Once seen as the shy ugly duckling of Girls Aloud, Nicola Roberts is asserting her true self on a magnificently bonkers solo album

At a music awards show early in 2009, two members of Girls Aloud sat at a prominently placed table. One of them was visibly wired, loudly rejecting the food and drink on offer, and sending her publicist out for a bag of chips and a bottle of vodka. Later, as the dancing began, Sarah Harding would hurl herself around with the same mad abandon as Grace Jones, who was gyrating wildly atop an adjoining table. It was the demeanour of the woman accompanying Harding that was far more intriguing. Initially, Nicola Roberts’s expression seemed to communicate the same reserve the bitchier sections of the press had long ago misinterpreted, possibly wilfully, as arrogance, as surliness. Yet closer inspection suggested something more complicated: Roberts, far from coming across as timid, appeared watchful, observing events and the behaviour of those around her with a weather eye.

When you consider that many of those same writers had for years, with a gleeful, careless cruelty, been labelling the singer as the ugly duckling of Girls Aloud, poking fun at her pale skin and ginger hair, that air of detachment is unsurprising. Which of us wouldn’t keep our distance, faced with such hostility? Roberts herself views her behaviour as entirely understandable, for all that it cost her dear. “I’ve never been the kind of person that is, like, ‘Look at me’,” she says when we discuss that night. “All eyes don’t have to be on me. But I do observe a lot — that’s just the way I am. That’s not me saying, ‘I’m shy, so I’m going to be an observer.’ I just find it weird, not so much now, but definitely early on, to have to strike up a conversation with someone I didn’t know.”

The heartening news is that, two and a half years on from that awards show, Roberts is no longer prepared to play the role of shy retirer. No wonder, as she has much to shout about. Her imminent debut album, Cinderella’s Eyes, is a riot of point-scoring lyrics and unfettered, giddy-making bonkers pop, on which the 25-year-old channels her inner Kate Bush and Cilla, working with some of the genre’s most inventive songwriters and producers (and co-writing 11 of the 12 tracks). The first single, June’s Beat of My Drum, was one of the most eccentric pop songs to have graced the charts in years; its successor, Lucky Day, is no shrinking violet. No wonder Roberts looks so up for it today, sitting in a London restaurant (and, significantly, attracting no looks of recognition whatsoever).