We are waiting for Keith Urban backstage at the venue, an old, seedy-looking warehouse-style building just outside Cologne. Guitar cases packed like an Elton John wardrobe are already ensconced.

A stream of other band members and technical assistants rumble about. This is a huge country artist used to playing stadiums and selling multi-million numbers of records in the United States who is cramming himself into something small, tight and intense.

Much has been made of the fact that he may be a successful country star in America, but he only became known in the Stetson-phobic UK when he married Nicole Kidman. After the exquisite wedding in a Catholic church in Sydney – beautiful views, beautiful dress, beautiful tears, both his and hers – he made the headlines again for wrecking the fairy tale. Three months after the marriage, he checked into the Betty Ford Center to be treated for alcohol and cocaine addiction. He spent his 39th birthday dealing with his demons, checking out for a magnificent reunion with Kidman on Boxing Day. Papers snapped them furiously wearing smiles of relief and clutching Christmas-wrapped gifts.

His album Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing featured songs that summed up his life, many of them joyous and written in the afterglow of meeting Nicole, and were all about the man he wanted to be, the man who didn’t let anybody down, the man who let go and surrendered to love. Except he wasn’t quite that man yet. Instead of touring and doing the talk-show circuit, he chose rehab.

It didn’t help him that a woman called Amanda Wyatt, a 23-year-old part-time model, claimed in a tabloid newspaper that she had a long-standing affair with him that ended just prior to his marriage. There were other tabloid reports of her kissing him again just before his flight to rehab. Not surprising, he felt hunted. Not surprisingly, he has avoided the press. For the first few months of this year,Urban seemed to be in hiding. We have not been waiting too long – about 20 minutes – when his American publicist appears, beaming. “You will love Keith. He’s so easy.”

Easy. The word frightens me. I remembered reading an interview that Urban had done last year. The word that kept running through it, repeating itself with a gloomy, doomy determination, was peaceful. Peaceful was the word he used to describe his life. A few days later he was in rehab. So I couldn’t help wondering whether easy was the new peaceful.

The tour bus pulls up. It smells of Dior Homme. Keith’s fiddling with a broken bottle of perfume. Earlier he had tried to transfer it to another plastic bottle. It’s a good smell for him. Fresh yet musky, heady yet light, clean, sharp, intense. He is wearing a black T-shirt, dark denim, a sprinkling of stubble and a piercing but friendly look.

The first thing you notice about Keith is that he is heartbreakingly handsome, much more handsome than any picture I have ever seen of him. His eyes are grey-green flecked with teal, and he fixes them on you. You get the impression that some people who are shy always look down or away. Maybe Keith did that once. It’s almost as if he went to the other extreme to combat it. He not only looks right at you, he welcomes you to look right at him. He doesn’t flinch. He gets us water, jokes he’s drinking a lot of that these days, apologises that he’s smelling “a little pungent” because of the broken Dior Homme. He’s almost easy. He’s not a coiled spring. He’s not jumpy, but yes, there is a low-grade intensity about him at all times. The bus will take them around Europe to modest venues of around 2,000 people. Does it feel like he’s starting all over again? “I like the way everything connects and you feel the energy from the crowd.” Perhaps in Europe the Love and Pain album is easier to digest, rockier. His 2004 album, Be Here, sold more than 3m copies in the US, and he says that people here in Europe feel more familiar with that.

“I wrote Love and Pain at the end of 2006. No, that’s not right. I’m very confused, 2005. I lost a year there. That’ll happen,” he winks, making a very direct reference to the three months he lost in rehab. Love and Pain are obviously inextricably linked for Urban. Did he write these songs when he was in love or in pain? “It was actually jubilant. There are no tortured songs there. There is a song, Stupid Boy, which I didn’t write.”

This was originally written for a woman, but when Urban played it to Kidman she really liked it and said he should record it anyway. It’s his current US single. It seems to imply “Yes, I know, I was a stupid boy”. He wrote the song Once in a Lifetime the night after last year’s Oscars.

