Awfully posh and awfully bonkers: She's the best bred wannabe Britain's Got Talent has ever seen. But is violinist Lettice (yes, really) one leaf short of a full salad?
Raw talent: Violinist Lettice stunned the judges on Britain's Got Talent last weekend
What sort of mother calls her child Lettice? A very shrewd one, it seems. Violinist Lettice Rowbotham - possibly the most bonkers person ever to appear on Britain’s Got Talent - tells me that being called Lettice (‘as in the salad’) has been the making of her.
‘It’s a fabulous name because no one forgets it,’ says our newest reality TV star. ‘It’s Old English. Mummy saw it on a painting once. The only other person I’ve ever met called Lettice wasn’t a person at all - it was a dog.’
Lettice, 24, made quite an impact when she appeared on BGT last weekend playing a breathtaking pop medley on her electric violin, while working the stage like a heavy metal hero (albeit one in a fur shrug).
Yet even before she put bow to instrument, she had the judges intrigued. Blessed with the plummiest voice this side of Highgrove, and the sort of snorty laugh that you think only exists on Fast Show sketches, she was a riot. A ‘vairy, vairy’ upper-class riot.
The product of a £30,000-a-year education at Charterhouse, she boasted of being too hungover to be nervous, neatly setting out her credentials as the resident party girl.
Judge David Walliams declared her to be the poshest contestant ever to appear on the show — and possibly even the poshest person ever to visit Birmingham, the scene of the auditions.
Still, sometimes, we like a bit of posh.
Lettice sailed through to the next stage of BGT with even Simon Cowell (‘a vairy clever chap,’ she says) smitten. The You Tube video of her performance on BGT has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, and it seems some of us have gone a bit Lettice-crazy.
Surely that name must have caused problems when she was growing up?
‘Oh yes,’ she admits. ‘A little boy I was looking after once said to me, “Celery, can I have a cuddle?”, and at a party, one boy went home and told his mother there was a girl called Cabbage there. Kids forget what vegetable you are.’
We meet in a posh (‘yes, it is vairy, vairy posh’) cocktail bar. Lettice is all waving limbs, loud guffaws, and teeth. She’s wearing huge dangly mismatching earrings — one turquoise, one pink — and is incredibly pretty, but not in a bland, society way.
Her hair, which arrives before she does, really deserves a chair of its own. It is backcombed furiously, piled on top of her head and seems to have a whole flowerbed of plastic blossoms in it. She is wearing a black fitted trouser suit teamed with a fuchsia bodice and floral platforms.
‘I’m not good at fashion,’ she says. ‘I’m quite mad when it comes to clothes.’
Just clothes? ‘Oh no, I’m quite mad in other ways, too. When Mummy was teaching me to drive, she said: “Just go straight over that roundabout.” So I did: right over the top.’
The overall effect calls to mind a mixture of the Duchess of York and Patsy from Ab Fab. Lettice seems a bit vague on who the Duchess of York is, but she punches the air at the Ab Fab reference. ‘I get told I look like her a lot, which is brilliant. People also say I look like Denise Van… somebody.’ Outen? She looks blank. ‘I’m not very good at knowing who people are.’
Privately educated Lettice plays her violin aged four, left, and seven, right
One of the criticisms levelled at Lettice when she appeared on BGT was that, as a jobbing musician who has played all over the world, in front of world leaders and royals, she was not a bona fide novice. ‘Fix!’ went the yell.
Conversation turns to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who flew her to Marrakesh to play at his youngest daughter’s wedding in 2010. Did she actually meet him?
‘Well, I still don’t know,’ she says. ‘People were saying Putin this, Putin that, but I didn’t know what Putin looked like or who he was. He was just some Russian man. I’m not good at politics. Or history.’
She’s hazy about the entertainment world too. It transpires she performed at film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s post-Bafta party this year, for the likes of Stephen Fry and Leonardo DiCaprio.
While she was playing, four women asked to ‘jam with her’.
She says: ‘I was playing and they were all up dancing. I recognised Jessie J and Rita Ora, but not the other two.’ Only afterwards did someone say they were Karen Elson (the supermodel) and Oprah Winfrey (the, er, second most famous woman in the world after the Queen).
‘No, I didn’t know who she was. She’s quite well-known, isn’t she?’
Lettice wears her ignorance as proudly as her earrings, joking that no one in her family is academic. ‘We’re not bright at all. We’re creative. We’re all artists, quite bohemian. A bit hippie.’
