SHE topped the album charts towards the end of 2017 and bagged her fourth Brit Awards nomination in February.

Now Paloma Faith is on course to make chart history if her record, The Architect, goes double platinum.

If it does it will be the former The Voice coach’s fourth double platinum album in a row – which would make her the first female British singer to achieve such a feat.

She told Weekend: “That’s crazy. Currently I’m the first British female to have had four platinum albums since Sade but if The Architect goes double platinum I’ll be the first to have had four albums in a row go double platinum.

“I can’t believe it. When you think about who has come before you it’s just amazing. It’s quite funny as well because Sade and I have got an ex-boyfriend in common.”

What makes the achievement even more stunning is that Paloma stepped back into the studio with the ongoing pressures of being a first-time mum. She had a baby in December 2016.

The 36-year-old said: “I feel like all parents’ lives are mad. It’s the same for most working mums. I talk to them at nursery when we’re dropping our kids off. Mine goes a couple of days a week and everyone’s in the same boat. We’ve all got a lot of things to juggle.”

That culture shock – and even a new sense of insecurity – stayed with her when Paloma stepped back into the studio.

She added: “I guess with a lot of mums it’s that feeling of like: ‘I’m going to try and do this but I don’t know if I can’.

“Quite often I still have this voice in my head going ‘Am I going to get away with this?’

“A lot of parents don’t have a choice. They have to balance work and looking after their children so they have to get on with it.

“Somehow you make it work and then you don’t really realise until somebody pulls you up and goes: ‘Wow. Well done’.”

But unlike most working mums, Paloma has to contend with the touring life. She’ll be at Haydock Park on August 10.

She said: “On this tour I’ve been driving out and driving back. Like recently I got off stage, got straight in the car and I was in bed by 3am then I’m up for 7am. Thank god for adrenalin.”

Next year Paloma will also mark 10 years since she released her debut, Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?

In that decade music has come to define her but she said that still feels a little odd when it came about by accident.

Paloma added: “I did my first few gigs at school because I went to a really cool school where they let us do cover versions of popular music.

“But I didn’t start singing in public until I was about 21 or 22. I was working in a bar and some people said: ‘Do you want to be the frontwoman our band?’

“I said: ‘You don’t even know if I can sing’, and they said: ‘We don’t really care, you’re just really cool’.

“So I just did it without pressure to be good and it was really fun and quite debaucherous and very rock and roll.

“That’s how I learnt to sing so loudly because it was all rubbish pubs for the venues and lots of blokes with their amps turned up really loud.

“That’s how it got started then I got headhunted by people who basically said we want to get rid of your band...”

Before that Paloma wanted to be a dancer. She started ballet when she was four and continued to dance until she was 21, gaining a degree at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, but she began to stop enjoying it.

Paloma, who has also appeared in a number of films including Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, said: “I graduated from one of the best dance schools in the country but it sort of killed my passion in a way.

“The training was not creative enough for me because there was a lot of emphasis on body image and what the body can do and not much emphasis on a conceptual level.

“They didn’t really cultivate creativity enough and that was one of the reasons I wanted to do it in the first place.”

Paloma then had a number of weird and wonderful jobs – including sales assistant at Agent Provocateur, singer in a burlesque cabaret, life model and a magician’s assistant – before destiny called.

She added: “I’ve definitely done some mad things but when it’s your reality they don’t feel as eccentric or crazy as they sound.

“Even being a magician’s assistant becomes very practical like packing your little costume, jumping into a box and sitting there for half an hour while waiting to be revealed.”

Her music career offered a different kind of magic thanks to her instant success. Her debut CD sold close to 750,000 copies – but her lifestyle took a while to catch up with her success.

She said: “It was all a bit weird because I’d be on TV and people would know who I was and then my flatmates and drunken friends would fall into my living room and point and take pictures of me.

“You don’t take have any money at the beginning. It takes 18 months to two years before any sort of royalties clear from any success in music. I felt almost imprisoned by the celebrity at the beginning.”