Cheryl Cole - Making music and videos has always been my dream

It's been 10 years since Cheryl Cole rose to fame on the reality TV show Popstars: The Rivals.

She won a place in all-girl group Girls Aloud and has subsequently enjoyed 20 top 10 singles in the UK and six platinum albums.

She has also carved out an impressive solo career, since releasing her debut solo album 3 Words in 2009, which was followed by Messy Little Raindrops a year later.

Her third solo album, A Million Lights, was released in June, with the lead single, Call My Name, earning the star her third solo number one.

The fashionista is also the face of L'Oreal and has appeared on the front covers of British Vogue, Elle and Harper's Bizarre, while she has also been married to Ashley Cole and had numerous run-ins with TV mogul Simon Cowell.

She is presently on the road for her first ever solo nationwide arena tour, which will be stopping at the LG Arena, in Birmingham, tonight.

Although her present sequence of shows is part of her first headline arena tour, Cheryl is no stranger to the live circuit.

She opened as special guest on the Black Eyed Peas' European tour in 2010 and also played four sold-out arena tours as part of Girls Aloud.

The singer almost didn't make it, however, after suffering from a potentially fatal bout of malaria in 2010.

"It takes a long time mentally to come to terms with it," she says. "As it's happening, you're just going through it. Looking back, you think: wow, that was really near."

Cole has fought hard to retain some privacy, despite being a tabloid favourite and making headlines because of her on/off relationship with Ashley Cole and being fired from the US X Factor.

She obtained an injunction against the paparazzi.

"I just wanted to wake up in the morning and not have 30 strange men sitting outside my door. They would follow us all day and all night. I had no freedom," she says.

"I'd get it if I was the president of the world, and I was preaching to people not to take drugs, and I was secretly smoking cannabis.

"I just don't understand what interest it is to the public what colour knickers I had on last night. I had malaria, I was going through my divorce – they're hard enough by themselves.

"You hear that people sometimes call the paparazzi themselves, to tell them they're on holiday – it baffles my brain. Some people, some celebrities, obviously enjoy it.

"I came from reality TV, but I'm not that person who got famous from Big Brother, and that's all my life is about.

"All I ever wanted was to perform, make music, make videos. Unfortunately that was my deluded idea of what this world is. It was in my blood. I had no second option."

By Andy Richardson