Life hasn't been easy for Jane McDonald in the past few years but now she feels stronger and is ready to get to those high notes in her new show. She talks to Michelle Fleming .

HOW do you go from packing out the Royal Albert Hall to believing you can no longer hold a tune? Singer Jane McDonald, in her broad, familiar Yorkshire tones, confesses how her ship well and truly sank the day her husband Henrik Brixen walked out on her.

Jane reveals frankly: "Henrik left three years ago. It was devastating. I thought to myself, I cannot do this any more I can't sing anymore. He was my life. We were such a partnership for eight years and when that stops, that's it. When someone who is that close to you and looks after you is no longer there then your confidence goes completely. It was the worst experience of my life and I've been through lots death and all sorts but nothing could have prepared me for the loss of my husband."

Jane's frankness is exactly what drew us to her from the comfort of our armchairs, when she first appeared on the BBC 1 smash-hit programme, The Cruise, in 1997.

But her admission reveals a soft interior to the seemingly tough, bolshy singer, who by day laid her heart bare to the nation and by night belted out cabaret numbers aboard The Cruise.

She admits her break-up with Henrik Brixen was doubly difficult as, not only was he her husband, but her manager too.

"We never switched off," she says. "It turned into not so much a marriage as a business partnership we were like work colleagues, which meant that in many ways it was a very painful split."

Henrik was her rock when fame and fortune came knocking literally overnight.

At the time Jane was considering packing in her life aboard the ship and heading back home to start a family.

"It was on my last ever cruise that I met him. I wanted to get married and settle down, have children, but then it all happened. It was overnight."

One minute Jane was entertaining families aboard the liner the next her records were going platinum and she had earned some lineage in The Guinness Book of Records when her record went straight in at number one without a prior release.

Jane admits being thrust into the spotlight was hard to cope with. Celebrity with all of its trappings good and bad - was an unnerving experience.

"It's a double-edged sword," she reveals. "I would never at 33 have got a record contract and the exposure I got without the show but there are down things too. I was very uncomfortable being in the limelight. I went from being a cruise ship singer to having a number one album. I did not feel like I belonged there yet."

When it came down to it, Jane still felt like the same girl who worked the club circuit not many years before.

Suddenly finding herself on the MGM Grand stage in Las Vegas, accepting the keys to the city from the mayor, unhinged her a bit.

"Although I had been singing for 15 years, I felt like I had a long time to go. I've always been very uncomfortable with the word star or celebrity. I've never seen myself in that genre. I see myself as just a singer. I'm still doing the same job that I've always done but there are a lot more people coming to see me. I'm a bit long in the tooth to start getting a bit starry. When you go straight in at number one I knew that the only way is down as you cannot maintain that sort of success."

After the break-up, Jane headed back home to her mum and the town where she grew up.

She tinkles: "For Christmas it was me and my mum in the kitchen cooking for 14 it was like something out of Delia."

It's been a tough few years for Jane, full of dips and turns, but she is adamant her music is all the better for the downtimes.

"It was quite a frightening experience but now I think thank goodness that happened," she confesses. "It's been fabulous going home and healing my wounds. It's like death when you get divorced, there's this real sense of loss that you can't be rushed through. You have to just sit there and rock in the corner for as long as it takes. One day I felt better. I looked in the mirror and it was like someone who had been away for a long time had come back."

So it seems the multitudes of fans who dashed out to ensure Jane a place in the record books have much to gain from her rite of passage she has just released her first album in three years.

She reveals: "I wrote some really close expressive songs about it, which was like therapy really. The song I See It In Your Eyes was about how I'd look in Henrik's eyes and know that he just didn't love me anymore. A lot of people stay together for all the wrong reasons and ruin their lives. Now I know it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

Jane is taking her album, You belong to Me A Salute to the Great Ladies in Song, on the road.

She explains: "It's a salute to the great ladies of song like Shirley Bassey and Dusty Springfield, the ladies that really stood out, who belted out their songs with such emotion, the sort of singers I aspire to be."

The past eight years have been far from plain sailing, but Jane has never regretted the ride.

She smiles: "I still go as a passenger on cruise ships. Cruising is the best thing in the world."

Catch Jane McDonald on her 'An Evening with Jane McDonald, You belong to Me Tour 2005'