LISA STANSFIELD is back with her first new album in 10 years and she hopes you want to hear it – even though many fans at her shows are simply waiting for her massive 1989 hit All Around The World.

“After 25 years, I have been through it all with that song,” admits the Rochdale-born singer. “There was definitely a time when I fell out of love with it. But then I thought to myself ‘it’s a product of me and who I am, it came from my head, and if it wasn’t for that song, I wouldn’t be here today’.

“So I made my peace with it. Now, I am just glad that I wrote it and not somebody else.”

With latest album, Seven, having made the Top 20 despite her absence from the music scene for so long, there’s obviously an appetite for her new material.

“The nice thing is, when we play the songs live, there is as much energy for the new tracks as the old ones,” says Lisa. “It’s not like people are heading to the bar when they hear tracks they don’t recognise!”

Although she has been acting – her credits include an episode of Agatha Christie’s Marple with Geraldine McEwan, and the film The Edge of Love, starring Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller – Seven has been a long time coming.

“I didn’t think there was anywhere I really fitted in,” she says to explain her absence from the music scene. “There wasn’t much stuff that sounded like the music I make, and if you’re making music and people don’t even know about it, you might as well make an album and put it in the loo and flush it away.

"There’s no point banging your head against the brick wall. So I didn’t see the point.”

The album has been worth the wait and is more than just a collection of soul songs. “There’s a thread running through it,” explains Lisa.

“A lot of the album is about the trap that a woman has got herself into – an unrequited, doomed or mismatched love – and how to get herself out of it… if she can.”

She says she likes to tell stories and create identifiable characters within her lyrics, saying: “I think we all suffer the same pain, all feel the same happiness, and we all have the same emotions within us. My life isn’t very racy or exciting so I make things up, tell stories. I like telling stories.”

It sounds like she had a plan all along but she insists: “It’s weird actually because I’ve never been the sort of person that has a big agenda.

“It’s like putting a jigsaw together and when you can see the middle of it coming together, you go ‘Ah right, I know now what it is’ and that’s when you can decide the way to go and what way to do it.”

LISA STANSFIELD will appear at G Live in Guildford on Wednesday, September 17.