Glamorous and very approachable but always on the move. That’s Katherine Jenkins, who stood still long enough for DAVID WHETSTONE to ask a few questions
THE day I chatted to Katherine Jenkins, she was in many of the national newspapers having decided to go public over her distress at being the victim of some internet bullying.
Someone bitter on Twitter had been saying nasty things, casting aspersions on her abilities as a singer.
“I don’t really want to talk about it too much,” said the Welsh mezzo-soprano, adding that she had decided to speak out initially to highlight the cowardly and hurtful nature of unfounded internet slurs.
She said her tormentor had now disappeared into the digital ether and it was nice to get a bit of peace.
But I wondered if this unpleasant side of social networking had made her think twice about indulging in the Twittersphere.
“I really enjoy Twitter although I think it should be a positive thing and not a place for bullying,” she said.
“I think, for me, Twitter is a brilliant way of communicating with my fans wherever they are in the world, keeping everyone up to date and giving them a bit of insight into what I’ve been doing.
“I’ve recently been in Australia and New Zealand so I disappeared for a few weeks from the UK. But I was able to share my photos and videos with people back home. It keeps all the people who follow me really in the loop in a very positive way.
“Also, when the album (Daydream) came out, people could contact me and say, ‘I like this’ or, ‘I don’t like this’. You’ve got this instant connection.”
She started to use the site, she said, soon after it became available, when she was in Los Angeles recording Believe, her previous album released in the autumn of 2009.
Now an inveterate user, we can find out via Twitter that she went to see the new film A Week with Marilyn (“Was there ever a chance that I wouldn’t love it?! Go see it!”), busked on the London Underground and flew to Germany for the second time in a week.
It all serves to make the life of someone who is seldom out of the public eye seem even more breathless.
According to her own website, since she released Believe, Katherine has “performed around the globe, turned 30 (she was 31 this year), made her acting debut on Dr Who and become a mentor and judge on Popstar to Operastar”.
It all screams of success and, allied to her good looks (shades of Marilyn in some of those publicity shots, I’d say), you can almost understand why a singer less abundantly blessed might feel like dishing a few sour grapes.
But ask her what she considers to have been her biggest break and it wasn’t a TV talent show or a model agency scout approaching her in the street. No, indeed. “I think, for me, it was getting a place at the Royal Academy of Music. That made me think, ‘Well, if I can get a place there, where they only take a very small number of people, I might be able to have a career in music’.
“I thought it would be really small scale but then getting the recording contract was another boost, having a company invest so much money in me.”
Katherine won a scholarship to the Royal Academy when she was just 17, having been a hugely successful chorister in Wales. She studied languages as well as music and graduated with honours and a teaching diploma.