He and Kidman had just become engaged. “The next day, in a moment of reaffirming my commitment and my intentions, I wrote what was in my heart.” What was in his heart was “don’t fear love, embrace it, it’s a leap of faith, a once-in-a-lifetime chance”.

It’s a collection of hopeful songs, yet he was obviously navigating troubled times when he wrote them. “There’s always a thread of light, it may be a sliver, sometimes it’s all dark except for the sliver, but you’ve got to hang onto something. Sometimes I think if you write songs about dark feelings, it brings on those dark feelings, it tests you – let’s see how you can actually handle it. You’ve got to be careful what you write in songs. You have to know that you can actually live it.”

Can you live without fearing love, fearing commitment, fearing rejection and all of the things that love brings on? “I have been learning about vulnerability. I think if you are in love with somebody you need to be vulnerable, and that takes a lot of courage and willingness. It’s not easy to be intimate and a lot of people avoid it or have a definition of it that’s relative. I find the more I’m letting go, the more I’m discovering,” he says and he fixes the eyes inside me. “I think it’s all about the surrender.”

He makes surrender sound sexual, intense, painful, beautiful, all of those things. But it is hard to find a person that you can surrender to, isn’t it?

“Very,” he acknowledges. “And I have experiences of sometimes surrendering to the wrong person and being devastatingly hurt, or maybe it’s the right person but the wrong time. So we start to pull in protectiveness around us. Ultimately, the song Used to the Pain is about that, about being willing to give in to love. It means willing to give in to pain as well. You have to be willing to be hurt to be loved.”

Have you been hurt? “Absolutely. Who hasn’t?” Yes, sure, he is emotionally articulate, heart on the sleeve, easy. But he’s also hyper-aware. He can sense when a difficult question is coming. Before I can even ask him to tell me about the particular hurt that drove him to rehab, he volunteers: “There are lots of ways to numb yourself so that you don’t feel that pain. I learnt a lot about addiction in the last six months. I think there’s a certain amount of denial in addicts, but also legitimate ignorance abut what the problem is, how it manifests itself. It’s easy to think, ‘Oh, I just went through a bad patch,’ and not realise the core of the problem. The disease of addiction requires a particular way of living every day.”

Is it tough combating it? “Actually, it’s not. The other way for me was tougher because I was not living. I chose the option to not feel, and that means you’re not living. In the last six months I’ve felt I’m alive, engaged in my own life, present, accountable and responsible.And the irony is, I’m becoming the person I was trying to be all along.”

When he wrote the collection of songs with titles like Won’t Let You Down, he wasn’t yet that person. “I couldn’t seem to grasp growing up. I couldn’t grasp responsibility. I didn’t have the direction I needed.”

What gave you that direction? “Surrender. Throwing up my hand and saying, ‘Help.’” What did this stint in rehab teach you that the previous one didn’t? (In 1998 he sought help at Nashville’s Cumberland Heights Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center.) “I was able to find my identity of who I am off stage. I’ve played music my whole life.” (He won talent shows when he was 8 and at 15 he dropped out of full-time school to play in bands at beer halls across Queensland, Australia.)

“It’s the only life that I have ever known, so it was a great opportunity for me to discover myself, not the musician but me. A lot of musicians struggle with that. When they are off the stage they get lost.” Did you also feel that after years of struggle you couldn’t cope with success? He arrived in Nashville from Australia at only 23 and was to shuffle back and forth for a decade before he was given a lucrative deal.

“No, I didn’t feel that. For me it was years of hitting my head against a brick wall after the novelty of living in Nashville wore off. “There was constant frustration, rejection, friction and stagnation. But for three, four, five years that still didn’t bother me, because I was excited to be there. After a while it started to wear me down. I think it was that it would bubble up at some point, this resentment, this frustration. Not towards any people but just towards the calling itself.”

