This summer, our biblical summer of the worst floods in 200 years, found its very own soundtrack in a song called 'Umbrella', by Rihanna (featuring Jay-Z). It's a perfect yet strangely melancholic and moving pop song, about sheltering your friends from harm. It stayed at No 1 for 10 weeks and became the longest-running UK number one by a female artist since Whitney Houston's considerably less moving yodel 'I Will Always Love You', finding Rihanna fans in the Beckhams, Naomi Campbell, Wayne Rooney and self-appointed global cool-pop detective Dame Elton John.
As with most pop hits, 'Umbrella's success wasn't solely down to the quality (and timeliness) of the song but also to the singer's mesmerising look. In the video, 19-year-old Rihanna, from Barbados, cuts a startling, hyper-stylised, almost burlesque figure with a deep-slashed raven-black bob and rolled-up umbrella as a dancer's cane, tiptoeing through the rain in ballet pumps and leather hotpants.
Right now, though, she is hobbling rather than tiptoeing into a suite of the 'W' hotel in Manhattan for a photo shoot. On one foot she wears a sparkly silver flip-flop, a bandage on the other because this week she broke a toe (stubbed it against a chair) and is now walking with a high-camp orthopaedic aid, a black wooden cane with a duck-head silver tip. 'I broke it,' she announces to the room, in her a iry, Caribbean-inflected American tone and gives an apologetic smile. 'I know.'
She's hypnotic. Her head pokes out from a fluffy white hotel bathrobe, like one of those 'styling heads' - a dressing-room table mannequin head on which 10-year-old girls practise make-up. She could be the 'Bratz Funky Fashion' version: enormous smoky-green eyes framed in glittering amber, exhibition pop-art lips glossed in pink, bewitching up-turned nose, sculpted eyebrows in a formidably high forehead and flawless caramel skin all spectacularly framed in a bouffant tease of raven-black curls, the sort of curls last seen in platinum form on the head of Marilyn Monroe.
She's flanked by her four-woman team (hair, make-up, personal assistant, manager) and is both undeniably teenage - chewing bubblegum and asking for the music (Amy Winehouse, Akon) to be turned up 'a lot' - and curiously self-contained, with an odd, detached otherness, her solitary 'demand' a bowl of calamari from room service. She sifts through a selection of vastly expensive frocks by Roberto Cavalli, Stella McCartney, Gucci and Versace, deeming her favourites 'retarded' (fantastic) and disappears into the bathroom, her walk-in wardrobe for tonight. 'I love dressing up,' she coos. 'I always did, even before all this.'
Rihanna's been called the Bajan Beyonce but really she's less a songwriter and more a pop impressionist - the Caribbean Kylie. She comes out of the bathroom and perches awkwardly on the side of an enormous bed.
'At first I just took what was given to me, but eventually I started saying "no",' she says in her measured way, contemplating her transformation. 'I said, "I don't wanna wear that and I wanna wear my hair like this." Now I'm in complete control of my image and everything else. It takes time. You learn.'
Since 1999, the year Destiny's Child saw 'Bills Bills Bills' become their very first US number one, contemporary American R&B has been the definition of what we mean by global pop music. Ever since, in the UK (as everywhere else), the bedrooms and clubs of teenage and twentysomething Britain, across all ethnic backgrounds, have been dominated by its production-slick beats and impossibly glamorous, assertive singers, especially the women who used to sing about financial independence and sexual empowerment. In recent years, though, their once-defiant spirit has been dying of compliant dreariness (Beyonce excepted). With their oddly similar names - Amerie, Teairra Mira, Ciara, Christina Milian - they seem to have merged into a transparent, homogenous pop amoeba: pleasant enough, always beautiful, never surprising. Until Rihanna.
In the past 18 months, the single-minded teenager has fired both her original hair stylist and fashion stylist and hired new ones, her confidence high after two enormous hit singles, the reggae-tinged 'Pon De Replay' and the 'Tainted Love'-sampling 'SOS' in 2006. She decided her old image was 'girlie and boring' and now wants to look 'different, unexpected and edgy'. Her third album, Good Girl Gone Bad, is exactly that (she and her New York song-writing/production team Sturken and Rogers are newly inspired by 'electro, Fall Out Boy, European dance'). Her forthcoming single 'Shut Up And Drive' features riffs from New Order's 'Blue Monday', while 'Rehab', written by Justin Timberlake and produced by Timbaland, is a mournful tale of lost love feeling like a catastrophic rehab meltdown.
