Delta on the rise

By REBECCA BARRY

A voice, loud, clear and feminine, bellows down the corridor. Backstage at Top of the Pops, Delta Goodrem is warming up as a swarm of mostly teenage girls wait excitedly in front of the stage.

Last time Goodrem came to New Zealand she was better known as Nina Tucker from Neighbours. That was before her debut album Innocent Eyes sold 2.3 million copies worldwide and her extraordinary vocal talent revealed her as a younger, edgier Celine Dion.

It was also before Goodrem was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease - cancer of the lymph nodes. On July 8, 2003, she was told she would need surgery to remove nodules on her neck, followed by months of chemo and radiotherapy.

A trip to America to launch her music career was cancelled, and over the following months Goodrem grew increasingly ill. Her beautiful long blond hair fell out as a result of the therapy and for a time she stopped writing altogether.

Now, under the harsh studio lights, perched daintily at the grand piano, Goodrem, 20, is glowing with health, her short, brown 'do framing her elfin features. Although much of her new album Mistaken Identity is a dark, introspective testament to the past few months, today she is singing a love song.

"There will be times when we're apaart, I want you to know you're in my heaart!" she belts from Out of the Blue, a song she wrote about former beau, Australian tennis star Mark Phillippoussis.

For those who have somehow avoided the gossip mags, news of the golden couple's split arose amid rumours he had a rendezvous with Paris Hilton in Las Vegas.

Yet Goodrem sings it as though he is sitting across from her, gazing at her luminous smile. Between takes, Goodrem plays a silly version of the song on the keys and makes jokes with the crowd.

"So, y'all come here often?" There is time to steal away for a chat ...

Q. In light of all you've been through, can you still relate to Innocent Eyes?

A. I look at that as a really wonderful time. I was a happy kid, in a loving surrounding environment with my family, I was working very hard and I wanted to send out the message to kids that it's okay to dream. I wanted everyone to see fantasy. And then something just slapped me across the face and said, 'I'd like you to know reality'.

Q. What was that reality?

A. I had to learn about another form of life that lots of people do every day. So many people's lives consist of going to hospital, seeing the doctors and nurses, going home, being sick all day, going back the next day. I mean, that's what my world consisted of for a year. And it was a really trying time. I couldn't really write for a while, so the past six or seven months I've been doing more writing. I'm much more a life writer than I am a love-song writer.

Q. Speaking of which, your split with Mark Phillipoussis has been all over the gossip mags lately.

A. Of course it's hurtful, but all I would ever say about that situation - I felt sorry for people having to hear about it - is just that I wish people the best, I wish him the best and her the best and whatever.

Q. So it's true Paris Hilton "stole" your boyfriend?

A. There's no reason for me to believe otherwise, so again, I totally wish people the best.

Q. There's a line on your new song, Mistaken Identity, that goes, "Yesterday's girl is not what you see." What do you mean by that?

A. I'd actually lost a lot of my identity, behind closed doors, nothing to do with being a public figure or anything like that. I'd lost my physical identity, emotionally I'd changed, my perspective was changing, my train of thought was completely different. I think of identity as how you think, how you feel, how you look - I had different hair - just everything. I just completely lost a whole feeling of sense of self. You lose all your eyebrows, you lose everything, you're stripped. You've got your soul and you've got what you see in front of you. Just a skeleton. You look completely different, everything is different.

Q. And you wrote You Are My Rock about your brother?

A. Yes. But he shares it with my friend Jude. And he gets sooo angry when I tell people that. 'It's my song, Delta!' It's not You Are My Rocks.

He took on this whole other maturity I'd never seen before, dealing with press calling him at the house phone, saying 'How's Delta?' and all these things that Trent doesn't know how to deal with. He's a 17-year-old kid saying, 'Well, she's just my sister.' And there's all these news crews out the front while he's just been told that I'm seriously ill.

Q. You're in remission - what does that mean exactly?

A. It means I've got five years to go of routine medical tests and that they wave me goodbye for a while and say: Stay out of trouble. I'm very happy. I'm feeling a lot more energy, I feel a lot more of the drugs and everything are getting out of my system, and it's exciting.

Q. Health-wise, how did you get this far?

A. I was lucky because I got so much support - from people in New Zealand, Australia, the UK. Not everyone gets that so I was very fortunate. We're still going through emails just trying to say thank you to people. That's what helped me, the people writing letters with their own experiences, like, 'I had Hodgkins's lymphoma as well and I still had kids and this is what I did 10 years later'.