“[Laughs] I know the first single ‘Lipstick’ did well there, but I couldn’t guess.”
WRONG. 54.
“Japan’s a big place so I’ll take that! Having the album released on vinyl in the UK now is surreal. Coming out of Mis-teeq after eight years, I spent a year-and-a-half, every day bar Christmas Day, in the studio experimenting with producers, writing and recording and discovering who I was as an artist. I felt proud of ‘Fired Up’ and prefer the album as a body of work over [2008’s] more successful ‘The Alesha Show’. I was heartbroken and devastated when ‘Fired Up’ never had a physical release here, but the label [Universal] gave me the rights so I was able put it out in Japan. ‘Lipstick’ was Number One in the ringtone charts there! [Laughs] It was October 2006 when I received the dreaded call that a big radio station wasn’t going to playlist my second single ‘Knockdown’, and the record company had lost faith and didn’t want to risk putting the record out. It was a dark time. In the space of two weeks, my marriage [to Harvey from So Solid Crew] ended and I lost my record deal. ‘The Alesha Show’ was a rebirth, but ‘Fired Up’ has a special place in my heart.”
You allege that when you signed your solo deal for ‘Fired Up’, the label higher-ups claimed ‘Black women don’t sell records’…
“That was a conversation that I had with my manager. When I got the offer from Universal, he sat me down and said: ‘Look, here’s the offer, but it’s important you know that this is the top people at this label’s attitude’. Or it was back then. But being a competitive person, I had a ‘I’ll show you!’ attitude and wanted to prove that it was possible – so it was that drive that made me say yes to that record deal. My A&R and the person who signed me had great faith in me, so I wasn’t focussing on the powers above them. After I won Strictly Come Dancing and I wrote [2008 top five single] ‘The Boy Does Nothing’, the label that dropped me tried to sign me again. They said: ‘Who would you rather sign with – Manchester United or Arsenal?’. I replied: ‘Well, I’m a huge Arsenal fan!’ – so I signed with Warner.”