Shania Twain talks ahead of Birmingham show

She’ll headline Arena Birmingham on Monday, bringing a cavalcade of hits to the venue like Any Man of Mine, That Don’t Impress Me Much, You’re Still the One and Man! I Feel Like A Woman!

The multi-award-winning Canadian singer/songwriter has sold more than 100 million records, making her the best-selling female artist in country music history and among the best-selling music artists of all time.

She’s been called the Queen of Country Pop, having released a self-titled debut album in 1993 that did little to suggest she’d become one of the world’s biggest stars.

Her second record provided a breakthrough, however, as The Woman in Me sold 20 million copies worldwide and spawned widely successful singles such as Any Man of Mine, while also earning a Grammy Award.

More was to follow as her third studio album, Come On Over was released in 1997 and became the best-selling studio album of all-time by a female act in any genre and the best-selling country album, selling nearly 40 million copies worldwide. It produced 12 singles, including You’re Still the One, From This Moment On and Man! I Feel Like a Woman!, while earning Twain four Grammy Awards.

And yet life has been far from easy for Shania. She disappeared from view for many years, suffered a violent childhood and also experienced a devastating divorce. Twain took 15 years off following her fourth album, Up!, in 2002, only returning last year with Now.

“I never thought I’d sing again,” she says. She underwent reconstructive surgery on her vocal cards, have contracted Lyme disease after being bitten by a tick. “Lyme disease can be so much more devastating. It can go to your brain.

“I did want a break. But, of course, I would have never stayed away 15 years.

“I was too embarrassed to tell anybody that I couldn’t sing. For a long time, I didn’t even know why I couldn’t sing.”

In 2008, Shania was divorced from former husband, the producer-songwriter Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange, 59. They had been married for 14 years but Lange had allegedly had an affair with the couple’s longtime personal assistant, Marie-Anne Thiébaud, 37, who managed their château in Switzerland and whom Twain considered one of her best friends.

At the time, Shania’s friends said: “It’s a multiple betrayal because it involves all the people around her, the people she is closest to. She is in absolute, total shock.”

The couple had enjoyed a private lifestyle with Twain worth an estimated $250 million and spent part of the year in Switzerland in a a 46-room château with winters in New Zealand on a 61,000-acre spread.

Lange denied the allegations and said the couple had simply grown apart.

Twain has been on the comeback trail since 2011, when she announced a two-year residency at Caesars Palace, in Las Vegas. It bought in $43 million and was followed by the sessions for Now.

The lyrics revealed her anger towards a former friend. “If I’m really angry, I’ll say ‘f**k’ a lot. And, if I’m writing, that word will be in every line. There was one song I wrote about my cheating friend and there was a lot of f**ks in there. I hated her, so that’s the best word to use when you hate somebody.”