And she does. Through career highs and lows, Chaka Khan remains the essential R'N'B diva. She tells Jim Carroll about her new money gig and more importantly, her first album in yonks.

CHAKA Khan wants a cigarette. She scabs one from her sister and then looks around for a lighter. As she sparks up, a passing member of Team Chaka chides her for the damage she's probably doing to her voice. Khan delivers a full-wattage glare by way of response. "It's my voice, baby, and it's doin' fine," she rasps.

Few can do diva like the lady born Yvette Marie Stevens. Indeed, few have helmed a similar rake of funky, r'n'b smash hits as the onetime Black Panther. While Khan may have been absent from the limelight of late, her performances of Ain't Nobody, I'm Every Woman and, especially, I Feel for You are always there to keep her in the frame.

As a result, Khan has never lost her diva bearings. It doesn't matter that her last album popped out almost a decade ago (Come 2 My House, with Prince helping out with the steamy funk). She's blithely unconcerned that she's usually in the news these days for off-stage family noises (her son recently beat a murder rap, which brought a lot of headlines, as did her flirtations with Scientology). Once a diva tottering around on unsuitable heels, it seems, always a diva tottering around on unsuitable heels.

Of course, she protests at this description. "I'm not a diva," she says between puffs. "I'm a siren. When I hear people who are called divas, I think of people who are high maintenance, people who are not nice, people who are not humble. I'm not that kind of person, I'm just a woman who sings. If I wasn't singing, I'd be uncontrollable. I just have to sing."

It's such singing for her supper which has brought her to London on this occasion. Khan's the star draw for a Bacardi B-Live "supergroup" which also features Roy Ayers, Venezuelan new-school funk band Los Amigos Invisibles and house DJ Dimitri From Paris.

Earlier, at a press conference featuring all the artists, Khan talked about how she got involved because it was about "artists from different generations and areas of music coming together and sharing ideas about music and coming up with something new." Backstage, though, it's apparent that Khan is really in this one for the money. "I haven't had an album out in 10 years, so I pay my bills by doing corporate gigs like this. They call me and, if the price is right, I do it."

But Khan's fortunes may be about to change. "I'm working on a new album right now with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Here's the deal with it. It's going to be called I Khan Divas. That's a good title, isn't it? "I'm going to be doing songs by chicks that I dig. I'll cover some Etta James, some Joni Mitchell and maybe some Phoebe Snow. A few original songs too, but I want to do other people's songs. I want to put my mark on those songs. I want people to think of them afterwards as Chaka Khan songs."

I Khan Divas is set to be released on Sony-BMG's Burgundy label, a new imprint aiming to get new sales from old lungs. "Right now, me and Aaron Neville are the only ones on the label. It's the first time I've dealt with a big label in a real long time, so I hope it won't end like the last one." That's a reference to her mid-1990s split with Warners.

What you won't be hearing on the new album, though, will be Khan trying on songs from new singers.

"You know what those new singers are lacking?" she asks before roaring the answer. "Talent!" She giggles away for a bit. "Okay some of them are good. I like D'Angelo; Lauryn Hill's great. But the bulk of them just don't have what it takes to be great singers and they're not getting told that."

When Khan started out, back before the Grammies and hits, things were different.

"I probably had more opportunities than they have because there was less competition when I got started. There were no such thing as videos or coming together for something corporate like this. It was very clear. You worked in the music industry, not in a modelling agency or in a circus or on some kind of stupid TV show. You made records. The records were released. You were seen as a singer. Nowadays, it seems to be a lot tougher because they have to do all these different things and be all these different people."

Khan's big break came in the early 1970s, when she hooked up a bunch of LA musos called Rufus. She's never looked back. Rufus weren't the era's only west coast mob blending pop, rock, funk and r'n'b, but they were the only ones with a lead singer like Khan as a selling point.

That particular point was proven when she went solo in 1978, with the Ashford-and-Simpson-penned I'm Every Woman. As the hits continued to flow, Rufus had to send a few polite notes reminding her of some outstanding contractual obligations.

Khan regards those hit-making years as her glory days.

"What I liked most about the old days was the old-fashioned way of creating music. I really miss that. I really like when it's as close to live as possible in the studio. Too many times, I go into a studio now and it's all technology. It's all in your face and it takes away from the soul of the performance. It's sad. But when you have a couple of really hot musicians just working and jamming away and coming up with magic, it's like a gig, an honest-to-God performance."

A couple of hours later, Khan is at the heart of such a performance at London's ICA with the all-star band. It's not a classic by an stretch, due largely to the overly slick house groove which Dimitri From Paris insists on laying down throughout, to the detriment of a lot of the songs. It's also obvious that Los Amigos don't have the same relationship with the funk as some of the other musicians on the stage.

But when Khan sings, you can hear that her big, powerful, searing voice is still in fine fettle. It's enough to ensure that songs which were in danger of becoming tired old routines still sound like a million dollars.

Of course, Khan does the classic hits, and you realise they're classic hits for a very good reason. When Khan has the microphone in her hand, even a bland funk-house backing can't disguise the heart and soul of I Feel for You. That's the real magic and that never fades.

I Khan Divas is set to be released on Sony-BMG's Burgundy label later this year