Singer Keith Urban will mark 15 years of sobriety next month but said that his own addiction struggles don’t mean he has a “negative opinion” about alcohol and would hate to think his audiences don’t feel they can party at his shows.

Urban told Australia’s Rolling Stone magazine: “I don’t want people at my concert looking at the stage and thinking about sobriety. That would be the death of a gig for me.

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“The reason I don’t really talk much about sobriety is it’s a very personal thing and I don’t want anyone thinking that I have a negative opinion of drugs or alcohol. I don’t have any at all, none. I want people to come to my concert and do whatever the hell they want to do.”

The 53-year-old singer, who has two daughters with wife Nicole Kidman, said it took him a long time to “recognise” he had a problem with alcohol because he didn’t feel his dependency on alcohol was the same as his late father Robert’s addiction, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

He said: “It took me a long time to get sober. Took me a long time to recognise my alcoholism.

“A long time because I didn’t drink like my dad, so I compared everything to him. So it just took a long time for me. But I was able to finally make the right choice in my life, that I wish my dad would have made.”