I come from the underground. I am never comfortable in the middle of the stream, flowing in the same direction as everyone else. I think people assume that’s where I want to be, famous for being famous, because as part of what I do there is a high level of showing off, but my instinct is always to resist the pull of the obvious. It’s not easy, especially when you have had any sort of success, because then people want you to repeat what it was that made you a success, even if your instinct is to move on, or to want to change, or have other ideas.
My biggest success came not because I was chasing it but because I was following through on my impulse to change. What was exciting about those early Compass Point sessions was that we were making something that sounded new, that came from the outside. We weren’t chasing fashion. Later, that kind of sound seemed fashionable. At the time we recorded it, it sounded almost uncannily, riskily fresh.
The industry always wants you to play it obvious. The way a corporate company works can never involve the kind of flexibility and spontaneity that encourages the innovation that leads to the biggest sort of commercial success. Capitol Records was very corporate that way, and that world does not work when it gets involved with creative decisions. The employees are working for the company, not for the artist, and their loyalty is always to the company. Their interests are in satisfying the financial needs of the business, not in allowing the artist to develop and perhaps make the sort of music that ends up making a lot of money. The truly creative artist succeeds and makes a profit in ways that the corporate mentality can never anticipate, because that success is based on completely new ways of doing and seeing things.
Sure, following trends, singing the obvious, might make you wealthier. But does it make you happier? If your goal is to make a lot of money and it doesn’t matter how you do it, then fine, that is your goal.
You can listen to the label, and sometimes you can follow their advice, or bear it in mind, but in the end you have to remember what the seed was you planted in the first place. What it was you intended to become as you started out. What was that seed you planted? A rose, an orchid, an apple, a plum, a lemon—what? You have to remember that. You cannot interfere with that process; what it was you wanted to be has to be what you keep being even as others try and make you change.
You can get sidetracked. A hurricane can wash you away. Trends comes along and people say, Follow that trend. A big act emerges, and the advice comes in: Why don’t you follow them? Even if it was a trend you might have set in motion thirty years ago, and you don’t really want to do it all over again. There’s a lot of that around at the moment. Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna. I cannot be like them, except to the extent that they are already being like me.
I have been so copied by those people who have made fortunes that people assume I am that rich. But I did things for the excitement, the dare, the fact that it was new, not for the money, and too many times I was the first not the beneficiary.
Every now and then a little devil sits on my shoulder and says, If you had done it that way, or If you were white, well . . . Now and then that comes into play, if you didn’t mind that the music was industrial and formulaic, and then I think, Oh no, then I would be like all the rest. All these little babies I have had.
Rihanna . . . she does the body-painting thing I did with Keith Haring, but where he painted directly on my body, she wears a painted bodysuit. That’s the difference. Mine is on skin; she puts a barrier between the paint and her skin. I don’t even know if she knows that what she’s doing comes from me, but I bet you the people styling her know. They know the history.
My advice to them is: Why don’t you find your own voice?! It all backfired on me, because I set out to inspire other people, but those I inspire tend not to be inspired in that they do their own thing, but in that they do my thing, a little their way, but not much. Take out the me—the dressed-up me, the disco me, the post-disco me—and there is not a lot left.
I couldn’t sell out, but I created the space for others to be able to make it, without the pressure of being the pioneer. They can play the pioneer without taking the actual risk. Because to take the risk means to never soften enough that you can become truly successful. It means saying no to things that might give you success . . . but not necessarily.
I am to this day a radical about not going with the flow. I decided after disco that I would not follow the formula, that I would create something else. If I had followed the crowd, by now I would be as rich as people think I am.
Perhaps I worry too much about integrity. Perhaps that is now an old-fashioned concept. Worrying about it too much means that I become a Norma Desmond character, stuck in my ways, despairing that the world is leaving me behind.
What is integrity? I think it’s about identity. I worked so hard finding myself that I don’t want to lose myself by becoming a caricature. It’s so easy to lose yourself by following others and joining a gang. It’s a constant fight, and people around you can be very convincing, so it is easy to say yes.
