HE MAY not want to be famous but stardom is beckoning Damien Rice. Without even trying the 28-year-old college drop-out has broken into the Billboard charts in America with his debut solo album.

O, recorded in Rice’s bedroom, entered the Billboard Top 200 last week, after a week of musical achievement that Ronan Keating can only dream of.

Earlier last week, the singer from Celbridge, Co Kildare, was nominated for the Shortlist Music Prize, the American equivalent of a Mercury Music Prize, alongside more celebrated artists such as Blur, Radiohead and Ms Dynamite.

Rice wrote the album when he returned to Ireland after a stint in Europe in 1999. He grew vegetables on a farm in Tuscany and busked around the Continent.

Unlike his pop star rivals for the prize, Rice made the shortlist and the charts with little publicity and without a marketing campaign. Instead, 40,000 copies of his album have sold by word of mouth since its American release a little more than two months ago. Although the album entered the album charts at 200, record sales have been increasing substantially each week as word spreads. It is currently at 12 on Billboard’s Top Heatseekers chart, which lists the best-selling titles by new and developing artists.

Bernadette Barrett, Rice’s manager, said: “We haven’t spent a penny marketing this record or doing any advertising. There’s no big push. People just like his album because it is real and natural and there’s nothing forced about it. The general force behind it has been word of mouth. It’s been an organic growth.”

Rice recently told an interviewer that he didn’t want to be famous, he just wanted to be nobody. However, the rising star could teach other artists a thing or two about making it in America. Despite an expensive marketing exercise, an image makeover and a pricey video, Keating beat a hasty retreat from the US in 2001 after failing to win over audiences. Similarly, Westlife abandoned their attempt to conquer the market.

“He’s different and that’s why he’s going to be successful, because people are always looking for something different,” said Nic Harcourt, music director and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic at KCRW radio in Los Angeles. “This record has an enormous amount of potential to break through in a significant way.”

Harcourt has been instrumental in building Rice’s fan base, being the first to play his album on American radio. The presenter has been playing Rice’s songs for the past year after he was sent the album by his management.

KCRW has a history of discovering new musical acts, having been the first station in the world to play Dido and Norah Jones, who went on to win eight Grammys, and the first American station to air Coldplay.

Such was the following he had built up that Rice sold out three shows in a row in Los Angeles earlier this year before the record even came out.

One of those was the infamous show at The Troubadour where Britney Spears met up with Colin Farrell. Appearances on the David Letterman and Conan O’Brien shows followed. Rice returns to America for more gigs on September 10.

Billboard, the music industry bible, has been among those applauding Rice, calling him “a star of the future”. Rolling Stone magazine commended O for its “absorbing melodies and emotional wallop”.

O has gone double platinum in Ireland — selling more than 30,000 copies — and is currently at No 8 in Norway’s charts. Already on release in Sweden, Belgium and Holland, it is due to be launched in Germany next week, and in Denmark, France, Italy and Spain next month.

Harcourt nominated Rice for the Shortlist Music Prize: “It’s the best record I’ve heard in the last year and a half.”

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