One of the many surprising elements of interviewing Rihanna is that when she is finally ready to meet she sends her driver across Los Angeles to pick me up. Divine, I think. So classy! Though I should perhaps mention that when the tank-sized Cadillac arrives, its luxurious blacked-out interior thrillingly haunted by the vestiges of her sweet, earthy perfume, it is… Now, let me check my texts to make sure I’m getting this right. Yes. That’s it: 3:26am.

Classic Riri. It takes a certain sort of hutzpah, a certain level of shimmering enormity, to establish your own time zone. Yet the nine-time Grammy Award-winning, Super Bowl-slaying beauty billionaire and current Oscar nominee has done just that. As a charming driver called Myron waves hello and pulls us out on to the eerily empty streets of West Hollywood, gliding towards Beverly Hills in the dead of night, it is with an ease that suggests this is all very normal and time really is just a construct. In the run-up to a Riri rendezvous, minutes become hours, days become nights, Monday becomes Thursday, and soon reality loosens its grip and you sigh and think, Oh, well. Welcome to Planet Rihanna.

Also, let’s be fair. She and her partner A$AP Rocky are now parents of a nine-month-old. Who knows how the sleep schedule is going? Well… great, it turns out. Later, relieved, Rihanna will announce: “Oh, he sleeps through the night now.” Blessed news. And, I tease, are you sleeping through the night yet? She chuckles deliciously. “You know I don’t. Look at us right now. No, I’m up. I’m like, ‘OK, time to watch some Housewives.’ These are my hours.”

As befits a near-mythical creature, Rihanna lives atop a gleaming tower perched above Century City, ringed by guards, the queen of all she surveys, from the mountains to the ocean. At 4am, the apartment building’s lobby is pin-drop deserted as I tip-tap across the marble and make my way down to a plushly decked-out communal sitting room in the basement, by the residents’ screening room and a few dozen floors below where Fenty Jnr is sleeping soundly (and whom we mustn’t wake). Among the tower’s other notable residents at one time or another are Candy Spelling, chef Nobu Matsuhisa and former Friends star Matthew Perry, who are all presumably tucked up and unlikely to burst in on us. As the clock ticks, the ping of a distant elevator sounds and a few moments later she arrives.