I remember when one of the singers on the list of those who came after me first said that she wanted to work with me. Everyone around me is going, You have to do it, you have to do it, it will be so good for you, it will introduce you to a whole new audience, you will make a lot of money. . . . I had to put my foot down before I suddenly found myself pretending to take risks, singing something stupid with her in some cheap, surreal setting.
No! It will be good for her; she will draw from everything I have built and add it to her brand, and I will get nothing back except for a little temporary attention. No one could believe that I said no, but I am okay on my own. I am okay not worrying about a new audience. If the fuck don’t feel right, don’t fuck it.
My instinct is that such a collaboration will not work. I don’t completely shut the door, but I want her to show me what she can do that will make it worthwhile. I have been through the jungle, through stormy oceans of time, to find myself and I can’t throw that away so easily. I would be a traitor to myself if I worked with someone only because they were the biggest thing on the planet, not because it made collaborative sense. And the biggest thing on the planet these days can very quickly become a normal-size thing on the planet, a shrunken-size thing, and they might drag me with them on their rapid decline.
I do a lot of collaborating, but I like to collaborate with people I can learn something from. I didn’t think there was anything I could learn from this person, or from those others who ask me all the time, the kind that have periods in the middle of their names.
With this one, who I will call Doris, I thought she was trying on other people’s outfits: She’s a baby in a closet full of other people’s clothes, a little girl playing dress-up, putting on shoes that don’t fit. I could see what she wanted to be when I watched her doing something when she started out that was starker and purer. Deep down, she doesn’t want to do all the dressing-up nonsense; she loses herself inside all the playacting. All this other stuff, it was the act of someone who is lost, and saying yes too quickly, and trying on the clothes of others—she’ll have that following her for the rest of her life.
That’s all it would be: business. Well, I’ve turned down so much business—you wouldn’t believe the business I have turned down—if I give in now, that makes a waste of all the time I stood my ground because I believe in something. I say no more than I say yes in my career. I am the worst person to work with if you want your ten percent. I say no to most things. I’ll turn up at a corporate event and spring out of a cake or an animal in full Grace Jones mode, but that is clearly a business transaction. There is no pretense that this is a creative act, and yet doing such a thing seems more creative than performing a duet for the sake of getting attention.
My power comes from standing my ground—empowerment, it’s where my strength comes from. It’s not meant to intimidate anyone but me. It’s respect for the journey I have taken where I did not do things I felt were wrong. It makes me more stubborn now not to give in, even though I’m told, If you don’t do such and such a thing, then you are a has-been. I never feel like a has-been, only a been-to.
I am disco but I am also dada. I am a sensualist but also a surrealist. That underground spirit—from the Beats, hippies, civil rights pioneers, punks; from the experimental artists, technicians and designers—dissolved into what became known as independent, as alternative, and that’s become less and less subversive, and less resistant to a co-opting commercial pull.
The mainstream absorbed the idea of the underground, and in the process made it difficult for there to be an underground, because if there is, it is quickly spotted and undermined. It is difficult to explain what it was like back then, to be so careful about the kind of work you did that you didn’t feel like a sellout. A lot of people now do not get the concept of the sellout. This is another thing that sometimes makes me feel a little Norma Desmond—that I am still wary about doing something that puts me in the middle of the current MTV/streaming flow, which all looks like something I did back in the twentieth century, at five in the morning in 54 or the Garage, or with Jean-Paul and Keith Haring, or on a red carpet leading to the sort of delirious humdrum glamour now being endlessly recycled.
I am wary, because to recycle myself means becoming a cartoon. I’d rather be a memory of something fantastic than join in with the party as it is now, filled with people copying something that happened before they were born.
There is stealing, there is inspired by, there is nothing new under the sun, which means that if you live to be a hundred, you realize the same things come and go, come and go. There is a lot of short-sightedness now. I always saw myself as a long-distance runner. The problem with the Dorises and the Nicki Minajes and Mileys is that they reach their goal very quickly, and there is no long-term vision, and they forget or never understood that once you get into that whirlpool as the performer constantly shifting identity, the entertainer creating shock, the singer acting larger than life, then you have to fight the system that solidifies around you in order to keep being the outsider you claim you represent. There will always be a replacement coming along very soon—a newer version, a crazier version, a louder version. So if you haven’t got a long-term plan, then you are merely a passing phase, the latest trend, yesterday’s event.
