Clare Teal still can't truly believe what is happening to her. The jazz singer of the moment tells Charles Hutchinson that most days she still has to pinch herself.

CLARE Teal may call her new album Don't Talk but she is only too happy to talk, almost disbelieving at her spiralling success at the age of 31.

"I'm feeling a thousand different things every minute," says the jazz singer from Kildwick, Airedale.

"I keep thinking about what it has taken to get to this point and how a few years ago I was sitting at a desk selling advertising during the day, wondering if it would ever work, and then every night and every weekend I would travel round the country gigging everywhere I could.

"Today I've been on the phone all day being interviewed; I'm being nominated for awards; I have a stylist bringing me clothes; I have a major record label backing me and I have 'people'. It's amazing but it doesn't seem real."

Real it is. Don't Talk is topping the jazz charts and entered the British album charts at number 20 on its release on October 18. Her promotional duties necessitated her postponing her autumn tour, rescheduling her Grand Opera House show in York from October 20 to this Sunday, November 7.

Like opera singer Lesley Garrett and former cruise-ship cabaret turn Jane McDonald, Clare is being marketed as a no-nonsense, down-to-earth Yorkshire lass with a belting pair of lungs.

Three albums behind her on the specialist label Candid, and with Michael Parkinson breathing sweet nothings of support on his radio and TV shows, she was signed to a multi-album deal by Sony Jazz in May, since when her world has been swell and all that jazz.

Maybe it is coincidence, maybe it is a changing of the guard to the new age of Jamie Cullum, Norah Jones, Katie Melua, Michael Buble and Clare, but her re-arranged date replaces the cancelled Giants of Jazz show featuring old stagers George Melly, Humphrey Lyttelton and Mr Acker Bilk.

You can sense Clare's excitement at her new world. "It's all changed... definitely for the better, all very exciting and nothing like I thought it would be," she says.

"I don't choose my clothes any more. I have a Maureen to do that now. Maureen from Australia. She chooses what I should wear if I have a television or radio appearance, but why it's necessary to decide what to wear on the radio, who knows! It's a mad world."

She notes an irony of the fame game: "It's so ridiculous. When you really need help at the start, you don't get it, no one helps. Then as soon as you have success, windows open for you that you'd never imagined. It's that thing of right place, right time, and all of a sudden jazz is trendy and I get to do things I'd always dreamed of, like the radio series."

Clare was invited by BBC Radio 2 to present her own show, After Seven, and the first series was broadcast on Friday nights this summer. "I really enjoyed doing it but I didn't realise it would be such hard work," she says. "I had some brilliant help from Desmond Carrington, who's been a broadcaster for ever, and he told me about all the pitfalls, such as talking too quickly, too slowly, or too deep."

She wrote all her own scripts for her programmes on classic songs of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. "I'm used to talking about myself on the radio - I can do that till the cows come home - but doing this series I had to talk about other things... and I felt it could have been better, more thematic."

Such Yorkshire candour applies no less to her assessment of her rise to success on the wings of Sony. "I went with Sony because I knew Adam Sieff, the head of Sony Jazz. He was the first person I sent my demo to when they didn't have signing money because jazz wasn't fashionable. Now it is, and I've never been cool before but now I am cool by default," she says.

"Sony saw me, they saw I'm not slim, I'm not tall, I'm not glamorous, all those things that they would want to tick in a box, but they've always been supportive and always encouraged me to grow as an artist."

Clare believes that her age is an advantage.

"There'll always be advice and I take everything on board but I'll only do what I think will improve me and that comes with experience, being a little older at 31, not 17," she says.

"There was talk of script writers coming in for my live shows: they said they wanted the shows to be the best they could be but I said 'I can't read someone else's lines, it's not what I do'. I'm not a stand-up comedian! I just talk to the audience naturally, and that's the point of it, it's more about people getting to know me."

Exactly, just let Clare Teal talk... and sing.

Clare Teal, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday, November 7, 8pm. Tickets: £16.50 on 0870 606 3595.

Updated: 16:03 Thursday, November 04, 2004