Rihanna stops talking, yawns expansively 'Sorry!' and then just stares, with those penetrating smoky-green eyes. Maybe it's the exhaustion (it's now 10pm after a hectic promo-pop day), but she appears to be barely here, so detached, wary (and young) she makes the hitherto alarmingly reserved Beyonce seem like the all-cackling, all-jesting Joan Rivers of R&B. We contemplate the impact of 'Umbrella' - how every teenage boy in Britain now has Rihanna atop their fantasy R&B pedestal.
'Huh huh,' she chuckles, suddenly coming back to life. 'Some older ones, too! My fan base has grown a lot in the guy-world. And it kind of shocked me. Because I like being conservative a lot. But girl fans, they're the best. They wanna dress like you, do their hair like yours and it's very cute, I love it.'
Tell Rihanna she's extraordinarily beautiful (and she is more so in real life) and she says 'Thank you' graciously. Was she always aware she was beautiful? 'Thank you,' she replies once more. 'Well, I only started wearing make-up after I won a school pageant [the Miss Combermere Beauty Pageant, aged 15]. It was very new and weird to me. I was a barefoot tomboy and only in high school I started getting fussy with myself. That's when I started being very aware. But every woman has an ugly day.'
She points out she's currently 'five pounds overweight' due to her injured toe: normally she works out with a trainer and is 'obsessed' with her legs - legs which are insured for $1m. Or is that just a made-up tabloid fantasy? 'It's true,' she smiles. 'Venus Breeze, the Gillette razor [one of her many sponsors, including Nike and Clinique], they named me this year's Celebrity Legs of a Goddess, so along with the title comes an insurance for your legs of a million dollars.'
Does that mean your feet are included?
'Um ... I don't think so. There's certain things, like a broken ankle, anything that's broken is not really damaged - if it's broken it's gonna heal back. But if I was to get like a gash, then that's a big deal 'cos they scar.'
I see. I was thinking your broken toe might mean you've now lost your no-claims bonus.
'No. Huh huh. But I think I'm just normal. I think, "Do people really insure their legs for a million dollars?" If it was my million dollars, I'd probably walk about in pants all day long.'
Robyn Rihanna Fenty, like so many of the American Idol generation, always had a feeling that if only people could hear her sing, she would become a star. But unlike so many, she was right. 'I always knew I was gonna do this,' she says. 'I would say, "When I become a singer ..." I knew I was gonna meet somebody one day. Really and truly.'
At home in Barbados, she'd sung on the beach, in the clubs, a fan of the local sounds of reggae, soca and dancehall, and inevitably, being a child of the Nineties (born in 1988), the high-wire vocal trapezing of Mariah Carey. The eldest of three kids, she grew up in a household emotionally skewed by her father's crack addiction, taking care of her two younger brothers while her mum worked in various accountancy jobs. 'I grew up fast, kind of like the second mom.' She would see tin-foil and ashtrays at home and didn't know what they meant. 'It was going on in the home for a long time,' she nods. 'My dad got put out of the house a few times because she was not having that around us. My mom had to be a woman and a man, working her ass off for us.'
In the summer of 2003, American song-writer/producer Evan Rogers (one half of the Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers duo behind Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Christina Milian) came to Barbados on vacation with his wife. The mother of a schoolfriend of Rihanna's was friends with Rogers's wife and so an audition was duly arranged. In Rogers's hotel suite, 15-year-old Rihanna - 'so nervous, this was my connection to the big world that was so unreachable' - wore 'pink Capris, pink shirt, sneakers' and sang Mariah Carey's 'Hero' and Destiny's Child's 'Emotions'. Impressed, Rogers called for a second meeting, with her mum present - 'that time I was in my school uniform' - which led to an invitation to New York to record a demo tape over the next year, on and off, between school, before moving in with the Rogers, with Mum's blessing. Signed up to Sturken and Rogers's production company Syndicated Rhythm Productions at 16, she was given her own lawyer and manager as the completed demo was duly dispatched worldwide in 2004. First to respond was Def Jam, via their newly appointed president and CEO, hip-hop titan Jay-Z (fiance to Beyonce). She auditioned in the Def Jam president's office.
'And that's when I really got nervous,' she blinks. 'I was like: "Oh God, he's right there, I can't look, I can't look, I can't look!" I remember being extremely quiet. I was very shy. I was cold the entire time. I had butterflies. I'm sitting across from Jay-Z. Like, Jay-Zee. I was star-struck.' She sang Whitney's 'For The Love of Me', 'Pon De Replay' and another Sturken/Rogers composition, 'The Last Time'.
'The audition definitely went well,' she recalls. 'They [Def Jam] locked me into the office - till 3am. And Jay-Z said, "There's only two ways out. Out the door after you sign this deal. Or through this window ..." And we were on the 29th floor. Very flattering.'