My goal was never to be controversial for the sake of publicity, of self-promotion. I wore what I wore—or didn’t wear—and acted like I acted because it was who I was, and I was making myself into a performance. I acted the same way before I was famous. I did it when I was a no one, when no one was looking, and I would have kept doing it even if I had stayed a no one. The craziness was there. I went to extremes. That didn’t come with fame. It became part of the fame, because that was me already. It was how I had learned to guard my body from evils. The craziness was the fire I lit to keep danger at bay.
Once you have the attention, once people know your name and think they have you figured out, that’s when the work really begins. To only be known for a year or two because you are outlandish, extreme, and nakedly in people’s faces is relatively easy. It’s what comes next that is difficult. That is really where it becomes conceptual. How you maintain the momentum, how you develop yourself, how to keep from drowning in it all. From disappearing.
I feel sorry for a lot of them. They lose their minds. They lose their way. They get pushed around by the system. They are not driving the system, as much as they like to act as though they are. The system is driving them, which in itself completely contradicts the concept of the artistic freedom these performers claim to embody. They are not free, for all their apparent wildness. They are controlled, and living up to a very narrow set of expectations. And many of them do repeat poses and wear costumes that some of us were striking and wearing forty years ago, without the risk attached that it is for the first time, that it does symbolize outsider energy that the mainstream finds provocative and dangerous.
They dress up as though they are challenging the status quo, but by now, wearing those clothes, pulling those faces, revealing those tattoos and breasts, singing to those fractured, spastic, melting beats—that is the status quo. You are not off the beaten track pushing through the thorny undergrowth finding treasure no one has come across before. You are in the middle of the road. You are really in Vegas wearing the sparkly full-length gown singing to people who are paying to see you but are not really paying attention. If that is what you want, fine, but it’s a road to nowhere.
I had many chances to take the easy road and become a safe, predictable entertainer, but I always chose to reject doing the obvious because that was never part of the original vision. If I didn’t like something, if it did not make me feel comfortable, I didn’t do it. So sue me. Most of all I have to be happy in what I am doing. If I don’t like something that you are making me do, then I will make your life hell. If I am miserable doing something, I am going to let you know.
My guard is always up when it comes to my work and my performance. I keep my eyes wide open, because to stick around in this business among all the people who want to lobotomize you and fuck you up takes a lot of inner strength. Maybe this all comes from those early, monitored acid trips, a certain clarity I have about what makes me tick, and what makes me happy.
I’ve been told that I have been an influence on many of these new singers—on how they appear, their manner, their style. That was never my intention. I never really thought about anyone else. I was narcissistic in a militant sense. Oh, I like that, that’s different. I want that, because I want to be different. Difference attracted me. Being different was natural to me. And I was immediately attracted to people who were different.
I look at Doris and I think, Does she look happy? She looks lost, like she is desperately trying to find the person she was when she started. She looks like really she knows she is in Vegas, now that Vegas is the whole entertainment world filtered through the Internet, through impatient social media. I don’t mind her dressing up, but when she started to dance like Madonna, almost immediately, copying someone else, it was like she had forgotten what it was about her that could be unique. Ultimately, it is all about prettiness and comfort, however much they pretend they are being provocative.
I would like to be a tutor for some of these singers. I would like to help them avoid becoming a piece in the system. It would only take five minutes. I would say to them, Get out! Quick! Don’t go back for your possessions! Run! There is only hell ahead, the hell of having to cling onto fame by doing what others tell you, the hell of losing fame because they don’t really know what they are talking about, and are not interested in you, who you really are, or who you will be in five, ten, fifteen years. They will replace you if you don’t do what they say. They will replace you if you don’t want to be as commercial as they want you to be. They will replace you when you are not sexy anymore, and if what you are is nothing other than about being sexy, you are doomed. Get out! Run! There is more to life and entertainment than sexy, the sexy organized around you by the system, which is the system set up by men. Take time out and reflect on what inspired you in the first place that came from within you. Jump off the merry-go-round.
