HAZEL O'Connor has twice endured cancer scares but the Breaking Glass star can take anything in her stride. Pop success, financial meltdown, health worries, all will be recorded in the autobiography she is writing at her home in Ireland, where the Coventry-raised singer has lived since 1990.

At present the Eighties' post-punk icon is on tour, in the wake of last year's release of her retrospective album, A Singular Collection, which inevitably features the "tea and coffee song", Will You, and this spring's new single, a cover version of George Michael's One More Try.

Tonight she plays Selby Town Hall Arts Centre, back on the road after her cancer false alarm in December.

"When I lived in California, I had a birth mark that suddenly grew out of control and I was told I had two types of cancer... so I quickly moved to Ireland. It was a big move for me, and after four months the hospital got hold of me from America to say they had made a mistake: they were not cancer cells but mimicking cancer cells, and then the same thing happened to me again just before Christmas last year," she says.

"A mole grew again and the skin doctor said 'you have the same cancer again', and I could only say 'b****cks'. I had to have it removed, but the doctor reckons everything's now cool and OK, so I'll just have to watch it carefully."

Since moving to County Wicklow, Hazel has embraced Irish music, notably in her Beyond Breaking Glass project with Irish harp player Cormac De Barra, in which she told her life story in a stage show that played the Edinburgh Fringe and Glastonbury Festival theatre stage and toured Australia last year.

Now she is performing with Slide, a "powerhouse quartet of traditional Irish musicians with attitude", and their concerts present 25 years of O'Connor songs and rousing acoustic music in a style she calls "Celtic Soul Beat".

"Cormac has gone off to work with Moya Brennan, who has an album out at the moment, so I said 'Hey, Cormac, what about your younger brother, your big, strapping, gorgeous younger brother Eamonn, who played low whistle on the re-recording of Will You on Beyond Breaking Glass? I was hoping Eamonn and his band would be free to tour with me, and they were!" says Hazel.

She loves the Celtic Soul Beat sound. "I think it gives the songs breathing space. That's what I've found since working with Cormac. When you do songs acoustically, having done them electrically, you notice the space," she says. "I used to be a painter before I did music, and the first teacher that made an impression on me was the one who said that the spaces were what mattered most. It's the same with music."

That said, Hazel also has been performing with an electric band, The Subterraneans.

"We did four shows together, culminating in a DVD recording that we made on April 4. We filmed it in Brighton because I've got a big home base of fans there: it's where my crowd is the largest. We've done the filming but god knows when the DVD will come out," she says.

The autobiography is definitely scheduled for release next year.

"I'm half way through it, writing it long hand as I've always been good at writing letters," she says. "I flow well when I write, and I wanted it to be in my words rather than having someone put it into their prose. I need to say it in my own way."

Just as she always has.

Hazel O'Connor, Selby Town Hall Arts Centre, April 30 at 8pm. Tickets: £12.50 in advance on 01757 213758 or £14 on the door.

Updated: 16:30 Thursday, April 29, 2004