Anastacia: "To get back at the record company, they blacklisted my name"

“When I had cancer, I didn’t like the word. I didn’t like that it was part of my life. One day, I was like: ‘Oh my god, the first three letters of that word are can. They’re in trouble now.’

“All of a sudden I was laughing in the face of cancer. You gave a girl with a loud mouth cancer, and she’s not going to shut up about it because she wants to help other people. So, that’s sort of been my dream: wanting to see the best out of the worst, because it does make life easier.

Anastacia has spent 25 years refusing to shut up, across a career strewn with impediments (though most could be filed under minor inconvenience for a woman who’s beaten cancer twice). Despite being a huge pop voice across Europe, she never quite ‘broke America’. Plenty of acts know that feeling, just ask Robbie Williams. The twist here is that Anastacia is American.Her path into music began unexpectedly in a New York City nightclub.

“I was dancing and a producer came up to me,” she says. “I was like, ‘Ugh, gross.’ But at the same time, he was like, ‘I’m not trying to come on to you. I just think you have a presence.’

“I didn’t really think about singing as an option. My mother sang, my father sang, and I could sing. I didn’t think it was anything to write home about, but I could sing a note.

“But once I started to work with one producer and got to another producer, I was getting compliments on my voice and getting them to suggest, ‘Oh, you should actually do this for a living. You have what it takes.’ And I was like, ‘Really?’”

For all the early encouragement, she went in green, with little feel for the politics, or the way an artist was supposed to carry herself. By her own account, it was an industry spat she had nothing to do with which shut her out of her own country.

“For some unfortunate reason, someone big at Sony Records must have gotten someone very angry at the big radio station,” she says. “To get back at the record company, they blacklisted my name. I never got radio play in America. I got to go on all the TV shows, I got press, but radio was where songs like ‘Toxic’ [by Britney Spears] got in your bones. You could feel the song because it was on rotation.

“So, with each album, they couldn’t move the needle. America never really was a market for me other than getting played in clubs and stuff like that.

“I would have had the same kind of success in America. It wasn’t about the songs. It had nothing to do with me. It was just a way to hurt the record company. I mean, I can’t imagine how many albums it would have been that they sold, had I not been the sacrificial lamb of the argument.”

That could have easily been the end of it. The numbers say otherwise: Anastacia has sold over 50 million records and boasts hundreds of gold and platinum certifications thanks to hits like ‘I’m Outta Love’ and ‘Left Outside Alone’.

“Unfortunately that happened, but I say fortunately, because I went to Europe,” she says. “That was my territory. It wasn’t just one country, it was all of them! So there was massive success, it ended up being my key location.

“My career started and continued to have tremendous success throughout Europe. And within that, it became normal to hop from Germany to Ireland, and then back to Italy, and then over to Slovenia, and so in a way, I have had to be very flexible with the different cultures and learn about them.

“You get to know more of how they are, how they live. And you get to see the similarities and the big differences, especially when I get to go to multiple places in a country. In Germany there’s Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich. The UK, Ireland, Scotland, they all harbour a different energy [from each other].”

Anastacia on the NTK Tour.

Italy was among the places that fell for her hardest. Anastacia has recorded with Eros Ramazzotti and Umberto Tozzi, names that might mean little to anglophone ears but that fill arenas across the continent. She also wound up in the company of opera royalty.

“Oh my god, I’m working my way through Italy!” she laughs. “I did ask a very important question to [Luciano] Pavarotti at the beginning of my career: ‘Am I singing right? I don’t warm up, am I singing correctly?’

He said: ‘Where you’re placing all your notes and how you’re structuring your sound feels natural. In my opinion, for you to continue regularly and sound the same without your voice giving out, I wouldn’t change anything.’

“It was confirmation from somebody who trains a lot and who understands it’s a muscle and it needs a lot of attention. I guess it’s just natural. It’s the way I approach my songs, and I’m not inhibiting my voice by doing that, which was lovely to know.”

The voice Pavarotti approved of remains a force, and will be brought to Ireland in September for a continuation of a tour celebrating 25 years of Anastacia’s debut album, Not That Kind.

“I’m really grateful to everyone that has loved my music enough to get me here. I’m also grateful I can still do it. When I sing my songs, I feel like I’m giving them the Anastacia on the record.

“When it’s an anniversary and it’s that kind of celebration, you have to put [your hits] in there and then fill the setlist to give the variety of your body of work. And that’s what I felt I did on this year’s tour. I’m copy and pasting maybe, with another couple of new songs for those who want to come back, and just for the fun of being able to pop a new one in there.”

Not everything on the setlist is built for a boogie and singalong, mind.

“I sang a song this year that I had never sung in my life since the record, and I chose it because it was a very heavy song,” she continues. “It was called ‘How Come the World Won’t Stop’. It was about losing someone, and how you feel about when you lose someone: everyone still exists, and everything still happens, and the world doesn’t stop. It stopped for me, but it doesn’t stop. It was a heavy song, but I felt like what we’ve all gone through in recent times with everything heavy, everything scary, I just felt like there has been loss. I wanted to sing it for the people that aren’t here.”

• Anastacia plays the 3Olympia on Tuesday, September 15 & Friday, September 18.