Well, I am delighted to be able to report that AskMen.com got it right when it said "even in her 40s Belinda exudes sexual power" and "looks better than ever". Despite the fact that its use of the word "even" stupidly implies a woman in her 40s shouldn't exude sexual power! Either way, when I read that quote for Carlisle as she sits in her room at Dublin's Fitzwilliam Hotel she murmurs "that's really nice" as though I'd tripped a switch that sent her sliding into some kind ofJacuzzi for the mind.

Then again, maybe I had. At least in the sense that Belinda is of the opinion that women become "invisible" in America after the age of 35. Not only that. Like too many women, and men, she has often felt "oppressed by the figures of beauty", to quote Leonard Cohen - particularly the kind of pencil-slim creatures that catwalk their way along the streets of LA, where Carlisle lived until the late Eighties. In fact, she now admits that part of the appeal of cocaine, her drug of choice for 30 years, is "you may look like you are a million years old but it keeps you thin!"

However, Carlisle, who now lives in France, has been what she herself describes as "sober" now for two years and perhaps it is no coincidence that during this period she recorded her first album in a decade - and her best ever - Voila, a collection of chansons. But before I ask her about a Gaeilgeoir - Hothouse Flowers guitarist Fiachna O Braonain, who also plays guitar on this CD and sings a la Serge Gainsbourg on Bonnie and Clyde - being described as its 'French Vocal Couch' let's hear about Belinda's shadowed childhood in California where she was born in 1958. "I'm the eldest of seven and we were lower middle class - we struggled," she muses. "My real dad left when I was five, my mother remarried and my stepfather raised us but was an alcoholic, and he'd be the first to say it."

Why did Belinda's dad leave, and did she ever track him down?

"I've heard different stories from different sides about why he left, but this becomes a bizarre story in that he could have found me, but didn't up to the time of the Go-Gos. Yet, it was hard for me, as my life had moved on and he felt like a stranger. Then we had a big falling-out because he's all fire-and-brimstone and didn't understand why I couldn't immediately love him and let him into my life. So he went off and we met again a few years ago, and then it just didn't work out."

Did Belinda get on with her stepfather? "No and my parents were very strict with me because I was a nightmare teenager. I was given too much responsibility for someone so young so I became the black sheep. Though a lot of this, I think, has to do with the friends you pick - and I picked the baddest girls in school, the Chicanos. That was my crowd at 14, 15. Then I hung out with Mormon kids who were more bad! But 'bad' then wasn't like now, it was more a case of smoking cigarettes and drinking apple wine!"

Maybe but this was great ground training for a neophyte punk. And that is what Belinda graduated into after moving to Los Angeles, rather than use the athletics scholarship she'd won for Brigham Young University.

"So many of the Mormon girls did go to BYU, but I'm glad I didn't because they became so Mormon-like!" she says mischievously. "But even at High School I was into music. I never liked the Doobie Brothers or Eagles but found the alternative in Art class: Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground. And I loved the Sex Pistols. But I moved to LA before punk, with a girlfriend who was a bass player in the Germs, and I met their lead singer Darby Crash when we were waiting at the Beverly Hilton to get Freddie Mercury's autograph! That's how the Germs were formed!

"But I was the 'Germ' that never played because I got mononucleosis, 'the kissing disease'. It was a big, teenage epidemic at the time, the teenage curse and it can turn into hepatitis. So, I got very ill and after that ended up doing props for the Germs. Later, I did sing with Black Randy and his Metrosquad then came the Go-Gos. But the LA punk scene was only 70 people and everybody was in a band! So, we as friends, just formed the Go-Gos one day sitting on a kerb in Venice, California, and I played drums at first then became lead singer. But we had no great plan. We just wanted to have a good time, drink beer, take acid, play music.

"Sure we'd say, 'We're going to be rich, famous' but that meant selling 10,000 albums and being famous on the LA punk scene."

Yet, that's not how things turned out for the Go-Gos who proceeded to sell millions of singles and albums worldwide, and still sometimes reunite. But even though one biographer claims that certainly at the start "drugs and sex were the order of the day for the Go-Gos", Carlisle - who recently said most Go-Go groupies were female! - insists "sex wasn't as much a factor" as drugs.

"Everybody does say it was sex, sex, sex but, honestly, we all had boyfriends, though before the Go-Gos we'd all had that, lots!" she says, self-consciously. "But in the Go-Gos we all were pretty true to our boyfriends. Yet, there was a lot of drugs involved. Then again, at the time, particularly in LA there was no stigma involved in using cocaine, it was freely available - although heroin was always seen as dark. But I wasn't the one who got into heroin. Yet around the third album, for me, the drug thing was really serious and in the end we were all burned out, from everything.

"My lowest point was after I met my husband (Morgan Mason, one time "special assistant to Ronald Reagan and executive producer of Sex, Lies and Videotape and now retired" ) in 1985. I was hiding my addiction from him. But not for long because he caught on and busted me. It (my drug 'It was recreational in front of him but when he was sleeping, I'd be up all night, well, because I liked my cocaine!'use) was recreational in front of him but when he was sleeping, I'd be up all night, well, because I liked my cocaine!

"But it wasn't that he gave me an ultimatum. I myself knew I couldn't go on like that. Most people who are addicts or alcoholics know, deep down inside themselves, when they have reached the end of their tether and they either decide to look at that or they don't. And I was sick and tired of being sick and tired so I stopped for a while."

