In the basement of Gloria Gaynor's house is a disco for one: a porch-sized dancefloor with a rotating glitterball, a bar, a pool table and, off to one side, a private cinema decorated with cardboard cutouts of movie characters. On the wall is an oil painting of Gaynor and a framed letter on White House notepaper from Jimmy Carter's wife Eleanor, dated 1978, wishing the singer well after surgery. She is proud of this room, where the air tastes refrigerated and the quiet of the New Jersey suburbs presses in like a physical force. To the observer, however, it looks like a faded monument to all the fun she isn't having. "Pretty cool," she says. "Huh?"
To people of a certain age, Gaynor will always be regarded with fondness and a degree of sheepishness for the time in their lives when playing I Will Survive seemed a meaningful response to any setback. By the power of disco alone, she lifted whole generations up from where they lay - face down on the carpet, having drunk the liquor cabinet dry, to an imagined resurrection of sequins and magnificence. In the two years after its release, the song sold 14m copies and quickly made the journey from anthem to cliche to drag act. These days it seems dated, its stridency histrionic, and even Gaynor seems to have moved on. This symbol of female self-reliance has retrained as a therapist and counsels women not, as the song puts it, to show their crap boyfriends the door, but rather "to have boundaries of your own and respect others' boundaries". Try turning that into a hit record.
Upstairs, her lounge is all chrome and black leather, with a carpet so thick you lose your balance walking on it. Gaynor is said to be nearly 60, although she won't confirm her age ("I'm just as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth," she says, grinning) and while she moves heavily, listing slightly to one side, her manner is light and amused - or at least, as light and amused as a born-again Christian can be. She converted in 1982 and while she tours Britain this month, for the first time in 20 years, she faces not only physical challenges, but spiritual and commercial discomforts, too. Gaynor is in the tricky position of being a gay icon whose church believes that her large gay fanbase are going to hell. But we'll get to that.
The fervour of Gaynor's early performances came from a desire to haul herself out of poverty and avoid the mistakes her father made. He was a failed cabaret artist, who left when her mother was five months pregnant with Gaynor. She and her five siblings grew up on the wages her mother made as a seamstress. "I suppose it was frightening for her. But she was a brave woman. Very strong and brave. And if she had any fears, we didn't know about them."
They lived in a three-room apartment in New Jersey, her mother in one bedroom and the six children in the other, bunk-beds pushed against opposing walls. Gaynor was the middle child, with three elder brothers, one younger brother and one younger sister. Did she have to make a lot of noise to get noticed? "No. I was smarter than that. I somehow knew that the one who whispered got listened to."
She only saw her father a handful of times; at five, at 12, 19, and then not until she was 35, when she went looking for him after her mother died. "I didn't like being parentless. And I just wanted my father. And we started to form a relationship. And then he passed away, two years after. I didn't see him much, I was performing. But I was glad I did that."
Gaynor intends to set up a therapeutic practice, what she calls her "ministry", once she has finished an online course in behavioural science. She wants to "help people to overcome the emotional scars that we all sustain in life, the betrayals, disappointments, whatever", with particular focus on teenage parents, who, she believes, throw in the towel on relationships too quickly. "They need to learn that you don't break up because you don't like how somebody squeezes the toothpaste. You talk about that." But won't the fact that she is Gloria Gaynor be a little weird for her clients?
"I think that will draw them," she says, triumphantly. But they might, you know, find it hard to relax. "Are you relaxed?" Yes, but I'm a journalist, and I'm not seeking relationship advice. "One of the reasons I'm doing this," she continues, "is that people tell me all the time that they're comfortable around me. People are intimidated when they first meet me, but it doesn't take them long to realise I'm just an average person."
The other life experience she brings to the table is her marriage to Linwood Simon, which ended several years ago after 25 years - and which, she says, with a mighty eye-roll, seemed to last "an eternity". They met when she was starting out, and he became her manager (she pulls a face at the thought). She now lives alone. With the help of her studies, she can see where the problems in her marriage lay. "Someone does something to you, it makes an imbalance; you feel that you're giving more to the relationship than they are and that's what inequity is. And you don't say anything about it, you think it's silly, they won't do it again, and before you know it, they've done it three or four times. And then when you're determined to say something, they're surprised - they don't know where you're coming from. Why all of a sudden is this a problem for you? They're now focused on your rejection of them. And eventually it does end the relationship."
This might just be a long-winded way of describing infidelity, but there is a bigger elephant in the room: those relationships that Gaynor's particular branch of Christianity doesn't sanction and that, awkwardly, coincide with her biggest fanbase. Gaynor is careful how she answers questions on this. In the 1970s, before her conversion, her background was one of nights out in New York's gay clubs, drinking champagne and smoking dope, which she didn't quit when she started reading the Bible, because "I told myself I was getting on a higher plane and closer to God". Eventually, however, she gave up both, although she keeps Moët for guests.
And her gay fans? "I had a backlash from gay fans for a tiny period. Because they didn't understand where I was coming from. Now they recognise that my beliefs are my beliefs and that I have no opinions separate from the Bible. There are areas that we agree to disagree on. It's as simple as that. I don't have a problem with them having their beliefs, because my feeling is that God gives each and every one of us the right to not even believe in him. So who am I to try to take that away from somebody? I will always try to share my faith with any person who is willing to listen. When I feel a wall go up, we can talk about something else ... and I will pray for you."
In the 1980s, when disco went out of fashion in the west, Gaynor did what any self-respecting diva would have done and hauled ass around the world, playing the international cabaret circuit; and, like an ex-president on a lecture tour, compensated for the drop in status with great bricks of cash. She had other hits, among them Never Can Say Goodbye and I Am What I Am, but the staple of any gig was and is I Will Survive, which she recorded in 1978 in almost parodic, show-must-go-on circumstances, while recovering from major surgery just after her mother had died. "I was standing there in that back brace and thinking of those two things while I was singing that song. It enabled me to sing with conviction." She knew it was going to be a hit, she says, when she performed in front of a "jaded" New York audience "and they immediately loved it". She walks me over to the piano to show me the Grammy she won for the song, in 1980.
We do a quick tour of the house. There is her teapot collection and her collection of "crystal landmarks", including a crystal Sydney Opera House and a crystal Golden Gate Bridge; there is a life-size statue of a Dobermann by the door. As we walk through the kitchen, I see a handwritten note taped to one of the cupboards: "Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels."
The following day, I go back to New Jersey to watch Gaynor sing I Will Survive in front of 6,000 people. It's an outdoor fundraiser for breast cancer research and the crowd has just finished a sponsored run, many of them with the names of dead friends and family pinned to their running tops. The performance seems like a terrible idea to me, the certainty of that song not born out, in this of all crowds, by the evidence.
But here's the thing: after a rambling introduction, Gaynor starts to sing. Women at every stage of cancer treatment cheer and sing with her and her delivery is so angry, it redeems the song wholly from kitschness. When she gets to the chorus, the hairs on the necks of 6,000 people lift in unison. At the end, Gaynor comes off stage, breathing heavily and, walking across the park with her lumbering gait, she fends off fans with a slight rise of her elbows, as if she is carrying something important.
· Gloria Gaynor plays the Shaw Theatre, London NW1 (0871 594 3123), from tomorrow until Friday
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