Katherine Jenkins has bounced back from recent low notes

Ed Power meets up with soprano Katherine Jenkins. Did he find the foot-stomping, champagne flute-hurling uber-diva that many would expect? 

Is Katherine Jenkins a foot-stomping, champagne flute-hurling uber-diva? That was certainly the impression put forward last year when the Welsh mezzo soprano split acrimoniously from her record company.

The break-up was accompanied by rumours of strops and outrageous demands: €1,800 a day splurged on hair and make-up, €2.5m squandered on record promotion and other expenses. The label, it was hinted none-too-subtly, was happy to see the back of her.

Where the story falls down is in the details, says Jenkins, speaking exclusively to Weekend. Yes, some of her hair and make-up costs were high. This, she points out, is absolutely standard for an artist at her level. And while she may have had her differences with Warner Music, it wasn’t as if she became damaged goods in the eyes of the rest of the industry — without question Decca, with whom she worked early in her career, was happy to welcome her back.

“There is definitely a double standard in terms of men and women in this business,” she says. “I might need hair and make-up done for TV. I know men who do exactly the same job as me — and they’ll have as much spent on hair and make-up. Yet nobody cares how much it costs. But that’s okay — that’s how it is.”

In person, Jenkins does not live up to her ‘reputation’, if you can call it that, as egotistical gargoyle. If you expected somewhat of a madam, you are, frankly, in for a let down. She is quietly spoken and thoughtful — not at all the high-gloss glamour puss she comes across as in her public appearances.

“I’m quite sensitive,” she says. “When I read something about me that’s simply made up, it can get to me. My mum has a really good attitude. She says: ‘Well, we all know the truth — come back to Neath and we’ll give you a hug’.”

That said, in a way Jenkins suspects she has got off easily as a celebrity. Her rise to house-hold name was relatively drawn out, and she feels sorry for young entertainers catapulted unceremoniously into the spotlight.

“I look at the kids on X Factor and think: ‘Oh my gosh.’ I came to it gradually. I became famous in Wales first, then further afield. It didn’t snowball; there was an opportunity to get my head around it.”

She is upfront that 2013 was a rough year. There was the falling out with her label, all that ‘diva’ stuff — and an extraordinary ad hominem attack after she ran the London Marathon wearing lip balm. This, apparently, was an insult to the thousands of runners choosing to tackle the course with lips unprotected, as God intended. Jenkins sighs: From the start of her rise to fame, she has been at pains to keep her personal and professional life separate. To become a media punch-bag is the last thing she ever wanted.

“I don’t want to live in the spotlight,” she says. “I strive to be surrounded by normality. All my friends are the friends I’ve had since before I was famous — people I was in school with. I go out and run in the park without any make-up on. It’s weird when you’ve two men with cameras following you. I don’t think that is normal. At the same time, I don’t want to moan. It’s my job — there are downsides to everyone’s job.”

Still, things have taken a turn for the better lately. She has reunited with Decca, recording a well-received comeback LP, Home Sweet Home. And, after several unhappy relationships — and a headline grabbing break-up in 2011 with her then fiancee, the TV presenter Gethin Jones — she has, at 34, found true love, marrying American actor/director Gavin Levitas.Several magazines dangled wedges of cash in front of the couple in return for exclusive rights to cover the nuptials, to which Jenkins offered a polite ‘no thanks’. In the end the ceremony, at Hampton Court Palace in September, was less of a circus than it might have been, thanks to George Clooney’s decision to get hitched the very same day.

“There is such a culture of people selling their private lives,” says Jenkins. “It’s what everyone has come to expect. With our wedding we were offered a lot of money. That’s not what we wanted. I always draw a line: I want it to be about my music, not my life. I love George Clooney, by the way: He’s my favourite after that.”

Along with stress and melodrama, 2013 brought a terrible deja vu. Several years ago, Jenkins confessed to taking drugs in her early 20s. This hardly marked her out as a dangerous deviant : Nonetheless, it was enough to get her ‘fired’ from her gig singing the Welsh national anthem at rugby matches in Cardiff.

“I worried it might be all over for me,” she told this journalist at the time. “I didn’t know how people were going to react. It could have been a career-ending moment.

“I feel candor is the best policy. I think people might understand me a little better if I am completely open. There is this idea that if you are a classical artist then you must be quite saintly, that you’ve never done anything wrong. It was an opportunity to say: ‘Look, I haven’t done everything right — I’ve made tonnes of mistakes and probably will again.’ I believed very strongly that I needed to say that.

“I look back at how naive I was at the start of my career,” she says today. “I was so excited. When my first album came out, I just couldn’t believe it… The entire journey has taken me by surprise.”Jenkins is reluctant to lower the tone and get into her differences with Warner. However, she is upfront that she wasn’t comfortable with attempts to mould her into a mass-market entertainer by playing down her classical roots. The nadir, surely, was when she was strong-armed into covering American goth-pop band Evanescence. This was far beyond her comfort zone; in hindsight she sometimes wishes she had dug her heels in.

“With people who maybe don’t understand classical crossover, there is a belief it’s just the same as pop,” she says. “Well, it’s not: It is about taking classical music and presenting it in a more popular way. I would perhaps not have chosen some of those songs. Then again, sometimes you have to do these songs in order to realise what it is you really want to sing.”

Home Sweet Home is out now. Katherine Jenkins plays Musgrave Park, Cork, along with Jose Carreras on June 20, 2015.