Life should be beautiful for Victoria Beckham. She's married to the world's most popular footballer (with movie-star looks). There's more money in her bank account than even she can spend, and she's never out of the red-tops. But the ex-Spice Girl isn't happy - her debut album isn't selling, and the critics couldn't care less. Will she ever receive the one thing that she really, really wants: respect as an artist?

Photographs by James Dimmock.
Interview by William Shaw.

Tuesday night. David and Victoria sit on the sofa at Rowneybury House, the £2.5 million home they recently moved into in Sawbridgeworth. A rare evening together watching TV. Victoria's really been looking forward to seeing new programme Footballer's Wives. She's heard that two of the characters are supposed to be based on her and her husband.
It's a big disappointment. The acting, she decides, isn't very good. As someone who spent some time training for the stage, she likes to think she knows a little about technique. And the script's unreal. Everyone's always drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes. As if. But it's obvious which one she's supposed to be. Bizarrely, she's the Page 3 girl who's marrying the team captain. The signs are obvious. For a start, they're planning a lavish wedding, which sounds a little too like her own £Imillion nuptials at Luttrelstown Castle. And there she is in every shot, dolled up in a basque and shades with her boobs up to here, when her boyfriend - who's clearly supposed to be David - pulls up in a Porsche and the pair of them start loading their Louis Witton luggage into the boot. 'All right babes," they trill smugly, proud to be so rich.
Victoria gags. She has a little epiphany. She turns to David: "I'm not surprised that people hate me," she says. "And you sometimes" Footballer's Wives is a bit of an eye-opener. Maybe this is how people really think she and David live. It is, she decides, probably what people want to imagine it's like. If people think we're like that, they'd probably want to smack us in the mouth."
At the age of eight, Victoria Adams' mum took her to see Alan Parker's film Fame, about a group of all-singing, all-dancing kids who were studying at the Manhattan School for the Performing Arts. That was the year she decided to become famous. For the next ten years of her life Victoria Adams slogged away at dance classes and singing lessons. Other students she met had more natural singing voices, or were picked ahead of her at dance auditions. But young Victoria Adams worked at it diligently, sometimes going to three different classes in a single evening. She forced herself to become good. The phenomenal willpower of Victoria Beckham is one of the least noted sides of her character. She is dogged. Some teachers at her dance schools clearly believed she didn't have the looks or the talent to make it. Victoria is proud to have proved them all wrong.
It's a cliche, but one that nonetheless proves itself over and over again, that anyone who wants fame so keenly is desperate to be loved. Victoria frowns. " I don't know about wanting to be loved," she says. "I wanted to be liked. I was never liked at school." The day after Footballers' Wives, she's sitting in a dressing room at the BBC TV Centre, waiting to be called for a run-through with her band for a performance on The Ian Wright Show. She was the unpopular girl at school. " I was never very good-looking. I never had a good figure. I never had many friends. But I never needed to be loved because I always had my family. I mean, I've always been very loved."
It's true. Victoria can't lay claim to a decent broken home as an excuse for her desire to be famous. Her family is extremely close. Growing up, there was nothing her parents wouldn't do for her. Her mother patiently ferried her around from after-school dance class to class. Now mum looks after Brooklyn regularly when Victoria's working. Her father - the self-employed electrical supplies salesman whose half-timbered Essex house and second-hand Rolls earned Victoria the sobriquet "Posh" - oversaw the refurbishment of the house the press like to call Beckingham Palace. Her sister, Louise, regularly acts as Victoria's right hand. When it comes to family, Victoria's relationships are as cosy as could be. It's the other relationships that she's found difficult. And in that department, celebrity isn't always exactly Mr Fixit.
It's over five years now since 'Wannabe' granted Victoria's wish to be famous. In spades. She's now - as far as the tabloids are concerned, at least - the most famous woman in Britain. Today, for example, is a pretty typical day. She's on the front page of The Star - who are playing up a supposed tiff with Tamzin Outhwaite. Tamzin was reported as saying she'd fancy a one-night stand with David Beckham; Posh simply said that wanting to sleep with a known married man was "disrespectful". But it's news. Every other tabloid has its own take on the story, which is based on a couple of throw-away sentences culled from an interview in Glamour magazine. She's more famous than any eight-year-old could imagine. Still, she wonders when she's going to be liked.
For months, Victoria hesitated about launching a solo career. All the other Spice Girls had done it, with varying degrees of success, but the one who had become the most famous of them all also had the most to lose. She always felt the knives were out, ready for her. So she conceived a plan. "I know what people say about me, but if I write a fantastic album with great songs, I can prove everybody wrong." She put a lot of work into her debut, Victoria Beckham. A woman of naturally conservative tastes, she's a massive fan of MOR artists like Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton and Usher. Her ambition was to write a great British pop IRWB album. After a couple of attempts at recording over here, she flew out to LA with Brooklyn. At the studio in LAs Record Plant, a huge sign on the door read: "Victoria Beckham. Private recording session. Keep out." Even this intimidated her.
Inside the door were two guys dressed in shades. Producers Soulshock and Karlin. As it happened, they'd just wrapped a session with her hero Whitney Houston. The first thing Soulshock and Karlin did was ask her to sing a track they'd written for her, 'I Wish' - the one she's performing today. The guide vocal was intimidatingly good by a black IRWB singer. So Victoria took a deep breath and promised the producers, "I will work my bollocks off. Which I do. I work really hard." What she meant was, 'You may not think I'm any good, but I'm going to prove to you that I can cut it." Which is a very Victoria Beckham thing to do. It's what she's been doing for years, after all.
She took a lot of care writing the songs on the album, too. Some of it's clearly autobiographical. There's 'Every Part Of Me', an unashamed love song to three-year-old Brooklyn. And 'IOU'- the sweet-toothed ballad she wrote to her husband David. When she performed it for him on Parkinson recently, viewers were treated to the sight of David wiping away a tear as she sang. At a recent live performance in Birmingham for an NSPCC benefit, he cried again. For all the soap opera of their relationship, it's clear that they are utterly co-dependent. In David, she's found something that matches the intensity of her own family relationships. "Yeah, I wrote a song about him, and I want to share it with him," Victoria says, instantly defensive. I don't think that's too personal. I don't feel I'm giving away too much."
Another song on the album is surprisingly true to-life, too. It's called ‘Watcha Talkin'About'. For an album that's written by a woman who's ecstatically in love with her husband and child, it comes as a note of sudden bitterness. It's about a friend who changed. “I remember talkin' to you constantly/’Cause we were cool like that ... /But now it's 'Let's do lunch'." Then: It started when the fame and fans kept comin' in/And then you changed on us..." It hardly takes a rocket scientist to work out that it's about Geri Halliwell, the Spice-defector. "You could read that into it," Victoria grins cautiously, as if trying to avoid another bout of public bitching. It could be. Yeah. It could be." Then, giving the game away, she starts laughing, as if pleased someone noticed. "You're the first person who's actually realised that!"
The song is about betrayal. Geri's change of heart about the Spice Girls clearly still cuts deep with Victoria. Until the Spice Girls, it had been Victoria Adams and her family versus the rest of the world. And then she found a second family the Spice Girls. For the once gawky ugly duckling, the experience of bonding with the forceful Geri Halliwell, or with the bumptious Mel B, turned her life around, liberating her.
The thing that's noticeable about you is that your relationships have always been all or nothing. "There are a lot of people out there who are jealous of my situation and what I have," says Victoria, opening a bottle of water. "I've had so many friends I thought I could trust and I can't. Honestly, now I can say I don't take anybody else on board." She pours herself a glass. "And it's sad it ends up like that. My family is where I draw the line." There was a time when she wasn't sure if she could even trust David Beckham. While she was pregnant with Brooklyn and about to marry the footballer, The Sun and the News Of The World both ran stories about Beckham fondling two different girls while she was out of the country on tour with the Spice Girls. Her faith in David crumbled and she became almost suicidal. "You trust somebody completely, but then you look in the papers and see, 'Beckham had a huge erection when he did this and did that...'When you're seeing that, in black and white, honestly, I felt that my world had ended - completely." It took her a while to accept his repeated denials over the dubious assertions in the tabloids. (The News Of The World later withdrew their story, agreeing to pay an undisclosed sum to a charity.)
There have been real betrayals, too. When she received threats that a gang was planning to kidnap Brooklyn, she employed a minder named Mark Niblett who she came to call her "white knight". Later it turned out his claims to be ex-SAS were dubious, and that he was selling stories about the Queen of Herts and her beau to the press.
Do you feel that maybe you weren't always a very good judge of character? "Oh yeah," she nods. It's sad, really sad. And what's sad is that most people have a price," she says. Really? You think so? "Most people," she repeats, "have a price." She adds that after the Mark Nibitt situation, she became "a lot tighter".
More than ever these days, it's about family. She says she can count her friends on one hand. She names four. Two are girls: Maria-Louise, who does her make-up and who she's known from the age of four; and another old friend called Melanie. The other two are boys: David Furnish and Elton John. She and her husband went out to dinner to London's Ivy restaurant a couple of nights earlier, with Elton and his boyfriend. Victoria and David's New Year's resolution was to go out together more now that Brooklyn is growing up. The Ivy visit was their first big outing this year.
