In February 2001, shortly before Myleene Klass briefly became hugely successful, "somebody very well known" who was loosely connected to the management of her pop band Hear'say approached her and the other two female members and made them an offer. The women, along with two fresh-faced young men, had been selected as the winners of ITV's first Popstars talent competition (the forerunner of Pop Idol and others), and shoehorned into a "band" of five vocalists. By the end of March, the band's first single, Pure and Simple, would become the fastest selling debut of all time, but at this stage, Klass insists, the five had no real idea whether the public had any interest in them.
It was at this point, just as the brick wall of celebrity hurtling towards them was about to hit, that the unnamed industry figure ("it wasn't anyone in our management company. I'll never say who it was") made his suggestion. If the girls wanted any little bits of work done - their noses sorted out, for instance, or their boobs or teeth done - that could be arranged, at no expense to themselves. "We were told about bands who had gone out there before us and had little nips and tucks and tweaks before they really made it, and if we wanted to do anything, we ought to do it now. We didn't even have a song selection at that stage!"
Twenty months later, Klass appeared on the comedian Frank Skinner's chatshow, started talking about life as a member of Hear'say, and burst into tears. In her year-and-a-half of low-wattage celebrity, she had acquired a stalker, had a former boyfriend sell a kiss-and-tell story to the tabloids, and been forced to secure an injunction against someone attempting to blackmail her family. Worse, as the wave of giddy hysteria that catapulted Hear'say to the top of the charts turned suddenly sour, she faced vicious hostility from her former fans - being hissed at in the street, called a "bitch" by a shop assistant, and even, on one occasion, being beaten up and sexually assaulted by some angry members of the public. "I got my face kicked in a couple of times," she told Skinner. "I don't go into town at night now."
Hear'say, and Klass in particular, have become music industry shorthand for how not to do pop stardom - picked up from nowhere and styled into "celebrity", then allowed to break down in public when things went catastrophically awry. Klass, the highest-profile victim of the messiest car crash in recent pop history, could be every musician's momento mori, a walking reminder of how quickly it can all go wrong. And yet here she is, all bubbly and groomed, bounding out of her seat next to her PR and kissing me on the cheeks and babbling on about how excited she is to have a new album out. Klass has scrambled back into bed with the celebrity monster. Does anybody ever learn?
Not that her new solo project, advisedly, is anything much like Hear'say. Happily, as well as being able to sing nicely, dance averagely and look FHM-friendly, Klass has another talent, having trained as a classical pianist at the Royal Academy of Music before she joined Hear'say. She started playing piano and violin at four, and won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music where she later took up the harp; her Austrian grandfather was head of the Vienna Opera. Moving On, as the new album is pointedly titled, is a piano album, featuring arrangements of Elgar, Faure, Beethoven and Satie. Her record company's dearest hope is that when the album is released on Monday, Klass will become the first artist to have a number one pop album followed by a number one in the classical charts.
She is, predictably, delighted to be back, however badly burned she was the last time. "Oh, of course, a lot of people have said, 'If you had such a hard time, why did you come back?' The answer is, because I love what I do. It's all I've ever done. And if I couldn't do it I don't know what I could do. I know I'm capable of other things, but I can't help it!"
It's a level of enthusiasm that is slightly terrifying, particularly considering the asides she throws in about the Hear'say era - like the day she had to have her hand plastered in makeup before going on Top of the Pops to cover the scars where an angry fan had pushed her up against a wall until she bled, or the times she would have to work up the courage to go onstage, worried that she might be hit by a missile.
Was anything worth that? "I do think I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I hadn't been through all that happened. I know I've paid the price" - she laughs, entirely without bitterness - "but it's like they say in Fame: 'Here's where you start paying in sweat and tears and everything else.' I do feel I paid the price. But I owe it to myself and to all the people who stand in queues to go to these auditions to make something out of the opportunity."
Her lack of self-pity is striking. But then, rather than being the battered celebrity wash-up having one last desperate stab at fame that one rather assumes she must be, the 25-year-old turns out to be a proper, big-smiles, on-with-the-show, showbiz pro. "It's been painted as if [Pop Idol] was the first audition I went to and I suddenly got the golden ticket. But I went to a million auditions before that, for all sorts of things. I know what it's like to sing 10 bars and get 'Next!' On to the next job." Pop Idol didn't mind giving the impression that all the Hear'say members were green ingenues plucked from obscurity; in fact, Klass had been performing in the West End and working as a jobbing session musician for a few years before she got her pop break, and she wasn't going to let little things like public vilification and physical violence stop her now.
And so, as we are chauffeured to her home following a children's TV rehearsal, she leans over the back seat and touches my arm and calls me luvvie and laughs delightfully for much of the journey. She is much tinier than she used to be in the Hear'say era, though she insists she is completely healthy and kept her weight up while a pop star to annoy those who told her she had to lose some (certainly her flat - a modern penthouse in a not-terribly-fashionable part of southeast London, which she shares with her boyfriend Graham - is full of bowls of sweets and cupboards crammed with crisp packets). She delights in telling tales of pop videos being stretched to make band members look thinner.
She knows her album - classical greats chopped down to three-minute hum-alongs, and pop songs arranged for piano and orchestra - will terrify purists, but, she cheerfully counters, purists are not her intended market. Her promotional schedule has taken her to Blue Peter and SM:TV as well as classical radio stations, which delights her. Classical music is like Latin, she says. "Only a certain number of people know it, it's going to die out if we don't keep it going. And yet it's only the privileged few that get to learn it. People say to me, oh, is that classical music? I like it. And if I've touched just one person who didn't know what it was, then I've done a job today."
In any case, she says with a big smile, she's not exactly a stranger to criticism.
