She writes her songs in English, she's a megastar in France, has recorded an album in Spanish — and all this from a Flemish girl-next-door. Ian Ramsey meets diminutive diva Axelle Red.

Gambolling into her record company offices in skin-tight jeans and fluorescent green V-neck sweater, Axelle Red is a small, energetic figure, all down-to-earth, good-natured giggliness. She greets her PR team as though she hasn't seen them for a decade, and is absolutely sure that she's met me somewhere before. She hasn't — in fact, given her frenetic schedule, it's a wonder we managed to meet at all.

Red is Belgium's most successful female singer, her funk-washed power pop reaping massive success in the French-speaking world : her 1994 single Sensualité is one of France's bestselling records ever. She's just come out of a studio in Brussels, where she is laying tracks for her new disc. If her last album A Tâtons looked west for inspiration (she recorded it in Memphis with the soul legends she adored as a child, like Isaac Hayes), the latest, scheduled for release in early 1999, stays a little closer to home.

'There's a definite English tinge there,' she says. 'I'm really interested in the British pop scene — especially bands like Massive Attack.' A touch of trip-hop, then ? 'Yes, but I don't want to imitate people. I want to interpret trip-hop and make it very much my own.'

The multilingual Red found the time earlier this year to record Con Solo Pensarlo, a compilation of tracks from her first two albums, sung in Spanish. 'I kept hearing one of my songs, Rien Que D'y Penser in my head in Spanish, in which I'm fluent,' she recalls.

'So I recorded it for fun. Everybody at the record company liked it so much that I did song after song in Spanish, until I had a full album's worth. I really enjoyed it — my voice has never sounded as beautiful.'

Born in the Flemish town of Hasselt, Red writes her lyrics in English before translating them into French. Will she ever make a record in her native tongue ? 'I sometimes sing in Dutch on stage. I only started out singing in English because all I listened to as a kid was American music — Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Stax artists, soul.'

This has been a year of landmarks for Axelle Red ; touring, turning 30. ('I hated being twenty-nine, I spent so much time worrying about hitting thirty') earning a nomination at the Victoires (the French Grammys) and recording the official World Cup anthem with Youssou N'Dour. When they sang it at the opnening ceremony, over a billion people were watching. 'I wasn't nervous,' she says, eyes wide, 'maybe because there were two of us. I told myself that the worst thing that could happen to me was to slip over on the grass.'

In the meantime, she married her manager and partner of 10 years, Filip Vanes. 'To be honest, marriage isn't important to me. Things like the quality of the relationship and loyalty matter more,' she says. 'We just wanted to have a big party this year for being together so long. It was a great wedding, just close friends, in Morocco.'

Her trip to Haïti as Unicef ambassador was quite another affair. 'I used to feel guilty because I was doing well and the world was in such a state', she says, 'but I realised that feeling bad didn't help anyone. It was much more important to lend my name.'

The fact that Unicef knew Red reflects how brightly her star shines. Not bad for a girl who started out singing along to Abba records and whose punkier classmates nicknamed her 'Disco Frog' because of her resolutely unfashionable passion for funk. She landed a record contract at 15 and had a minor hit with a cutesy number called Little Girls : her then record company wanted 'an Eighties girl group-type sound'.

Then years later came début album Sans Plus Attendre — a long, painful wait punctuated by her transformation into Axelle Red (' I looked for a name like you would for a dog. I just liked the sound of Axelle. My real name ? it's a secret.'), a stint working with seventies rocker Mick Ronson and two hits while she sat a law degree. Why did it all take so long ?

'There were always obstacles — record companies that didn't work out, that kind of thing. When I was nineteen, I gave myself five years to be successful, and at twenty-four I made the first album. So it was just in time. I could have done something sooner, but it wouldn' have been what I wanted.'

Red likes to have absolute control. 'Yeah, if something isn't one hundred percent the way I want it, I won't do it,' she says. 'Not that I'm so tough. I'm hard-headed when I deal with the music business. But in my private life, I'm very naïve. You can tell me anything and I'll believe you.'

Despite Red's megastar status, her lyrics don't suggest an entirely contented woman. She seems to look sadly at time's passing. 'I'm very happy,' she insists. 'When I first became famous, I didn't like being public property, but my friends kept me down to earth. When I think about my childhood, though, I get nostalgic. Kids have great qualities — naivety, sensitivity, opennness — which they lose when they grow up. I've tried to keep them.'