Lenny Kravitz is able to stroll through the 'hood, he will tell you, because the 'hood is his roots. It's where he's from. But once again, he is being slightly disingenuous, because Kravitz is no more from the 'hood than Michael Portillo is. Born in New York in 1964, he was brought up on Manhattan's élite Upper East Side by his Bahamian mother, Roxie Roker, star of US TV sitcom The Jeffersons, and father, Sy Kravitz, a Russian Jew who worked as a producer at NBC News. The young Kravitz regularly visited his maternal grandmother, who lived in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant - the "'hood" of which he is so proud. But his parents were keen socialites whose regular parties were attended by the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Woody Allen. At the age of 11, his family relocated to Los Angeles where he attended the famous Beverly Hills High School, alongside actor Nicolas Cage and Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash.

When he turned 16, he was desperate to earn some creative stripes as a musician, and so he left his parents to become "homeless" for a couple of months, living in the back of his car while writing songs under the guise of Romeo Blue. Within three years, he'd dropped the David Bowie-influenced moniker in favor of his own name, and landed a recording deal. His 1989 debut album, Let Love Rule, made him a superstar.

But while he proved to be a prolific songwriter throughout the Nineties (and not just for himself, either; in 1991, he wrote "Justify my Love" for Madonna), it was his flamboyant dress sense and high-profile love affairs that really sealed his celebrity. Even when music critics began to slate him as nothing more than a feather boa'd rock pastiche, he remained a tabloid staple.

According to Kravitz himself, he has been denied proper respect for far too long now. "Think about it," he says. "I'm the guy who writes, plays and produces absolutely everything I do. Come into the house now and I'll play you any one of 15 different instruments, and I'll do it better than most musicians out there right now. But people don't care about that, do they? They just want to know who I'm sleeping with." He could always live his private life a little more privately, I suggest. "But I do! I do not court celebrity, and I never have done. But, obviously, if you do date famous women, then a certain amount of press interest comes with that. And what am I supposed to do then? When I was dating Vanessa [Paradis], the paparazzi followed us all over the world, even to the remotest holiday island. Next day, I'm all over the papers. Incidents like that give me a reputation, and I guess that reputation precedes me."

But where this used to get him down and, ultimately, lead to depression, he now no longer cares. "It's taken me a long time to reach this point," he says, "but I'm happy with who I am and where I am. I'm happy."

This month, Lenny Kravitz turns 40. Perhaps spurred on by thoughts of eventual mortality, he has decided to spread his wings. "I have so much more creativity within me than most people realize," he confides. "Mostly, that's because I haven't showcased it yet, but now I am prepared to."

He explains that he is currently working on a semi-autobiographical film called Barbecues & Bar Mitzvahs, which he will direct and star in, and is developing lines in both clothing and furniture. He has also recently become an in-demand interior designer, and is about to oversee a project for South Beach's swankiest hotel which, he promises, "is going to be completely amazing".

And yet despite this overflow of creative juice, he continues to insist that the trappings mean nothing to him. As we walk through his garden and back towards the kitchen, he tells me about the property he owns in the Bahamas, a small, very basic, tin shack on the beach.

"I could live there, happy every day just to see the sea and breathe the fresh air," he says, nodding hello to his chef. "Really I could."

'Baptism' is out on May 17