LENNY KRAVITZ: Justifying his lack of love

There are dry patches,there are droughts, and then there are deserts – and it seems that Lenny Kravitz is living through his own personal Gobi. For the singer, 43, admitted this week that he has not had sex for three years. He made the confession while promoting his new album, It Is Time For A Love Revolution, saying that he will not break his vow of abstinence until he has wed “the perfect woman”.

The soft-rocker told Maxim magazine: “It’s just a promise I made until I get married. Where I’m at in life, the women have got to come with something else, not just the body, but the mind and spirit. It usually trips them out, but that’s the way it’s going to be. I’m looking at the big picture.”

A quick flick through Kravitz’s little black book of ex-girlfriends reveals Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Vanessa Paradis and Nicole Kidman, along with his former wife Lisa Bonet, The Cosby Show actress and the mother of Kravitz’s daughter Zoë, 19. The details for Naomi Campbell, Penélope Cruz and Natalie Imbruglia are also thought to be in there. Impressive. But then, this is a man whose dressing-room was kitted out with a four-poster bed and a fridge full of chocolates. His big hit from 1993, Are You Gonna Go My Way, has roused even the Clintons, with Bill recently using it on campaign rallies in support of Hillary.

Kravitz has always been surrounded by stars. His father, a Russian Jew, was the NBC News producer Sy Kravitz; his mother was the Bahamian actress Roxie Roker, who starred in the US sitcom The Jeffersons. The family lived first in New York, where musicians such as Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie and the writer Toni Morrison would pop round for dinner. “I even sat on Duke Ellington’s lap while he played piano,” Kravitz has said. “And once on my birthday he performed Happy Birthday for me.”

Things changed when the family moved to Los Angeles, where he attended the home of junior celebrities, Beverly Hills High, and his edgy East Coast life was replaced by moneyed fakeness that the young Kravitz didn’t like it at all. Yet his rather bland coffee-table take on rock music, plus his frequent posturings on New Age spirituality, seem Californian in the extreme.

In 1990 he wrote Justify My Love, a hit for Madonna (although a former girlfriend, Ingrid Chavez, successfully sued him after pointing out that she had written more of it than Kravitz had acknowledged). His own big hits, from 1989 to the present, include It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over and Fly Away (the latter hit No 1 in the UK after featuring in a car advert). His new single, I’ll Be Waiting, has the line: “As long as I’m living/ I’ll be waiting/ As long as I’m breathing/ I’ll be there.”

The man is clearly in it for the long haul.

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