By the time I finally pinned down Grace Jones for this interview, I had decided she was a rude has-been with an addiction to tardiness and a penchant for petty thievery.

I had heard she once kept an interviewer waiting for eight hours, but she kept me waiting for five days. On the first attempt, she held a crew of 12 at a photo studio for six hours, before sending word that she wasn’t in the mood to be snapped today. I turned up to find an unamused photographer, a weary stylist and a little chap called Filippo, from Bentley’s restaurant, whose job it was to handfeed her the oysters she had demanded we provide. “She no coming?” asked Filippo, dejected as a kicked puppy, as he sadly packed 85 top-notch molluscs back into his icebox.

Grace deigned to show up the following evening, whereupon, my sources tell me, she had a noisy on-set bust-up with Philip Treacy, then proceeded to make everyone work through the night, announcing, in her low boom: “I don’t do daytimes.” Kate, Style’s unflappable picture editor, told me she was “quite sweet, actually”, but this was before the studio called to accuse Style of stealing the orchids from reception. Predictably, the CCTV footage showed Grace, in grainy black-and-white at 4am, manhandling the flowers into her handbag on her way out the door. Classy.

After eternal wranglings, I finally secured a dinner date with this apparent nightmare near her home in Putney, southwest London. “Putney? Are you sure?” I had asked her PR. “I know, bizarre,” he had laughed. Bizarre indeed. At her local Italian on the riverfront, lousy with gilet-wearing bankers’ wives and Bugaboos, Grace suddenly arrives — an alien extraordinaire and self-confessed “black panther”. She is wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat, sunglasses (it’s night-time) and several challenging garments by Issey Miyake. She has a small, unlikely-looking entourage in tow — a tiny woman in an anorak and baseball cap, who tells me she is Ms Jones’s assistant, and Chris, her brother — who both shake my hand, then evaporate the second their parts in her grand entrance are over and done with. All of a sudden, it is just me and the black panther sat opposite one another. She is staring at me, unblinking — and something like fear grips my stomach.

“Would you mind if I ordered something to eat first? Some Pinot Grigio Santa Margherita? Some bellinis?” she begins softly. A waiter is summoned, and Grace launches into fluent Italian. Then, once the table is groaning with booze and seafood, she does something truly shocking. She apologises. “I’m so sorry about the other night,” she says, her accent a throaty car crash of Jamaican, American and Eurotrash. “Eat some calamari, drink some wine,” she soothes. “I know people are intimidated by me, but that’s just theatrics. I’m a fun person, I promise.”

You canny old broad, I marvel, as my considerable ire begins to lift. But then canny is Grace all over. This autumn, she has expertly masterminded the mother of all comebacks. Her first album in two decades, Hurricane, is released at the beginning of next month (it is blisteringly good), and next year promises a docu-film by Sophie Fiennes about Grace’s life and times. Whisper it, but Grace Jones is about to become relevant again. Her festival dates over the summer certainly left fans panting. “They were rocking. I was worried that the people were going to fall off the balconies at the Festival Hall,” she tells me. Were you nervous waiting to go on? She stares incredulously. “I’m never nervous. I yawn before a performance.”

Such diffidence exists because Grace has seen it all before. Reportedly 60 years old (“I’m younger, but if you want to know by how much, call the FBI”), she was born into a family of die-hard Pentecostal Christians in Spanish Town, Jamaica, in the late 1940s. Her parents soon relocated to Syracuse, in New York state, leaving the children to be raised by their grandmother and step-grandfather, a man so strict, he made Grace climb trees to pick the switches he would later beat her with. She joined her parents in America as a teen and planned on becoming a Spanish teacher — “Can you imagine?” she honks — before taking an acting class, catching the drama bug and decamping to New York City, baby.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Grace was it. Warhol’s muse, Schwarzenegger’s mate, supermodel, disco queen and Bond girl — not to mention a drunk, sexaholic gym maniac who starred in an ill-advised Playboy shoot with Dolph Lundgren, her body-builder boyfriend. Then, thump, it went quiet. Jones has materialised occasionally during the past 18 years — releasing novelty records or performing Pourquoi me réveiller with Pavarotti — but, by and large, she had been relegated to a kitschy footnote in the history of camp. Who even knew she was living in London? I call Treacy, who has been hanging out with her for several years. “Her name equals danger, but she’s really very sweet,” he says, laughing. What about that row on the shoot? “We do try to kill each other, but usually it’s over a hat. I can see why Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were obsessed with her. She’s one of the few true icons of fashion and music — a legend.”

“A legend is someone who has died,” Grace drawls when I tell her this. Back in the restaurant, the wine has taken hold and, diva antics aside, I must confess she has revealed herself as seriously good company. But has she always been so scary? “Oh, I’m sure I have, honey. I used to drag people up on stage, whip them and pretend to f*** them in the rear. You can’t get more intimidating than that. But I’m honest about it, so the men who go out with me know I’m going to be more macho than them. My husband used to shout at my mother, ‘What is wrong with your daughter? I’m married to a man.’ ” She throws back her head and roars with laughter. “I’m not like a normal woman, that’s for sure.”

Grace has always liked a shock tactic. In the late 1970s, she shared a flat in Paris with Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange, and remembers going to a party with various French ministers wearing nothing but a string of bones around her neck. “It was no big deal,” she shrugs. “Can’t do that now, though. You’d end up in jail.” When Grace was invited to Schwarzenegger’s wedding — he was her co-star in Conan the Destroyer — she was determined to make a play for one of the Kennedys, the family of the bride, Maria Shriver. Did she score? “They all wanted to sleep with me,” she says, but declines to confirm if she sealed the deal. London society was similarly stunned when Jones began stepping out with Ivor Guest, the 4th Viscount Wimborne, a couple of years back. Tatler ran a bitchy piece saying she was a terrible choice, as she was too old to produce an heir. It appears they are no longer together, though. Didn’t you want to be a viscountess? “I’d rather be queen.” Do you manage better without sex now you’re older? “No, I get cranky. It’s not in my blood to get bored with sex. When I don’t have one guy, I usually have six or 10 of them fluttering around.”

