I don’t think you're ready for this, Kelly!

Call her the dark horse of Destiny’s Child if you like – although one risks a stiletto to the shins when employing equestrian imagery in conjunction with any young lady, never mind one as immaculately turned out as Kelly Rowland, who shows up for our interview in the Four Seasons hotel looking like she just walked off the set of her latest video, dyed lilac bangs and all.

Anyway, you know what I mean: Kelly was the quiet one (not as quiet as Michelle, but that’s another story) compared to Beyonce, and yet over the last six months she’s produced a killer one-two singles combination – the rather charming ‘Dilemma’ duet with Nelly, and more recently ‘Stole’, a conscious pop confection up there with TLC’s ‘Unpretty’ for its perfect meld of substance and sweetness.

The album Simply Deep is not bad either, a scrubbed selection of low slung funk grooves, r&b balladry and gospel-with-attitude. In fact, Rowland grew up singing in Atlanta churches before hooking up with the Knowles family business in Houston. But coming from such as staunchly religious background, did she feel any conflict in going into one of the dirtiest industries in the world?

“You hear that, but only from people who judge,” she says. “I think that it’s wrongly judged, nobody on this earth can judge but God. So I don’t really listen to that.”

Enough of that – let’s get down to the real nitty-gritty; rumours of a romantic involvement with her leading man Nelly. Is she really going out with him? In other words, does she think Nelly’s ready for this Kelly jelly?

“We’re not dating,” she says, “Nelly and I honestly are just friends. We’re like brother and sister and he’s really cool.”

So what does she look for in a bloke?

“I look for a guy that’s respectful, responsible, a Christian, has goals, is honest, that kinda thing – I don’t ask for much, humorous… spontaneous…”

Is his denomination that important?

“Just as long as we come to a meeting ground, because you don’t want to constantly argue in your household about religion, ’cos when you have kids you don’t want them to be like, ‘Oh my god, which side am I gonna go on?’ It should be some kind of happy medium.”

Speaking of family values, one of the interesting things about ‘Dilemma’ was that it had this innocent, almost doo-wop 50s thing…

“That wasn’t me! I didn’t do that!”

…yet the actual song is about feelings of infidelity.

“Yeah, honestly, I’ve never been in a situation… aw, I’m lyin’! It happened a long time ago where I came close to a situation like that. I didn’t even know what this song was about until I started singing it, ’cos I always listen to a melody first, so I got in the studio and I was like, ‘Nelly, why did you write this song; I’m cheatin’, I’m cheatin’!’ So of course I sang the song and everybody loved it… but I’m not the infidelity type. It’s not me.”

As we were saying earlier, ‘Stole’ is just as serious, a triptych of true life tales that tackle such subjects as classroom gun violence, foiled hoop dreams and low self esteem among young girls.

“I am very sensitive when it comes to babies and young people, what they go through,” Kelly says. “I always think about it, it just haunts me even when I go to sleep at night, sometimes I have dreams (about) the fact that we’re one generation, and the generation after us doesn’t look good and the generation after that one doesn’t look good.

“I think that parents should be more into what their child is doing nowadays. I just did this big press media thing in the UK and they were asking me about the whole gun violence that’s been going on in London – ’cos they were blaming everything on rap music but it’s not just rap music, it’s movies, they see guns in cartoons – and I was like, ‘You know what? God put parents on this earth for a reason, they’re supposed to sit down and tell their kids, ‘Look, this is wrong and this is right.’’”

So does it bother her that there are small girls who treat Destiny’s Child as role models?

“That does kinda get to me sometimes,” she admits, “simply because they see us on these magazine covers and album covers and they’ll think, ‘Oh wow, they must be perfect’. Honey, that’s airbrush, that’s make up, that’s beautiful clothes from designers, that’s all of that kinda stuff, and I’ll be the first to say it. Everybody on this earth has different looks, which makes you an individual and makes you beautiful.”

What about the ladyboys then? Why do Destiny’s Child make such great drag queen music?

“Ahm, because we always want to be fabulous and so do drag queens. What I love about songs like ‘Bootylicious’ is you really get in the mirror, and the same way we paint it in the video, you wanna feel like that. If I’m getting ready for a show or to go out, that’s the song I listen to. You wanna look at your butt and you wanna see how your waist looks and all of that. Everybody wants to look bootylicious!”