The wordplay tickled her, but the room felt thick with corporate tension rather than Christmas joy.

She also thanked Nick Cannon, her TV and radio presenter husband, “for sharing my moment, as he should because it’s momentous”. She thanked us for coming, even though she wasn’t sure who was here.

Everyone from the record company clapped heartily the woman in front of me looked at her friend with a kind of “Was that for real?” grin at the end of every bombastic number, including a deranged disco version of Auld Lang Syne.Ĭarey was ushered on to the stage in a plum, body-hugging dress, looking much, much bigger than her airbrushed female Santa album-cover shot (by David LaChapelle) in vertiginous heels: her feet are “repelled” by flats. If you like Carey’s melismatic histrionics, beltingly deployed most famously on Hero, you will be enraptured. The album is a lush, orchestral and supremely camp smorgasbord of hydraulic chords and Carey’s five-octave-spanning whoop-de-whoops, topped with the grand cherry of a razzier version of her 1994 hit All I Want for Christmas. The room was decked out with giant baubles and faux presents. The night before we meet, the 40-year old singer attended a lavish event at the Lincoln Centre, where an audience was played, at ear-splitting volume, her thirteenth studio album, the inelegantly titled Merry Christmas II You. Today she will claim she is still a little girl living a far from normal life, while also “the boss lady” of her own corporation, happy finally to have found unconditional love. Carey once said her dogs had their own entourage and her assistants had assistants. She brought her own toilet paper (but it was GMTV, who can blame her?).

When she appeared on GMTV last year, she had two people lower her on to the sofa.

But this is Mariahworld, where - if one apocryphal story is true - rose petals must be found should madam pitch up at a hotel at 3am and find the floor not to her liking. Is she OK? What does she want? Outside the New York hotel suite, the corridor is seething with Mariah Carey’s jittery flunkeys. The day of our interview has changed, our appointment is hours late.

Mariah carey hero live 2010