I've barely walked into the room before Michael Ball is offering me tea from an expensive looking pot.  We're in an ornate faux-Georgian drawing room in an exclusive Mayfair Club - not quite the image that goes with Ball's boy-next-door chumminess.  "Oh the PR Company chose this", he chuckles.  "I'd be just as happy outside".  At 37, the singer has much to be happy about.
 

Since making his name in a string of West-End blockbusters - Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, Aspects of Love - he has released seven gold albums, hosted an array of Television Shows and sold more than two million records since 1991 - not including the new one, which is in the Top 20 and expected to go into the Top 10.  In addition to all that, his new video, Live At The Royal Albert Hall, also shot straight to the top of the charts.
 

Despite it all, Ball says he is still susceptible to stage fright.  "Not as badly as I used to be, but I get very nervous when it is something new".  "When I did the opening ceremony for the Rugby World Cup I was really hyped up.  I am Welsh and you just want to show that you are one of them and make everybody proud".  It worked.  He says: "After the game we were walking back from the Stadium, which was teeming with very drunk Welshmen.  Everyone was just so happy and when they saw me it was like 'Mike! Oh my God you were so good!  We are so proud of you!  Come and kiss my wife!'"
 

He clearly values this accessibility to fans.  "I like to have as much of a rapport as I can", he says.  "I don't cut myself off, because I feel safe to do that.  I've got incredibly loyal fans.  You get camaraderie between people who wouldn't necessarily have met who have now become best mates, people who travel all over the world.  They have a surrogate family and I'm the catalyst for that.  And," he adds insistently, "it's really healthy".
 

Is there a danger that devotion can turn into obsession?
 

"You get people who are way out there of course."  Ball picks his words carefully before adding:  "You don't sneer at people like that.  You have to think why are they like that.  What's happening in their lives that you've become such a focus.  "I mean it is odd.  I couldn't imagine my life being empty enough - well not empty, but unhappy enough - to want to focus it on an area that I really don't have any contact with".

Ball's new video contains some footage which gives a glimpse of his life out of the spotlight - albeit a selective one.  "The video is truthful", he insists, "but there are times on tour when you're feeling terrible.  People don't want to know that - your job is to take people away from that.  You don't want to go on and say:  'Look, I've had a really crap day, and I don't feel like singing this song, let's have a talk about it'.  They'd say: 'Well, no, let's not.  Let's you get on with entertaining me, please'."
 

Ball is now trying to branch out:  the video features his first original work as a songwriter, a number called Someone Else's Dream.  He has previously shied away from writing.  "I don't read music and I don't play an instrument," he admits.  "If I sat at a piano or got a guitar in my hand, I'd like to be that boy genius who can sit there and just go:  'It's been a hard day's night ...'  But to think you've got to sit there and practise your scales and get your left hand to do what your right's doing - I haven't a clue."
 

It was Irish singer-songwriter Brian Kennedy who persuaded him to make the effort.  "We sat in the studio and he said: 'Think of something, just think of a hook.'  And there's one phrase that I remember from when I was growing up, which was 'to dream the person you'd like to be is to waste the person you are' - all pretty New Age rubbish," he concedes bashfully, "but it does work.  And it just started coming out, all these ideas and words and the shape of a song, and he showed me how chords could fit together, and since then I just haven't stopped."
 

Another original is on the Christmas album, but Ball isn't planning to make a career of it.  "I'm not going to be a singer-songwriter," he insists:  "All I hope is that if I do write things, they don't stand out as being a pile of junk."
 

He needn't worry - as far as Ball's legion of fans are concerned, he can do no wrong.
 

Reproduced with the kind permission of  The Sunday Express
BEN WALTERS
Sunday Express Newspaper