"I know why I'm in the room. I'm the entertainment, I get that. I come in and it's sexy, it's cool and it's fun

“What's the matter with you?” Usher looks at me as though I have just emerged the worse for wear from a fist fight in one of the downtown bars in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

- INTERVIEW BY DYLAN JONES

One thing I've learned in 40 years of interviewing people is that YOU NEVER MAKE IT ABOUT YOU, but when I tell him I am recuperating from an operation on a meniscus in my left knee, he tells me that a while ago he'd had a similar, less dramatic thing.

“Some time after the last tour, it went. I'm a physical guy and it split,” he says, using the smile that I think he uses for every emotion. I'm not saying it's not genuine, but it's huge.

“You have to rest, and you have to do the physiotherapy but as soon as I was done with that, I was like, let's get it on. Bring on the show!”

The show this time is the ginormous Vegas-style extravaganza he's currently performing in London, an extraordinary colossus that sees him conjuring up his famous falsetto while roller skating around the stage wearing a bespoke Union Jack suit, bringing the sexy to south London in a way that's probably never been done before.

Called the Past Present Future Tour, Usher oversaw a night where he channelled that ever-present nostalgia in his work from his nine record-busting albums using a stage show that looked as though it had been beamed straight from Broadway. Only it was a lot, lot bigger.

There are bigger stars in the world, but not many, and certainly not here today in a seventh-floor suite of a ridiculously well-appointed hotel deep in Mayfair. The 46-year-old man sitting opposite me is in the middle of a 10-date residency at The 02 which, rudimentary maths tells me, means over the space of a few weeks he's playing to 200,000 people. And that's one hell of a lot of sexy smooching. As The London Standard already said in its review, his show might be one of the most technically impressive things to be seen on the O2 stage, as Usher and co whizzed around the venue on wheels, stretching into splits, backflipping, all while his breath control remained super formidable.