Did you only start to feel this when you were no longer rejected? “You mean, did I find a comfort in the struggle?” he chuckles. “Yes, absolutely. That’s all part of letting go because that is actually insane.”

Was it hideous to be locked up (in rehab) for three months? Did they make you clean floors? “I think those types of journeys are all very personal and very different,” he says, intentionally vaguely. There’s a pause where suddenly the Dior smell seems thick and pungent, not easy and clean. Suddenly there’s a sliver of darkness in his light. You’re a Scorpio, aren’t you? “Yes, how could you tell?” Because you’re intense, moody, watchful.

“My brother is a Scorpio and he’s completely different to me, far more intense. I have mellowed a lot over the years,” he says, reintroducing easy-breezy. His brother is older by two years and couldn’t be further from the music and the limelight. “He’s predominantly a dad and a husband. He loves being at home.

He has a part-time job right now but he’s never really been about work, and I was always about my work. I was focused on that from a young age. It’s only recently that the personal side of

my life has blossomed. I roamed the world to pursue my career and I was always at odds with myself because I am family-orientated. I am loyal and like having a partner. I couldn’t do both.” He shakes his head solemnly and a real sadness comes into his eyes.

Are you upset that you disappointed people? “Absolutely. It’s very hard to take that. When I wrote Won’t Let You Down, I wished I could have been the person in that song. I’m much more like it now but…” His voice trails. He dives off for more water and I ask, are you looking forward to being a dad? “I am. Next year actually would be lovely,” he says, attempting to dispel the current Kidman baby rumour. It’s a rumour that appears every other month, but as Kidman is full-on shooting a movie in Australia with Baz Luhrmann, it seems doubtful that she would risk pregnancy at this time. He’s keen to dismiss rumours that they hardly see each other. He plans to tour for two weeks, then fly back to Sydney for a week, then go back on the road. “It’s not really that hard to be back and forth,” he says, shrugging away my horror at the jet lag.

“It’s either that or I don’t tour this year. It’s what I do.” It must have been awkward for him all this time wanting to crack the world outside the US, and there he is suddenly propelled into the spotlight and at the same time eclipsed by his wife. It took his fame to a new level, being bathed in the constant paparazzo glow. “It was an awakening! Nothing prepares you for that. But when you meet somebody and you fall in love, then you do what it takes to stay together.”

They met at a gala dinner in January 2005. Was it love at first sight? “Well, there was something, a good connection. Something indefinable. There was a familiarity to her, of course, but it had nothing to do with who she is professionally.” He hadn’t seen all of her movies and he reckons that’s a good thing: he didn’t fall in love with the image but the woman. “You know, it was a different kind of familiarity, a mystic familiarity.” And how has this love, this marriage, changed you? “Oh God, in every way. I am more selfless and I am learning so much about myself from loving her. I am more comfortable with who I am because at the core I’m happy. It’s a beautiful journey,” he says. I wonder about this beautiful journey. It can’t have been an entirely smooth one when, a few months into the marriage, there was the need for rehab? “I think that pain can knit you together more than joy,” he says.

He is the type of man who loves women and needs women, even though in the past he may have been unsure about how to commit to them. He’s an introvert using the stage to be an extrovert. He was born in New Zealand, the North Island, but moved to Australia when he was two, first to Brisbane, right in the city centre, then they moved out to the country. “From when I was 10, we had a bit of acreage.

My dad wanted a self-sufficient farm, so we had chickens and a cow to milk in the mornings. It was hard because we were suburban kids and suddenly we were three miles from the nearest town. I felt isolated. I used to complain. But when my dad moved us back into town we wished we were back in that farm again." Ten years old is an interesting age for this to be happening, a formative one, and it's no wonder it propelled him into a life where he veered between extremes and a life on the road, always looking for something. Being a boy growing up miles from the nearest town meant that he had a limited social life. "Yes, you get very resourceful and imaginative. In the afternoon, all I wanted to do was get at my dad's drum kit.

