By Maureen Coleman.

Pop star Katie Melua - who spent much of her childhood and teenage years in Belfast - has revealed how she had a close brush with death when she went sleepwalking on a hotel balcony.

The Nine Million Bicycles singer, who attended Dominican College, Fortwilliam, when she lived here, has just been on a short acoustic tour of America. And it's been an eventful trip so far for the chart-topping songbird.

Writing on her blog she said: "I had a near miss with death on a hotel balcony in New York after having had too little sleep, where you think you're dreaming and you can fly."

Melua also told how a tout - not recognising her - tried to sell her a ticket to one of her own shows. "I also stared straight into the eye of a ticket tout trying to sell me my own ticket outside my gig in Canada," she said.

Last month, at one of Melua's shows in LA, two women had a punch-up, throwing glasses at each other and pulling hair. The show had to be briefly stopped while the fight was broken