I don’t want it to look as though I am moaning about them because I am jealous or feel replaced. With these singers, it’s not that they are new and amazing that bothers me. I love seeing new talent. It can be an inspiration. I like to be inspired. It is more that I am disappointed with what has happened to them, that they have fallen into the same old traps. They didn’t really learn from those of us who went there before. I’d rather be defaced by them than meekly followed.
Some of them do have something, but they never stay true to what that is, because they get distracted by those urging them to shed those parts of their character that are truly interesting, not simply commercially attractive. Doris in her provisional, original state is the closest she gets to herself, and her public persona reflects who she really is, but she is getting further and further away from that. This other thing, the second-, thirdhand dress-up thing takes over.
I sometimes think even though she doesn’t sing or perform in a conventional manner, Kate Moss is more of a rock-and-roll star, a pop star, than most of the singers playing that role. Certainly more than the likes of Doris. In terms of power and mystery, Kate has more going for her, and she’s a real survivor with whatever is thrown at her. The way she stays positive in dealing with all the shit is often a big help to me when I feel down. I often help her out with man trouble, women problems, with her children, with work.
I’ve known her for twenty years. Because we are hard workers traveling the world from job to job, we would always bump into each other on airplanes. When you do this kind of job, in whatever form it takes, there are plenty of people, brands, companies, and magazines keen to suck out of you whatever it is that they need to fuel their own energy and presence. They don’t care if they suck everything out of you and leave you stranded, alone—or worse. They just move on to the next source of energy. It’s very difficult to survive for long periods of time without losing your sense of purpose.
Kate is very good at dealing with it all. My way is often to lash out. If something hurts me or someone tries to rip me off, I hit right back, I get it out my system so that I don’t become a victim. If I don’t hit back, that’s when I end up ill, or with a nervous stomach, or worse. It’s the fight in me. I take the punches but I punch back. I don’t become defensive, I go on the offensive. I know how to fight! And I can fight dirty. . . .
Kate has the thing I have, and Jessica, and definitely Jerry—more sometimes than me—which is why we have all survived many years in what is mostly a battering, unforgiving business that really wants to use you up, take what they need from you, and then move on to the next specimen. We end up a little warped, and probably misunderstood, but we refuse to be sucked dry.
Kate often says to me that I am the only performer around at the moment who deserves to be called a diva. That gets us arguing, seemingly a little too serious if anyone hears us. I hate that word diva. It’s been so abused! Every singer given a makeover or a few weeks on a talent show seems to be called a diva these days! Christ almighty. Where’s the exclusivity? It’s so commercial now. Call me something else. Call me by my name. For me, a diva is like the great opera singer . . . the great film star . . . out of reach, in their own world, with a real gift for invention, even if it’s just their way of entering a room, fame in the purest form, attention-demanding performance artists with a flamboyant, compelling sense of their own importance, so special and inimitable it verges on the alien . . . and of course the word is usually used to describe an apparently erratic female whose temperamental qualities, survival instincts, and dedication to perfection are seen as weaknesses, as self-indulgent, not a strength. So, Kate, I am not a diva. I am a Jones!
Doris came to see me backstage at a concert once after a show. I was surrounded, so we never got a chance to really talk. Ever since, she has sent messages that she wants to work with me. They keep coming, although she never directly contacts me. She tries to get to me through my management, through my brother Noel.
People are surprised that I am not interested in collaborating, but the idea does not immediately inspire me, it does not seem attractive. What would it be the point? What has she got to offer me that I haven’t got already? What would I learn?
One thing she has got that I haven’t got is the way she plays an instrument, and that might be a way forward to a serious collaboration. A basic, unexpected musical collaboration. But I don’t think that’s what anyone is looking for from a collaboration between us—they want the wildest, crudest, most monstrous Grace Jones along with the wildest, goo-goo Doris, to satisfy a cheap expectation, a clash of egos, of costumes, of tits and crass, of managed extremes, and it would be a fuss for a day or two, analyzed to death for a few hours, recycled in pictures and headlines, and then it would be all over.
