IT'S been a while since Pink has hit the headlines for her music. For the past year the focus has very much been on her nuptials to motorcycle racer Carey Hart, which finally took place in January of this year.
It was a sunset ceremony on a Costa Rican beach, the couple walked down a candlelit aisle, watched by just 100 guests, including Lisa Marie Presley. Just your average glam celebrity wedding then, with added tattoos.
Pink, whose real name is Alecia Moore, even wore a dress for the day - "I thought I'd be a girl for a change," she laughs. But it wasn't the ceremony itself that had people talking, it was the fact that the singer had proposed to her long-term boyfriend, rather than the other way round.
"Yeah, people have mixed feelings about that, especially guys. They're like, 'What are you doing? Now my girlfriend is going to propose to me and I'm not ready!'," she laughs. "Sorry."
But then she's always been one to do things her own way. Her single-minded attitude has propelled her to 20 million album sales around the world, despite doing things against the protestations of record bosses.
She has switched from R&B to rock to pop on hits like Most Girls, Just Like A Pill and Feel Good Time with impressive ease and in the process she's shown herself to be an interesting and smart pop star.
Headstrong
Her appeal is as much in how she conducts herself as the music she performs. Always been opinionated and headstrong, her current comeback hit Stupid Girls is a perfect example.
The song rails against Pink's contemporaries, those celebrity women who are famous for being famous - a crowd that Pink has always stood out from.
"It's about the epidemic," she says of the song, the video of which features Pink parodying the likes of Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton. "It's about everyone and no one.
"I live in LA and it's all around me, it's everything we see on television. I wrote it because I think there should be a choice, and there's not a choice being given right now. It's their way or the highway, and I'm the highway."
And so the story of the singer's proposal to Carey Hart is textbook Pink, one that has thrilled her fans no end.
"It's a long story," she laughs, "and I don't know how to work out an abridged version."
Let's try. Last summer, while watching a race Carey was taking part in she decided to write him a pit board - usually reserved for mechanics wanting to send messages to the riders.
After telling Carey's father she was going to propose ("He's like, `It's about time'," laughs Pink.), she wrote a couple messages before writing, `Will you marry me? Seriously'.
He didn't see it. That and a nervous twitch he has while racing got her thinking he had turned her down. The crowd looked on sympathetically, but she refused to believe it. She tried again, and Carey crashed into another rider. This time he'd seen it.
"Everyone in the stands was cheering," she grins. "Then I told him to get back in the race because I don't marry losers."
Extreme
It's been a long road to get to this point, however. Meeting at extreme sport event X Games in 2001, they split up in 2003, dated on and off, before reconciling properly last year, not long before Pink's proposal.
Even now things aren't conventional domestic bliss.
"We're never together," she says. "We're not together long enough to even fight. I might see him for my brother's wedding, if he comes home, but that's unlikely."
But she's happy. "Carey is a piece of pumpkin pie," she says. "And I like pumpkin pie."
Being in love does have its problems for Pink, however, especially when it comes to her career.
"It's a lot easier to go to sleep at night when you're in love," she says, "but it's much harder to write songs. You need to turn that off and go watch the news, or talk to a friend, or have a fight. There is definite passion in our relationship though, which helps."
Pink's songwriting issues aren't evident on new album I'm Not Dead. After her disappointing 2003 album Try This, Pink finally seems to have settled into her own sound. In her explorations of various genres on previous albums what's really developed is a confident songwriting ability.
"I didn't expect to be so emotionally involved in this album because the last one was definitely a draining experience," she says. "But I guess I was just kind of at that place where I felt like I kind of had something to add to the world.
"I feel like there's a hole and I know how to fill it, people aren't talking trash any more. At the beginning of the record I was like, I don't know if I have anything to say, I don't know if I can do this. 40 songs later they're like, OK that's good, you can stop there."
Jim Moore
This album also saw Pink work with one of her biggest musical influences - her father Jim Moore. It was Jim who, while playing guitar to his daughter as he brought her up in Pennsylvania, inspired her to take up singing as a career.
On I'm Not Dead Pink sings with her father on `hidden track' I Have Seen The Rain. It's a song Pink knows well, Vietnam vet Jim having wrote it while he was serving in that war, and having performed it with his daughter at many a Vietnam vet function.
"It was the first song I ever learned," says Pink. "My dad taught me how to harmonise to it. He always wanted to be a singer and write songs and that was one of his dreams he never reached. He had a group in the Air Force, and then went to Vietnam, and then life happened.
"I just thought, what a blessing it would be to share my experience with my dad, because he is most of the reason I am here, able to do music. He was so nervous and humble in the studio, which was huge for a girl to see her father - tough guy, Jim Moore - like that.
"It was a point where you go, I've made it, and this is really special."
Pink's new album I'm Not Dead is out now. She plays the M.E.N. Arena on Sunday, November 5. é26.50. To book call 0870 060 1768 or to book online.
