In October 2001, a record label employee was about to connect me by telephone to then-19-year-old Britney Spears, who was on tour in Australia.

“So, I just wanna make sure that you don't focus on, like, what's happening in the States right now?” came the concerned American voice. “'Cos this is just an entertainment interview and she's not prepared to talk about, like, world politics. And if you could just not broach any questions about, like, virginity or any sexually explicit questions? Because she's not prepared to talk about that either." Responding, aghast, that Britney was uncommonly protected, he replied with the single word: “yes”.

Britney’s World, in late 2001, was doubtless as Britney’s World had been from the very beginning: eerily controlled, possibly to a catastrophic degree, given the level of rebellion that was to come. Our conversation that day was nonetheless a cheerful one, her helium-high voice immediately addressing the 9/11 nightmare (she was heart-broken) while swooning over her boyfriend Justin Timberlake and how he’d invite her up to his hotel room and leave a trail of flower petals from the elevator to the room and still she hadn’t slept with him, no sirree, making yet more claims about no-sex-before-marriage being definitely the-right-thing-to-do.

Less than a year later, perhaps tired of the lies and tired of playing the game to Britney’s benefit alone, the global media turned on the first teenage superstar of the 21st Century with a gleeful hysteria which has spectacularly increased as Britney has even more spectacularly imploded...

Britney, back then, was fantastic, the first and best of the gleamingly-contoured, fantasy-pop machine-babes. In a way, her kind should never do interviews, let no light in on their magic, the intrusion of reality like a fatal, toxic rust in a meticulously-soldered mechanism. Unfortunately for Britney the media of the early decade was beginning to define itself with exactly the opposite brief, to expose the seemingly perfect as just as flawed as the rest of us. And Britney, then unwittingly, gave them what they wanted.

By June 2002, she was already unraveling. She split with Justin amid rumours she’d cheated on him, was pictured smoking fags, was reportedly drunk in lap-dance clubs while still promoting her wholesome Baptist ways. Then, her parents split up. Arriving in Mexico City, she was newly anointed by Forbes Magazine ‘The Most Important Celebrity In The World’ and was pursued as such by the paparazzi, their vehicles forcing her vehicle off the roads and up onto kerbs while Britney and her personal assistant Felicia sat inside, horrified, and had a conversation, Felicia later told me, about the fate of Princess Diana. Britney, wrongly believing that no-one could see through her heavily tinted car windows, stuck her middle-finger up to the cameras permanently flashing outside, every single one of which snapped the gesture which then splashed across the global tabloids the following morning.

That very morning, in the impossibly swish Four Seasons Hotel, Britney gave her first-ever Mexican press conference where a TV reporter, three minutes in, wondered whether, come her concert the next day, she would greet her Mexican fans like this: and here, he raised his middle finger. Britney coped well, explained she was scared, that she loved her fans but was human too and sometimes the paparazzi made her mad. Twenty minutes of willfully snide questions later – why is 95% of her show not sung live? Is she now dating her choreographer? – and she left her podium to a barrage of Medieval boos.

Seconds later, Britney stood in a corridor, preparing for a TV crew waiting in the room next door, surrounded by three bodyguards, two PRs, her personal assistant, make-up artist and hair-stylist with her hands covering her face, silently weeping into her palms. Watching this from 10 yards away, the atmosphere was atrocious, the excruciating silence finally broken by a lone male voice imploring everyone to stop taking everything “so serious!” Then, Britney shook her hair back, had her face lightly dusted and walked onto the TV set with her nuclear-white smile intact (literally sponsored by Listerine) where the highly excited Mexican TV presenter (male), dressed up in a blonde pig-tailed wig and school uniform while Britney taught him how to dance. Me, I didn’t get my promised “exclusive” interview (no time) and interviewed her make-up artist instead, about Britney’s favourite lipsticks (Yves St Laurent, Stila, MAC - the cover story went ahead anyway).

Being around Britney Spears in Mexico in 2002 felt like the end of the joy in pop music, that there would be no more jokes, japes or fabulous characters anymore, all snuffed out forever under the weight of the almighty corporate brand and its tyrannical need to control. Which was, thankfully, rubbish, because pop lives forever, it was just going through a transitional period, readjusting to the incoming era of all-encompassing reality. This, then, was Britney Spears six years ago, in her “good old days”, single-handedly defining what pop music then was; holographic, hypersexual, meticulously crafted by brilliant pop alchemists in a luminescent lab of swirling smoke and mirrors. Today, gossip sites claim she's a suicidal, bi-polar, crystal-meth addicted, twice-divorced single mother of two estranged children, locked in a psychiatric hospital. Maybe Britney, from the beginning, didn’t stand a chance, living a life built on lies, illusion and millions and millions of corporate American dollars. Maybe the beginning of the end wasn’t so very far from the very beginning.