When Alfie Boe walks on stage as the penniless poet Rodolfo in English National Opera’s new production of La Bohème next week, he’ll be drawing on plenty of background material. Some will come from Jonathan Miller, making his return to the Coliseum for his first new production in years.

Some will come from Boe’s teenage years in Fleetwood, Lancashire, when he was the slightly mystified recipient of the Jussi Björling recording of Puccini’s opera, given to him by his brother. And then there’s the year that he spent in a grotty flat with three students, or, as he cheerfully puts it, “three other guys who would rather buy drugs than a loaf of bread, you know what I mean?”

OK, it was hardly a Dickensian pit. Boe and his flatmates were studying at the Royal College of Music and lived on Gloucester Road. “But the apartment was awful,” Boe laughs. “One morning the drains burst, and it smelt dreadful, and we had rats on the window sill, so I packed my bags and told the landlord he could keep his deposit. That was my year of bohemian life”.

True penury perhaps it wasn’t, but then in Boe’s view Rodolfo and his chums aren’t really victims of that either. “These guys, they’re not poor. They do come from wealthy families and it takes one letter home to get an allowance sent through the post. They’re playing at being bohos.”

Experience of Rodolfo has clearly taught him a lot. He first sang the role when he was 24, at Glyndebourne Touring Opera, and a few years later left a place on the Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House to sing it in Baz Luhrmann’s Broadway production. “I’ve studied this piece since I was 19, when I first received that recording. I’ve read the story inside out, read all the novels about bohemian life. I worked at it throughout my time on Broadway.”

On-the-job training, Boe would probably call it, because that is how his career progressed. He left school in Fleetwood, a depressed fishing town north of Blackpool, when he was just 15. “Any excuse I had to get out of maths — or any subject — I would take. And I didn’t really get that much support to go for my music. So I never got the push.”

Instead he did things the old-fashioned way. “I was always told: ‘Get yourself a trade, because you’ll always have something to fall back on’. So I became a paint-sprayer, a body mechanic in a car factory. And if I’d ever thought that becoming an opera singer was my career it would have just baffled me.”

Except that one day the opera singer in him couldn’t stick to just bemusing his fellow mechanics with the odd blast of You Are My Heart’s Delight. A single day was the turning point: “I was cycling to work and it was playing on my mind — you need to sing, you need to sing.” No sooner had he joined an amateur production of West Side Story than he had nabbed the role of Tony. Next came a contract with the D’Oyly Carte and finally the Royal College.

Yet even then he never stopped “learning his trade” the way he knew best: by doing it. “There are so many who can read about doing a job, and they may know the ins and outs of a car engine, but when it comes to changing spark plugs they’re useless.” That was also why he realised that another training programme, the Royal Opera scheme, was not what he wanted, whereas Luhrmann’s Bohème — opera for the masses — definitely was.

Whether that production, which closed after nine months without making a profit (suffering in part from a Broadway musicians’ strike and the impact of 9/11), succeeded in all its aims he admits is questionable. “We did the best for Bohème, and I think we came out pretty well. But you can only give so much to an audience member. They have to do the work themselves.”

It has taken some soul-searching for Boe to reach the conclusion that opera can’t be diluted to make it more appealing. In the guise of the “singing mechanic”, he made two, heavily-promoted albums for EMI, in each case forced to record music he felt was clichéd. But more galling was to read in The Times that his boss at EMI believed that their work with Boe represented “crossover with integrity”. “That was really wrong. I wanted to go into the mainstream world with classical music, but crossover makes me cringe — how many times can you sing You Raise Me Up, for crying out loud?” His next release will be more modest, “a smaller label, but legitimate and credible and the world I’d rather be in”.

The world he loves above all is still staged opera. It was partly why Covent Garden’s prodigal son returned to the house this season to sing a one-minute cameo in Elektra (“to show them that I could still do the job”). Next season he will star in La traviata at Welsh National Opera; a return to the ROH — he assures me for a role longer than a minute — is also scheduled.

But he hasn’t forgotten that sense of mission, as he puts it, “planting the seed” in the public’s mind about opera. He reckons he has sung to a million people in his concerts around the country in the past year, not once having to sing You Raise Me Up. The tours include the odd stop at Fleetwood, too. “I get my friends in the audience who think I’m a bit stupid singing opera,” he chuckles. “They’ve heckled me and I’ve had things thrown up on the stage, but it’s fun and it’s real and it’s life. If it brings them to the theatre they can stand with a pint in their hand for all I care and throw beer cans — as long as they’re listening to the music.”

La Bohème opens on Monday at the London Coliseum (0870 1450200)

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