Even so, Belinda continued to "dabble" until 2005 and when she uses the word,"sober" it does relate to both her use of drugs and drink. "And this brings us back to those issues about my father because stopping drugs and drink means digging deep, trying to find out what made you indulge in the first place," she says. "But I didn't do the work I needed on this until the past couple of years. And coke is a horrible drug, the most disgusting drug you can use. I can say that because drugs and alcohol were a big part - and by that, I mean every day - of my life for 30 years. I thought it was manageable but, at a certain point, no matter how much you think you are in control, you aren't, and that's the point I reached."

But despite her addictions, Carlisle, after the Go-Gos split, did have six hit records, appeared in flicks such as She's Having A Baby, had her own child and sustained a marriage!

"Yes, I have been married for 21 years and my boy is almost 15, but, honestly, I don't know how I held it all together," she muses. "I was blessed to have a husband who stood by me. I'm also incredibly lucky the demons didn't get me completely. But my bottom, emotionally and spiritually, was a lot lower than people know. Yet making those movies was a strange time for me because I came from the Go-Gos and, unfortunately, the press always related weight to what I was doing. I was always a 'cute', 'chubby', 'pleasant', 'pretty', 'plump' songstress - and that's part of the reason cocaine was great in the beginning because you don't eat! You look like you are a million years old but are skinny!

"Now I couldn't care less about living up to some 'svelte' image of myself as a woman, and it would really be sad if at my age I was concerned with that. I probably stopped worrying about it when I did the Heaven On Earth and Runaway Horses albums and moved out of LA in the late Eighties. I felt I'd become a video vixen and too much emphasis was put on my appearance, even though I know I'm photogenic. It was hard for me, because you think you have to be perfect, live up to that video image."

That said, back in 2001, at the age of 42, Carlisle posed nude for Playboy . So, apart from the fee reportedly being lucrative was this also a punk-like reaction against stereotypical concepts of female beauty?

"I had been approached by Playboy over the years and realised I'd need more than the reason of just taking the money," she responds. "So finally I said I'd only do it if I could be in character as a Fifties pin-up - I couldn't do it as myself. And yes, I did think if it was done right, it could send a message "You don't have to be 20 and blonde and a stereotypical Playboy model with a stick-figure and big plastic boobs to be as sexual as I was."

But isn't pushing this concept beyond a woman's forties similar to the kind of liberating message the likes of Catherine Deneuve, for example, are currently projecting by posing nude or otherwise, in France?

"Absolutely, but I think the French are almost unique in that way, and Italians," Belinda suggests. "Whereas in America, as a woman, you are invisible after the age of 35, particularly sexually. And pop music is youth-oriented so I'm lucky I've been doing it 30 years! But - and happily this has nothing to do with my age - at some point I decided I'd love to make an album of French pop, and knew I could do it because my French is good!"

So, Carlisle didn't need Fiachna O Braonain after all!

"No, I did because there is a difference between speaking good French and singing it!" she responds "But how Voila got started was that David James, who manages John Reynolds (producer of Sinead O'Connor's album The Lion and the Cobra and father of her son Jake) said, 'I'll put you together with John.' Then I met him, we got on great, and he really has helped me realise my dream."

Which is? An album of songs that includes La Vie en Rose, Ne Me Quitte Pas, Pourtant Tu M'aimes, and my particular favourite, Avec Le Temps. "It's my favourite track too!" Belinda, responds delightedly. "I love all those tragic and romantic love songs even though we weren't supposed to be romantic during the punk era, right? But I always was, and always loved romantic songs by the likes of the Supremes, Linda Ronstadt, and the Beach Boys. But when it came to Voila we always were aware of taking songs that were iconic and making them more contemporary.

"And Ne Me Quitte Pas probably was the hardest song to do in that sense, in terms of keeping the integrity of the original and making it sound contemporary. And, to tell you the truth, singing that song was a bitch! Because it is so much about restraint and restraint isn't something I've done before!"

Even in life! "Right!" she says, laughing. So, in the end, as Belinda Carlisle approaches 50, "sober" and at an artistic peak, one could suggest that she is currently operating at an optimum level in every way.

"Yeah, but I think 50 is going to be weird!" she responds. "Forty was, because it was a big passage - particularly as a woman because you tend to look at your life, where you've been, where you're going, what love is about and you can be melancholic. But also at 40, I was dropped by my record company so I was faced with: 'If I am not what I do, then who am I?"

But didn't 'I am the wife of my husband and mother of my son' come as even part of the immediate answer to that question?

"It did, and I knew that on the surface but still, underneath, remained the question of who I was," she says. "So in this sense 50, I hope, will be a little easier than 40 was. Because up until my 40s my life was all about releasing an album, touring and trying to get the balance right between my career and my family life.

"In that sense, I must admit I have regrets. With my son I missed out on a lot and wish I hadn't. As a kid, he used to think I lived at the airport! But now he and I are very close and I make up for lost time in different ways, such as we always go on mother and son trips together. Yet yes, I think I am at the best possible point in my life. I didn't think anyone was going to hear this album so all the amazing reviews and people coming to talk to me about it, are like a bunch of pleasant surprises! So, overall, my family life is great and so is my career! Knock on wood (Belinda raps tabletop) is great. Yet it hasn't been easy for me but, ultimately, I am a strong person and a survivor."