Mercury award winner Speech Debelle on playing the Liverpool Masque...

As she talks, it's hard for her to suppress her excitement. And rightly so. last week she won the Mercury Prize with her debut album, the fabulous Speech Therapy.
"Mercury means something to me because it's the only award that looks at a body of work," she says.

"I've always loved albums. I don't buy singles. I'm an album girl, I love that intensity. So to have my album win Mercury, well, that's my dreams all come true."

As we speak she's rushing from the hairdresser to the recording studio.

"I'm going to meet the Prime Minister later," she explains. "I haven't got a clue what to wear. They've invited me to some kind of reception at 10 Downing Street. Weird."

And the studio?

"I'm so excited - I'm off to meet Eg White," she explains. "He's the man who wrote Leave Right Now for Will Young and Chasing Pavements for Adele. In my Mercury speech I said how much I wanted to work with him.

"Mercury is an opportunity for me to make a wish list for my career. It won't all come true, but it's a way of getting what you want out there, and then seeing what comes back."

There's a reason that Speech Debelle's debut album is called Speech Therapy and that's because she speaks straight from the heart, with complete intimacy, as if only addressing one person, as if she expects the record never to be heard.

She left home when she was 19 after a falling-out with her mum and lived in homeless hostels for four years.

"It's overstating it to say I was homeless - I stayed at friends' houses as well as hostels and kept in touch with my mum," she says.

Since its release, slow burn has turned into forest fire, with a storm of critical acclaim culminating in her nomination for the internationally renowned Mercury Music Prize - beating The Horrors, Florence and the Machine, Kasabian and Friendly Fires.

In the last week she's being seized upon by the BBC, had her photo plastered across the papers, appeared on the breakfast telly couch and ensured that her rise from hostel dwelling and bad deeds to articulate, honest and abrupt pop star has become the biggest story of the autumn.
Amid all the hype, it's worth going back to the record and in particular the very last track, the title track as it happens.

It's this, perhaps, which sums up what Speech is all about better than anything else she has written, sums up why the reaction to her music has been so strong, so heartfelt: "I've made some mistakes in this life I'm not proud of, see? But I hope that doesn't mean now I'm trying it will be harder for me."

Speech Debelle is putting forth everything - her thoughts, beliefs, mistakes, love, anguish and humour.
"I've really laid myself bare," she admits. "I knew this was an all or nothing record. Thankfully, at the moment, it seems to working out."