‘I did a 90-minute workout at 2am!’: Lenny Kravitz on sex, spliffs and staying gorgeous at 60
The musician has embraced clean living, even if it sometimes means wearing leather trousers to the gym. He discusses celibacy, discipline, his new music – and why he hasn’t been in a serious relationship for nine years
Nobody does rock star like Lenny Kravitz. He pads into the recording studio like a tranquillised tiger. It’s dark in here, but he is wearing shades. He’s got on a leather jacket, skinny black jeans, a T-shirt made from metallic shards. His dreadlocks reach way down his back and are as black as his designer stubble. Kravitz, who has spent much of his adult life topless, has a 28in waist and an eight-pack that could double as a xylophone. Last Sunday, he celebrated his 60th birthday and he’s every bit as gorgeous as he was when he made his name in the late 80s; possibly more so. The consensus seems to be that he’s the hottest 60-year-old man on the planet.
I can’t believe you’re 60, I say. “I can barely believe it myself. But it’s beautiful,” he says. Is it in the genes? “It’s a combination of genes, self-care, hard work and discipline.”
Kravitz is instantly recognisable, his songs less so. Take away the few big hits (American Woman, It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over, Are You Gonna Go My Way, Fly Away) and many of us would struggle to name a song of his. It’s 26 years since he last had a Top 10 hit in the UK and 24 years in the US. And he’s hardly prolific. Blue Electric Light, released this month, is only his 12th studio album in 35 years. Yet Kravitz remains huge, worth an estimated $90m (£70m). He writes and produces for other musicians (notably Madonna’s Justify My Love, although this takes us back 34 years), acts (The Hunger Games, Precious, The Butler) and works as a successful interior designer.
Blue Electric Light is a classic Kravitz mix of funk, soul, pop and heavy rock. His voice is honeyed, he is a gifted multi-instrumentalist and he has a fine ear for writing songs that sound as if they’ve already been written by someone else. The album is sunny and sexy, at various points echoing Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Prince, Elvis Costello and Miguel.
Then there is the outrageous song TK421. Named after the Star Wars character, it also seems to be a euphemism for Kravitz’s you-know-what. (“Come on, baby, get on the one / Can you feel it, oh, my TK421!”) The accompanying video is every bit as raunchy as the lyrics. It’s his first nude scene and he pulls it off with aplomb.
Kravitz, who lives in France, the Bahamas and Brazil, grew up in New York. His mother was the actor Roxie Roker, who starred in the sitcom The Jeffersons; his father, Sy Kravitz, was an NBC television news producer. Roxie was black with Bahamian ancestry, while Sy was white and Jewish.
By the time he was in his teens, his mother was a household name – and wealthy with it. But she was adamant she wouldn’t spoil Kravitz, who showed promise in music – choral, classical and pop. Despite that, he ended up at the brattish Beverly Hills High in Los Angeles, which inspired the TV series Beverly Hills 90210. “On their 16th birthday, you’d see the kids driving in their BMWs. The teachers’ parking lot was full of Chevys and Fords and the student parking lots were Porsches and Ferraris. It was pretty funny,” he says.
Did you have a car? “Hell no!” So how did you get to school? “Bus or a carpool with friends.” But your parents could have afforded to buy you one? “Of course. My mother was on a No 1 TV show for 11 fucking years. But that would not be raising her boy to become a man. We had no maid – on Saturday morning, she’s scrubbing toilets. She was the most amazing human being.”
His relationship with his father was fraught. When Kravitz was 15, he was desperate to go to a jazz concert, to see the drummer Buddy Rich. Although his father had introduced him to jazz, he told his son he’d been out enough that week and couldn’t go. Kravitz said he was going – and that he was also leaving home.
Today, he says he must have put his mother through so much pain. There was no internet, no mobile phones. If he didn’t have change or there was no working phone box, he couldn’t get in touch with her. And often he didn’t. He was homeless; sometimes living in a car, sometimes depending on the kindness of strangers. “It’s a miracle I survived, that I wasn’t abused,” he says.
Hold on, I say – I thought you said in your memoir that you were abused by a woman in her 20s when you were 13? Ah, he says, that was different. “Yes, she did do that, but that wasn’t …” He comes to a stop. “In today’s world, yes, that was abuse and assault. It was this chick who saw this young teenager and thought I was cute and I’m going to give him some. Any young boy would have taken that opportunity and enjoyed the hell out of it.”
Did you have sex with her? “No. She began and I stopped her.” Why? “I had a girlfriend.” What did she think when you stopped her? “She thought it was comical – ‘You have a girlfriend?!’” Were you a virgin? He nods. I ask if he’s talked about it to his daughter, the actor Zoë Kravitz, and whether she regards it as abuse. He doesn’t answer directly. “I mean, she stopped, and I can’t speak for everyone, but that would have been a fantasy for so many kids. But, for me, it’s not what I wanted.”
