Vanessa Paradis has been singing for nearly 25 years, a fact that makes me feel very, very old. It seems to be a fact she herself is in denial about. “Boy, is it that long?” she says, those big, blue eyes getting ever wider. The image of the 14 year-old singing Joe le Taxi on TV in 1987 – an impossibly cool, blonde-haired, gap-toothed ingénue in a see-through cropped top – is burned into my memory, probably along with most other teenagers watching, who at that age felt nowhere near as impossibly cool or gorgeous. Watch the video on YouTube Now, as a greatest-hits compilation is released in the UK and she embarks on her first European tour for over a decade, a trip down memory lane is unavoidable. “I kept pushing [the greatest hits] back, but when I started to do it, it was like seeing my life pass across my eyes and through my ears. It got very emotional.” Looking for images for the CD booklet, Paradis had to trawl though old photo albums and videos of herself performing. “I can’t believe some of the terrible outfits I wore,” she says. “What was I thinking?” While the 38 year-old may be better-known now outside France as partner of Hollywood actor Johnny Depp and mother of his two children, along with sporadic film parts and a modelling career for Chanel, Paradis has remained in her home country as revered and popular a singer as when she first emerged as a child star. Unlike the current crop of Willow or Justin Bieber pop wunderkinds, Paradis had serious musical tastes from an early age. “At home when I was four or five, I loved singing along to Forties musicals and Serge Gainsbourg. I was really old-school.” Having made her first appearance on French TV aged nine, she recorded her first single at 11, an experience she describes as an epiphany. “A studio could be a boring place for a kid, but I just instantly fell in love. It was so magical to me how everything worked, how you stood in front of the microphone behind the glass with the headphones.” Couture week is in full flow outside the Parisian hotel where we meet, yet, despite her regular appearance in glossy magazines looking irreproachably chic, Paradis is, to my great relief, disarmingly casual in jeans and scraped-back hair. She is as slight as a bird and delicately pretty, but swift and unflinching, too – sharp enough to deflect any gratuitous probing into her personal life. But, when she talks about music, her face lights up like a child’s at Christmas. Teenage fame was, claims Paradis, an accident of fate rather than a result of burning ambition. “If you listen to [Joe le Taxi], it is a very simple rumba; it wasn’t meant to be a big pop song at all. I have no idea why it was so successful. It was just one of those moments.” Fame brought Paradis a starry life, the patronage of her childhood hero Serge Gainsbourg, moving to America at 16 to make a record with Lenny Kravitz, and flash perfume adverts. But it also brought, particularly at home in France, a backlash of jealousy – graffiti outside her home and people spitting at her in the street. It does seem a miracle that she hasn’t turned out to be another damaged child star. “Growing up is not easy, but growing up on TV is something else. Big success brings big criticism, but I was lucky to have the family I had, present and loving and intelligent – allowing me to do my thing but protecting me as well. [Without them], it wouldn’t have turned out that way.” Indeed, those early brickbats seem to have given Paradis a toughness and tenacity that can only have helped her to put up with the intense scrutiny of being with Depp, and a desire to protect her own children from the public eye, although she admits her daughter Lily Rose adores singing and dancing as much as she did at that age. The greatest-hits collection will certainly reveal to a British audience last acquainted with her 1992 hit Be My Baby that Paradis’s music has moved on from teenage insouciance. While she has made only five albums (“Not much in over 20 years, admittedly, but I have had several careers”), her last album, Divinidylle, was her most critically acclaimed yet. Paradis maintains her life has been “blessed” with the kind of success that means she has never had to chase opportunities, but she has also clearly put hard work into developing her talent. There is something of the careful perfectionist in her, beavering away with something until she is happy. Listening to the range of her songs, you can hear her songwriting talent and that once girlish voice deepen and stretch. “I was so young when I started that I had to work with other people, but, as I have got older, I have become less scared of being bad. It is like becoming an adult, becoming a mother. I have been given songs by some of the best people, but, at a certain point, you have to work for yourself and put in some sweat.” Age seems to suit Paradis, giving her the range “to play with my voice”. She says she still loves to sing Joe le Taxi but prefers a more intimate performing style now. “There are no feathers or sparkles – everything is quiet about the music. But I don’t think I have been so happy on stage.” Paradis seems content to have traded pop fame for the artistry of a classic French chanteuse, but is still prepared to sing for her supper. “What matters most is the quality. If you get the success, too, then that is great, but I wouldn’t have it the other way around because that is misery. But we’ll see – maybe one day I will need to eat.” 'The Best of Vanessa Paradis’ is out now on Wrasse records