I got the money and fame and I was like, 'Is this it?'

Mica Paris is the icon of British music who insists she's still a 'work in progress'. As she makes her West End stage debut, she talks to Hamish MacBain about her rise to stardom, drinking with Prince and her soul music mission

LOOKING good!" I blurt out, semi-involuntarily, as I wander into the bar area of Neon, just off Piccadilly, to find Mica Paris, being photographed right behind the door.

"Work in progress, honey," she smiles back, a phrase she will later also employ to describe an almost four-decade career that, as well as Eighties pop superstardom, has taken in radio presenting, screen acting (not least in EastEnders) and the West End stage.

"It's so funny," she says. "Last year someone sent me an article in Smash Hits from when I was 18. It was titled The Making of a Pop Star. And I'm still trying to be successful. This is the joke.

That was '88. I'm still exploring." Last night she made her debut, downstairs at Neon, in Rehab: The Musical, a funny-serious show about a Nineties singer who gets papped snorting cocaine and has to go off and sort himself out.

Also starring Keith Allen (who turns up halfway through our conversation sporting his sleazy PR guy character's Hulk Hogan-esque beard), Paris describes it as "important... I only do things that are really important. I went to see it and I was blown away. I've been trying to tell people what this thing's like, this beast, this machine called the music industry and why it swallows up our best. This does that really well."

And if this sounds a bit earnest, let me dispel that notion immediately. Later she will tell a story about Prince calling her up at home "at 4am, 5am" from Cafe De Paris. Off Mica Paris would go, to find him sitting, "nursing a little shot of whiskey that he didn't touch", not saying very much. "But I can talk the arse off a f*****g donkey, so he didn't really need to talk. I'm entertainment, you know what I'm saying?"

After an hour or so in her company, I do know exactly what she is saying: the tales, the opinions, the laughter, all completely unfiltered, come thick and fast.