Besides her own brood, husband Carey Hart and their children Willow and Jameson, there are the band members, dancers and inner circle who have been with her for more than a decade.

They are a tight-knit crew but not a clique. Newcomers to the fold are welcomed with a warm hug as I discovered when I joined P!nk on the UK leg of her summer tour in August.

I’m not exactly a newcomer to the team; Alecia Moore and I have known each other since she coerced me into drinking white chocolate martinis with her during our first interview in 2000. I haven’t drunk one since and have zero plans to ever do so again.

Whenever we reconnect it is the same. Our interview time is quickly eroded by minutes of shared laughter. Pretty much everything she says is hysterically funny and almost always self-deprecating.

But this is the first chance I have had to meet the extensive crew who keep P!nk on the road and as the singer would say herself, they’re a rad bunch.

The team had enjoyed a big family dinner hosted by Alecia, as she is known to her friends and family, the night before to celebrate being back on the road as the What About Us pop star launched her campaign to usher seventh album Beautiful Trauma into the world.

And backstage in their V Festival compound everyone is cheering as Willow competes in a cartwheel competition with one of the dancers or shoots Nerf guns with her new best friend, the daughter of guest British musician James Gillespie.

“The best thing about getting the band back together, the first day I got notes from everybody, teary lovefest notes about how happy and proud everybody was to be back,” she said.

“When I am in my head, they pull me straight back into my heart.”

The feeling is very mutual. From keyboardist James Chapman who has been with her for 18 years to the “freshest” member Eva Gardner who joined the band a decade ago, those who help P!nk bring her music to the people all credit their boss for the good vibes.

“It starts from the top. All of us have played with lots of different artists but there’s nothing like this. This is a really special situation and I think that’s because she’s special,” Gardner says.

Backing vocalist Stacy Campbell, who has also worked with Cher, Tina Turner and Janet Jackson said it occurred to her during the Truth About Love tour in 2013 that P!nk’s team is a reflection of the artist herself.

“On the last tour, it hit me. We must be parts of her. She is the whole; she is the guitar player, she’s the background singer acting like a nut, she’s the drummer bashing the s … out of things. She’s the keyboard player playing the melodies, she’s the dancer. It occurred to me that we are her dissected into a bunch of pieces,” she says.

Drummer Mark Schulman said the unified dynamic is particularly unique when you consider the crew has been created by the pop star rather than forming as an organic band.

“The truth is, like any other job we are all individually selected. It’s not like we came together as a band, we were either auditioned or invited,” he said.

“And that is hit and miss. Trust me, I’ve been touring for a long time, nearly 30 years. Fortunately most of the tours I’m on, we all get on extremely well but this is extraordinary. You are doing 10, 12 hour bus rides and if you don’t get along with the people on the bus in very cramped quarters it can be very challenging.”

Their boss also loves to play matchmaker. More than a few marriages and babies have resulted from the unions formed within Team P! nk.

Guitarist Justin Derrico who has been in the fold for 11 years met his wife, dancer Clare Turton on his first tour with her.

“Because of Alecia, I met my wife Clare and now we have a child. She was one of the dancers on my first tour with Alecia. We became really good friends and now we’ve been together for 10 years. So thank you for the rest of my life,” he said.

“And I’m not the only one. Tracey, one of the dancers, met her fiance on the last tour. There’s been all these relationships and kids to come out of this family.”

Mention their return to Australia next year for the two-month leg of the Beautiful Trauma tour and everyone gushes enthusiastically. These tourists all have their favourite haunts — and love of flat whites — and take as much opportunity to explore as P!nk when she and the family settle into their Down Under groove.

Ask why they think she has built such an intense and resounding rapport with her Australian fans and they all the same thing.

“I love Australians. They are call it as they see it people. They really like no bulls …. What I believe it is about Alecia that resonates is she’s tough and she’s honest but she’s playful. That’s an Aussie win,” Schulman said.

Her bonhomie backstage and on stage is contagious. But there is also a side to this most honest of pop stars which she rarely reveals outside of the confines of her dressing room or tour bus.

She is a hard-ass perfectionist and can judge herself harshly. While tens of thousands of people in front of her stage at the V festival in Essex gave her a resounding reception for the gig, P!nk said she was a sobbing mess when she came offstage.

The rush of adrenaline which slammed through her system after she ziplined from a giant hook dangling above the main stage onto the catwalk briefly threw her off her game.

She messed up the words to the latest hit single What About Us — the crowd sang along anyway — and covered it brilliantly by joking “it takes me four years to learn a new song”.

“I’m glad you got to see possibly the roughest show of my entire life that has ever happened in the history of all time,” she tells me in her dressing room the next night, ahead of her V festival set in Sheffield.

“The audience was amazing, a-mazing and no one said it was as awful as I thought it was. I got off stage last night, went to the tour bus and sobbed like a baby.

“Everyone was ‘What are you talking about?’ But you don’t know what it’s like in here (points to her head).

“Now, it’s already better. I did hear there were people having sex. My friend Laura Wilson was walking around and she thought she saw two girls fall down.

“But then she looked again and they started gyrating on each other. I’ve never seen it in the crowd but I’ve heard about it.”

The fact is P!nk and Alecia are exactly the same person. The pop star is not a persona nor a heightened version of the wife, mother and friend who is at the centre of this family.

“This is my real life; I am surrounded by beautiful people all the time who are into living life and making memories, sharing great bottles of wine and laughing and all that,” she said.

”Pop music is about feeling free and happy and inclusive and all that. That’s why live shows are the best because you stand there and close your eyes and feel. You’re not thinking. It’s the perfect place to be.”

P!nk’s Beautiful Trauma tour kicks off at the Perth Arena on July 3 and 4. She will then play the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on July 10 and 11, Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on July 16, 17, 19 and 20, Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on August 3, 4, 6 and 7 and the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on August 14 and 15.

There will be a pre-sale for Telstra customers from October 16, with general sale on October 20.