YOU may remember Brummie blues singer Niki Evans from the 2007 talent cattle market of The X Factor.

“It was all right for me; I came the furthest of the over-25s, but the women aren’t taken seriously on that show,” she says.

“You’re considered as pub singers who don’t sing girly little songs or wear flashy bras on stage – or compete with girls who don’t need to have bras to hold things up.”

Nevertheless, Niki caught the eye of impresario Bill Kenwright and his production team for Blood Brothers, who signed her up for the Willy Russell musical in 2008. From Monday, she will be in York, playing Mrs Johnstone, the Liverpool mother who gives up one of her twins at birth to the posh, barren mother on the other side of the tracks.

She knows the role inside out now but it was a very different story in 2008. “I’d never had any acting or singing lessons and I’d never been to a theatre, apart from taking my kids to the panto. I’d never been to a play,” Niki says. “So when I was offered it, I didn’t know what Blood Brothers was or who Bill Kenwright was, as I come from a rock/blues background.

“I’m just a Birmingham girl born and bred. I wanted to be Tina Turner and not anything else. She was my absolute idol.”

She loved the music of Guns N’Roses, Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen too, and she found she had a gift for singing.

“It just came naturally to me. I just used to sing and I’d like to set up the speakers and sing over the voices on the records, and if the window was open and I was singing to songs by Heart, the neighbours would be saying, ‘Your Niki’s singing that rubbish again; get her to sing something else’,” she says.

“So my dad said, ‘Sing Connie Francis songs’. I wasn’t into trends, just good songs, and my favourite song was Connie’s Where The Boys Are.”

Niki progressed to singing in Birmingham’s pubs and clubs. “I had a thousand tapes and I would lay them out when I went into the Conservative club or working men’s clubs, look round and see who was in. If there was a Mother’s Pride bag and gold shoes, I’d sing stuff they could waltz to.

“In the Conservative club, I used to have to sing the National Anthem. I know all the verses but every time they went to sit down after the first verse.”

Niki sang in bands from the age of 12. “I was in a band called What The Funk; I didn’t look 12, I grew a pair of boobs by the age of 12, so I could pass for 18. I used to go into nightclubs at 12, and I’d sing Jack Your Body, Lady Marmalade, Play That Funky Music White Boy,” she says.

“I sang in school concerts as well, when they asked me to, but not musicals because that was just messing around.”

Her father sang in a skiffle band but it was not easy for Niki to break into music. “My mum used to say, ‘Do you want to be a nurse?’, and I’d say, ‘No, I want to be a singer’. But we were living on a council estate with no money, no connections and no facilities at school, where they were all singing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang songs and I was belting out Tina Turner, singing River Deep Mountain High at the age of 15 with the teacher on piano. When I opened my mouth and sang, he said, ‘I didn’t realise you could sing’.”

She has, in her own words, a “big gob on her”, whether talking or singing. “But now I have an orchestra behind me, I prefer people to say I have a good voice, rather than just a big set of lungs,” she says.

• Blood Brothers, Grand Opera House, York, Monday to Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm matinees, Wednesday and Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or grandoperahouseyork.org.uk