SHE’S SOUTHAMPTON’S shining star.

And while Foxes has been busy building a career in the States and featuring on other artists’ music, she is now ready to go it alone with a UK tour, getting under way next week.

The singer, Louisa Rose Allen, a former schoolgirl at Cantell, is following up her recent Grammy win with her debut album Glorious, set for release in May.

For a 24-year-old, she’s already crammed a lot in.

Her debut single Youth is already enjoying chart success, having reached number 12 in the charts, and she’s already been involved with a number of hits.

There was her appearance on Clarity by Russian- German dance producer Zedd. That was a Top 10 hit in the US, while the Rudimental track on which she appeared, Right Here, was a chart-topper here in the UK.

“The last year or so has been me working with other people, so now it’s my turn,” she says, sitting in an east London café around the corner from her flat.

“It feels like I’ve been around a while but it’s accidental. I wasn’t ready, but I’m not going to turn down those guest spots,”

she adds. “They came about because I was asked to write a part, but it ended up that I sang the parts as well.”

As a small child growing up in Swaythling and St Denys, Allen had the pretty standard dream of becoming a pop star. When she grew older though, her ambition wasn’t to be in the limelight herself, but to write music for others.

It was only when one of the songs she’d recorded as a demo was used on an episode of American teen drama Gossip Girl that things changed. It was then she met Zedd, and Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, who asked her to sing guest vocals on Just One Yesterday, a song on their fifth album Save Rock And Roll.

“Pete heard one of my songs at a party, although I should tell everyone he heard it while on a Gossip Girl box set marathon really.”

It’s not hard to work out why these artists would want to collaborate with Allen. Her music pitches her somewhere between Florence And The Machine and Bat For Lashes; it’s bold, at times bombastic and drenched in melody.

Lyrically, she writes about herself, despite coming up with a stage name to keep some distance between her music and her real self, and looks-wise, well, the word pretty doesn’t quite do her justice. As far as modern pop stars go, she has everything needed to succeed.

“I didn’t need any persuading to step up and perform,” she says. “It was more just the fame and negative things that come with it that I didn’t want.

“What convinced me more than anything was doing a couple of shows and seeing how my music can inspire people. I started thinking, ‘I do actually want to be the face of this, I don’t want to let someone else sing these songs’.

“If I have the chance to do this, and maybe inspire people in the same way, say, Patti Smith inspired me, then I should.”

n Glorious is out on May 9.