Watch Out

She is in this business, she says, purely for "the connection between my music and my fans". But many women from her Wembley crowd seemed hungry for the whole visual package, lining up to buy flimsy copies of her sparkly cowboy hats from unauthorised vendors outside the Pavilion ("Getcher Anastaysher 'ats 'ere, only £5!"). Even before her illness, the fans adored her as a symbol of feminine strength. Now the Anastacia sisterhood — the feisty young housewives and secretaries with flyaway hair, crop tops and high heels who shriek and sigh at her concerts — worship her as a quasi-immortal goddess. She speaks with pride of her rapport with them. "My crowd, as you noticed, areÉ You could drop a pin and hear everything, because what they want to do is hear me sing. As much as they want to sing with me — and I let them sing with me — most of the time they want to hear me sing. Sometimes the silence in the room is completely because they're waiting with bated breath for the next note.

And they want to hear everything: they want to hear the breath. The silence is so respectful." She loves audience participation too: at Wembley she had a few fans brought up on stage to sing with her, and showed films of others singing her tunes a cappella outside the concert hall.

On her latest tour, fans started giving her big photograph albums containing pictures they had taken at the concerts, and letters and e-mails expressing their love for her. "I have tons of these albums in my house, and my mom is able to look through them and feel like she saw every show — 'This is when you were in FrankfurtÉ' — and it's really lovely."

Anyone poring over those photo albums would see Anastacia in countless different stage outfits, most of them extremely ostentatious and many of them revealing her famous navel. While the Wembley show had an air of Las Vegas about it, with its immaculately choreographed dancers and Anastacia's appeals for the crowd to wave their hands from side to side — "These are called the love hands!" — her costumes were more reminiscent of a Saturday-night hen party in Romford. I suggest diplomatically that her taste in clothes is, ahem, interesting. "Well, that's on stage. When you see me on stage, that's the on-stage Anastacia. You've got to be a little bigger than life up there. I love fashion. I think I'm pretty normal when I'm just hanging out: I put on a pair of jeans and some high heels." But she does seem very fond of sequinsÉ "Well, on stage, yes! You must get out of the show you saw," she chides. "You have to look at the whole package instead of judging someone from when they're only on stage."

But she also has a large tattoo, which of course remains on her lower back when she is off stage. It is an ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, representing "eternal life", and was a Christmas gift from her family several years ago. Since it appeared on the cover of her first single, it has inadvertently become a kind of personal insignia. "All of a sudden, that tattoo seemed to be the recognisable symbol of who I was: when people see it they think of me. And now people get the tattoo on their bodies." When she was starting out as a singer, it was suggested that she ditch the dark glasses, which for some people give her a Nana Mouskouri quality, but she needed them as aids for vision. Recently, though, she has conquered another physical problem: she has had laser treatment on her eyes, and though she still occasionally wears her flashy coloured spectacles — "I still love glasses; I enjoy them" — she doesn't need to. "It's become an interesting freedom." It must have been amazing to suddenly see properly for the first time. Did she have a "Hello, birds; hello, trees; hello, sky" moment? "You know what?" she replies. " It doesn't feel any different. I just look different to myself, because I can see myself without any glasses in a mirror. I find it exciting to be able to put make-up on, and to enjoy seeing the make-up and seeing my eyes. It's as if I'm getting a second shot at growing up."

It's easy to see how Anastacia would get on well with Sir Elton, a famous spectacle-wearer who dresses outrageously on stage and has fought and won his own life battles. What else do they have in common? "We have tons in common, but that's for us to know." The two of them shared an intimate public moment when he invited her to duet with him at Madison Square Garden five years ago. "I'd finished singing on stage with him, and he came over and instead of kissing my hand, he came down and kissed my navel. And I was like, 'Whoa! Yuuuummy!' It was in front of 30,000 people, so it was a little bit like, 'Should I kiss his navel? What should I do?' 'Cause he's a 'Sir'."

If there are any heterosexual men kissing her belly button on a regular basis, she isn't letting on. She recently split up with a German TV presenter, and says she dislikes negative attitudes towards the state of being single. In fact, she celebrated that very state on her previous album, with the song Sexy Single. She is raucously amused that, when she played a charity event for Prince Albert of Monaco, a press report linked them as a couple. "I did his Red Cross ball and we happened to be nice to each other and suddenly it's, 'Do they have a relationship going on?' And everyone's like, 'What's happening with you guys?' And I'm like, 'What is happening with us? 'Cause I would love to find out. I'm the last one to know what's happening in my love life."

The pressures on a recording artist in the spotlight are enough to drive anyone mad. And the next day, as she makes crazy faces for a video camera in Brooklyn, we might begin to worry about Anastacia. But her name means "she who will rise up again" in ancient Greek. This redoubtable woman has succeeded in regaining her health, reclaiming her life and repairing her eyesight. She will surely be able to get her marbles back.

The new album, Pieces of a Dream, is released on November 7