starlet express

Her father, Sir Tim, may have penned the words to Evita and other hit musicals, but Eva Rice insists she is writing her own song. And with a record contract and a book deal under her belt, there's really no reason to cry for her

EVA Rice has the most distracting eyelashes. They are so long and curly, coloured with mascara only at the top two-thirds, that they appear to be detached from her face. As if two frilly insects are hovering over her grey-blue eyes, moving in rhythm every time she blinks.

At the age of 25, the daughter of Oscar-winning lyricist Sir Tim is the most 21st century of young women. She has just written a book, Standing Room Only, published by Hodder & Stoughton in their big mainstream-but-groovy paperback format. It is a rock 'n' roll fairy story about Lydia, a drifting girl who leaves a stuffy job in a museum to manage her new boyfriend's band, Moja. Rice, who has fronted struggling bands for years, has also made a single called Standing Room Only, with a group of musicians including her boyfriend Pete Hobbs. The band are called Moja. And if that is not enough to steam up the marketing men's Alain Mikli specs, Rice is just the most gorgeous thing: tall, blonde, a model. When she is not doing all her other things.

"Everyone I know is trying to do loads of different things in case one of them doesn't work out," she explains from the head of her record company's self-consciously down-with-the-kids boardroom table. "You try and do one thing then you realise you can't do it because a) there's so much competition or b) more to the point, you get told to change everything you're doing the whole time." She laughs, a high breathy kind of sound. "That wasn't really the case with me. I didn't know what was going on really. I just hoped for the best."

This is the kind of thing that Lydia says in the book. And because Standing Room Only is a fairy tale - it even had the subtitle "a rock 'n' roll fairy tale" until a marketing focus group found it confusing - everything comes right in the end. And you can't be angry with it because it is not pretending to be world-changing literary fiction or an episode of Panorama. Similarly, it is impossible to be too cross with Rice, with her ethereal eyelashes and pale, matte skin, for castigating the music business for being superficial and marketing- led, then releasing a single which was initially conceived as a promotional gimmick. It's the 21st century. This is how things are done.

When Rice left Bristol University, with a third class degree in theology, it was not immediately obvious what she might do with her life. That third still makes her squirm. "I just did absolutely no work. I did turn up to the odd thing so they didn't actually chuck me out. Pathetic really. But I don't think many people want to do much work when they're 18."

She temped. Signed up with modelling agency IMG. Wrote songs for her band, The Replicant Saints. Played "crappy little venues", hoping that the right person from the right record company would turn up and realise that what their label really needed was an old school pop group with a girl singer and great tunes.

Nothing much happened. Rice wrote a guide to Enid Blyton characters. This is true and not something that her record company has made up. They couldn't make this stuff up. You can buy it from amazon.com. There was more modelling - quite starry stuff, for Harpers & Queen, and Dazed & Confused among others. Then she wrote three chapters of a book about a dreamy, diffident girl who finds herself whirled into a crazy rock band romance. Hodder & Stoughton bought it. The single was designed to be a fun gimmick to accompany review copies - until record company V2 got involved. Whatever happened to the lines between fact and fiction?

While Rice denies that the book is autobiographical, Standing Room Only draws heavily on her portfolio existence. She mocks her own wariness to go outside personal experience. "I don't know whether I could write about something that wasn't actually what I'd been doing. I haven't been living the kind of life they've been leading in the book but it was very easy for me to glam it up and make it sound more exciting. I still have the basic this-is-what-I've-been-doing-and-I- know-exactly-what-I'm-talking-about thing. If I went on to do something else I'd have to know what I was talking about. I'd have to branch into another subject and learn all about that." She laughs her little cough-like chuckle. "So I don't really want to do that yet."

The story took Rice two years to complete, then took her by surprise. "It is definitely a girls' book, which I didn't really feel until I'd finished it. It's not like a lot of the other books that are around just now. I was so bored of all the books which immediately start out with: I'm overweight, I'm worried about my looks, I've got a crap boyfriend, I can't pay my mortgage, I've got a bad job. I mean, who wants to read about that?" She does not add, although she probably could, that writing about these problems would also move her outside the realms of her own experience.

"So I made all my characters super good looking with no money problems so everything was already sorted. That's what makes it a fairy tale." That, and the fact that the guitar player who has a loaded mother, a 1969 Jaguar 240 and is a beast in bed prefers the thoughtful, unshowy Lydia to his band's pneumatic sex bitch singer. That is true fantasy. Just the kind of fairy tale girls like.