You used to claim you would never meet a man you couldn’t have. Is that still true? “It’s totally true, but I wouldn’t want most of them now,” Grace says flatly. “I’ve become more particular. I have gotten myself into hot water — gone for a really hot, good-looking guy, and he has turned out to be a psycho. Let me tell you, you don’t want to do that more than twice.” Pause. “I did it thrice. Ha-ha-ha.” Why keep going for dangerous men? “They go for me,” she replies wearily. “Then it always ends up that either I’m going to kill them in their sleep or they’re going to kill me.”

So, what type of man do you prefer? “I’m attracted to the artistic type,” she says, dead serious. Oh, please — what about Dolph? Or Atila Altaunbay, the 21-year-old Belgian bodyguard you married in the 1990s? “My husband was a wedding singer,” she protests. “He had a beautiful voice. But, like always, they turn, and you see the little demon coming out. He was cool for years, then — bang — he changed. Became very aggressive.” So you choose your men more carefully now? “Oh, no,” she says, shocked at the idea. “We’re still good friends, obviously.”

My jaw has hit the table by this point, but Grace is merrily sucking the eyes out of an enormous tiger prawn and ordering the first of the five rounds of flaming sambucas we will imbibe. The waiter gets the giggles. Apparently, she is always in here knocking them back. “Don’t tell on me,” she yells. “Sambuca is good for the breath. Tequila, though, is the devil in my life. I once drank so much on my birthday in Beverly Hills that Sven — who I was living with at the time, a best friend of Arnold’s — let me out of the car and drove off. I woke up under a stairwell in my Bulgari jewellery and Claude Montana fur with a bump on my head. For alcohol, it’s the best high. Although,” she continues pensively, “I did almost kill somebody in a tequila-drinking contest in Belgium. An ambulance had to come and get him. He was in hospital for three days.” How much had you drunk? “A bottle,” she grins. “I’m the tequila queen.”

It is no wonder she was a chat-show staple (remember her going for Russell Harty with her handbag?), but is the tough-talking, shot-downing, oddly dressed Jones more a creation of her alpha amours than her own woman? In the early 1980s, she had a child with her lover and collaborator Jean-Paul Goude, who recently told The New York Times: “I was more interested in the virtual character than the real woman. I still am.” “It’s true,” she shouts, throwing back another sambuca. “That’s why I left him. I was an object always. It wasn’t until we had our son that he realised I was a human being.”

Amid all the bluster, she concedes she can get lost in the performance of being Grace Jones — potty-mouthed cyberbitch, what a scream at parties — and that it has cost her. Apparently, she likes to curl up at home, watching TV and eating soul food — but this can be disappointing to the men in her life. “Jean-Paul is still angry with me in public, though we are close in private,” she says sadly, before insisting I save her number in my phone (under Black Panther) and requesting that I take her out on the town the following night (I don’t). Interviewees occasionally resort to faux buddy tactics to ensure a good write-up, and Grace has gone so far as to snog her previous inquisitors. It is a pose, however, and it implies nerves. Underneath that fabulous exoskeleton, there is a human heart that minds very much what you, me and Goude thinks of it.

Grace has found love, though. She dotes on her son, Paolo, 28, who lives in Paris and whose sports days and parent-teacher meetings she religiously attended, albeit in a series of Thierry Mugler jump suits. He is among the few who have been permitted to know the fried-chicken-eating, infomercial-watching mortal underneath the high-fashion hat. In fact, for all the sex she has had, it is telling that the only men whose affections Grace seems confident of are Paolo’s and Warhol’s — a man who carted around his own sack of myth-making neuroses. “All my memories of Andy are happy ones. The saddest part was the shock I felt when he died. I’m full of conspiracy theories.” You’re convinced there was something sinister about his death? “Absolutely. He came through the operation fine, and he had an all-night nurse — and I don’t want to rehash things, because of his family — but he called for somebody and nobody came. I think they purposefully ignored him. You don’t have somebody like that, with an all-night nurse, and he’s pushing the button and she’s not there. I don’t believe it was a natural death.”

She is upset, and thinks it is time for a cigarette, throwing a minor tiff when it dawns on her that we have to go outside for it. “It’s f***ing ridiculous. You eat dinner, then you have a f***ing cigarette. It’s f***ing civilised.” This gives rise to a more general complaint about the sorry state of pleasure-seeking in the Noughties. “A lot of people look back too much. My son’s friends sit there and tell me: ‘We’re so jealous of Studio 54,

we wish that was happening now.’ It was an amazing time, but people have to make their own parties. I keep telling people to get out there and party. Open some clubs! Personally, my best parties are wherever I am at the time.” Even when you were hanging with the toffs? “Sure. High society likes to have fun too. They just need someone to tell them it’s all right to take their shoes off, get naked, stick a joint in everyone’s mouth.” Still getting high, then? “You wanna get me arrested?”she chuckles. “I’m Jamaican. I always ask for a little spliff when I’m on stage. They used to throw them up to me, but not any more,” she sighs.

As we are pretty drunk by this point, I pluck up the courage to tell her I know that she stole the flowers from the shoot earlier in the week. “Oh, honey, they were fake anyway,” she says, “We did a lot of shooting, so I thought, why not? That’s the least I should get, right?” Sure, I find myself saying, beaten down by irrepressible, irresistible Grace. You can steal all the flowers you want.

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette