Who can name the title of Bo Bruce’s latest single? And who can name the chap she penned it with, the man she’s supposed to have been getting comfy with since she reached the final of The Voice 2012?

For the record, she’s “very single” right now – though the whole Bo and Danny O’Donoghue “are they, aren’t they” took its toll.

“You become mates with someone, then everyone is pointing their fingers,” she says.

“‘Are you shagging?’ they ask. ‘Oh my God one of you is in love with the other one’.”

O’Donoghue is the singer in Irish rock band The Script and was her mentor on The Voice.

“It’s not a good start to a friendship. It was complicated. We then couldn’t hang out and have a beer like mates should.”

For Bruce music is the name of the game.

But she’s an honest tomboy who realises the business is a trade.

“It was the sacrifice I made by going on a show like that.

“I didn’t want to be part of gossip magazine fodder and it’s all come back to hit me in the face again. But it’s different now because at least I’ve got a record.

“When they say, ‘Who are you shagging?’ I say, ‘Well, it’s funny you should say that because I’ve made a record!’”

She’d been trying to get someone in the music industry to give her a chance since she moved to America after being kicked out of the super posh Marlborough School, overdosing on drugs and finding herself in rehab, with music an aid to convalescence.

By her late 20s – she is now 28 – she needed The Voice to give her a platform.

“I created my own little thing in New York a few years ago. I was carving out a name for myself. I had an EP out [Search The Night was made in Brighton with The Robot Heart singer Tom Marsh] and people liked it. The problem was no one knew about it.

“But once I had my head around the idea The Voice wanted me, I thought I could use them in a way.”

She got to sing on TV and the producers allowed her to keep her publishing deal and management (Brighton-based Polar Patrol put her in touch with Snow Patrol, Athlete, Zero 7 to write an album).

“So I said, ‘Oi, listen I have an EP’ – and it worked. As soon as I finished that show it was at number two underneath Coldplay in the iTunes chart.

“I was like s**t – it was worth going on Saturday night TV.”

So when the paparazzi and gossip mags had their hacks hassle her through Soho looking for a line on the O’Donoghue romance she wasn’t surprised.

More pressing was the declining health of her mother, who eventually died from pancreatic cancer a month after The Voice finished.

Bruce, real name Lady Catherine Anna Brudenell-Bruce, says her mother, Rosamond, Countess of Cardigan, was “my numero uno”.

“I was on autopilot on The Voice. I had one priority at that time and it was my mum. I did what I had to do at the BBC then I would go to stay the night at the hospital. That went on for months on end. And my mum died. It was all complete chaos.”

When it came to naming the new album she wanted something to describe the paradox she found herself in.

“I was trying to find a word that would describe what happens when the greatest thing in the world and the darkest thing in the world happen at same time.”

Her career dreams had arrived.

“I suddenly had Coldplay’s agent saying he wanted to work with me, labels wanting to sign me, Snow Patrol saying they wanted to help produce the album. Then I lost the one person who meant everything to me.”

She named the album Before I Sleep, which comes from Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.

Though she admits, “I still can’t get my head around it. That is what my life is like at the moment. It’s all too raw.”

The Voice gave her a perspective, which is that singing a pop song in front of millions of people is no big deal.

“What is real is family and my mum. So The Voice was a strange experience. I usually have bad stage fright and I was thinking, ‘What the hell – why does it even matter?’”

Her Lady status had hindered her in the past because record labels didn’t know how to market her.

Now her name has added to the tabloid spice. She went to school with the Middleton sisters – and they were friends. But Mr and Mrs Middleton never organised her birthday parties.

Her cousin is the lingerie model Florence Brudenell-Bruce who once dated Prince Harry.

Her father, the Earl of Cardigan, was declared “mentally unfit” by a judge after being accused of theft and criminal damage. His stately home is under threat and in January it was reported he had been working as a delivery driver to supplement his £71 weekly benefit.

Daughter and father never got on. She has a restraining order against him. Bo was cautioned for putting a scaffold pole through the window of his Audi a few years back.

“I don’t have any parents any more. I don’t have a backdrop to sort of lean on. I have this posh word in my passport that makes me different, apparently. That is as far as it goes.”

Ever one to confound expectations, she’s shacking up in a splitter van for her debut UK tour and a tiny club date in Brighton. She says the aim is to finally meet “the people who bought the record, and not be dazzled by the lights”.

  • Bo Bruce plays Komedia Studio Bar, Gardner Street, Brighton, on Friday, May 17, as part of The Great Escape. Starts 8.45pm, SOLD OUT.