I used to play Electric Light Orchestra all the time. I've no idea why." He bursts into a few jaunty lines of Mr Blue Sky and Telephone Line. Why did you decide that Nashville was the best place for songwriting when you were 23 and had no background in country music" "If somebody asks me what's the craziest thing I've ever done, I would say going to Nashville. I suppose it was crazy to think that would work – but then it didn’t enter my mind that it wouldn’t. “The path I took was to meet songwriters. The plan was for me to co-write and make myself better musically. For the first few years I did nine-to-five songwriting. You show up, you meet a songwriter you’re going to work with for the day, usually in a windowless room, and see what happens. And sometimes nothing happened. Most of the time a pretty average song, and sometimes a really great song. I learnt through everybody I wrote with. Ultimately, I’m glad I did it, but it was painful. There’s some mornings I’d drive to work and I’d be crying, I hate this, really crying, because I was miserable. I didn’t feel like a songwriter… I still don’t consider myself a songwriter, if that makes any sense at all.” No, it doesn’t make sense. It means you must have some serious self-esteem issues going on. He’s won Grammys for his songs and has a string of platinum-selling albums. He laughs. “No, I think I’m always striving for a little bit more, to write better lyrics.”

His lyrics are very direct and from the heart, and he wishes they were cleverer and more multi-layered.

In Nashville he also learnt to be lonely. “Nobody has any shared memories with me in Nashville. The hard part was I had to keep going backwards and forwards. Either my visa or my money ran out. I thought that I could go back and pick up where I left off, but that never happened. It was ‘Go to the back of the queue’ – and it was a very long line.” That must have been very difficult for keeping friendships going too. And what about relationships? If you constantly never knew when you were coming back, how did you keep them on track? “I think I always purposely kept people at a distance because I was on some sort of mission. I never wanted to be vulnerable, to be intimate, to forge relationships. I always seemed to be moving. Even when I was a kid, I went to lots of different schools. Six different schools in seven years and I got used to leaving.” That must have been a strange and confusing pattern for a lonely boy who really would have liked stability and support, but only knew how to leave. “Yes, early on I didn’t have relationships.

I met somebody in 1994 in Nashville who I ended up with for a few years because really my comfort is to have a partner.” Trouble is, he was not good at having partners. “The other day somebody said to me I never had relationships before this, I just used to take hostages.” I wonder if it was Elton John who said that to him – it’s one of his lines. Urban and Elton are quite close; his songs seem influenced by him. And Elton had asked to play piano on one of the tracks. Urban thought about it but wanted to keep the piano-playing to himself and share the empathy of the hostage-taking. “I feel that this is the first relationship that I’ve ever been in. It’s not anybody else’s fault but mine. I’ve not committed myself in a relationship,” he says, his eyes all shiny with newness and rediscovery. If only it were that simple. I’m sure there are other people who have been in relationships with Keith who felt he was supposed to be in a relationship with them. Amanda Wyatt claimed to have been dating him on and off for a year and that she was still seeing him until a month before his marriage. And then everything got cut off. Was she real? “Yeah, but I don’t want to get into it. It’s all crazy.” You mean her story was made up, exaggerated? “Absolutely. Very much so.” Do you feel bad that she sold her story? “Oh, you know, everyone’s got their own journey. Their own paths. I don’t even care to discuss it.” He looks right at me with hope in his eyes, a hope that the intense and difficult questions can dissolve and we can be easy again.

So, you and Nicole, this is your first relationship? He chuckles with relief. At 39 were you shocked to suddenly find yourself willing to go there? “No, because I’ve always been willing, just scared, and I feel like I’ve finally found the right person. And then I came to the realisation that I was not the right person. I needed to be the right person or I was destined to be on that wretched path for the rest of my life. Circling around, not being willing to be open and honest with somebody, so I had to get all my demons out of my closet to be honest with somebody. That’s when everything turned around.”

