La Roux: 'Of course Lady Gaga's not my thing'
She's tough on Take That, lambasts the 'Ikea' mentality and thinks the media has gone soft. La Roux gives us a piece of her mind.
24 September 2009
It is morning, and 21-year-old Elly Jackson – or La Roux, arguably the biggest new pop star of the year – is on the Eurostar to Belgium, where she is heading to appear on a TV show. She is grateful for the coffee her press officer has bought her, but wonders if anything stronger is available. "Have you got my gak as well?" she laughs.
The hit singles and No 1 album have, evidently, not made her clam up for fear of adverse publicity. Within minutes of our meeting, she has dismissed Take That as "gaylords" and compared today's chart acts unfavourably with their 80s forebears.
"George Michael wrote Careless Whisper when he was 17," she says. "I didn't see Tinchy Stryder writing a song like that when he was 17, but he still gets the same praise." She blames a culture that shuns criticism for the drop in standards. "It's the media," she says. "Everything is 'amazing, brilliant'." Radio DJs, she contends, are "not allowed to slag anything off", and any negative opinions are kept private.
She says she doesn't want to "start a hate war" with anyone, but she does wish she could be more truthful about other artists. "I can't possibly like everything – how ridiculous is that?" she says, reasonably enough. But still people recoil when she speaks her mind. "They're like, 'Really, Lady Gaga's not your thing?' Have you listened to my album? Of course it's not my thing!"
She's aware that honesty comes at a price. "One woman thought I was being anti-feminist because I said I preferred girls with keyboards to girls with guitars," she says. "So she messaged me on MySpace to tell me she wasn't going to play my record any more even though it was her favourite. That's so dumb."
Aware that her outspokenness is proving increasingly polarising, Jackson draws a distinction between the artist and their art. "I'm still going to listen to Gary Glitter's records even though he's a kiddie-fiddler," she says. "Don't let his problems ruin your life. You're not buying their personality, you're buying their music. Of course it's never nice when you're into an artist and you discover they're horrible, and, yes, it would be disappointing if I suddenly found out that Annie Lennox was racist. But you'd still love the music. It wouldn't matter what I heard about Michael Jackson or Prince – you can't just stop liking a song."
Although the music on her debut album has more in common with the early-80s synthpop of Yazoo, Depeche Mode and Eurythmics, her heroes are Jackson and David Bowie, and her dream is to perform a duet with George Michael. "I love him," she says. "I want him to be my dad! Even the Land Rover incident last year just made him more endearing."
Dressed in a green felt trilby, white winkle pickers, drainpipe jeans, and a black-and-white jacket with shoulder pads, La Roux cuts a striking figure. She bemoans the new conservatism – what she calls "the Ikea mentality" – that has led to everyone wearing the same clothes from the same shops: Top Shop, M&S and American Apparel. "It's ****ing boring. No one wants to look different." With her notorious gravity-defying red hair – held in place this morning, she says, by "grease and dirt from not washing, lots of mousse, wax and thickening spray" – and equally colourful personality, she might have fitted in nicely in the era of Lennox, Boy George, Marilyn and Marc Almond. "No," she argues, "I would have faded into the background because I would have been too like everybody else."
She admits that, in honour of Duran Duran et al, she and recording partner Ben Langmaid have a "gak channel" in their studio, which they use to achieve that distinctly early-80s treble-heavy sound – the sound of "everyone being coked out of their brains". She reflects on her own treble-heavy sound. "My album is quite gakky – not because of anything being consumed but from a love of that sound." She adds: "There were absolutely no drugs taken in the making of La Roux's album," then pauses for comic effect. "Not while recording it, anyway."
She explains that Langmaid, who is considerably older and only collaborates with her in the studio, leaving the performance side of things to Jackson and her touring band, is "teetotal, and has been for 10 years. He's finished partying." He gets annoyed when she turns up to record bleary-eyed from the excesses of the night before. Not that she parties much any more – the attention she gets makes her uncomfortable. "I used to go to illegal warehouse raves for three days, but it's no fun going out now. Besides, I don't want to become like Peaches Geldof. I take my job really seriously."
She still lives at home with her mum (actress June Ackland from The Bill) and dad, in south London, but she's looking for her own place in the same area. "Move to Kensington?" she muses. "I'd rather live in a bin. I've got four really close old friends, I can walk to them all and to my sister's house. No one recognises me here – the Jamaican man at the newsagents isn't really my market. If I lived in Shoreditch I'd get recognised all the time."
Does she miss anonymity? "Of course, yes," she replies. "I have to watch what I say, even when I'm walking down the street, in case there's someone behind me who'll recognise me." Not that celebrity has really changed her – she's still candid to a fault. "That's the problem – I'm really open. ****ing hell, I tell randoms I meet in clubs really personal stuff. I'm like, should I do that?"
Paradoxically, there is a desire on La Roux's part to retain some privacy in this age when performers are, because of the glut of gossip magazines and social networking sites, permanently in the public eye. She yearns for that time when there was some distance between artist and audience and it was "all about the music, not Twitter and blogging and all that bollocks". She doesn't accept the view that "the only way to sell records is to be in Closer every week". It's this very over familiarity with artists that leads to such short-lived careers, she says. That and because: "The music's shít. I know no one wants to hear it, but that's why."
