If we're being honest with ourselves, no one really expected Poppy Donham to do much with herself. She was never good in school, and her parents certainly didn't help her with her studies. She was never pushed one way or another- she showed up, sat near the back and doodled long strands of curly-cues, and left when it was time to go. For a moment, the world was sure Poppy Donham was cursed to stand in the background for the rest of her life. It wasn't until she made it to her last year of school and she got busted with a bag of cocaine did anyone think one way or another about Poppy Donham, a little girl who had glided through life, until this very moment.
Even then, Poppy hadn't made much of a name for herself. Being a troubled girl in Northampton was a pretty dime-a-dozen struggle to go through. Her father died, her mother started to drink, and Poppy began to float away into another being. Though she had, for just a second, been a blip on the radar, things around her resumed- everyone quietly forgot that she had ever existed. "Who is Poppy Donham, anyway?" A girl with blonde hair and sunkissed skin, a thick accent and bright eyes that left no room for confusion. A little girl lost that no one was looking to find.
But Poppy herself had never been worried. See, it didn't matter that she had no one, really, to tie her down to life. She was tied down all on her own. She was smart, but not in the ways that others wanted her to be. She was kind, but she let it show when she felt like it was time. She was sweet, but only to those she thought deserving. And, most importantly, she was talented. This was not a question of "if" but "when," in Poppy's mind, when it came to her future as an artist. Poppy had never doubted that she was meant to sing. What she did doubt, however, was how long it would take for someone to notice her.
She was working as a waitress in a pub when it first happened. She had been living in a dingy flat for a while, scraping together money for god-knows-what-next, when she took part in a karaoke night. "Quit your job," the person told her, giving her a shiny white card with their name on it. "Quit your job and come with me. I can make you a superstar." But Poppy wasn't stupid- she had seen the Lifetime movies where this ended with a girl in a ditch. So she didn't quit her job, but she did decide to go to a few meetings and see if it was really as great as it sounded.
Soon, she was holed up in West London writing an album. The whole thing happened so quickly, she didn't really understand it herself. One morning, she was turning in her apron at work and dumping her cat into a tiny flat in West London while people filtered in and out, helping her write. She was great on the piano and didn't need help with that, but she was shit with the guitar and needed someone to play it to her rhythms. As her new PR team got her in touch with lots of important people via MySpace, or whatever it was important people used, Poppy started writing songs. She wrote about her childhood, about her mother, about her father, about her cat, about her first love and first loss. She wrote about evrything. Piles of songs were suddenly a possibility, and then, things got REALLY interesting.
First, there was the release of "Under The Sheets" with Neon Gold. After that, the up and coming awards. After that, her first album. And then things started snowballing. People still asked, "Who is Poppy Donham?" but their question had a different tone to it, now. It seemed almost lyrical in its questioning, in its need to understand the small little thing who had popped up out of nowhere, who packed a punch with her voice and wasn't afraid to show it off.
Then, of course, there was the trouble. Poppy Donham was a drug addict, people said. I remember when Poppy Donham was nothing but a shit waitress at a pub, I bet she blew the manager for the job, people said. Jealousy, her PR people told her. Its common when these things happen, they told her. "You can't let it get to you." Who is letting what get to whom? She thought. "If I never work a day in my life again, I'll have enough money to eat every day for the rest of my life. I don't care who they think I've blown."
And so it went, and it went quickly. Sometimes Poppy couldn't keep up. Sure, she'd always known she'd be a singer, but she never realized it would reach quite this magnitude. But what could she do, besides smoke a lot of cigarettes and hope for the best?