Rihanna talks about Jay-Z in a direct, matter-of-fact way, in a way she'd surely find impossible had a relationship beyond the professional developed between the two, as recently rumoured in America, perhaps inevitably in these gossip-fevered times. She told a US magazine she'd grown tired of the speculation.
'I guess it's just the affiliation,' she said. 'Being a female and being on his label and having a close business relationship. At first it was funny. Then it was frustrating. Because it got really intense where people just weren't letting up. Then it turned into a "beef" between me and Beyonce. I was like, "Where are these people going with this? This is crazy."'
Rihanna says the Beyonce she has met has been nothing but 'supportive, she is just so great' while her relationship with Jay-Z would appear to be almost paternal. 'Jay-Z just always gives me pep talks,' she says. 'Always good advice like keep good people around me, always telling me to let loose, go hard and have fun. And work hard.'
There's a song on Good Girl Gone Bad called 'Question Existing', lyrics written by Def Jam artist Ne-Yo (he wrote Beyonce's 'Irreplaceable') which is a startling rumination on the pop-life existential crisis. 'Ne-Yo just knew,' says Rihanna, 'how to say exactly what I feel.' 'Take off my cool, show them that under here I'm just like you,' she sings, sadly. She wonders, of men, of friends, 'Who can I trust?' At 19, under intense scrutiny at the heart of global pop culture, it's no wonder, perhaps, Rihanna wears a tangible cloak of keep-out self-protection, far from the earthy, goofy, girl next door she was billed before 'all this'.
'With success has come a lotta great stuff, but there's cons, too,' she decides. 'Who to trust is a huge one. I always have to keep my guard up. A lot. I'm dealing with fake people. All the time. So I just keep my guard up.'
We contemplate if growing up in emotional chaos left her mistrustful of people. 'I think it made me very independent,' she says. 'I'm very strong. Very determined. I'd always been a daddy's girl. I was Daddy's girl. And I found out who was doing right and who was doing wrong. And I turned into a mommy's girl.'
Today, her father has long beaten his addiction - 'he got through it really well, actually' - and they have a relationship (separated for years, her parents divorced three years ago).
'I didn't know what it was so I was scared of it at first,' she adds, her guard lowering, momentarily, unexpectedly. 'I was very ignorant. I just saw what was going on. Heard the arguments. Then I was angry. I was: "Why are you doing this? This is not cool." I was, "Are you stupid? You know it's wrong, you see the effect it has on us." I could never understand why he wanted to continue. It's a real thing that happens. It's an addiction. It takes over from who you are. And you become that drug. And it's sad it happens in so many households.'
There are depths in Rihanna's curious stillness, a modern pop enigma who is, like the young Kylie, a strangely distant, adaptable, showgirl persona built for the glittering pedestal. Now working with a roster of almost comically cool American peers - 'It's completely insane; I got Ne-Yo, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, I feel very blessed, definitely favoured by God' - as long as her collaborators stay fabulous, so will she. She works 'constantly', is single (a prospective boyfriend must be 'tall') and this year moved to Los Angeles, where she bought herself a condo. Her two favourite home possessions are a black baby grand piano - 'I'm gonna learn, but it's kind of an ornament right now, I can't play chop-sticks, no ...' and a huge painting of 'big pink swirls, it's extremely beautiful'. She finds little in common with the chaotic figures currently dominating young America in the year Britney publicly combusted, Paris went to prison, Lindsay Lohan got involved with cocaine and Nicole Richie described to the world her teenage heroin experiences. Rihanna hopes to be a more dignified role model.
'I'm very aware of the impact I have on people's lives,' she says, 'so I only wanna make positive ones. Why not help? Be that example they can follow. I always wanted to make a difference in the world. I was always trying to figure out how can I change the world. What could I do? I think the American way is a fantasy. People live with air in their head, really. Their priorities in life are fancy cars and bling. In Barbados it's all about having fun, definitely, but also about having good grades.'
She contemplates those real 'bad girls' of 2007, her rehab-bothering neighbours in Los Angeles, and says she won't be turning, any time soon, into Britney Spears.
'I hope not,' she declares. 'It's sad and I can't understand it. I sympathise with those girls and I want it to stop. I do not understand why they don't wanna help themselves. It's crazy. I have to feel like I'm on my feet. The moment I feel a little iffy, I have to snap out, get back on my feet. I can't understand how people let it get that far, and in control of them. To me, you have to have control.'
· 'Shut Up And Drive' is released on 27 August. The album Good Girl Gone Bad is out now