“Well you DO realise we’ll HAVE to POUR the BECK’S into a GLASS,” says the man behind the bar I wonder why. “We don’t know who may have been using the bottles before we got them,” says a woman with noticeable breasts; “and, anyway, this is a classy joint.”Outside, we drink our beer, eat our chicken legs A female emerges. The men have got their suits on, and their ties; some adventurous souls are wearing blazers, but they have ties, too; all have brightly polished shoes Except me Sneakers Harrumph.And the women The mothers. Windsmoor, Jacqmar, Richard Shops, what can you say? The only answer is lunch. My daughter wants a picnic – chicken legs, bread and lettuces from M&S. She wants to eat it in the cathedral Close: a sort of territorial instinct is persuading her to try and mark it out with tomato-pips and breadcrumbs; but her mother says it won’t do so we compromise. Outside the cathedral gatehouse, in the Buttermarket, by a pub called the Olive Branch, there are tables and chairs, lots of them, two couples sitting there, glooming in the incipient drizzle.

And look! Here’s me! See? I’m the only one who’s properly dressed: ancient sailing trousers with a busted fly-zip; washed-out old polo shirt; blue plaid Pendleton thing, not quite a shirt, not quite a jacket but soft and comforting as chocolate-fed, afternoon, hotel sex. Appropriate, I’d say, but the other parents wouldn’t say that, oh dear me no, they wouldn’t say that at all You can tell. She was born in Heywood, Lancs, on 11 April 1966, the middle of three sisters. Her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a housewife, although at one point they had their own chip shop.Her childhood was happy. The Stansfields were working-class but never went without at Christmas or birthdays.

She was the same then, she says, as she is now: “I don’t take a lot of shit and I don’t give a lot of shit.” She wanted to be a gymnast or singer, “but, unfortunately, I hated PE … I’m still a lazy cow – I’d watch daytime TV all day if someone didn’t give me a kick up the backside.”By the time she was eight, her parents and neighbours had already recognised her singing talent “I suppose I knew I was quite good,” she says. “But more importantly, I knew I loved it.”When she was 10, her family moved to nearby Rochdale. She made new friends easily although she took to being a “bit of a class clown, really cheeky” as a way of winning the respect of her peers She worried about her body “It just wasn’t keeping up with the other girls in my class I was all skinny and flat-chested When my first period came I felt fucking brilliant. I went for a walk in the park and I thought, ‘Now I’m a woman’. Then I got breasts and everything.”She left school with two O-levels, in English and Drama. But her life was already taking shape away from books and playgrounds in the adult world of working men’s clubs, where from the age of 14, she had been singing songs of betrayal and unrequited love with a voice and a peculiar insight beyond her years.”People used to say to my mum: ‘How can Lisa sing about all those things so emotionally, when she can’t know about them yet?’ ” she says.

“I didn’t really know what I was singing about, I just felt the words. I’ve always been very emotional when I sing.” Nor was she embarrassed to be singing about sex, a subject she had yet to discover for herself. “My mum and dad never minded what I sang – they still don’t mind if I sing sexy lyrics. Mums and dads have sex too, you know.”Stansfield is protective about her parents’ role in her early career.