Shaggy believes the military prepared him to be a pop star.

The 'It Wasn't Me' hitmaker spent four years in the Marines before embarking on his music career and claims the tough training was perfect preparation for his hectic career because it taught him how to be alert after having hardly any sleep.

He explained: ''I go to bed late and get up early. In this game, to win it, you have to do that. I flew in last night and I could have had a club appearance at 2am and be on your show in the morning - I could have done that. And I would have been on time. The military prepared me to do that because you go to bed late and get up early, and I did that for four years.''

The 46-year-old star has recently returned to music following a decade-long absence and explained his time out was a result of ''management issues and some label issues'' which meant he was robbed of his ''creative freedom''.

Speaking on ITV's 'This Morning' he said: ''It wasn't the change in the music world that really bothered me, I had some management issues and some label issues ... and people go through different things in their career and things weren't working out on the management side and things weren't working out on the label side either after those massive hits.

''Funny enough you have to be careful for what you wish for because you want really big hits, but when you get really big hits, and your label is making a hundred and fifty million dollars, there are people that are now interested in what you do, and now they will tell you what to do, so you become important. So your creative freedom, you're not going to have that again and there's a lot of egos and things flying so after a while it wasn't working.''