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Another interview (dailymail.co.uk
Sauce, sorcery and a magical voice
16th January 2010
She's sung in a burlesque cabaret, been sawn in half as a magician’s assistant, played the devil’s girlfriend in the late Heath Ledger’s last film - and has cast her spell on the pop world with her enchanting debut album. Maureen Paton meets singer, actress and all-round showgirl
I’m heading for Stepney in East London, where pop’s newest showgirl has spent the day posing for photographs in a Georgian townhouse that’s almost as stylishly camp as she is. Paloma Faith is curled up on a chaise, looking like a red-lipped Hollywood pin-up with such mega-shiny magenta ringlets that you could probably spot her from outer space. And yes, it’s all Paloma’s own hair, coloured Rita Hayworth-red from its original brown. ‘I enjoy being a girl,’ lisps the half-Spanish, half-English singer/songwriter in what sounds like the understatement of the millennium, cooing over the cut of my 40s jacket and telling me that although her famous fetish for stilettos has given her broken veins on her legs, ‘it’s a fair trade-off’.
Paloma (full name Paloma Faith Blomfield) is a former singer in burlesque cabaret, a life model, lingerie saleswoman and magician’s assistant with the stage name of Miss Direction, who regularly got sawn in half. All these part-time jobs not only funded her bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance and a master’s in theatre directing, but also taught her how to put the ‘show’ into show business.
There’s a rumour that Paloma also used to work as an erotic dancer, but she giggles when I ask and says, ‘Only in people’s dreams.’ And so far this artful performer hasn’t put a foot wrong, literally or metaphorically, in a career that combines stage spectaculars full of optical illusions with straight acting roles. She appeared in the 2009 horror film Dread and shared a scene with Heath Ledger in late 2007 for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus after making her debut as a grungy emo schoolgirl in the first St Trinian’s film. And she’s still only 24.
Her seductively dry voice and jazz, blues and soul influences have seen her dubbed the new Amy Winehouse, but Paloma is no Winehouse-style emotional wreck. After becoming a YouTube hit by pairing up with fellow singer/songwriter Josh Weller for the comedy song ‘It’s Christmas (And I Hate You)’ in December 2008, and performing at festivals such as T4 On the Beach, she landed a five-album deal with Epic Records. And last June she made it clear that she was going to be a very different kind of diva to Ms Winehouse with her debut single ‘Stone Cold Sober’, which threw down a gauntlet to the drink-and-drugs-driven music business by putting the sexiness into sobriety.
‘Artists such as Duffy and Amy sound lyrically defeatist. You shouldn’t let men affect you like that’
As she coolly explains: ‘I think that not doing drugs is the new rock’n’roll. Everybody does drugs, especially in London, but I think it’s more unique and rebellious not to do them. And as a songwriter, I’m trying to challenge myself to use my brain to think laterally rather than taking the lazy option of a chemical that makes that happen. I know quite a lot of ex-addicts, and when I was growing up I saw the harm that drink can do, too. And I got a very strong anti-drink and drugs message from my family because they had seen the effects of it.’
‘Stone Cold Sober’, which became the soundtrack on a Rimmel commercial with Lily Cole, went straight to number 17 in the charts, and her first album, Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?, reached number nine last September. Pretty impressive for someone who was once considered ‘too risky’ to be signed up.
As Paloma explains: ‘I started singing old blues, jazz and soul music more than seven years ago, so I was doing it before Amy’s first album Frank came out in 2003. But I didn’t get a record deal at the time because I think they thought there could only be one person allowed with the timbre that Amy has. But then all these other soul singers came along and proved there was room for more than one, so I feel I’m bridging the gap between Duffy, Adele and Amy and theatrical people like La Roux, Goldfrapp and Björk.’
Her icons, past and present, include Edith Piaf, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker, Björk, Etta James and Grace Jones. And she’s become a role model herself, not just with her highly orchestrated, Phil Spector-influenced sound (such as in her latest single, the apocalyptic ‘Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?’) but also in her hourglass curves that send out such a healthy message to other girls.
‘I’m really into food, it’s one of my favourite things – everything from potato waffles to lobster,’ says Paloma. Even her towering locks allegedly inspired Amy’s tipsy-looking beehive; they shared the same manager for a month, with Amy asking Paloma at one point to join her band because ‘she liked the way I looked’. But Paloma was always destined to be a frontwoman rather than someone else’s support.
‘I think Amy is somebody I would probably get on quite well with,’ she now says. ‘It’s sad about her addictions, but I think she’s just a bit lost and her mistake was to think she only achieved extreme creative success because of that man [Amy’s junkie ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil]. It’s only her insecurities that made her feel he was the creative one instead,’ adds Paloma. As she puts it, ‘All creative people have to have vulnerability because those nuances are what move people. So I’m deeply insecure – but I’m good at hiding it.’
