Every pop singer makes a point of announcing that they were the school weirdo, who took up music expressly to "show them". Madeleine Peyroux's claim, though, rings a little truer than most. Meeting the jazz singer now, at 31, it's easy to imagine her as the unblinking, quietly intense misfit at her Brooklyn junior high school. "My parents were both university teachers, so it was a big part of my upbringing to be talking about Socrates and Greek tragedy," she says, almost as soon we've shaken hands. "Then to go to school the next day and try to have a conversation about this stuff ... And I was overweight and wore second-hand clothes, so to say I was a weirdo was an understatement."