I bet you get a good table at the Ivy. "Yeah," she laughs, "we do get a good table." It was a really nice night. Contrary to her Footballers' Wives type image, Victoria doesn't get out much. Most evenings she's in putting Brooklyn to bed. But when word got out who was dining in the Ivy the Soho street outside filled with paparazzi. The police arrived to control the crowd. Eventually the maitre d' suggested that they should leave, because things were becoming a little frantic outside. So they did. Such is the life of the extremely famous. And the shot of Posh and Becks exiting made all the next day's papers.
Another moment of epiphany: "You'd have thought they'd have been on about Sir Elton John, and the fantastic goals David has scored which have got us through to the World Cup," says Victoria, still innocently bemused by her public image. "But what they were really interested in was that I was holding a bag that had 'Sex' written on it. It's quite bizarre."

She'd like to leave England behind sometimes. If her husband's contract negotiations with Man United fail, there's always a chance of that happening. 'Travelling, I've found that this is a very negative country As much as I love what I do and I don't give up easily, you sometimes get to the stage where you think, 'What am I doing that is so offensive to everybody?' I'm not saying, 'Poor me' ‘cause I know I'm lucky." Like many a star in tabloid England she looks to America with rose tinted glasses. I remember Richard Branson saying, 'Out there, if you've got a Rolls Royce, they'll pat you on the back. Here they'll just key it.’” When she was a little girl, her dad used to drop her off at school in his Roller. It mortified her The other kids used to take the piss. Plus ça change.
The album Victoria Beckham came out last autumn. There was no hiding Victoria's disappointment when it performed poorly -in its first week it sold just 16,500 copies, trailing far behind other new entries that same week from Bob The Builder, David Cassidy and Ian Brown. And things didn't improve. It lasted only four weeks in the top 250 albums, and to date has sold a measly 31,586 copies (in comparison, Mel C's debut album Northern Star sold 821,553). She thinks it's a serious pop record - that it shows how well she really can sing. "Because of the person that these tabloids portray, people find it difficult to take me seriously as an artist. Because they're always more interested in the shopping, and David and the family," she insists.
She looks at the British charts and thinks that most of the records are catchy, insubstantial rubbish. Her mother phoned her the other day after Top Of The Pops and said, "It's like the NHS, isn't it?" - meaning it's an institution that becomes shoddier and more worn out every day. If I want to get on a TV show, I can get on any TV show. If I want to get in a newspaper or a magazine - that’s not hard. But try to get a music channel to play my songs -that's bloody hard. And then somebody’ll turn around and say, 'If it was Jennifer Lopez it would be on heavy rotation,"' she says. "And you think, 'Hang on a minute! Come on, let's think about the music for once!"
But the thing about Victoria, as you should have gathered by now, is that she remains remarkably determined. She isn't giving up. She is, after all, the daughter of a man who worked his way up to a Rolls Royce himself. "Definitely my father's daughter," she agrees. "Totally Perfectionist. Relatively impatient. Hard-working."
David arrives, cap pulled down over his head. He's under a huge amount of pressure right now, sitting out games on the benches while a game of brinkmanship is being played with his career. But he's turned up with a big bag of M&S goodies for Victoria. "Shopping?" I ask him. 'Just food for Victoria," he says, stretching out his only free left hand - still clutching a mobile phone - to shake.
The genuineness of their relationship has become a spectacle in itself. Despite the public attention - maybe in spite of it - they remain devoted to each other. "I can take what people say," says Victoria, gamely. "But the one thing that is mine is my relationship. You never know how long people are going to be loving David's football, or liking what I do. I'm so aware that all of it can be taken away very quickly As long as I've got my family - that can't be taken away from me."
In the liner notes to the album Victoria Beckham there's a tiny, mawkish aside to Brooklyn: "Hopefully when you're a big boy this album will be something to make you proud of me and show you that once upon a time mummy was famous. X." Ever present, the fear that all this can be taken away from her.
You can't mean that. Whether you like it or not, you're always going to be famous. Maybe not this famous... 'You don't know. You just don't know."
And is that always in the back of your mind? "Oh yeah. I'm very much aware of that. I mean, who knows what's going to happen?" And would you mind if it was all taken away? She considers, I think I would. I wouldn't mind the fact that I could go on holiday and lie on a beach in a bikini with Brooklyn and not be paranoid about anyone taking a photograph, or about what anyone was going to say"
But you would like to be able to prove yourself? "Oh, I do like to be able to prove myself. And I feel I've still got a lotto prove."