ople clamoring to release it. But that was just fine as far as Carlisle was concerned; she couldn't have cared less."It had been 10 years since my last album and I really had no desire to do another one," she says.
"I mean, in rock music terms I'm like a dinosaur. Then I met a potential manager three years ago who asked me if I had anything I wanted to do, and this idea just popped out of my mouth. I just thought it would be great to do something that was completely different to anything I'd done before and which had no commercial pressures attached. If people bought it, great, if they didn't, well " she throws up her hands and makes a face.
"Frankly, the fact that anyone has taken an interest astonishes me; I assumed it would be this little CD I'd sell at the gigs that I still do occasionally."
Considering the life that she's led, Carlisle ought, she says, to "look like I'm a million years old." In fact, she has scarcely changed since she was at the height of her fame in the late 1980s. Her cheekbones still look as if you could slice bacon on them, her nose is as tiny and button-like as always, her jaw as strong and jutting.
All that's different is her voice. What was once an excitable squawk now seems imbued with experience, full of plaintiveness and sensuality.
"That probably comes from too many cigarettes, too much wine and just a lot of life. The ridiculous thing is that I don't drink anymore, I don't smoke and I certainly don't do drugs. However, if you listen to me I think you can hear years of abuse in my voice - both bad abuse and good abuse."
What exactly does she mean by good abuse? "Well," she says, "some of it was a lot of fun, you know."
These days, Carlisle may be the secretary of her local branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, but she hasn't entirely cast off the trappings of a good-time girl, or of an old rock-chick. Her house smells of joss sticks, she's deeply into Buddhist chanting and is also a big fan of the works of the cosmic fruitcake David Icke. All this, though, is very tame stuff compared with the excesses of old.
By the time Belinda Kurczeski became Belinda Carlisle she had already gone through several other identities and had left a trail of devastation across the hills of southern California. She was born to a lower middle-class family in Hollywood, and her father walked out when she was five. Her mother married again, but Carlisle's step-father was an alcoholic and she ended up having to look after her six younger siblings.
"I was always the responsible one, always having to set an example to everyone else. I guess that responsibility must have proved too much for me because by the time I hit 14, I'd gone really wild. I ran away from home, smoked pot, dropped acid You name it, I'd try it."
First, she changed her name to Donna Rhea and sang backing vocals in various Los Angeles punk bands. Then she became Dotti Danger and played drums in a band called the Germs. "I had no musical training at all. I just got behind the drum kit and started beating the hell out of it."
When the Germs disintegrated, Dotti died with them. But by then Carlisle, as she'd now become, had decided that the rock music life was everything she ever wanted. Together with four girlfriends, she formed the Go-Go's.
Did she have any particular musical ambitions when she put the band together?
Carlisle looks at me as if I'm mad. "Ambitions? Our only ambition was to learn how to plug our guitars into our amplifiers. We really started from absolute zero and even by punk standards we were incredibly bad. People used to come just to laugh at us. I would look out into the audience and see people falling about in hysterics."
But then something wholly unexpected happened. Within three years the Go-Go's had become the most successful band in America, clocking up hits such as We Got the Beat and the often- covered Our Lips Are Sealed.
"I guess we had the last laugh," she says. "We worked incredibly hard, and what was really bizarre was that there turned out to be natural song-writing talent in the band." Among the songwriters was Carlisle herself, who penned the memorably titled Skidmarks on my Heart on their first album.
However, the band's main interest lay in proving that they could top anything their male counterparts did. Soon the house they all lived in had become known as Disgraceland and even grizzled rock veterans would shudder disapprovingly and quicken their step as they passed by.
"We used to get a kick out of making people feel really uncomfortable, especially men. Basically, our behavior was designed to horrify. You have to remember that girls behaving that badly were a real rarity at the time. We did everything male rockers did, and more - except for the sex, I have to say. We always wanted to have male groupies, but we scared them off.
"I remember thinking to myself: OK, I'm young and I'm a musician. People are going to have certain expectations of me. They're going to think I'm a flake, they're going to think I'm a drug addict and they're going to think I'm irresponsible - so I might as well become all those things."
Soon, with weary inevitability, things started to topple out of control. Three of the band's five members, including Carlisle, became full-blown junkies. Whenever they went on tour, drugs would be FedExed to where they were playing.
