You’ve been honest about your past promiscuity. How will you marry that with raising a daughter?
Well, how I’m seeing it, I did sleep with lots of people, but it felt culturally like it was all right. My sexuality is quite a gentle thing. It’s always been more about longing than dominating – I’ve never believed women are inferior. I was famous and people wanted to have sex with me, and when I was young I felt inadequate and ashamed of my body and I couldn’t really believe what was happening. But I never wanted to go, ‘I’m better than you’ to women. I wanted to be like, ‘Oh my God, you’re amazing, and I can’t believe that I’m allowed to do this.’ So it doesn’t feel at odds with it. The reason I’m not like it now is because one, I’m in a committed monogamous relationship and two, because I’m an addict and I was doing those things to feel better. And three, I now retrospectively recognise that a number of the people I was having sex with were doing it because of their own problems – for their own sense of inadequacy – and I was therefore participating in their problems.

So how will you educate  Mabel about all of that? 
I won’t be like: don’t go out with anyone like I was, because that’s very reductive, [although it’s] easier because it saves time. But this  is my prayer – that I bring up someone who is aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Like are you eating that because you’re hungry or because you’re sad? Are you having sex with those people because it feels brilliant or because it makes you feel validated? What I’m planning to do, if my wife allows it, is to speak openly about that from the get go. When my girlfriend – er, wife – was pregnant, I said, “I might straight away go there’s no such thing as Father Christmas.” And my girlfriend cried, and I was like, “Why?” Because you’re teaching her there’s some sort of benevolent spirit; you’re training them to be a consumer...

But sometimes it’s nice to be held in disbelief…

 I know, I don’t think I’m going to win the argument.

Do you think the reaction to your sexual admissions would have been the same had you been a woman? 
I would have been condemned as a slut, and I am aware  of that and that’s wrong.  If you’re asking me are  women judged by  a different standard,  then of course  they are.

You say in Recovery about identifying your mum’s illness and your feelings toward her as a behavioural trigger. How has your relationship evolved? 
In some surprising ways, I guess, because I have a particular dynamic with my mum. I’m an only child, she’s a single mum, and I’m  a boy. If you’re going to get a bit Freudian about it, the fact I didn’t have committed relationships and slept with lots of people I didn’t know well was probably connected to the fact that I had a very intimate and encompassing relationship with my mother, so the way that my relationship has evolved is that she now has a relationship with me, her granddaughter and her daughter-in-law. It’s calmer. I felt responsible – for her having cancer, for her being alone, for her financially – and probably from quite a young age. And that’s not right. Now being a parent, I watch myself when I go, “Give us a kiss” and stuff like that, because I recognise she [Mabel] doesn’t owe me anything, but I owe everything. But I cross that because she’s such a darling thing, so I want her to kiss me and cuddle me and she smashes me in the face, reminding me what the relationship actually is.

Russell Brand speaks candidly on fatherhood, recovery and his promiscuous past