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“Always waiting for women…”

Nightwish’s keyboard-playing mastermind Tuomas Holopainen curls his mouth into a half-smirk and raises his eyebrows into his purple hat, as he leans up against a wall in London’s Brixton Academy.

Seeing as the absent women in question, who was due and hour ago, is the band’s singer Anette Olzon, her current no-show is enough to set alarm bells ringing for those waiting for her, After joining the Finnish symphonic metallers just over two years ago, Olzon has undergone a dramatic baptism of fire - one that looked, last November, like it was going to get the better of her, when she collapsed in tears onstage in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, forcing the gig to an abrupt end.

Fans we left wondering if this incident was the beginning of the end, particularly as the quintet promptly took a three-month holiday.

But, today, here in London as Nightwish wait to take the stage in front of a sold-out crowd - the first they’ll be facing since that aborted show - such assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact, Holopainen is all smiles as he reveals that his bandmate is not late and has certainly not gone AWOL - the pair weren’t told they had an interview scheduled until just before K! arrived - so Olzon took the opportunity to hotfoot it to a Louis Vuitton store to treat herself to a new pair of shoes.

“I just love nice shoes for onstage,” she says as she rushes in through Brixton’s main entrance, having cut her retail therapy short to come and meet us.

“I’ve got you a present,” she tells a smiling Holopainen, greeting him with a friendly hug. “You can have it after this.”

If there are any cracks running through Nightwish’s foundation, they definitely aren’t on show today. The band are visibly relaxed and rested after their time off, with Olzon, in particular, looking fresh-faced, a pretty twinkle in her eye.

“We’re really happy to be back on the road,” Holopainen admits. “Excited, in every sense of the word.”

“I think we all have longed for each other,” Olzon adds with a laugh.

So what happened at the end of last year?

“At the end of the last leg on the tour in November, it wasn’t the best,” Holopainen sighs. “We made a mistake with the schedule - it was so hectic. It was incredibly hard and having a new singer in the band doubled that. The last few weeks were mad because everybody was ready for the mental asylum!”

“We were all totally exhausted,” explains Olzon. “You can only go and work with illnesses and tiredness for a short amount of time. My body was just totally done. And I couldn’t even have the time [off] to recuperate.

‘So when we met in South America, I was quite stressed to go there,” she says. “Plus, the fan base was very different - they follow you everywhere - and there were fans at that show with their [middle] finger up and throwing posters of Tarja [Turunen, former Nightwish singer] on the stage and stuff.”

As Olzon herself will admit, at 37 she’s well past the age of caring too much about how popular she is and is more than capable of sticking up for herself when met with derision, but even the strongest of people - “I’m a tough cookie,” she asserts - stumble occasionally.

“Even if it’s just 10 people out of 3,000, the human thing is to see those ten,” she says. “You always hear the negative more than the positive. Of course, I want to be loved, you know? It’s not my fault that she [Turunen] was kicked out. So being tired and feeling like everyone was sick of each other, I felt very sad and alone. We needed to go home.”

“Sometimes work has to exhaust you, it has to suck,” continues Holopainen. “It can’t be fun all of the time. But we talked it over and it’s been cool ever since. This break has done us a lot of good.”

The band members went about their own business for three months - Olzon stayed at home “being a mum” and took a skiing vacation, while Holopainen enjoyed two weeks in Florida’s Disney World with some friends (“After my home, it’s the best place on earth”) before knuckling down to some song writing for the band’s forthcoming 2010 studio album and extra-curricular production work. With Olzon in Sweden and her four bandmates, including bassist Marco Hietala, guitarist Emppu Vuorinen and drummer Jukka Nevalainen, located in various Finnish cities, regular contact was kept via text messages and phone calls. But during the respite the keyboardist did worry that his vocalist might decide that the life of a member of Nightwish was not for her.

“One thing I’ve learned is to take nothing for granted,” he says. “It’s a really hard life - not only physically, but mentally as well. It really takes its toll on relationships.”

Would you have put the band to bed if Olzon had decided to quit, or would you have conducted an open search for a singer for the second time?

“I don’t know, I honestly don’t know,” he answers, shaking his head. “I think in such a case I would really seriously need to think things over. But, also, I’m a very persistent person, like the rest of the band, and I really don’t want to give up that easily.”

Olzon, however, reveals that she has never felt “that I don’t want to do this”. Instead, with the help of the “hundreds” of fan letters she received, showing their support after the Brazil incident, she realised that she had to find a new way to cope with being the frontwoman of a super-successful band.

“It was a very hard situation to go from no-one to someone,” she muses. “People think that we are superhuman, that we don’t get ill, that we don’t break down. [Following Brazil] newspapers wrote that I had a fight with my ex-husband, that I was pregnant and I had a miscarriage… Just made up things! It hurts and it’s painful, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

‘The guys have been very good support but they can’t help me with the little issues that only I can overcome, so I’ve taken on things to help me,” Olzon confesses. “I’ve taken on a [life] coach - she only talks about positive things, so it’s really good for me to have that. I see her once a week when I’m home and we have Skype when I’m on tour. I have an assistant now, too. It’s the first time I’ve had someone who takes care of me. I don’t want to be a diva that hides behind security but we should have somebody that can say ‘Hey, back off!’ when it gets too much.”

Only time will tell if Olzon’s adjustments will shield her from the pressure in 2009, but with the band vowing to keep tighter control of their schedule to ensure that they have the appropriate time off, road burn should be a thing of the past for Nightwish. After all, as Holopainen is the first to concede, Olzon is too good an asset to lose.

“I’m very impressed,” he concludes. “She has done a wonderful job - I give her and A+!”