Sarah Brightman

Of course, if you’re a full-on, card-holding, diva-worshiping gayer you’ll know Brightman has gone from dancing in Pans People and on the Kenny Everett Show to taking the West End and Broadway by storm and ultimately becoming the world’s biggest selling soprano of all time.

That all aside, we’re clearly a bit too obsessed with her 1978 hit I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper, but we’ll get to that later.

Right now we’re actually trying to find her. She’s so petite that we almost don’t see her perched on the end of a sofa in a vast hotel room.

Up close it’s not hard to see why she’s been splashed across the press recently for looking better now than she did during her 20s. We’d hesitate to use the cliché “elfin”, but that’s what clichés are there for.

“Excuse me eating,” she says as she has one of her favourite violet and rose flavoured chocolates. Although the confectionery in question is tiny, she nibbles at them politely. She offers them, but we’d likely wolf them down in one swift gulp, taking her hand with it.

Besides, we’re far more caught up in mentally noting what she’s wearing in our newly hatched plan to look the same at 48 (little black dress, black tights and knee-high black boots if you’re interested).

She chuckles when asked how she feels about the press saying how great she’s looking. “I’m not really, I’ve got my lines like everybody else. I think that what didn’t go for me when I was younger has worked for me as I’ve got older because as you get older your face starts to slim down.”

Hmmm. We can’t see any lines, especially as she says that “for her sins” she started the day with an appearance on breakfast TV. She laughs when we note that, along with appearances on Saturday Kitchen and Ready Steady Cook, that wasn’t the sort of thing we expected divas to do.

“I think that everything has changed now. Where there used to be so many music shows and things for artists to go and sing on, which is what we do,” she chuckles, “there aren’t anymore.

“So what people are mainly watching on television are reality shows, cooking shows, creating a new house show, buying a new house show, all of those kind of things. So I suppose they’ve sort of created spots for celebrities and artists or whoever it is that wants to go on them.”

But promote she must, regardless of the fact that her new album Symphony – her first in five years – is already breaking records around the world.

“I’d been running around since the 90s. Releasing albums, touring the world, promoting and it was gorgeously successful and I was on a roll and everything was wonderful but I got to the point where I just thought ‘I don’t want to repeat myself anymore’. So I sat back a little bit and I took on different things.

“What I wanted to listen to, my ideas, everything in my life kind of changed. So the types of songs I would have chosen were completely different to start with. It made, for me anyway, a much more interesting piece of work, although it sort of still sits within that ‘Sarah Brightman style’ that I’ve created for myself.”

Notably, the reviews have picked up on the word “gothic” to describe her most recent sound. Brightman, however, has a history of embracing the genre.

“When I was in musical theatre – well, I wasn’t really in musical theatre, I only did, or worked on Lloyd-Webber pieces – the two main pieces that I worked on, Phantom of the Opera and Cats…” She breaks off suddenly, as though realising.

“Cats in fact, TS Lewis, was very melancholy, was very dark, quite sort of gothic Victorian in his thoughts about things. And Requiem, which is a mass for the dead. All of those things were quite dark anyway.

“You think of classical music as very golden, as very utopian, and all of those wonderful things and that doesn’t necessarily mean that I was that way. My taste in classical music was always in the more Eastern European. And I suppose my taste in music today would be Radiohead, Evanesence, and what’s his name with all the make-up? I’ve gone completely blank.”

Marilyn Manson, we suggest and she agrees. “Those are the artists I like for my own enjoyment, and I’ve always had a sort of melancholy soul. When I was a child I was into churches and spiritual things and death. Not gore, but all of that sort of area.”

Fans of “that sort of area” will be pleased to hear that when the world tour for Symphony hits the UK next year, that gothic melancholy is high on her stage agenda.

One area she’s not so keen on though is the current classical crossover scene. “I don’t like what’s happening with this classical crossover…” she giggles when we ask her to elaborate.

“Well, what other artists have done with it. There’s nothing organic about it, it’s become a marketing thing. I think what the record companies suddenly thought was ‘well Sarah Brightman and Bocelli, they’ve been doing this thing and its really successful, lets find lots of opera singers and give them this to sing, and that to sing’.

“I listen to the productions and there’s nothing organic, there’s nothing real, there’s no reason why it should be suddenly like that because a lot of these kids are just pop singers.” She catches herself and stops. “But I will refrain from that,” and laughs when we say we’d hoped she was going to name names.

She mentions some market research that her record company undertook, and how the style of music is now attracting all different types of people. Clearly, we want to know where the gays fit in.

She rolls back in the sofa, laughing. “They’re big,” she says beaming. “That’s huge. Well I’m always very pleased to be part of that because in my mind the gay movement have always known what’s coming before it happens. They’re very in on arts and music and I’m quite glad when people say your gay demographic is high because I’m flattered.”

And because we’ve sneaked our gay agenda in there, we can finally bring up the legend that is Starship Trooper, which she performed at Pride a few years ago.

“Ooh yes that was fun,” she whispers naughtily before bursting out laughing again. “If I’m asked to do it again of course I would, I loved the last time.”

But, would she be camping it up or going all goth? “Well I’ve done Starship Trooper so I can’t really do that one again…” she considers, before we suggest Captain Nemo. “I would love to, the only trouble is that it only works if you do it with effects,” she says seriously. “It’s a very atmospheric piece, and when I did it on my tour there was lots of flying and curtains and projection and stuff like that.

“I don’t think they’d be able to come up with those sorts of demands. I’m not quite sure how I’d do it,” she says, thinking, before we note how funny it is that she wouldn’t perform ‘without effects’.

“Oh no, you’ve got to have the effects!” she laughs. That, we suggest, is both quite gay and diva-ish.
“Is it?” she rolls around laughing once more. “I can’t, it’s like I couldn’t do Starship Trooper without all those dancers.”

See, you can take the girl out of musical theatre…