Jenkins: 'I experimented with drugs'

Katherine Jenkins has confessed that she experimented with drugs before embarking on a career as a classical singer.

The opera star revealed that she fell in with a "bad crowd" in London and took cocaine as well as ecstasy pills and powder.

"I just liked going out with friends, getting drunk on too many Malibus and Cokes, and then someone would produce some drugs and occasionally I would take some," she told the Mail On Sunday.

"I was hanging around with a bad crowd. I was very trusting and keen to please."

The singer added that she stopped using illegal substances after signing a £1 million-plus record deal in 2003.

She said: "I knew in that moment that I had to stop taking drugs. I'd been given this amazing opportunity and I just couldn't let myself mess it all up for the sake of cocaine or ecstasy."