Down Under MySpace hit for French singer

SHE'S French, she's kooky and her "bunny boiler" song I'll Kill Her is fast becoming an unlikely hit here in Australia.

Last month national broadcaster Triple J began playing Paris-based singer SoKo's quirky acoustic track and within days it had become one of the station's most requested songs. The tale of unrequited love struck a chord with listeners, probably thanks to a heavy dose of humour and SoKo's enchanting French accent as she sings about the "bitch blonde girl" who stole her man.

"She's a bitch you know?" she sings. "All she's got is blondeness, not even tenderness. Yeah, she's clever-less." Then she goes on to warn with a delightful ESL turn of phrase: "she'll dump your ass for a man called Brendan . . . because he's full of money".

Of course, it doesn't hurt that on top of being kooky and French, SoKo is also 21 and gorgeous. The first she heard of her burgeoning stardom Down Under was a flurry of messages (many asking for her hand in marriage) on her MySpace page. Last week she added the plea "Fly Me To Australia" to her homepage, hopeful promoters may pick up on her popularity.

"I did that for Denmark when they put me on the radio. I wrote: 'Fly me to Denmark', and they did," she reports down the line from her apartment in Paris.

So Australia wasn't the first country to discover this internet ingenue, although she remains unsigned and her only recording is a five-track EP SoKo not SoKute available online (www.myspace.com/thesokos).

"It's so weird," SoKo says of her growing stardom, especially given she only began writing music about a year ago. "It's all the time a surprise, because it (I'll Kill Her) is just something I've done and put on MySpace for my friends in, like, November.

"I think in March or April, Danish radio took it and put it on air." Before too long it was a hit in Denmark and SoKo, who was virtually unknown in France at the time, was selling out 500-capacity shows in Copenhagen in two hours.

"People were arresting me in the streets, and they're like, 'Hey, are you SoKo?'. I couldn't believe it 'cause I've done that (recording) in my room and I'm really not happy with it."

And that's one of ironies of SoKo's success – she doesn't particularly like the recording of I'll Kill Her which is making her a star. And, at times, she finds this frustrating.

"Say you want to do a huge painting," she explains, "and you make a little black and white sketch on a napkin and you're like, 'I want to do that with a lot of colour and really big'. Then people are like, 'Oh no, this one on the little napkin is really good, we should put in in a museum'. But that's not what you want to do."

Her sudden success, courtesy of MySpace, has caught SoKo a little by surprise. And although there is a buzz building around her in France she's not keen to sign any of the major label contracts on offer.

"I don't want to sign now because I think it's really rushed," she says, admitting she's only just learning to play her first instrument – a ukulele. "I thought it was the easiest instrument to play. Come on, it's just like four strings!" she laughs.

But it is Soko's wonderfully witty lyrics, rather than her ukulele skills that have charmed listeners as she sings about the ordinary angst of love and bad hair days.

Although she currently juggles acting with her new-found career in music, SoKo is open to all offers of a free trip Down Under. She visited as a tourist two years ago and loved it. Well, everything except the insects.

"I'm planning to actually create a nuclear bomb to kill spiders and flies," she says. You can take the girl out of France . . .

Listen: www.myspace.com/thesokos and search "soko" on www.myspacetv.com