Katy Perry bringing colour to Birmingham NIA

With a cotton candy theme Katy Perry's latest UK?tour promises to be a colourful occasion for all involved. She plays Birmingham NIA on Wednesday.

With candy-coloured hair, wacky costumes and bizarre stage set-ups, a Katy Perry show can be more like watching a psychadelic cartoon than a real artist.

But don't be fooled – her meteoric rise to global superstardom is the product of years of hard work, and a dogged determination to make success happen.

Born Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, Katy's indoctrinated orthodox Christian upbringing is no secret, with her parents only allowing her to listen to gospel music.

In fact, that's where her career began – with a hugley unsuccessful self-titled gospel album in 2001.

It wasn't until she left home and heard Queen's Killer Queen that she took a different direction.

"When I started out in my gospel music my perspective then was a bit enclosed and very strict, and everything I had in my life at that time was very church-related," she says.

"I didn't know there was another world that existed beyond that. So when I left home and saw all of that, it was like, 'Omigosh, I fell down the rabbit hole and there's this whole Alice in Wonderland thing right there'."

After seven years of getting nowhere, working her way through four record label deals, she finally rose to fame with the release of her second single I Kissed a Girl in 2008, which topped music charts around the world.

Album One Of The Boys followed later that year, and by 2009 she was named as Billboard magazine's 51th-best-selling music artist of the noughties.

Her second studio album as Katy Perry, Teenage Dream, was released in August last year – and if you're thinking that there always seems to be a new single out, you'd be right.

The multi-platinum album, which hit the number one spots in the US and UK, has so far spawned five chart-toppers – California Gurls, Teenage Dream, Firework, ET, and Last Friday Night (TGIF) – with sixth single The One That Got Away, which she performed acoustically on last week's X Factor, to be released shortly.

Thanks to this constant battering of the charts, in May this year Perry became the first artist in history to spend 52 consecutive weeks in the top 10 of the US Billboard Hot 100.

Currently sporting hot pink hair, Katy also hit the headlines last year when hubbie Russell Brand did every woman's worst nightmare and posted a picture of her on Twitter, in bed, sleepy, and sans make-up.

But, she says, she bears no grudges.

"We were just messing around – I didn't really care," she says. "I mean, when I go to rehearsals I look like that. I'm every woman.

"It takes a village to make me who I am – you don't have to wake up looking like Gisele."

Limited tickets are still available for her show at Birmingham's NIA on Wednesday, October 26, 2011.

Priced at £27.50, they can be bought on 0844 338 8000 or from www.theticketfactory.com