Singer Stansfield bares soul in new album

Lisa Stansfield groans as she recounts the advice of countless record company executives in recent years. "Why don't you do an album of covers?" they ask her. A nice collection of inoffensive classics is, however, unlikely to happen. "They can p*** off," she says.

It's 10 years since Stansfield, now 47, released an album - a stretch of time in which she has not so much stood idle as lain fallow, biding her time until she felt relevant again. "Well, what's the point of putting anything out if it's going to be ill-received?"

Having experienced success in the 1990s - with platinum-selling albums, hit singles All Around the World and All Woman, and Grammy, Brit and Ivor Novello nods - Stansfield was nervous of a lukewarm reception. Her last album, 2004's Trevor Horn-produced The Moment, peaked in Britain at a disappointing No57. "There's always a stagnant time," she says. "And it's almost always before it explodes again and something new comes out."

That new thing is Seven, an opulent-sounding collection of songs written by Stansfield and her longtime writing and romantic partner, Ian Devaney, which showcases that famous voice against plush, cinematic arrangements. "We sat there, me and Ian, and said, 'If we do that, will it be really show-offy?' And then we went, 'F*** it. Why not?' You've got to give people something worth waiting for."

The idea that it might be time to make a comeback occurred a few years ago, with the rise of a new clutch of soul stars such as Adele, Amy Winehouse and Duffy. Thirty years ago, Stansfield ploughed a similar furrow: after winning a singing contest in her hometown of Rochdale, near Manchester, she signed a record contract with Polydor before starting a band, Blue Zone, with Devaney and Andy Morris.

Following her powerful guest vocal on Coldcut's People Hold On, the young woman who spoke with the broadest of northern English accents - but somehow sang like Barry White - captured the public imagination. She had mettle and humour and she swore like a trooper, but her songs were seductive things, worldly wise and potently feminine. Her new material is in the same vein, recorded in New York, London and at Stansfield's own studio in Rochdale.

She met Devaney at school in Rochdale. "I always remember walking into the theatre…" She pauses. "It sounds posh that our school had its own theatre, but it was a community school. It was the first time I'd ever seen him and he was very brooding, gangly and tall, sitting on a plastic school chair strumming his guitar. He looked up and I thought, 'Oh. My. God'." She was 14 then, and the pair were just friends until she was 22, by which time they were in Blue Zone and enjoying their first taste of success.