Now in remission from cancer, chart-topping Delta Goodrem is back in business - but her work has changed, she tells Brian Boyd
Using cancer as a promotional tool? Don't mention it to Australian singing star Delta Goodrem. The 20-year-old, already with a number one album in Oz behind her (recorded when she was aged all of 18), was struck down with Hodgkin's Disease last year and was more than a little bemused on her return to the music world when it was suggested to her that maybe she could use her ill-health as a publicity angle.
"It's incredible the lengths some people will go to," she says. "I was just over the fact of wondering if I would live or die and then there are these suggestions that I could use what happened to me as a positive thing for my career - you know, maximise the potential for publicity.
"I was quite astonished by this, but apparently that's the way of the music industry. There was no way, though, I wanted to portray myself as being of interest because of an illness. I didn't want to talk about it in that sense. I certainly didn't want to be a figurehead or anything."
Little more than a year ago, Goodrem could do no wrong. With a successful acting role in the long-running soap, Neighbours, she took time out to return to her first love, music, and recorded an album. With shouts of "just like Kylie and Jason" in her ear, she surprised the music world by releasing an album of perky pop/rock, Innocent Eyes, that instantly went to the top of the charts.
Aged just 19, everything was going perfectly - until she was diagnosed with cancer, news which dominated the headlines in her native Australia.
"It was a massive shock" she says. "I went from worrying about the dance steps in my new video to chemotherapy. It was awful losing my hair while still a teenager. Just awful. I was only 19, but I felt like I was 150. In less than a few months, every single aspect of my life changed."
Hodgkin's is rare in people so young. Goodrem, and the doctors that treated her (she is now in remission), are at a loss to explain how or why it happened.
"You know, it might have had something to do with the fact that I was still filming Neighbours while having to do all the promotion for my first album" she says. "I was either filming or flying to Europe for tours. I remember at the time that I had lost a lot of weight and I got this really strange rash on my body, but I put it down to sheer tiredness. But when I was diagnosed, I had to have an immediate four-hour operation, which was followed by chemotherapy and then radiotherapy and then a course of steroids and so many intravenous injections that my veins collapsed."
Such was her popularity in Australia that actors and musicians who didn't even know her - including Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman and Olivia Newton-John - sent messages of support. From Britain, where her album had topped the charts, Elton John sent messages.
"Maybe people are a bit surprised by how quickly I've come back with this new album, but it was really what I wanted to do" she says. "And there were no health reasons why I shouldn't have gone in and made a new album. I think putting it together really helped. I had just come through a real roller coaster of a time and doing the songs for the album helped put things in context for me.
"I worked on the album with Guy Chambers, who wrote a lot of songs for Robbie Williams, and it was always going to be different from the first one. What happened to me changed me as a person and changed me as a songwriter. I can hear the difference clearly - this album is big and dramatic. It's not pop, and I'm not apologising for that - because I'm proud of it."
Unlike others who have moved into music from Neighbours, Goodrem has a background of musical accomplishment - she is a trained classical pianist. She first landed an album deal when she was 15 years old but her role in Neighbours meant that her music had to be fitted in around her appearances in the show. The producers of the soap helped, in that she was able to début her first single on the show, in the guise of her character, Nina Tucker. It was also useful that when Goodrem had to go to Britain to promote her album, her character was sent to Japan for a few months.
Despite her chart-topping success, Goodrem has recently returned to the soap. When she signed up, it was a five-year deal and regardless of how she was faring outside the show, she had to return to fulfil contractual obligations.
"I went back to film a proper farewell for the character" she says. "There was some unfinished business with the character and obviously I had be written out when I was unwell, so this ties everything up.
"Nina will be seen leaving to pursue a full-time singing career - just as I am doing in real-life - and when I went back we filmed intensively for five days, so the footage can be stretched out for a month."
It was her "appearance" on another Australian programme, though, that really excited her.
"I was mentioned on Kath 'n' Kim and, for me, that's just fantastic," she says about an episode of the cult comedy (a sort of Aussie mix of Absolutely Fabulous and The Royle Family that is currently being show on RTÉ2) in which she was name-checked.
"You know, having a number one album and a number one single in Australia is one thing, but being mentioned on Kath 'n' Kim is quite another . . ."
Delta Goodrem's new single, Out of the Blue, was released yesterday. Her album, Mistaken Identity, will be released next week