On the journey from dinosaur tour guide to manager of supersonic pop sensations, Rice moves Lydia between modelling (via her best friend Frankie), the scuzzy end of the music business (the band, obviously), the second-hand celebrity that comes from having famous parents (the love interest and guitar player, whose mother is an actress). The settings are the sticky carpeted recording studio, the airless pub where the changing room doubles as the broom cupboard, the soul-destroying queues of the modelling casting and the decadent squalor of rich kids who have too much money and too little parental supervision. The book ends just as Lydia gets the gorgeous and enigmatic guitarist to admit he is in love with her and the harassed yet deeply impressed record company A&R man to sign the band.

Rice discusses her cross-media achievements in the most down-to- earth way, as if it is only natural to switch between composing on the guitar and word processor in between photo shoots. Not that this combination can't get a little jumpy. "When you're writing a song, I always feel you can get what you want to say across in three minutes and not feel too worried that people are going to be upset or offended by it because it's so short. But with a book, you've got to keep people's attention for that entire time. There's only about three minutes of my book that I absolutely love."

As a writer she is coy about her influences, although she will admit to admiring Jilly Cooper. (Enid Blyton is also a given, although her own book is mercifully free of the girlish gushiness of both. And of contorted Cooper puns.) Rice met Zadie Smith at a photo shoot for Company magazine, and did not know who she was. She is now embarrassed about this. When she told Smith about her book, and the single, Smith said: 'Oh no, you're the SClub7 of contemporary publishing.' Rice is horrified because she really despises the current trend for teeny bubblegum bands.

Instead, she listens to old music. "You've got to go back to all the old classics before you can start looking forward to everything else." As a little girl she had a real thing for Wet Wet Wet. She particularly admires Blondie. She talks about them a lot: their perfect pop aesthetic, the fact that Debbie Harry was in her thirties when she first became a star. And also because she is a woman in a band full of men. "I love hearing about girls who are in bands with only blokes. I've always been in a band with boys. Now I can't imagine being in a band with a girl, which is really weird because in the rest of life I'd probably always prefer to be with girls. Maybe I just wouldn't be used to it now. Also, I think it looks good." She sighs, which is a kind of pretty, floaty sound. "No one can really top her, Debbie Harry."

Standing Room Only, the single, is defiantly poppy and despite looking like more of an indie girl, Rice is adamant that this is the way it should be. "It's become really annoying that if people say pop now it conjures up all the manufactured acts and the stuff that's been around for the last few years. It should be uplifting and brilliant like Blondie or the Police or any of those really truly great pop bands. A brilliant pop song has just the same effect on a listener as a brilliant piece of classical music.

"Standing Room Only is very short but it's got that immediate- straight-in-get-to-the-chorus-fast-but-you-want-to-hum-it-afterwards thing and it's uplifting and I think that's the main ingredient for a great pop song. We've got the bit in the middle where there's a sort of guitar solo with talking over the top ... we did the song using all the typical pop things that you would get in a classic pop record, the massive harmonies, the woops, the handclaps."

Rice wrote the song with Pete Hobbs, by text messages on their mobile phones. She goes a little pink when she explains this as it sounds suspiciously like something dreamt up in the the record company's marketing department. But everything else about her appears to be true. Why shouldn't this be? But she moves quickly off the subject "It's much harder to write a good happy song than a good sad song. That's one of the things that dad's always said. I remember him saying that it was really hard to write A Whole New World for Aladdin, when they're flying in the magic carpet over the world. How do you sum that up without sounding naff?"

Genetics would suggest that Rice is more comfortable using three minutes to capture a moment than 70,000 words to tell a story. She admits she has been influenced by her father's success, his use of rhyme and ability to stick to the point when writing a song, but is unwilling to make a monogamous commitment to one form or another. She spreads out her unfeasibly long fingers on the spangly tabletop and ponders books v songs.

"They fit together so well because I've been writing about music and I've been doing music as well and there hasn't been a friction between them at all. I could have written five novels in the time I've hung around while I've been in a band. I don't know what I could write about in the future that I know so much about."

She would like to see what happens to her characters - but will only write about them if Standing Room Only, the book, is a big hit. "I wouldn't like to if the book didn't do well, because you wouldn't feel so inspired. You want to know that people are into them. If it did take off and do really well, I would be tempted. I didn't want to carry it on until they were famous in this one because I just thought, I wouldn't know what I'm writing about." That staccato laugh again. "I might start being ridiculous."

So Lydia and the fictional members of Moja will have to wait for Rice and the real life Moja to live the next bit first. She is not going to write ahead of herself. They can't get rich and famous unless Rice does. Or should that be until?Standing Room Only is published by Flame, priced #10. Moja's Standing Room Only will be released by V2 in August

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