Violinist unruffled about her intercultural leap into dance music

For someone talking about a stalker who's followed her around for 10 years, Vanessa-Mae looks unperturbed. In fact, she's astonishingly nonchalant about it, dismissing suggestions that it's a niggling problem.

'If you have a stalker you don't want him to affect your life,' says the 26-year-old violinist. 'The moment I stopped going out, enjoying myself and being independent he would have succeeded in getting to me.

'At the end of the day, being a stalker should be his problem and not my problem. The fact that he hasn't obviously got a life outside his stalking should make it his problem rather than me changing my life for him.'

It's all the more remarkable given the potential threat the man could pose to the violinist. When David Martin, a 57-year-old former hospital engineer, was arrested last year loitering near her house in London, he was carrying a knife and two of her albums. 'I still go to the studio and I still drive myself home - my boyfriend couldn't wake up in the middle of the night and collect me from the studio at 4am because that would just be silly,' she says.

Martin, who confessed that he first started following Vanessa-Mae when her debut album, The Violin Player, was released in 1995, has repeatedly broken restraining orders which banned him from approaching the violinist or even visiting her neighbourhood. 'He's banned from London now which is pretty serious. It's great that the police take it seriously. Luckily, they don't wait for you to actually be kidnapped or your dog to be killed or strung up outside your house to take it seriously.'

The way she manages to crack a joke at her tribulations is evidence of Vanessa-Mae's composure. Throw any question at her and she comes up with an unflustered yet somewhat rambling answer, whether it be about her fraught relationship with her mother, whom she sacked as her manager when she was 21 ('It's almost more important for her to be my manager than my mother, I think'), the acerbic criticism she unfailingly receives from music critics (she once described herself as 'the first one to bastardise Bach with beats') or how the media pays more attention to her attire than her adagios ('It's just like when you go out to dinner with someone: you can't control the direction of our conversation').