So how posh is she? She says ‘not at all posh’, but this cannot be true since she grew up in a £3million 18th-century mansion in Surrey with a glass spiral staircase. She also has a sister called Bunty, which is surely a bit of a giveaway?
Lettice, who attended the prestigious Royal College of Music, appearing on This Morning earlier this week
‘Maybe I’m a little posh, but not rich. My family are not aristocrats. Mummy was quite working class — her father was a builder and her mother was a housewife. She did secretarial jobs herself before she met Daddy. But art was her big passion.’
In fact, her mother, Sheree Valentine Daines, is quite a well-known artist who has had work (including portraits of Michael Parkinson, Jonny Wilkinson and Joanna Lumley) exhibited in the Tate. Her father Mark is also respected, his work collected by the likes of Jeffrey Archer.
Her father’s side of the family ‘is where the money comes from’.
‘He was born in Borneo, where his father was working, but he went to boarding school in the UK. But they weren’t rich rich. Not like the people I’ve been to school with.’
How rich are we talking here? ‘Well, Brooklyn is going to be in my sister’s class next year. She’s dead excited.’ She means Brooklyn Beckham, obviously.
As well as Bunty, she has another younger sister, Felicity, and an older brother, Charles (also an artist). They all had the best education money can buy, but she insists their parents didn’t pay for most of it.
‘We all got scholarships. Mummy wanted us to have all the things — music lessons, art lessons — that she could never afford.’
All of this suggests that rather than being ditzy, that glorious head of hair may be hiding a sharp brain.
What’s certain is that she was a musical prodigy. After starting the violin at four, she went on to study at the Royal College of Music. Her CV also includes the prestigious Purcell Music School in Hertfordshire (where fees are £30,000 a year) and Charterhouse (ditto).
She does have a clutch of A-levels, but admits she spent much of her education ‘crawling under the desks making everyone laugh’.
Did the teachers want to smack her? ‘No, actually. I’d just smile — and they’d laugh too.’ She definitely has a winning smile and even when she is talking rubbish, she’s a hoot. She does seem to have lived entirely on Planet Lettice, though, where normal rules do not apply.
The party girl - who says she met Olly Murs through partying and gigging - outside Mahiki nightclub in London
‘I do like a party,’ she says, about 16 times, and she has clearly been to a lot of them, from Knightsbridge to Dubai and Val d’Isere, the French ski resort.
But she claims Putin only paid her £200 to play at his daughter’s wedding. These sums don’t add up, I say. Lettice cocks her head.
‘Oh well, the flights are always provided for you. And partying isn’t expensive. I’m a girl! It’s not as if I have to buy my own drinks.’
Her own friends, even pre-BGT, included X Factor winner Matt Cardle and runner-up Olly Murs, whom she met through ‘partying and gigging’.
She’s upfront about the fact she was ‘scouted’ by the BGT producers and asked to audition — ‘but so what? They say it’s open to everyone. Why shouldn’t I have the chance?’ She gets serious when she talks music, and starts to sound, for the first time, like a grown-up. ‘It’s hard to put into words how it feels,’ she says. ‘It’s like I’m possessed.
‘Sometimes I go into a kind of trance with it. I can get completely lost, and open my eyes three hours later and suddenly realise people are watching me.’
It doesn’t take a genius to work out why she didn’t want to go down the route of being a conventional musician. No orchestra would have her, for starters.
‘Well the horrible thing about orchestras is that you have to play the actual notes that are on the page. I like to improvise, throw my hair round, go and play the drums. They won’t let you do that.’
Nor does playing at weddings, even international top-society ones, float her boat. ‘Well I can’t be myself, can I? I’m quite loud. No bride wants to be upstaged.’
So what’s the aim with BGT?
She wants to be Beyonce, basically, but with a bow. ‘To be me, and to play my music, but my way.’
And get ever-bigger hair? ‘Yes. I could grow lettuces in there.’
Can she do it? Cowell et al would be taking a gamble. Her craziness is enchanting for an hour, but it would have to be tamed for her to have a lasting career.
Yet for all the ditziness, she is clearly a hard worker. You can’t reach her level of playing without absolute dedication to the craft.
And you have to give her full marks for the ability to entertain, even without the violin.
She has been single for some years. I wonder if her ideal man is some brooding Czech cellist.
She nearly falls off her chair again. ‘Oh God no, it’s Mr Bean,’ she says. ‘I love Rowan Atkinson. I’d like to marry him.’
If she can’t, she’d really like to marry a man called Jeffrey, because ‘that’s my favourite name’.
‘And if his surname could be Leaf,’ she swoons, ‘then my life would be complete.’
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