Don’t push Miss Kittin – she’s close to the edge, or as she herself would put it, ‘super-close’ to the edge. Not only is her DJ schedule punishing, she now has a solo album, ‘I COM’, to promote and has barely got the time to drink a cup of tea. John Burgess meets electro’s Carrie Bradshaw.

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“I love you guys but I’m close to a nervous breakdown. In case you don’t see me alive, it was nice to meet you…”

It’s lunchtime in Berlin and Miss Kittin appears to be close to the edge. The sun is beaming down on the city, which looks stunning from the rotating restaurant at the top of the TV-Turm. Four different types of cake have been ordered, but despite this and the fact that she prefixes most adjectives with the word ‘super’ (‘super-peaceful’, ‘super-violent’, ‘super-faraway’, to name but three examples) the girl from Grenoble feels anything but. Her dramatic missive is directed, via her press officer’s digital camera, to her record company, Novamute. The promotion of her debut solo album, ‘I COM’, has added a workload to her already punishing DJ schedule and she is protesting. Tired and a bit grumpy, she would like to make clear that she is not a robot (despite her synthetic-sounding vocal delivery) and would rather be at home in her jim-jams. This morning, she got upset because a cup of tea was too hot to drink in the time she had to spare and, on top of that, she didn’t know what to wear for the photo shoot. Eventually she opted for a ‘Berlin-style’ army jacket with a dubious red armband and a detourned H&M hooded top on which she has inscribed the words ‘Nobody can destroy me’. “It should say: ‘Nobody can destroy me but myself’,” she revises.

Ah, here come the cakes.  She beams.  Things aren’t looking quite so bad after all.

Miss Kittin – who has sparked a firework of ideas and imitators on the electro/techno scene – is candid and confessional, in person, on tape and on paper. ‘I COM’ is largely autobiographical, with songs about the tiresome aspects of her job (‘Professional Distortion’), low self-esteem (‘Allergic To Myself’) and even a rocking ode to her manager (‘Meet Sue Be She’). On her website (www.misskittin.com) she keeps diaries illustrated with cute doodles. Aside from her taste in music (Blur, T. Rex and PJ Harvey figure alongside the usual techno suspects), she comes across like an electro Carrie Bradshaw, her skewed sense of humour evident in her scrawled and scanned notes.  ‘Punk losers may be the best fuckers but good sex you can always find’, she declares, augmented with a heavily inked ‘Tell the world!’ One month her diary entry eschews music completely in favour of a romantic description of the wedding of the stripper from the Swedish peepshow she immortalised in Miss Kittin and The Hacker’s ‘Stripper’.

But her latest entries once again return to the subject of work: ‘Life is a 24/7 job right now’.  You get the feeling that Caroline Herve, as she was once called, is becoming fed up of her persona just when she is stepping out into the spotlight on her own after numerous collaborations (“There should be a ‘featuring Miss Kittin’ section in the record stores,” she jokes).

Despite the evident stress, Caroline relaxes during our revolving lunch and lights up as we touch on topics close to her heart. There’s DJing, which she loves (“It’s like a game; which records to play, how to play it”); fashion (“It makes me happier to go to Top Shop than Gucci. We all want to be unique but sometimes it’s comfortable to be like everyone else”); the early-90s riot grrrl movement (which she wants to resurrect for electronic music); her grandfather (who worked as an illustrator and was a big inspiration); Laurent Garnier and Sven Väth (who also inspired her); her chatroom (especially the part she read which discussed her physique: “She was not very thin and she became less fat!”); her current home, Berlin (“It’s cheap, it’s big, it’s green”); her moniker (which, due to a moment of indecision, is a mixture of Kitten and Kickin’); and what she defines as the brother-sister relationship she has with The Hacker.

It was with the latter – a.k.a. Michel Amato – that she first came to Jockey Slut’s attention in 1997. You couldn’t really miss them. There weren’t any techno records around at the time that derided VIP culture – particularly ones with a vocalist who demanded we kiss her ass and laugh at the death of Ol’ Blue Eyes (‘Frank Sinatra’).  Furthermore, when we interviewed her, Miss Kittin talked of how the “shitty, serious world of techno” needed a kick up the arse, and of playing Visage and New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ in her sets long before electroclash.

Miss Kittin and The Hacker would record in the latter’s bedroom, where her unique vocal delivery emerged. She claims she didn’t really bother to find out whether she could sing properly and so talked, with wayward intonation, through what became 2001’s ‘The First Album’.  Each track, she reveals, was recorded in one take.

