Actress and singer Claire Grogan has admitted that releasing a new album with her band almost four decades after their chart debut was like starting again. As part of Altered Images the now 63-year-old, who has also starred in hit shows such as EastEnders and Red Dwarf, had enjoyed huge chart success with six UK top-40 hits and three top-30 albums between 1981 and 1983 with hits including Happy Birthday, I Could Be Happy and Don't Talk to Me About Love. In 2022, the band released a new album, Mascara Streakz - their first since 1983's Bite - and obviously, the music business had changed hugely in the intervening years, with a focus on social media for promotion.

Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, the mum of one said: "It was on a really lovely label called Cooking Vinyl Records, but I didn't have a huge spend to make that work and to get it into the charts. So I had to get very involved in presenting the message that we had a new album out, and had to get quite savvy about doing little promotional clips and being on social media, something that I had really shied away from," she confessed.

"I learned a lot from that experience, I really did. I wouldn't like to be on social media all the time, but for somebody like me, I have had to kind of almost start again. The only way you can make it work is to be very hands-on with it. You can't leave it to someone else. You've got to do a lot of it yourself.

"And I've kind of enjoyed that aspect of it. There was something exciting about being in control of the campaign to a certain extent," she smiled.

"It was very different (from the 80s) getting to perform my new album for the first time at the Rough Trade record stores. And I got to have all these experiences that a lot of young bands are having. But I got to have it as an older performer. It was really hard work. I was on my knees, but I really loved it."

Claire and the band are hugely in demand to play festivals, and in September this year, they will be undertaking their own tour performing their iconic 1981 album Happy Birthday in its entirety - something which instils both excitement and fear in the Scottish songstress. "I had previously done a tour of the Bite album where we performed it in its entirety, and it worked really, really well.

"The thing about the Happy Birthday album was it's so incredibly young and naive and very, very different in some ways to what I'm doing now in general. So I wasn't quite sure if I could pull it off - and we're still not quite sure," she admits. "But the thing is, I'm really committed to it, and when I listened to the songs, I thought I had no idea when I'd ever find a better excuse to go back to these songs and sing them.

"Because the only really song from that album that I (usually) do is Happy Birthday. So I just really love the sort of challenge of doing the other songs. I'm quite excited."

Reflecting on the difference touring now than in the band's heyday, Claire muses: "First time around I was caught up in a whirlwind of kind of being famous, Top of the Pops, everything else. It was quite crazy and sometimes difficult to handle. But now I'm a lot more in control, and I've had a lot of life experience...I look out at the audience, and I think we've all been through some s***, and yet we're all here, recreating a moment from our youth because we want to and because it takes us to a place that we all want to be in. And I like that. I think it makes it quite a poignant thing."

Altered Images tour the UK from September 3-25, beginning in Norwich. Tickets are available from their website.