BY: Philip Sweeney

"This isn't an image. It's me," says 30-year-old Portuguese fado singer Mariza. "I like my hair like this - there's no rule that says all fadistas have to have black hair - and I like to see beautiful clothes and make-up on stage." Her bleached-blonde, finger-waved hairdo and bright, striped stockings may not be exactly in keeping with the sad Portuguese song form - it means, and bewails, "fate" - but since she has just been awarded Best European Artist at the prestigious BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards, clearly a lot of people like Mariza the way she is.

As well as the awards panel, a whole succession of European festival-goers have been emerging from Mariza's performances over the past year enthusing about her voice (you can expect more of the same tomorrow night, when she performs at Edinburgh's Usher Hall). So, it's not surprising that, with a second album about to be released, such industry heavyweights as Jools Holland (who invited Mariza to perform on his TV show) and broadcaster Charlie Gillett are proclaiming the Lisbon singer as world music's next big thing. More pertinently, some of the greatest praise has come from home. Not only did her 2002 debut album, Fado Em Mim, achieve gold status in Portugal, but she was also named Best Fado Voice by the national radio station, Central FM - no small compliment considering the reverence with which her predecessor, fado supremo Amalia Rodrigues, is still held. Fittingly, it was as a guest performer at a tribute concert after Amalia's death, in 1999, that Mariza first started attracting world attention.

But, accolades aside, it is the singer's looks - or should that be look - that continues to cause a stir. She certainly cuts a dash visually, even off -stage in jeans: model-lanky, poised and flaunting a genealogy that includes Portuguese, German, Spanish, French, African and Indian blood. And on stage she's equally striking, her shoulders draped in her trademark fringed silk fadista's shawl, the last emblematic vestige of old Lisbon fado style.

"I always take a shawl if I'm going somewhere I think I might be asked to sing," she admits. "If I don't have one, I borrow one... I like to feel the ends between my fingers, to pull the material. It's like I get energy to sing from it."

Performing, Mariza exudes energy. Her voice is powerful, but unfailingly mellifluous and accurate. It is a real fadista's voice, although there are those who regard her as edging the tragic purity of a fado singer's art towards histrionics, as she hunches dramatically over an agonising line, her accompanists - Spanish guitar, bass, the trilling metal 12-string Portuguese guitarra - following raptly.

Given this vocal passion, it's not surprising to learn that Mariza's models outside fado are Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson and the new young Spanish flamenco star, Estrella Morente. Within fado, she admires all the stars of the mid-20th-century golden age - Lucilia do Carmo, Herminia Silva, Fernanda Maria and the name that overshadows any female practitioner of Portugal's national music, Amalia Rodrigues.

"Why are all the new young fado singers around Europe these days women?" I ask Mariza.

"Perhaps it's because people accept the expression of emotion like that more easily from a woman," she replies. Perhaps, but one thinks also of the expectations implanted by the genre's grande dame.

The only Portuguese singer to have become famous internationally, Amalia packed the Paris Olympia and the Lincoln Centre, recorded in London at Abbey Road in the 1950s and 1960s and completely dominated the strange, fatalist world of the genre, so reflective of the Portuguese character. I once interviewed her in her big, tiled 17th-century salon in Lisbon, the walls hung with her portraits and framed Manila shawls, the tables covered with trays of whisky, wine and coffee for her guests. "I sometimes think I am fado," she had remarked, in response to my request for a definition of the form. It wasn't just bloated ego.

"It's irresistible to sing Amalia," says Mariza. "She had the best poets, the best composers writing for her of course, she's my favourite fadista."

Mariza's repertoire overlaps to a considerable extent that of the late diva's, with classics such as "Barco Negro", "Maria Lisboa" or "Estranha Forma de Vida." And of all the recent young pretenders to the fado queen's throne - the demure Cristina Branco, ethereal Dulce Pontes, even Misia, with her black cocktail dresses and Louise Brooks haircut - it is Mariza's timbre and inflection that most call to mind the melancholy beauty of Amalia's voice.

From its murky hybrid origins - Portugal's Jewish, Arab, African and Brazilian inhabitants probably all added flavour - fado arrived in the early 20th century as bohemian tavern and brothel entertainment. In a similar manner to tango, it became attractive to the upper classes as a means of fulfilling their desire for a bit of rough. Amalia spanned both worlds and went far beyond them. Born dirt poor, she began singing while a teenage fruit-seller and washerwoman and rose through talent competitions, and then fado cabarets, to tower over the mid-century world of smart Lisbon clubs and hit fado movies.

Mariza too came up through the fado houses, in her case the informal bar -restaurants of Lisbon's Mouraria and Barrio Alto districts, where singers, musicians and the general public gather to eat and drink and talk, and fados are sung or not, according to the mood and the company.

Mariza was born in Mozambique, to a Portuguese civil servant father and an African mother, during the country's final years as a Portuguese colony. In 1975, when Mariza was still a baby, the family moved to Lisbon. There, they opened a small restaurant known, if anyone bothered with a name, as Anabela's, after her mother, who cooked "African, with a touch of Goan, and very well." As a child, Mariza used to creep downstairs and watch through an open door. "I just remember darkness, and smoke and guitars and voices, and feeling, wow, I want to do this," she remembers. It wasn't long before she did, as a toddler -fadista learning songs from drawings by her father before, in her teens, turning to rock and jazz with local groups.

One night, as she sang a fado in a bar with friends, the owner of Senhor Vinho, one of Lisbon's top fado clubs, heard her and asked her along to sing a couple of songs. She sang Amalia's "Estranha Forma de Vida" and was promptly offered a weekly slot. "By the third time it was like I was in love - I didn't want to sing anything else," she says.

Having refined her performance, working on a stage wardrobe with the young Lisbon designer Joao Rolo, going blonde ("It was just for fun at first now everyone identifies me with it and I can't change") and experimenting with percussion, bass and cello in her arrangements, Mariza was soon making her first record under the direction of top fado composer and former Amalia Rodrigues guitarist, Jorge Fernandez, whom she'd met at Senhor Vinho's. "By this time, so many people knew me, from my parents' restaurant, Senhor Vinho's or TV, there was a sort of expectation," she says.

In the event, she needn't have worried. On the record's release, the Portuguese press, from the mighty Diario Economico down, dubbed her Amalia's rightful heiress, and international markets, led by the fado-loving Dutch, started blossoming as rapidly as Lisbon's jacaranda plants in May. Now, with her current series of high-profile concerts, Mariza is winning over UK audiences, too.

As fates go, Mariza's is panning out pretty happily.