I saw off my mother, the stalker's harder

When he broke that banning order he was sentenced to six months in prison, but because he had been on remand for three months he was released.

He is now banned from entering the area inside the M25, but the police officer leading the case has said he believes Martin is likely to breach the new order as well.

“The trouble is he does not believe he is doing anything wrong. You just can’t reason with someone like that,” says Vanessa-Mae. “I am trying not to think about it because once you start changing or curtailing your life because of a stalker, they’ve won. By getting to you they’ve established a link and I am not establishing a link with any stalker.”

If she is anxious, it does not show on her serene, flawless face. We are sitting in an executive eerie atop her record company in central London. The virtuoso is casual — in jeans — with one foot tucked casually under her on the sofa and a bottle of water in her hand.

Even so, her attention to detail — what she admits is a tendency to control-freakery — is ever apparent. Every time she blinks I get a glimpse of two dollops of bright purple eye shadow, in a shade that exactly picks up the pattern on her floaty top.

She is smart, articulate and polished. So easy and relaxed is her manner, even when talking about her fraught relationship with her mother, who was also her former manager, that one can only gawp at her self-possession.

The most devastating observations — “you come to a point where the boundaries are blurred and you don’t know what’s more important to your mother, to be her artist or to be her daughter” — are delivered with a smile. The two fell out when the violinist “sacked” her mother on the eve of her 21st birthday. She says that Pamela Nicholson, a lawyer and talented pianist, was obsessed with her daughter’s career and kept her a virtual prisoner.

Vanessa-Mae has successfully moved on, managing her own affairs with the help of a couple of PAs. At 25 she handles a multi-million-pound career and has cut her family — other than her beloved stepfather Graham Nicholson, a London lawyer — out of her life. No surprise, then, that she refuses to be spooked by a little thing such as being stalked.

Martin’s obsession began on her first British tour when she was 15. “He always seemed to be hanging around at the stage door, wanting an autograph. Then one day we heard that the crew had allowed a guy off the street to help set up. He’d talked his way on to the show,” she says. “After that he’d call the office, trying to make friends with the staff and calling everyone by their first names.”

He left gifts at her family home and sent letters pledging his devotion. She did not see any of them and did not fully realise what was going on. Her fan mail was opened in the office and she was protected from all distractions by her mother. The police were informed but there was nothing they could do.

Celebrities are a magnet for stalkers and she accepts that putting up with “fans” such as Martin, from Brighton, East Sussex, is part of the price you pay for being in the public eye. But since Jill Dando’s murder in 1999, such nuisance behaviour has taken on a more sinister edge.

“I drove home after a show three years ago and he was there. He was trying to talk to me as I got out of the car. I blanked him but it didn’t do much good,” she says.

“Letters started coming twice a week to my London home, first by post, then hand-delivered. I didn’t like that because you know somebody’s been there, on your doorstep, somebody who might still be hanging around.”

Martin started following her when she walked her dog and his letters became disturbing. “He is completely deluded. He was saying he wanted to marry me and that ‘now nothing was standing between us’ — whatever that means — we should get together. It’s almost as if he feels I owe him something. He loves my music so why can’t I love him?”

He was arrested after her boyfriend spotted him near their home last year. The months that Martin spent on remand were a welcome relief. “You’d think three months in Wandsworth would put him off. If he comes back he faces five years in prison,” she says. “I hope, but I am not sure, that will stop him. I am not throwing down the gauntlet but even the police think he may return.

“In a way I feel sorry for him. He’s wasting his life but I can’t let him ruin mine. I think I’m sensible. I walk where it’s brightly lit, I have my door keys ready and I have a panic alarm. My boyfriend has his family and his business in France. He can’t chaperon me every minute and I wouldn’t want that. I have to live with it the best I can. If I start vetting my life I’ll be living in a bubble, which is what I’ve managed to come out of.”

She is referring, of course, to extricating herself from her mother’s grip. By the time she left home at 21, she had never been outside the house alone.

“It still feels odd, sometimes, to be on the street by myself,” she says. “At 21 I’d never queued in a supermarket, never been out for a pizza with friends. There was love there, but also control. My mother would vet all my friends and if I went out, it was with a bodyguard. I even went on dates with a bodyguard.”

Vanessa-Mae’s talent was spotted early. Born in Singapore, her Singaporean-Chinese mother divorced her father, Vorapong Vanakorn, a hotelier (and “Peter Pan figure” whom his daughter also no longer sees), when she was three. Mother and daughter moved to London and Pamela married Nicholson.

She was educated at Francis Holland, a fashionable girls’ day school near Sloane Square, and started violin lessons when she was five. By the age of eight she went to Beijing to train for six months, then came back to school part-time. Two years later she appeared as a soloist with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and at 13 she toured the Far East with the London Mozart Players.

She managed to go to school “about once a fortnight” until she was 15, then work took over. “My best friend at school would be saving me a place and never knowing if I’d turn up,” she says. “I did some GCSEs but, really, I neglected my studies. I was having a successful career and that was what mattered.

“Without the impetus from my mother I don’t think I’d have made it. I was very loved and very protected, but in the end that became claustrophobic.

I was a teenager and I needed friends. My mother would encourage me to go to work parties, but she felt that if I had friends I would lose focus on my music.”

Instead, she practised at home with a live-in teacher. Her mother accompanied her to concerts, recordings and photo-shoots. Vanessa-Mae became increasingly unhappy, feeling both physically trapped and artistically stuck “recycling all the old repertoires”.

“There came a point where the boundaries between manager and mother were blurred. I needed to wake up and she needed to wake up and establish what we meant to one another,” she says. As she was about to turn 21, she plucked up the courage to tell her mother that she needed her own life and that their professional relationship was over.

“I felt I’d had fun in my professional life but no fun in my personal life. I needed to enrich myself as a person. If you are an artist you must have relationships with other people. She took it badly,” she says.

“I have always managed to separate our financial relationship as manager and artist from our personal relationship as mother and daughter, but for her the two were so entwined she felt that if I no longer wanted to work together, I no longer wanted to be together. But that is the opposite of what I actually felt.”

Since then they have barely spoken. Vanessa-Mae thinks her mother (who is now divorced from her stepfather) lives in London, probably quite nearby, but she is not sure.

“It’s awful not to be in contact with your mother. It’s sad for her and it’s sad for me, but that’s just how things are. It’s more a reflection on her that she’s so work-oriented it took over everything.”

Still, it must be sad for her to see her daughter on television and on billboards. “I don’t think she’d ever admit to that.”

The one who has remained constant is Nicholson, who she insists is her “real” father as he adopted her. They had dinner together last week, an impromptu housewarming for his new flat.

“His attitude was always, ‘Oh well, darling, as long as you’ve done your best . . .’ but sadly, my mother was the opposite.

“It must be hard for him, having two strong-minded women in the family but, to his credit, he’s never taken sides.”

What really changed her life was meeting Catelan, a wine merchant, five years ago. He was helping out in his parents’ ski shop in Val d’Isère, the French ski resort, when Vanessa-Mae was shopping. “He loves music but he doesn’t play and he genuinely — genuinely — did not know who I was. It was refreshing to know that you could forge a relationship just based on the way you conduct yourself.

“I had a very privileged upbringing. I was educated independently and we had skiing holidays, but it was all connected to work. Everything you had you had to work for. What I got from him was what I’d been craving: love that did not have to be bought.”