‘Pop music gives me the worst headache…’

and maybe I accept myself a bit more. So this is an artistic choice I am exploring, about sex and power. To be broken but still be strong – that is a woman to me. That is sexy.”

I tell her that she appears surprisingly relaxed for someone who has just performed in front of a crowd of 60,000. “You saw a bit of the chaos before. Onstage it’s calm, it’s a moment of full presence, exercising my flow,” she explains. “I kind of feel like a tai chi master, in the zone. Which is nice to be able to do at such an old age.” She is 33.

Sthis group for special talent but I got bored, because it was so much about technique and I wanted to do my own thing.”

She dropped out of dance school at 15, to her teacher’s dismay. “She told me I was too old and it was too late to change. And I didn’t have any talent. Really. People would laugh at me when I sang. I was completely out of tune. But I just loved music so much. I started piano lessons. I joined a gospel choir. I applied to music school but couldn’t get in.”

Things began to improve when she started composing her own songs. She recalls an early breakthrough with an unrecorded song titled Born Blue, a phrase that could sum up her entire oeuvre. “It went, ‘I was born with a heartache, I’ve always been this way’. I didn’t really have the other parts for a music[ian’s] life but