Jain has gone awol. It’s early March and the French pop star is due to soundcheck for a second sold-out night at L’Olympia in Paris. Her name is in foot-high letters above the 19th-century venue’s front door. Just before 5pm, the 25-year-old, born Jeanne Galice, rushes up Boulevard des Capucines looking apologetic. She had gone home for a nap and missed her alarm. Sleep is at a premium – in less than a week she will fly to Austin for SXSW, where she will play eight considerably less glamorous shows in three days.

L’Olympia should have been the end of the campaign for Zanaka, Jain’s first album. It means “child” in her Madagascan mum’s first language, and documents Jain’s youth, spent in the UAE and Republic of Congo thanks to her dad’s job in the oil industry. Released in France in November 2015, it went gold three months later. But since the UK and US are now catching on, the promo cycle is starting again. There has been some daytime Radio 1 airplay, and Chris Martin said her song Makeba, a funky tribute to South African singer and activist Miriam, was one of his current favourite tracks. In February, Jain performed Come on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, flanked by eight singers wearing her trademark white-collared dress. She wrote the song in her teens, and made a point of including it on her debut. “It’s the song that started everything, so I wanted to say to this girl of 16, you see, your song is working!” she says backstage after the soundcheck has finished.

Columbia Records have brought three influential British bookers along tonight, hoping to score Jain the kind of spot that helped Jain’s peer Christine and the Queens conquer the UK. They have some common ground, such as stage names that aren’t quite alter egos. “It’s more like a zoom on one part of me that I wanna show,” says Jain. Both gained notoriety in France after performing at Victoires de la Musique (the French Grammys) as unsigned artists, and both talk of being born musically in a particular place – for Jain, it was a producer’s backyard parties in Pointe-Noire, Congo. But the comparisons can rest there. Jain is maximalist as Christine is minimalist, her music powered by Congolese and Arabic rhythms, reggae, mountains of bass and neat DIY pop production; the slippery “oooh-wee!” exclamations in Makeba pep up Jain’s appealingly monotone chants.

If anyone, she’s more like the late Lizzy Mercier Descloux, another French artist who synthesised sounds from her travels into punky pop in the early 80s. Some people might call this ... “Yeah, yeah!” Jain laughs. She knows what’s coming. “I know that it’s not cultural appropriation because I grew up in these countries, in Congo, in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, so that’s my history, not someone else’s history. I have no problem with people saying that, but I know it’s not true.” Lifting other people’s culture “is not my values, not who I am”.

Instead, Zanaka’s celebration of multiculturalism feels like a riposte to politicians attempting to whitewash French identity in the post-terrorism climate. The song Heads Up could be a reference to the Front National gaining power by stoking a culture of suspicion: “Heads up for this time where fear’s not a leader, where open mind is stronger, life is for lovers,” Jain commands. But, she says, she wrote it after moving back to Paris in her late teens, and being shocked by the racism she witnessed. Its newfound relevance isn’t something she’s pushing. “There was not terrorism here at that time, so it’s very sad for me to see that something that I wrote four years ago is very actuel [current],” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jain’s Makeba video

Music was always Jain’s way of adapting to a new country. Aged nine, she moved from France’s south-west to Dubai, where she studied darbuka drumming and Arabic. A few years later, the family left for the Congo, “a cultural shock”, she says. Being faced with the reality of poverty also shook her out of her teenage, centre-of-the-world mentality: “It’s not something that you read in books.” In Pointe-Noire, a rapper schoolfriend introduced Jain to his crew, who convened around a local producer called Mister Flash. “I was the only white girl, and I wasn’t doing rap, and still I got along with everybody,” she recalls. “That was a very happy time.” The guys were mostly interested in imitating American rappers, “but there was lots of rumba, the traditional music in Congo. That’s where I took this envie [desire] of mixing up things.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

Mister Flash taught Jain how to produce, allowing her to start self-recording. She would started writing songs when “I was a bit lost because I didn’t know where I was or who I was”. Sharing her feelings was hard, so music became “my own little secret”. Inspired by French duo the Dø, she started using MySpace to share work and ask professionals for advice, a move that she now finds outlandishly ambitious. “It’s really weird because I am so not confident, but I just had nothing to lose.” Only one guy responded, Dready, an old reggae DJ, who is still her manager. He was ready to start work, but Jain decided to complete her studies. She lived in Abu Dhabi for a year, where she graduated and covered Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone with her band, the Macumbaz, before moving to Paris to live with her older sisters and study graphic design. She started gigging around the city, and four shows in, thanks to a management connection, ended up supporting Seal at Paris’s 6,000-capacity Zénith. “I realised that I really liked to be on stage, and that I wanted to pursue it,” she says.

The figure that appears on stage at l’Olympia later on is the opposite of the calm young woman I met backstage. Jain used to tour solo, and tonight is only her eighth show with a live band; she plays synths when she’s not bounding around demanding that the crowd shout: “Très, très fort!” Three lit-up screens display bold Keith Haring-style animations. Twentysomethings fill the standing area, and upstairs, parents accompany little girls in DIY Jain collars, their combined force making the 128-year-old balcony bounce unnervingly. The gig is so explosive (and Jain’s catalogue so small) that she gets away with playing Makeba twice.

Before the second rendition, she performs Paris, a new, typically optimistic tribute to her hometown. Afterwards, the screens list the names of the victims of the November 2015 attacks. But it’s not necessarily a sign that Jain’s second album will be more explicitly political. “I’ve never been inspired by a politician in France, and I think a lot of my own generation think that way. We never trusted anybody, actually,” she says. While she is “very scared” that the Front National could win the upcoming election, she is unsurprised by their popularity among her generation. “Politicians made a lot of mistakes, and that” – the angry vote – “is what they get back.” Whatever the election’s outcome, she plans to keep working as she always has. “I just wanna write about what I am living as a citizen,” she says. “That’s all.”

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