"I was stood on the concert hall stage last year and one of the record company people that was with me told me that I'd be playing there, and I thought he was pulling my leg," he told The Daily Yomiuri on the telephone from the New Zealand city of Rotorua last week.

Having kicked off his global trek in the decidedly unglamorous surroundings of the Welsh seaside resort of Rhyl out of season in January, his journey from North Wales to New South Wales could mirror the progress he has made over the past 10 months.

One year ago, the 37-year-old was a mobile phone salesman with a love for singing that he had nurtured from childhood.

His life changed when he auditioned for and eventually won Britain's Got Talent, one of the plethora of TV talent shows that clog up the British TV schedules, but he is in no doubt about the show's importance.

"Without the program I wouldn't have had any chance at all, it wouldn't have happened," he said.

"I couldn't afford to continue singing so I'd completely given up on it, and before that audition I'd virtually not sung at all for four years," he added.

His rendition of the aria "Nessum Dorma," from Puccini's Turandot, blew the usually acerbic Simon Cowell away, and his part in the singer's rise was noted with a credit in Potts' debut album, One Chance.

"It's hugely flattering to be in the position where you've got one of the harshest judges in the world--well, apart from me on myself--that respects what you do," he said.

Sessions for the album commenced one week after the show's finale, and his Italian version of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" is a curious yet impressive version that, initially, did not fill Potts with enthusiasm, until he remembered a lesson he learned as a teenager, when he worked at a supermarket.

"[I was] given a fruit to taste that I'd never tasted a granadilla and I had one look at it and...I thought, 'That looks horrible...then I tried it and it actually tasted pretty nice. And I looked back on that experience and thought, 'Well, you can never judge anything by the way it looks,'" he recalled.

After a lengthy sabbatical, he only quit his "day job" three weeks ago.

"I never took anything for granted. You know, there's no such thing as a guaranteed future in this industry...and from working 20 years in retail I know that if people stop buying something then it stops happening. I know that I can never take anything for granted, and I never would," he said.