Michael Flatley’s feet used to move so fast, they tapped 35 times a second and required a €28 million insurance policy on his legs. He hasn’t danced for nearly 10 years – not even in his own quiet way any more, he says – but the “feet of flames” that bewitched 60 million over more than four decades must now be in one hell of a state.

We are sitting at a table in the emptied breakfastroom of the InterContinental hotel in Dublin when Flatley whips his right foot out on to the seat beside me: size eight, small and sockless in unflashy black sneakers.

If my feet had put me on the Sunday Times Rich List, I say, I’d dress them in silk socks and stroke them each night to thank them. “Well, listen,” he says. “I don’t really give any of that any thought. To be honest, I don’t think much about me.”

Self-effacement is not what Michael Flatley is known for; at least, it’s not what the swagger of his stage persona suggests. Truth is, he says, “I don’t even look at myself. I don’t give that 10 seconds of my time ... I get up to the mirror, brush my teeth, say ‘Oh dear’ – and gone.”

It was in 1994 that Flatley leapt into the public eye in Riverdance, a seven-minute extravaganza during the interval of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Dublin. He kicked and clicked his feet to throbbing drums, satin shirt billowing over his bronze chest, arms flung wide.

Even his bouffant hair seemed to rewrite all the rules of Irish dancing. Each show he created afterwards – from Lord of the Dance and Feet of Flames to Celtic Tiger – delivered more taps for your bucks. And at 67, Flatley still seems to hear the drumbeat, always thinking, “What’s next?” he says, looking around the breakfastroom. “What’s next?”

He says he’s let his “gloves down a bit”, but he looks dapper in a navy jacket, silken collar upstanding, and “a bit of warpaint” that his wife, Niamh, has put on him. (She was in the chorus line of that first Riverdance, and was subsequently his leading lady.)

We meet the day after Flatley launches the 30th anniversary tour of Lord of the Dance.