'Cherie Blair Inspired Me to Keep Singing,' Says Carla Bruni

Carla Bruni today said Cherie Blair had inspired her to keep singing after marrying the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Bruni's promotion for her new pop album, Comme si de rien n'?tait (As IfNothing Had Happened), went into overdrive today when she offered twohours' free listening time on her website. The mix of love songs, lamentsfor lost youth and metaphors about antelopes has been mostly well-received in France although Le Monde today said the album was short on emotion.

Her record label is still waiting to see how the public responds to the breathy love songs, which inevitably conjure up the image of the president with lyrics such as "I want your laugh in my mouth" or her likening of her lover to an addiction stronger than Afghan heroin.

Today she said the love song You are my Junk was not a plea for the legalization of cannabis: she was totally against drug use although unfortunately addicted to cigarettes.

The former model invited French state radio into her Paris mansion which she said once housed a presumed killer of Rasputin, and where Sarkozy prefers living to the Elys?e.

In her living room, dominated by a bust of her mother, a statue of the writer Alexandre Dumas and grand piano, she said she was an independent woman and Cherie Blair had encouraged her not to give up her pop career.

"Tony Blair's wife, who continued to work as a lawyer through her husband's entire leadership, told me that it was also frowned upon when she kept working, but that she worked every day and it was fundamental for her to keep her profession. And they needed it, they had lots of children."

Bruni also announced she had taken her husband's nationality and was no longer Italian.

Bruni confirmed the album's proceeds would go to charity, saying her first single from it, L'Amoreuse (The Woman in Love), was finished when she fell in love with the president. In it she sings about being so happy in love she feels she can fly and wants to eat the sky.

In a poll last week, 55% of French people said they felt Sarkozy used Bruni to boost his own image. Today she said she had "no political role" and was still a woman of the left.

She is known to have demanded the lights were dimmed to make an Elys?e dinner in honour of Shimon Peres more cosy. She had also wanted her husband to quote Nietzsche more often, but failed.

Recently she described how her husband had once calmly explained to her how to handle a bolting horse and that she recommended he use the same gentle, instructive tone when addressing the nation.

She denied that she was pregnant, but said she would love to have another child.