Her Spanish first name means ‘dove’, the symbol of peace, but for Paloma, femininity is all about being strong without being aggressive. ‘I don’t believe in violence, but I do believe in my pride,’ says the 5ft 4in Paloma, who once got a black eye after protectively stepping between her best friend and a violent man who was ‘giving it too much’ outside a club. ‘I might not be able to fight back but I definitely will be able to get up again,’ as she puts it.
And her resilience extends to her songwriting as well. ‘Everyone has heartbreak in their lives, but when I started writing my own material, I felt that a lot of female artists such as Duffy and Amy sounded, lyrically, a bit defeatist. I don’t think you should let men affect you like that, because we are ruling the world now as women. There’s such a massive boom in female solo artists at the moment. We have been monopolising the charts for a year now and the boys are like, “They’ve taken over!” But no one said that about men monopolising the charts for the past 60 years. And my mum always tells me not to put men on a pedestal.’
Paloma was raised in Hackney, East London, by her English schoolteacher mother, a 60s feminist and single parent who divorced Paloma’s Spanish-born graphic designer father when Paloma was four. Later Paloma’s mother met another partner, a photographer. ‘My stepfather, as I call him even though my mum never married him, was present in my childhood, but my mum was my main port of call. She’s cool, my mum, she doesn’t need marriage. They have never lived together – that’s the answer to a good relationship, so I hear, for each to have their own house on the same street.’
Paloma went to a tough local comprehensive in Stoke Newington. She found herself being bullied because of the large orthodontic braces on her teeth that also fitted round the outside of her head (‘like Hannibal Lecter’), but thanks to her mother’s belief in her – and the support of what she calls ‘some inspirational left-wing teachers’ – she thrived as a straight A student. It’s made Paloma such a fan of comprehensive education that she even got stuck into a heavy-duty discussion about it with Michael Portillo last October on BBC1’s current affairs programme This Week.
After school and college, she ran away to join a circus – well, performance artist Marisa Carnesky’s travelling Ghost Train installation, to be precise. ‘Marisa was my mentor – she taught me that if you have an aim in life, you can make anything happen,’ says Paloma, who has aimed high ever since – especially in the fantasy-outfit department.
‘People say that I look like a drag queen, that I look scary, but I think that’s a fear of my confidence’
‘A lot of men do have a fear of my ultra-femininity,’ she admits. ‘Sometimes people say I look like a drag queen, that I look scary, but I think that’s a fear of my confidence. Most women in contemporary culture pare down their femininity, so there’s a slight androgyny about them, and I think men have got used to seeing that. Me and my mum had discussions about me wearing suspenders and corsets because she burned her bra when she was young. But I say that my look is about postfeminism, about women reclaiming womanhood as something of power, not something negative.’
Currently single and living in West London, Paloma has an eclectic fanbase ranging from teens to 70-somethings, but, as yet, no retinue of lovelorn boys. Maybe, I suggest, that’s because of the unattainable image of many girl singers. ‘I hope it’s that and not because I’m unattractive and repellent,’ she says with a down-to-earth cackle, adding, ‘it’s very difficult to keep relationships going in this industry, but I do have a male best friend, and he’s in the music business, too.’
Paloma embarks on her first headlining tour of the UK and Ireland in March, and plans to continue combining music and acting, especially after the experience of working with Heath Ledger. In The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, she was cast as a girl who went out with the Devil (played by Tom Waits, one of her musical heroes) in the story of a theatre troupe that makes a pact with Satan. Ledger, who died suddenly two years ago before completing his role as a mysterious outsider, was an inspiration to her in that he would always go the extra mile.
‘He was really serious and committed about what he did; in my scene with him, he ad-libbed the line, “What are you, a singer?” when he sees me being carried over someone’s shoulder. Anyone who was living life as positively as Heath was could not be depressed,’ says Paloma, referring to press reports that suggested his accidental overdose on prescription drugs was suicide. ‘He would be on set even when he wasn’t in a particular scene, and that’s not the behaviour of a depressed person. If you’re depressed, you don’t even get out of bed. He was ill with the flu and was tired, but nothing more than that, so I think his death was a very unfortunate mistake,’ she says.
Paloma has all the right instincts for survival in two tough, male-run industries, and won’t allow herself to be bullied by the image-makers. ‘There’s always a sexualisation of women in American pop videos, but I personally haven’t experienced sexism. I’m such a strong personality that nobody really answers back to me anyway,’ she says with another giggle. ‘I just say “No!” to wearing a bra and knickers for a shot and they go, “Oh, OK…”
‘I do feel like an old soul,’ she adds. ‘I don’t necessarily fit in with my own generation because I’m not that interested in “stuff” – material things. I like to think I’m emotionally high-maintenance – but not necessarily materialistic. And when my mum gets affected by negative comments about me, I tell her off about it. The world is full of opinion, and it’s important to take the criticism as well as the compliments with a pinch of salt. It’s all transient, so you are best off being oblivious to both.’
Trust a cool operator like Paloma to know the difference between truth and illusion.
