“It gets disappointing when the British lose their sense of humour with my stuff. “I mean, the whole Sven the Viking issue was… I was in this very serious conversation with this woman about compartmentalising different parts of yourself to survive a violent attack. It was a very heavy conversation. And I said, the child in you is the one who gets violated the most in any violent attack. You kill your child first. You have to, to survive the situation. The child is gone, and the hooker in you survives. That’s what kept me alive. If the little girl had been operating I would have been dead by now, and I have no doubt of that, because I was dealing with a maniac who wanted to cut women up. Put the sex aside for a minute — this is about hatred. So, my prostitute got me out of it — that side of me that understood what the energy this guy was feeding off was. Just keep him from going crazy. A little girl screaming and crying would have got me killed, so I got rid of her.

And bringing her back has taken a lot of work — not to be a bitter tough broad, but to allow yourself to be vulnerable again. How do you do that? Well, that’s where the different personalities come in… the strong side of myself… whether I call it the prostitute or Sven the Viking. The little child is the one who’s so much a part of the writing of the songs, she’s the core, you know, the honesty and the openness. So I said to this interviewer: the part of me that’s Sven the Viking — if anyone tries to hurt the little child — he’s going to rip their balls off… “