KEY POINTS:
Leona Lewis has been on the line for a few minutes when she moves away from the mouthpiece.
"Nicola," she says to her minder as they wait for a plane back to London, "can you just stand in front of me?"
It's tempting to think this is a diva moment, that whoever Nicola is, she must be carrying five of Lewis' Louis Vuittons and a handbag with a dog in it. After all, her famous 22-year-old charge is being groomed as the next Mariah Carey or Celine Dion. But Lewis giggles and comes back on the line.
"Sorry, it's just this weird guy is staring at me. In a really weird kind of way."
She's still not used to the attention. Lewis' second single, Bleeding Love, was at No 1 in New Zealand for nine weeks and was the biggest single in Britain last year. In 2006 she won the British TV talent quest The X Factor, and acerbic judge Simon Cowell proclaimed her as the show's best-ever contestant. Not only did Lewis seem to bring out a softer side in Cowell, eventually he took her on as his protege.
"I've been lucky," she says, "I've only seen the nice side of him. But I wouldn't like to see the nasty side, you know what I mean?"
Her mega-watt voice also won over Take That singer Gary Barlow, who made Cowell promise he'd do Lewis' career justice. Then Clive Davis, the music mogul who groomed Whitney Houston to superstardom, offered to sign her after the show, telling Cowell, "You may have a Whitney Houston on your hands".
Despite fans downloading her first single, (a cover of Kelly Clarkson's A Moment Like This) a record 50,000 times in 30 minutes, Cowell went against his commercial instincts to rush out an album. Instead, Lewis and her producers spent a year writing, recording and setting tongues wagging as to whether she had staying power. Now she's in promo mode for the proof - debut album Spirit, one of SonyBMG's highest priorities this year.
So it's nice to know there is no real diva lurking within the manufactured one. Lewis is humble and sweet, and uses the words "amazing" and "incredible" a lot.
"You just never know what's going to happen, and to see that people have received my stuff so well, especially in different parts of the world, I think it's so great. I'm really grateful for all the support."
She still lives in Hackney, a rough but vibrant borough in East London.
"Hackney hasn't got a good reputation but I've lived there all my life. I just come from a normal, working-class family. They still live there and there's a strong sense of community there. And everybody knows each other. I think it's a really nice area."
Despite this, Lewis was groomed for her current role. Her social worker parents (her father is black, her mother white) spent most of their savings sending her to performing arts schools throughout her childhood. She later attended the famous Brit School in Croydon, where she made friends with Katie Melua (Amy Winehouse and the Kooks' Luke Pritchard also attended).
The grooming has continued. Cowell capitalised on her exotic looks, sending her off for a photo shoot at fashion bible Harper's Bazaar, rather than farming her out to a hodge-podge of media outlets.
"I just see myself as a normal 22-year-old girl. I love to dress up and I've been given some really beautiful gowns from different designers. I also love high street stuff as well so it's a real mixture with me."
Lewis is happy to leave the endorsement deals and marketing strategies to her management team. "I've got so much music to do, it's what I'm focusing on."
And to those who scoff at the Houston comparisons, there's little chance of her turning out like her idol in more recent years - Lewis is practically a straight-edge punk, sticking to a no drugs, no alcohol, no caffeine policy. She's also a strict vegetarian who won't wear leather. She loves animals, particularly the family rottweiler and Yorkshire terrier. She says she hasn't gone wild celebrating her success.
"I don't really splash out a lot. The only thing I've bought since the show is a car because I kept borrowing my mum's and it's been quite annoying. I kept nicking it at the weekends, so I've just bought a little Mini Cooper. It's quite sweet."
Not everyone sees Lewis as the saviour of old-fashioned diva-dom she's being touted as. Despite her album's huge budget, and an impressive grab-bag of producers including Dallas Austin, Salaam Remi and Ne-Yo, critics have been slow to warm to it, calling the end result "generic" and complaining it is short on personality - the sound of a naive talent yet to find her identity.
Lewis says Cowell was keen for her to make an album that "represented me completely" and she feels she has. But there are only two songs on the album she had a hand in: Whatever It Takes and Here I Am. Like the rest, they are big romantic ballads with vague lyrics.
"My heart's crippled by the vein that I keep on closing, you cut me open and I keep bleeding, keep bleeding love," she sings on the second single, a surefire laugh among heart surgeons.
Lewis has had the same boyfriend, an electrician, since she was 17, and known him for most of her life.
"A lot of the emotions are drawn from my personal experiences of love and there's some heartbreak as well. If it comes from a real place it's definitely believable for everybody, and when I sing it definitely comes from places I've been. I don't think I'd be able to sing it if it didn't."
On the show, the one criticism was that she lacked star quality and confidence. The judges felt she was oblivious to how good she was. So now she knows how good she is, has that changed?
"Naturally I can be quite a shy person. If there's a room full of people I don't know, I kind of go into myself a little bit. Because I wasn't really loud like some of the other people on the show, I'd be seen as quite timid and quite quiet. But I always had a self-belief and a quiet confidence, not a loud one. I'm exactly the same now, y'know."
Lowdown
Who: Leona Lewis
Singles: A Moment Like This (2006), Bleeding Love (2008)
Story so far: After winning British TV talent show The X Factor in 2006, judge Simon Cowell took her on as his protege. SonyBMG head Clive Davis signed her, and in 2007 she released her debut album, Spirit in Britain. The album is out now in New Zealand.
Influences: Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Minnie Ripperton
