“When they first see me, they just think I’m four eyes and blonde hair,” said Anastacia, introducing herself on MTV’s reality show The Cut in 1998.
“When I sing, it’s very different.”
Her TV debut opened with a long, wide shot. Audiences heard her before they saw her. That voice is all purr and growl, like a lion clawing its way through velvet.
As the camera zoomed in, Anastacia strutted down the staircase, her hair in pigtails under a candy-striped bucket hat, her midriff exposed by a crop top, in accordance with 1990s pop regulations.
By the time she finished her song, Not That Kind, the phone lines were red hot. Even Michael Jackson placed a call, trying to sign her to his record label.
“It was like a clamouring,” recalls the Chicago-born star. “Everyone wanted to sign me.”
It was a stunning about-turn. For years, record companies had expressed interest, then got cold feet. Anastacia thought she’d used up all her chances.
“I was the most un-signable artist because of the way I sounded and looked,” she says. “No-one could work out how to market me”.
Executives wanted her to sound more like Celine and look more Britney. She was constantly told to ditch the tinted glasses she’s needed since the age of six. One label dismissively told her she looked like a “sexy librarian”.
“They didn’t understand. I need these glasses to see you at the distance you’re sitting now,” she says, sitting two feet away from me in a BBC radio studio. “Without them, it’s like being blind.”
Once she’d appeared on The Cut, “everyone got it”.
“Had the show not happened, I don’t even know what I’d be doing. I have dyslexia and I’m not really great school-wise, so I think I’d be, at the best, a receptionist.”
Pre-fame, reception work was her bread and butter – most memorably at a hair salon that provided a “first glimpse of what it’s like to have a glam squad”.
But she was always singing. By her early 20s, Anastacia was in demand at Hollywood functions and parties, including Steven Spielberg’s wedding to Kate Capshaw.
“I sang a Celine Dion song – I can’t remember which one. Then fast forward a couple of years later, and I’m having dinner in this restaurant in Malibu, and it happens that Spielberg and his wife are there having dinner with Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz.
“I went over and I said, ‘You won’t remember this but I sang at your wedding, and what’s wild is that my dream came true and I’m actually a singer now.
