As we look forward to the start of the Oxford Mail Film Festival, Tim Hughes meets a fan of the silver screen who has brought the majesty of movies into music.

SCARLETTE Fever is all about films. Not just a movie buff – she’s far more serious than that. She is more a cinema fanatic.

For as long as she can remember she has absorbed film – living, sleeping and dreaming the roles of the characters she grew to love.

So it is perhaps surprising that this budding actress or director instead chose to forge a career in…music.

“I have always loved film,” she tells me. “I’m a big movie fan and I’ve got more DVDs than my local Blockbuster.”

Scarlette, real name Karen Louise Barrow, is enjoying the sun at home in rural Hertfordshire – an isolated spot which, she says, made her the film freak she is.

“Growing up here on a farm, as the youngest of three children, meant I spent a lot of time on my own. So I got into films.

“Cinema stimulates all the senses except smell. I like that extreme make-believe.

“I lived my life as if I was in a film. That’s why there’s so much imagination in what I write.”

Scarlette, 30, describes her music as “pop with huge orchestration and theatricality, but underlying rock,” and it has been going down extremely well with fans, critics and the cooler style mags.

But despite causing waves in the metropolitan music scene, she has no plans to give up her rural life.

“I’m a real country girl at heart,” she says. And to prove the point tells me she has just come in from riding her horse.

“It’s important to me; it keeps me grounded.”

It’s an endearing image – this striking, avant-garde artist getting back to nature on the bridleways of the Home Counties.

“I like parties in London as much as walking the dogs in my green wellies,” she says thoughtfully. “I am a bit schizophrenic, but then people are by nature. We are all multi-faceted, and especially me…I mean look at the whole Karen/Scarlette Fever thing!”

So how did she choose her stage name? “It was partly inspired by Scarlett Johansson,” she confides. “But I also love the colour – it’s so passionate and fiery. And the name stuck when a friend joked I had scarlet fever when I was ill.”

It certainly fits her widescreen cut of rock, pop, orchestral ballads, and anthemic chord changes – as evidenced by her debut album Medication Time.

Even the title is a movie reference – in honour of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Music is the ultimate medication,” says Scarlette.

Highlights include single Black & White (co-written with Alex Smith from Metrophonic) and previous favourite Crash & Burn. Fellow film fans will recognise another cinematic theme – a sample of John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy soundtrack in her tune You Don’t Know My Name.

And true enthusiasts will appreciate how extraordinary that is; the late multi-Oscar-winning composer almost never gave permission for his stuff to be used in that way. But then, she had an unfair advantage.

“I wrote it with Grant Black – who was John Barry’s godson,” she says. “Mr Barry never gave permission for his stuff to be sampled, so when he said yes it was one of the best days of my life. A true honour.”

For his part, Mr Barry liked it so much he allowed her to use another tune – Give Me A Smile, an instrumental from his 1999 album, The Beyondness Of Things.

Other picture house references come in the shape of the self-explanatory Single White Female, and Face The Facts, a song inspired by the movie Lost In Translation.

“I’ve been wanting to get somewhere in music for a long time,” she says. “I’ve been writing for this album for two years, and broke off my career to do it.”

That career, it turns out was as a marine biologist – initially perplexing until she explains what inspired her. “It was the film Jaws,” she giggles.

“It was the first movie I saw. I was only five, but I watched it with my sister, who was 11 and my brother who was 13 – and it made me realise what I wanted to be; I wanted to be like Matt Hooper.”

So does she still harbour an ambition to study sea life? “Nah, I’d rather keep it as a full-on passion and hobby.

“I’m far more comfortable with music. I love the buzz of being in a studio, even though I don’t even feel comfortable on stage – which is why I could never have been an actress. I get terrible stage fright.”

Which begs the question, why did she become a solo artist? “I knew I wanted to write my own songs,” she answers.

“I was never that into music when I was a kid; didn’t come from a musical family... The most important thing, though, is entertainment and having fun. Perhaps one day I’ll record a soundtrack… maybe even the soundtrack to my life!”

* Scarlette Fever plays the New Theatre on May 3, supporting Mike & the Mechanics.

Tickets are £40-£45 from ticketaster.co.uk