One cool morning last October, Russell Watson sat in a neurologist’s consulting room at the Cedars Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles waiting for the man to speak. He could hardly see the doctor’s face: his vision had diminished to a narrow tunnel and he had an excruciating headache.

“You have a tumour,” said the doctor. “Quite a big one.”

There would be a four-day wait for an MRI scan to reveal the precise size and location of the tumour. Watson had come to LA to record a new album: the studio was ready, the musicians were waiting, but he was sick, frightened and in permanent pain. How could he think of work?

Watson smiles — a tight little smile, almost a grimace: “I thought this record would be my last, my legacy,” he says. “Since an early age I’d had an in-built premonition, a vision that I wouldn’t make 40. For the previous seven years I’d had a recurring nightmare in which my head exploded. And here I was with a brain tumour on the eve of my 40th birthday; I thought, ‘This is it, I was right, I knew it’.”

Fortunately for Watson and his many fans, his visionary powers turned out to be faulty: he made the record, had the tumour removed and lived to tell the tale. As he sits opposite me on a sofa in a Manchester hotel suite, it is apparent that the experience has been, if not humbling, then profoundly moving: “It changed my priorities,” he says. “Made me appreciate the importance of relationships, of friends and family and, most of all, my two daughters. My fear for them if I died — that was the worst part.”

In his seven years as an international singing star and self-styled “people’s tenor”, the Russell Watson story has been well documented in interviews, tabloid gossip columns and in the pages of Hello! , so let’s just summarise: Salford lad, welder, married with a baby, gives up work to try his luck as a singer round the northern clubs; after lean years, hiding from bailiff, ducking and weaving, he is heard singing Puccini’s Nessun Dorma in a working men’s club and is invited to perform it at Old Trafford before Manchester United’s last Premiership match of the season in 1999, when they clinched the title.

Fame spreads, his crossover albums of Italian arias and pop classics conquer charts on both sides of Atlantic and Watson “the Voice” is courted by popes, princes and the Beckhams. Casualties along the way include his marriage, his engagement to a receptionist from New York and his relationship with a former manager, who claimed that he had been dumped.

Then, two years ago, Watson began having headaches — “like a knife being pressed into the bridge of my nose” — and consulted a specialist who told him there was nothing to worry about: he was suffering from stress and should find ways of relaxing. When his peripheral vision began to be affected late last year, he visited another specialist who also told him he was suffering from stress: “I said the only thing that’s stressing me is this pain in my head.”

On the flight to LA to record his new album, Watson told his producer that he was experiencing terrible pressure inside his skull. “When we landed, he suggested a game of tennis to clear my head,” recalls Watson. “I couldn’t see the ball.”

Four days later, the MRI scan revealed a tumour the size of two golf balls: “Like a figure of eight,” says Watson, “one filling the frontal cavity of my skull, the other forced through into the top of my nose.” Watson went back to his hotel and phoned his best friend, the Colonel (a nickname dating from early club days when Watson sang Elvis songs and his friend dubbed him the King). “I asked him to make sure that the kids got everything.”

He flew home and booked in for surgery at St George’s Hospital, South London: “My mates were saying, you’re so fit, so strong and healthy, you will sail through it,” says Watson. “I was thinking, if that surgeon’s knife slips inside my skull, fitness is irrele-vant.” It made him feel lonely, he says, surrounded by their determined optimism: “Even though I knew they probably went home and said, “F***ing hell, poor bastard.” He spent the evening before the operation with his daughters, Rebecca, 12, and six-year-old Hannah: “I thought I was saying good-bye.”

Was there anyone to lean on, to be truthful with — a girlfriend? “Well I’m not in a relationship,” he says, “So no. My rock and support was the Colonel and his wife Lynne. I stayed with them for three weeks after surgery; Lynne doted on me like a mother.”

He could barely walk, he says, and the tumour had affected his pituitary gland, which controls hormone levels: “My mood swings went from ecstatic to suicidal.” he says. “I remember one night standing on the balcony, full of dark thoughts and self-pity, thinking ‘God, this is f***ing terrible, why me?’ I went back to bed, couldn’t sleep, got up again. I thought I’d had enough. If it hadn’t been for the girls . . .”

Watson’s energy levels were at rock bottom and he didn’t leave the house for two months: “I couldn’t deal with more than one person at a time or with multitasking and I cried easily,” he confesses, his cheerful chappie face looking bleak for a moment. “The best thing I can say now, three months later, is that where I was getting a hell of a lot of really bad days, now the good days outnumber the bad.”

In two weeks he will embark on a 22-city concert tour to promote the new album — lush covers of classic love songs and not an aria to be heard. He has been shunned by critics in the past who said his untrained tenor voice was just not up to operatic standards: did this influence the new direction? “Doesn’t bother me,” he says. “Seven years ago classical crossover didn’t exist — putting Italian lyrics to pop songs in a big ballsy way. Now every bugger’s doing it. I’ve transcended all that bickering and bitching.”

Now he has a new lease on life, what are his career ambitions? “Longevity, that’s the most important thing,” he says. “I want to be a musical force for a good long while.” But above everything else, he insists, the reprieve taught him to cherish his relationship with his daughters. “It put everything into perspective.”

Russell Watson’s new album, That’s Life, is out on March 5.