Pop Sensation Unfazed by Impending Global Stardom

Lorde, 16, who says she chose her stage name because she wanted an aesthetically feminine aristocratic title, tells the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis that the record company “got straight away that I was a bit weird.”

Interviewing an international pop sensation while their mum hovers in the background is a slightly odd experience, but then, as Ella Yelich-O’Connor points out, she shouldn’t really be here herself. She should be back home in New Zealand, in Devonport, a suburb of Auckland that’s apparently known locally as the Bubble – “because it’s so insular and closed off from everything” – and which she describes, winningly, as “the kind of suburb that people make movies about, there’s quite weird mums everywhere”.

By the time she arrived in the US, she notes, Royals was so big that fans turned up at the airport and outside her hotel. “Which was weird,” she says, with a perplexed shake of the head.

Perhaps her calmness has something to do with New Zealand, a country that, by her account, doesn’t really go in for excitable celebrity culture: “I’ve had two of the biggest songs in the country and I can do exactly what I’ve always done.”

Lorde’s debut album Pure Heroine is released in the UK on 28 October.