajoling, begging, bullying' until she finally agreed to a brain scan. 'Looking back on it now we can all laugh,' says Coco wryly. Head trauma, after all, is notoriously discombobulating, so it wasn't necessarily bloody-mindedness that made her rebel against her doctors. 'I'm all better now but it's been a big sort of life-changing part of me.'

She's putting a brave face on an accident that has put her at risk of seizures (the medication, she says, 'was actually brilliant to write [songs] under'). She recently had to spend a day wearing electrodes on her head, for tests. 'My friends think it has changed me, though I'm not sure how. It's a big deal – your head is your world, after all – but for about three months I barely noticed it. Then I got really grumpy.' Her song 'Self Machine' is a touching tale of alienation ('I'm a lonely robot in a wasteland'), but she says it's not about her own feelings so much as those of the Disney character Wall-E. 'Man, I loved that film.'

A side-effect of the accident was losing her sense of smell. It hasn't put her off her food. 'Nothing could,' she says, wolfing down a beefburger during our photo shoot to prove it. 'It's OK, you know: there are plenty of smells you don't want to smell anyway.' But other smells, like gas and smoke, are more important, and Coco – or rather, her concerned family – are hoping Aldous the Alsatian will act as her nose and protector; he was a particularly important guardian when she was living alone off Frognal Lane, in Hampstead, where she rented a flat for a year. The Heath was her country escape (and the Holly Bush her favourite place for a hot toddy) but now she is living near Victoria, with a bolt-hole cottage in Wiltshire. 'There's a lot that needs to be done to it but it's right by a lake and it's great for the dog to get some exercise. I really appreciate the countryside these days. You have to be very intrepid, very wary, streetwise, living in a city like London.'

There is no lover in her life at the moment, and she claims that her songs, brimming with heart, are about imagined love affairs rather that anything of real-life significance. 'They're more about things I wanted to happen than things that actually did happen. Songs can be like short stories. I write ideas down on scraps of paper and then find them in my coat pockets weeks later.' She scotches internet rumours that she had more than a musical relationship with Pete Doherty ('completely denied') and claims to be 'on the lookout for a nice Scandinavian boy' but doesn't rate her chances. 'I just live in my own little world of Coco and the music. I get all wrapped up in it and it's a lot more peaceful than the world you may or may not want to live in. On stage, I don't even feel anything. You just completely lose yourself. It's numbness, with a lot of pride in what you're doing.' The cheer of a crowd when she played her first single 'Caesar' 'gave me a huge buzz. It's what I live for. And dancing. Like a buffoon.' I entered this interview deeply sceptical but by the end I'm completely sold on her. I blame Coco.

Coco Sumner plays the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen on 14 April and will be supporting La Roux at the O2 Academy Brixton on 8 May

Sumner time: meet Sting's daughter Coco Sumner

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