Craig Revel Horwood has a confession. ‘I find this hugely scary,’ he says. The tap shoe is about to be on the other foot for the man used to dishing out low scores and brutal truths as a judge on Strictly, as he prepares to find out what the world thinks of his own startling new performance – not as a dancer but a singer.

‘I’m not au fait with the music world. I’m sure there will be judgment. I sort of don’t mind,’ says Craig, with the kind of wince celebrities give when he marks down their cha-cha-cha. That suggests he does care, quite a lot. ‘They’re all songs I love and I know I can sing live. The album has not been doctored. There’s no auto-tuning. What you hear is what you get.’

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Craig Revel Horwood says his new album has no auto-tuning, adding: ‘What you hear is what you get’

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Amanda Abbington and Giovanni Pernice perform on BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing

The good news is that Craig has delivered a showstopper. Revelations: Songs Boys Don’t Sing is a collection of numbers usually performed by women. ‘I chose them because I relate to them and I have played women,’ says Craig, who most recently appeared as Miss Hannigan in the musical Annie. ‘There are so many women’s songs that boys want to sing but they’re too scared to, you know? This is the only opportunity I’ll ever get unless I do a whole show in drag, which I don’t want to do. I want to sing them as a bloke.’

He’ll take them on tour next year too, telling the stories behind each choice. Even diehard Strictly fans may be surprised to learn that Craig developed his singing skills in the chorus lines for Miss Saigon and Crazy For You, long before he became a director, choreographer and household name. Big, bold bangers like Shirley Bassey’s This Is My Life showcase a deep, rich voice with a load of swagger. Quieter, more tender tunes like Memory from Cats are performed not in character but as himself, a 59-year-old gay man with an eventful past and a promising future who was surprised by the emotions that overcame him as he sang by candlelight at a recording studio in Soho. ‘I felt completely naked in that room.’

We will hear more about that in a little while, but it’s hard to meet the only original judge still on the Strictly panel without asking about the scandals that have rocked the BBC’s flagship show. Professional dancer Giovanni Pernice denies bullying but has left the cast. His accuser, Amanda Abbington, has received death threats from members of the public. Graziano Di Prima has apologised for kicking his celebrity partner during the last series but will not be coming back. Other claims have been made and the BBC is investigating as we go to press.

‘Let’s see how bad it is. I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you. I only know these people per­sonally from directing them when I do the Strictly Come Dancing Live tour,’ says Craig. ‘They’ve been nothing but char­ming. I haven’t seen any of that.’

His contact with Giovanni, Graziano and the other dancers was limited while the television show was being made. ‘You know my quest for the truth is always important, that’s why I’m honest about their one minute and 30 seconds of performance. I don’t ask how they were trained to get to that stage. How they get there is their own thing. We’re not part of it.’

The judges are kept separate from everyone else behind the scenes at Elstree Studios, where Strictly is filmed. ‘We’re on floor two, the dancers and celebs are on the ground floor, and wardrobe and everything is on floor one. There have been things in the press saying, “How would Craig not know what’s going on?” Well, actually, I’m only there on a Saturday and all the training has been done. I don’t see any of it.

‘The only time the judges ever enter a rehearsal space with anybody is for the final, to tell them what dance they will be doing. So for me it was a shock and I’m still hoping none of it’s true, but I really don’t know until it’s investigated properly, because at the moment it’s all just alleged. People are speculating and I hate that because it’s a feeding frenzy, not based on any form of truth. It’s better that everyone just sits and lets the truth come out, in a court of law or a tribunal or somewhere, so we can find out what actually went on.’

Surely his job as a judge is to look very closely at the couples, so would he not have noticed if things were wrong? ‘They’re acting. If any tension is real and you’re doing a paso doble then you can use that for the dance. We’re talking about actors here. You don’t have to be really in love to dance a rumba, right?

‘The only way you could tell is if there is a disconnection between them in the dance, but that is something I would bring up as a judge. They walk on in character. There are so many dance couples in this world that cannot bear each other but they come out and go, bang, bang, bang! You’d swear they’re in love. A lot of people at work have to act like they love each other, but they don’t. So it’s impossible to tell.’

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Ms Abbington apparently struggling with the rehearsals during the dance contest

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Craig Revel Horwood and his fiancee Jonathan Myring. His marriage to Jonathan, a paramedic 22 years his junior, has already been pushed back several times

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A young Craig strikes a pose. As a teenager, he had a Russian ballet teacher who used to hit her pupils with a cane

Does he have sympathy with the idea that some of the alleged behaviour is normal in the ultra-competitive, hands-on world of professional dancing? ‘Yeah, but it depends on a lot of things, like where you were trained, what your training is for. Similarly with Olympic champions, there are training devices that people use. It’s the same in football when your manager is training you and screaming at you. It’s a sport and it’s hard. The thing that makes it even more difficult in this situation is that celebrities are not used to that environment at all – and it’s arresting because it’s tactile when you’re dancing with a partner.

‘The first time you do a pas de deux class you’re really embarrassed and it’s awful because you’re being picked up, lifted, thrown about. Slips happen. You’re so close. You have to get used to touching one another, catching one another, in inappropriate places sometimes, accidentally. That’s certainly my training.’

