All singing, all dancing, all acting super-gal Paloma Faith not doing it by the book
Only 23, but break your high heels and snap your suspender belt if Paloma Faith hasn’t already done a lot in her short life. There are the two years she spent fronting a rock’n’roll covers band, Paloma and The Penetrators, and now she has a new band doing her own songs; TV acting work and film parts in St Trinian’s and the forthcoming Terry Gilliam flick; ‘Paloma Faith Presents...’, the club night she runs; she graduated from Leeds University with an MA in time-based art; and, of course, it doesn’t take just a couple of minutes to look as drop-dead fabulous as she does every day of the week.
A driven woman? You bet. And really, the story of Paloma Faith has only just begun. She looks like a star, performs like a star, dresses like a star, walks like a star, giggles like a star, and yet you still can’t go out and buy one of her songs. Intentional? Of course. Paloma’s vast ambition was never going be sated by an indie throwing out a 7” and seeing what happened. She held back for the big boys, and it worked: in February she signed with Epic Records, home of two Michaels, Jackson and George.
“I think quite a lot of people are scared of me and I don’t think anyone knew where to place me,” she says when asked why it took so long to secure a deal. “I do pop, but it’s kind of alternative, and it’s soul, and rock’n’roll - it’s so eclectic that it’s almost like every song sounds like a different genre. I like it like that, because I don’t feel one-dimensional myself.”
There are, though, certain artists that seep out of her music, often as a feeling: there’s the grit of Etta James, the dark heart of Dinah Washington, the earth mother soul of Erykah Badu, the rough edge of PJ Harvey... She loves those strong women, of course, and she loves the kind of man who can’t keep still. “I want to keep developing and experimenting all the time,” she says. “People who re-invent themselves and don’t stay stagnant are inspiring to me; people like Antony from Antony and The Johnsons, Andre 3000 and Tom Waits.”
We’re having breakfast on the Kingsland Road in Dalston, east London, very near where Paloma grew up. “My mum still lives in Stoke Newington,” she says. “She’s been a teacher in Hackney for 40 years and brought me up a single mum. It’s changed a lot from when I was a kid. She said this to me the other day: ‘When I moved here, I was working class. And now I’ve stayed in the same house, I’m middle class.’”
And what were you like as a teenager, Paloma? “My friends were naughty, but I’m a bit of boffin, really. I read all the time. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I need to know everything before I die!!!’ And I get disappointed with people of my generation, because I think there’s a culture of numbness; of getting completely smashed the whole time, and not thinking about anything. And I think it’s massive in the middle classes, I’m sorry to say. They’ve never had to fight for anything in their whole lives and yet they’re so bloody complacent, it’s almost unbelievable.”
Be expecting some music soon, and look out for Paloma in that new Terry Gilliam film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which was also Heath Ledger’s last. What happens if it takes off and you’re suddenly offered loads of movie parts? “Well, David Bowie did music and acting, and he likes dressing up too.”
but not to perth right? just the east coast.....