“With Hacker we always record everything live. We never sampled my voice because we are lazy and because we had no sampler. If we had destroyed the walls of the room in his parents’ place and put a discoball in and invited people in we could have recorded it as a live album,” she smiles. “I didn’t know how to sing. It shows that anyone can do it. And people were influenced by what we did in that little bedroom. It’s funny.”

One person under their influence was Felix Da Housecat, who found in Miss Kittin his perfect muse when he began recording what would become ‘Kittenz And Thee Glitz’.  Their ‘Silver Screen, Shower Scene’ – which Caroline sees as a continuation of the ‘Frank Sinatra’ theme – propelled her into the limelight. “Today if he (Felix) asked me I’d say no because I don’t like to repeat things. But when you’re 25 and a Chicago legend says: ‘Let’s go to the studio and have fun’, you don’t say no. 

“I don’t regret it because it made sense in my life. I was sceptical because I thought I may just be seen as ‘the girl who sang on Felix’s record’, but quickly that was not the case and I was like: ‘Wow, I’m still myself’.”

Her unusual approach to electronic music and performance was compounded with what she sees as a pivotal show at 2000’s Sonar Festival in Barcelona. “We were to play live, and at that time the only live performance you could expect from a techno night was a guy standing behind machines turning knobs. There was no space for a microphone and people didn’t want to see one.”

Except they did – in droves. Miss Kittin and The Hacker did everything they could to catch the crowd’s attention and triumphed. The most head-turning aspect of the night was the £30 nurse costume she flaunted, which a friend found on London’s Oxford Street. Kittin also wore it on the cover of ‘The First Album’, handcuffed. “People still show up to my gigs in nurses’ costumes. People probably think I go to the dentist dressed like this.”

Shouting loudly into microphones in crazy East German clubs and playing to huge crowds at festivals around the world strengthened Caroline’s voice and she began to sing. “It’s like a muscle, you are training your vocal cords. You realise you have more possibilities.”

These are realised on ‘I COM’, which begins with the sound of a rock guitar as if to tell fans of her more synthetic work that they should expect diversity. “The album is a mixture of all my influences. I like the experimental pop side of rock’n’roll,” she says, name checking Blur, Radiohead and Sonic Youth, “though I cannot play guitar. I had to tell Tobi (Neuman, the engineer) how I wanted it to sound, and I had to play air guitar to tell him how long to leave the note, the reverb and distortion. It was funny.”

‘I COM’ does embrace electro-rock (‘Meet Sue B She’), Miami bass and R’n’B (‘Requiem For A Hit’, which is crying out to be released as a single), lush, spiked ballads (‘Happy Violentine’, ‘Dub About Me’) and even the kind of kitsch-pop that recalls Saint Etienne (‘Kiss Factory’). She also collaborates once more with The Hacker on ‘Soundtrack Of Now’.

“It’s magical sharing that great moment when you find the melody and the song comes alive. Alone, you cannot jump around and go: ‘Wow, I love this riff’. The ultimate thing would be to be in a band. I did everything upside down. I’m supposed to start with the band.”

The most personal moment on ‘I COM’ is ‘Allergic’.  “‘I’m allergic to myself’, she sings, ‘unlucky in gambling, unlucky in love’. Caroline claims it’s not totally about her or her alter ego. “I start with a piece of me and write something around it. It’s not about Miss Kittin being depressed. It’s a manifesto for people to accept their weaknesses. It’s time to say: ‘I feel bad, I feel ugly’. It’s a self-pity party track!”

As well as the ‘Nobody can destroy me’ message to the world emblazoned across her chest, Caroline also has the word ‘Exhale’ tattooed onto her left shoulder. She is a spiritual person who’s drawn to alternative medicine in order to survive the rigours of her profession. Her website urges us to drink water, and she has doodled a cartoon Kittin in a yoga pose. She views DJing a kind of cathartic experience. “I was so full of anger and tension, which I put into the music,” she says of a recent London gig. “I got into a trance to transform the bad energy into something enlightening.”

Cakes demolished, we hurry back to her car, a 15-minute walk away. Caroline does not want to be late for an appointment to see a doctor of Chinese medicine; today is a Tuesday and the weekend still casts a long shadow. Matters are made worse as we take the wrong route back, losing precious minutes, her annoyance visible. As we approach her compact BMW Z3, she spots a parking ticket wedged into the wind¬screen wiper. No matter: she will soon be somewhere peaceful. Somewhere super-peaceful. She smiles, waves and drives off.

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