Did you decide to check into rehab in an epiphany moment, or was it a gradual process? “Yes, it was a process, not an event. You could say that I had a moment of divine intervention because I never had that feeling of surrender in quite that way before.”

Urban is fond of a bit of mystic explanation, although he says that the treatment wasn’t particularly different from his first rehab. It didn’t work before. “Because I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t in the right place in my life or with the right person. The stars weren’t aligned. It happened directly after my marriage. It came along with facing up to things about being a better person. You can’t expect to be in the kind of relationship that I was looking for if I wasn’t willing to be the person I can be.” It’s one of those intense looks where he seems to conjure again something mystic. He says: “I have found joy at having gone through grief that I would never have known without it.”

Do you not worry that addiction is about repeating the same patterns? About having the same relationship over and over again?

“I think it’s a struggle, a nightmare when our ego gets in the way, when that little man starts getting behind the world. He’s quiet now, he’s sleeping, but far be it for me to think that he’s ever gone.”

He laughs that wary little laugh. What things might wake him up? “Interviews.” What do you fear? “The next question.” And he carries on: “I’m a lot less fearful than I used to be. I used to be afraid of everything – criticism, rejection, failure. I never read any of the press I used to read when I was younger. That’s a good start. Don’t believe the good, don’t believe the bad. I try not to obsess, not carry anything with me. It’s like anger. Anger is just the way it is. But resentment, to carry it around, is unnecessary.”

Despite his intensity he’s resolutely easy, and he tells me that he’s happy at the moment. “I’ve had a good long run of being at home, particularly in Sydney with my wife. We have breakfast in the morning, then she’s been working and we’ll have dinner in the evening. It’s just nice to be there. It’s a beautiful place and it’s nice not being beholden to a schedule.”

Does she cook? “A little bit, yes. But I like being supportive and I’ve had a good chance to be that. It makes me happy. Having that contentedness now at home means that I actually love being home.”

I imagine that he’s happier with himself because he doesn’t have to beat himself up for his bad behaviour. He’s the kind of man who I imagine used to punish himself and others more when he used to disappoint. Contentedness, though, reminds me of the use of the word “peaceful” I’d found so irksome in the pre-rehab interview. I ask him, what kind of peaceful was that? “I don’t know. It’s relative. Bits of me were peaceful. I had everything pretty much in place to be balanced, but I was definitely leaning on my work and other things that I didn’t need to be leaning on. That’s what got taken out from under me. It was a good thing that happened.” He smiles, and you notice his perfectly shaped lips are full but not pouty, more smiley than sulky.

Does he regret doing Playgirl naked except for a guitar? “I wasn’t embarrassed at the time, but obviously, in hindsight, no pun intended, I wish I hadn’t done it.”

While we’ve whiled away the afternoon, his band and his crew need him for the sound check. A fan has delivered a cheesecake with a hand-painted image of Urban flying, angel-like, with his guitar.

I don’t suppose he eats carbs. The sound check is soulful. The songs range from sweet-nostalgic to upbeat-jubilant. They are well-crafted songs, and although a few Germans in cowboy hats turn up later, he can’t be defined as just a country artist. But those sensibilities that are very country, of the heart being poured out onto a record sleeve, are very evident. He sits in the dark by a window with a sliver of light for a portrait mocking this apparent metaphor. On one wrist there’s a tattoo that spikes out like barbed wire. “It has my wife’s initials in it. It was actually from another relationship where we had matching tattoos. We didn’t need that any more, so I had it altered.”

On his upper arm in swirly writing set inside a fanfare is the name Nicole. It’s written there, banishing all past pain and other relationships, the only woman’s name etched on his skin. Down the other arm is the tattoo of a thunderbird. “It’s the symbol of happiness. It’s supposed to bring it… Took a while to kick in, though.” Happiness is never – not even for Urban – easy.

Keith Urban’s new single, I Told You So, is out on July 16

Explore Music

• Proms

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• The top 10 fan versus band scuffles
• Mamma Mia! The first review
• Times critics' 20 best films for kids