Back in his native Australia as a teenager, the boy from Ballarat in Victoria had a Russian ballet teacher who used to hit her pupils with a cane. ‘That was so she could pass under each one of us along a line and make sure we weren’t using our thigh muscles to lift, we were using the hamstrings. Nowadays that would not be allowed, because you can’t walk into a class with a cane and start whipping people, can you?’

Teaching methods have changed dramatically, but sometimes physical contact is required, he says. ‘With ballroom dancing, the shoulders can’t be up. To remind the person, you’ve got to push their shoulders down. That’s all normal.’

Craig is always suited and booted on Strictly so it’s disconcerting to see him at a pub in London’s Fitzrovia in shorts and a T-shirt bearing the name of Mushroom Giant, a progressive rock band in which his brother Trent plays drums in Oz. He’s gung-ho and gleeful about his music, but very serious when it comes to Strictly. So what about the BBC promise to put a chaperone into training sessions?

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Craig Revel Horwood, right, with fellow Strictly judges Anton du Beke, Shirley Ballas and Motsi Mabuse

‘That’s a great idea. We do it in the theatre and it’s fantastic. It changes the atmosphere, having a third eye on the whole situation.’ He pauses, as if realising something. ‘But you have to remember also there was a whole crew in there. Camera, lighting and sound. There’s normally an assistant producer noting anything that might be worthy of going back over. There must be, how do we get to watch them on TV otherwise? It’s not a secret fly-on-the-wall, it’s filmed specifically to see their training.’

So what’s the point of a chaperone? ‘It regulates things, which I think is good. With Annie they were everywhere.’ The West End musical has a large cast of children. ‘If the kids want to give a leaving present to me as Miss Hannigan then that has to go through the chaperone. That’s to protect not only the children but me as well, from anyone that might say something bad.’

Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, wants Strictly to focus more on entertainment and less on fierce competition. Craig’s response will make every winner wince. ‘It’s always been about the entertainment. It’s never actually been a real competition. You would never enter Ann Widdecombe, would you? Let’s face it, not one of the celebrities could ever go professional, apart from maybe Layton.’ Viewers complained that Layton Williams was a trained dancer, as he had starred in the West End as Billy Elliot. ‘That’s a whole other story,’ says Craig wryly.

He’d rather talk about the album, which he prepared for by working on his voice with Strictly singers Rietta Austin and Hayley Sanderson. ‘I went in to the studio with great trepidation. It was either make or break. I was saying to myself, “Who is Craig Revel Horwood? What does he actually sound like?”’

What did he discover? ‘He’s a lot softer than I thought. He’s not judgmental. He has innocence, which is hidden from view because that makes you vulnerable.’ Craig sings As Long As He Needs Me – Nancy’s song about her bad boyfriend in Oliver! – as himself. ‘It could be between myself and my father in that way: an abusive relationship, but you still love that person for who they are,’ he says. He has spoken before about his fractured relationship with his father Philip, a former officer in the Royal Australian Navy who drank himself to death.

‘I found it tough to be myself and let emotion run riot. I sit on Strictly with a stern face and I’m guarded. This is a vast departure from the person everyone knows from the telly. It’s about exposing me and my raw, natural voice and emotion.’

There’s one song he’s holding back, though. ‘I want to save one for our wedding, because I think we’re getting married in 2027.’ His marriage to Jonathan, a paramedic 22 years his junior, has already been pushed back several times, but now they’re waiting even longer. ‘It’s to do with my plumbing,’ says Craig, who’s frustrated with the pace of renovations to his seven-bedroom turreted mansion near Rutland Water. ‘It’s taken a year and a half to get the council to get everything together before the build can happen. We also want the garden done. That needs two years to develop and grow, otherwise we can’t get married under the archy bits. We want to get married on a little island, so we’re going to build a bridge.’

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‘I found it tough to be myself and let emotion run riot,’ Craig says of recording his album

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Craig as Miss Hannigan in Annie. Her says: ‘There are so many women’s songs that boys want to sing but they’re too scared to, you know?’

The first of two ceremonies will be at a local church. ‘Only 60 people can go, so that’s our families. Then we will have another at the house for my theatre friends. I’ve booked Alexandra Burke. I paid her three years ago!’ This all sounds expensive. ‘The delay is about saving money for the house build as well, because I can’t afford to do both, unless I win the lottery. Or unless with this album I become Lady Gaga overnight!’

Will we see him sing on Strictly? ‘The only way that could possibly happen is if everyone wrote into the BBC and asked to hear one of my songs from the album and it was so popular they couldn’t ignore it,’ he jokes. ‘We’re not allowed to self-publicise in that way.’

What about the future? When Craig shed tears during the Strictly final just before Christmas, some viewers thought he was about to quit. Is he going to croon off into the sunset? ‘Ha! Er, no, because I love dance too much and this is my dance outlet. I never get anything like this throughout the year. I do get to choreograph and I get to direct but I never get to see things in the way I do on Strictly and it’s fantastic. They’d have to drag me out kicking and screaming. I’d have to be sacked before I leave.’