The ephemeral nature of success troubles La Roux, who realises she will soon have to come up with an album of songs to match her debut. The problem remains how to repeat the shock of hearing that shrill electronic pop sound and seeing this strange androgynous creature for the first time. "I might have to go the other way, be slightly 'less', otherwise I might end up looking like a clown," she says. "Maybe I'll go acoustic. Or dancehall. I really like dubstep, too. But I'm also into songs that are long and epic."
She jokes a lot, especially when she's with her band. It's a transgressive sort of humour. In Belgium, on the tour bus to the TV station, or whiling away the hours between rehearsal and performance, you get to hear La Roux and Co in full comedic flight. It's like the cast of The Inbetweeners doing an impression of the cast of Goodfellas. Nothing is deemed too distasteful, although Jackson does pull me aside at one point and request that a lewd sexual reference be excised, concerned that it might upset her mother.
She acquired her Bill Hicks streak at school, she explains later, backstage at the TV studio. "I used to make really inappropriate jokes and get thrown out of class. I used to say the things you definitely shouldn't – I once made a really distasteful joke about Barbara Windsor having cancer when I was eight. The whole class would piss themselves and I'd be in detention, but I'd do anything to get a laugh."
It all seems at odds with the atmosphere of alien hauteur and ice-queen cool projected by her album sleeve and videos. "I think I'm the opposite of the ice-queen," she says, munching on sweets left in a bowl by the TV organisers. "I'm a bit … silly. I like having a laugh. On tour, you develop a way of dealing with it: you have to make jokes to keep everything light."
It's not all bawdy banter. She delivers an articulate speech on the role of the producer in pop, worries about a well-known female singer's obsession with her weight, and reveals that on tour earlier this year in the US she was so miserable she wanted to end it all. Then, sitting outside, as it gets cold and dark, she becomes wistful as she talks about her parents' idyllic marriage. "I'm romantic," she says. "That's why I like epic love stories with tragic endings. You need the ache to write; even when you're happy there's an ache, because you know it won't last."
Her album was written as a way of resolving painful feelings that resulted from desperately wanting someone who didn't want her back. Those feelings, she says, "have long gone". She's not afraid to let go of the agony that propelled her here; she's just pleased that her misery and awkwardness have connected with legions of young women.
"One of the most rewarding things was when a couple of girls came up to me in a toilet and said, 'You've made us feel OK about the way we dress and the way we are.' They had short hair and I don't know if they were gay, but they were slightly quirky. They were like, 'There was no one for us to look up to – we like David Bowie but it's really nice to have a modern role model.'"
She acknowledges that she is an oasis of androgyny in a sea of glossy, conventionally feminine popettes. "I don't think I'm like them but if you're going to put someone in a box for having short hair and being tomboyish, there are some in the public eye like Agyness Deyn and Pixie Geldof … but it's bollocks when people make out there's a whole wave of androgynous girls. It's still ****ed."
Jackson is incensed by the current issue of a lad mag with Pixie Lott on the cover. "Do you know what the title is?" she spits. "'Pixie Lott finally gets her kit off.' Come on! That's wrong – she's 17 and she's wearing a bra and pants! And people wonder why I get so angry."
She takes heart from the way In for the Kill, without any assistance from radio, wormed its way into the nation's affections. "The public spoke for itself. People don't just want R&B girls thrusting their groins at them. It gave me hope. People bought the record even though it was fronted by this odd boy-looking ginger girl who apparently 'sang like a mosquito', as one paper put it."
Longing for the days of the gender-bending pop star, she is delighted that not only is fellow female synth siren Ladyhawke openly gay but that Ricky Martin has tentatively admitted to being bisexual. So is La Roux gay? "Nope," she says, on the Eurostar back to London. Has she swung both ways? "I love everything. I'm greedy." She is suddenly reticent. "Not necessarily in practice. In theory. I wouldn't say even if I had." She takes the comic route out. "You can fall in love with vegetables. People have got married to aubergines before. Anyone," she declares, "is capable of falling in love with anyone."
She admits to being in love right now, but won't say with whom, and covers her tracks by adding: "Who knows if I'm actually with them? You can love someone and them not love you back." Would we know them? "It's a footballer," she banters. "Yes, I'm having an affair with Ashley Cole. Sorry, Cheryl."
She's certainly happier than she was before this all began, when it seemed as though success was just a pipedream. "I was a lot more shy and … a lot more stoned," she says of the period when she and Langmaid would have to go to the park "to get air" because "we'd had such intense conversations about the songs and what they were about". She had to get therapy. "I was in quite a bad place – a really bad place – two years ago. A shít place: proper shít. Me and Ben didn't know what we were going to do. We were ****ed."
Now she's not ashamed to say that she'd like to be a globally popular, multimillion-selling star. "I'd like it to be a worldwide thing," she says as the train pulls into London. "It would be great to sit there at 40 and go, '****, I sold 10m records!' But it's not just about money; it's about creating something that loads of people want to buy. I'm not interested in making music for a niche. I'd be in Hadouken if I wanted to do that."
The single I'm Not Your Toy is released by Polydor on Monday.