"I remember thinking that was so cool, at least to begin with. We'd just turn up in the dressing room and there would be all this cocaine, or whatever, just waiting there for us."
By the time she was 25, Carlisle says, "she had lived three lifetimes." She'd also been engaged five times. Was she ever tempted to marry any of her fiances?
"Never! I just liked the idea of being engaged." She lifts her chin and gives a slightly hysterical-sounding laugh. "I suppose that sounds crazy, doesn't it?"
The realization that she'd crossed the line between hedonism and self-destruction finally struck home when she was recording the band's third and final album in Reading.
"I was meant to be flying from LA to London and I missed five consecutive planes because I was stoned. That's when I knew everything was out of control. Looking back, I could easily have died. In many ways it amazes me that I didn't."
Having been in the vanguard of female substance abusers, Carlisle then became a pioneer therapy-seeker in late 1980s LA: At one time she was attending Overeaters Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous simultaneously.
"All at once, therapy became the chic thing to do. It was extraordinary the people you used to see there. In fact, even today I'll go to an AA meeting in LA and recognize somebody and go, `Hey, didn't I see you 20 years ago in suite 2160 of the Mayflower Hotel?"'
When the Go-Go's split up in 1985, Carlisle, by now svelte, sober and married to James Mason's son, Morgan, reinvented herself as a pop diva - or "video vixen," as she puts it - and went on to have a further string of hits such as Heaven is a Place on Earth, I Get Weak, Love Never Dies and (We Want) The Same Thing. Yet however successful she was, there's a sense that Carlisle never took anything that seriously, at least not to the extent of giving herself diva-like airs or basking in her own aura.
"I always knew that there was this person called Belinda Carlisle, but I was never quite sure who she was. When I was successful as a solo singer, I felt under a lot of pressure to look and behave a certain way. I must say I found that hard to handle - having to live up to people's expectations and always worrying if the next record was going to be as successful as the one before."
For several years the hits kept coming, but slowly they began to tail off. Then, two days after her 40th birthday, in 1998, Carlisle was told by her record company that they were dropping her.
"I can't pretend it wasn't painful," she says. "I felt pretty sore, too, given how much money I'd made them. But it forced me to look at myself and made me realize I wasn't simply what I did.
"Music was a part of my life, but there were a lot of other things there too" - marriage, motherhood (she and Mason have a teenage son, Duke) and archaeology (she likes to go on digs).
Aged 42, she posed naked for Playboy. "People still ask me if I regret doing it, and I tell them, `Look, I'm a former Miss August - there aren't that many people who can say that."' She also appeared on Gordon Ramsay's reality TV show Hell's Kitchen in 2004, a less happy experience.
"I hated it, not because of Gordon, but having the cameras on you 24 hours a day. I decided early on that I was probably being presented as a complete buffoon, so I just shut down. I was as incredibly boring as I could be so that I'd get voted off as soon as possible."
And then there are the band's reunions. The week after we met, they were appearing in Las Vegas - five middle-aged women bashing out their old punk hits on the Strip. "I must say it astonishes me that we are still performing together," she says.
"What's even more astonishing is that we're bigger than ever in the States."
Do they get on?
"I'd say we're close but extremely dysfunctional. There's a real tension whenever we're together, which is probably why we're so good on stage."
Carlisle moved to France in 1994. It's while we are sitting in her living- room, happily bathed in the glow of old drug tales, that I notice her budgerigar is no longer sitting on its perch. Now it's lying in the bottom of its cage with its feet sticking in the air. When I point this out, she starts to scream: a piercingly loud blast that makes the one- eyed pug dog scuttle off in alarm.
The vet is summoned, but it's too late. There's nothing to be done. Clearly upset - she rescued the budgie from the side of a road three years ago and hand-reared it - Carlisle none the less insists on carrying on with the interview. The vet turns out to be an old friend of hers, as is the local teacher and the local doctor.
Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis may live down the road, along with Adam Clayton of U2, but Carlisle tends to move in less starry circles.
"It's very weird actually - I go off to Las Vegas and all these people are going berserk. And then I come back to France and nobody has a clue who I am. But that's the way I prefer it. Here, if I see anyone staring at me, I just assume they're mad."
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