What would that mean? It would certainly be a waste of my time. And what would she get out of it? I’m not sure, really. She would demonstrate perhaps that she is a fan, but I think she has already shown that—as Rihanna has—in the way she dresses and performs. Is she looking to pick my brains, ask me questions about why I’ve done what I’ve done the way I’ve done it? Well, we can do that in private.
One way of collaborating would perhaps be some kind of performance, to be seen by no one, where we talk about fame. I could speak about my experiences, and how they’re really disconnected from who I am and why I do what I do. I have never done anything to be famous. Fame is awful. Fame is the worst part of this. People don’t realize this until it happens, and usually they’re not ready for it at all. When you’re famous, everyone has an opinion about you, mostly wrong and abusive, and if when fame hits you are not absolutely rooted in the very earth, then it can ruin you. You have to be absolutely focused before you become famous to be even a little focused after.
Everything comes at you when you are famous. Even the most talented and grounded people can get swept away unless they have the right sort of people to turn to for help. I was extremely lucky that I had Chris Blackwell. I say lucky, but there was an element of destiny about it. He got me, and he understood that I was not contriving to seek publicity, or chasing fame. He understood why I made the decisions I made, and what I wanted beyond the fame, which passes through you as you pass through.
If you can meet someone like that, it helps you make the transition from being someone who behaves in a certain way for a certain amount of people, to becoming someone who behaves the same way you always do, but now in front of lots and lots of people. I sometimes think it would have been good to have had the private conversation I could have with some of these new fame-crushed singers with Michael Jackson. Fame distorted his life, so that because he was good at something, singing and dancing, he then had to deal with this other thing, for which there is no real training.
I talked with him for a while during one of those moments where we happened to be in the same place. We had a tiny bit of time to talk when we were both in a recording studio at the same time, with not a lot of other people around. There was that unusual quiet where you actually talk about real things that might be on your mind, a quiet you felt he very rarely got. He shyly asked me about breaking away from the family, because that was something he knew I had managed to do. When your world changes so much and yet you are still bringing the family with you into this new state of being, it only adds to the problems.
Michael asked me how I had managed to break away from all the obligations and expectations. He wanted to know how to go out into the world, whatever the dangers, without that extra complication of the family watching over you, sticking close to you, stopping you grow. It was a big pressure on him. My family was deeply religious, and there were a lot of siblings. There was a certain resemblance to his situation. I was, in my small God-fearing Spanish Town setting, the equivalent of a child star, performing on behalf of my family, who effectively managed me, who never wanted me to grow up.
“How did you get away?” he asked. My answer was very simple. I said, “I just did it. You just have to do it. Don’t think about it. If you do, you hesitate, and it becomes a problem. Once I was free of their influence, I couldn’t think about how I was the daughter of a preacher, and I had a responsibility to behave how they wanted me to. I was out there crazy.”
I remember being on The Merv Griffin Show in a full-body flesh suit, and my father, he told me later, was appalled. He thought I was naked. In his eyes, I was. As naked as the devil spitting fire, dripping with sleaze and grinning for the hell of it. This was who I was going to be, and I was going to enjoy myself; I couldn’t think of what my family would think. It wasn’t about them. It was about me.
I had to follow my own path, or I would always feel held back, and frustrated.
I told Michael to do it, to walk out on them and let the chips fall where they fall. If you think about it too long—think about it and think about it—then you get torn apart while you are waiting to make a decision. By the time you make your mind up, it can be too late. Michael could never really make those decisions in time, and by the time he did, it would lead to more problems for him to deal with, and that meant he found it even more difficult to make decisions that could help him.
If Doris and I had that conversation, I would tell her that fame is not inside you, it is outside you. It comes from outside, and you cannot control it. Everybody wants to be somebody, but at the same time, now that everyone is acting like they are someone, there is something more special about being anonymous. Fame doesn’t make you somebody. You are already somebody.
There are only a few things I enjoy about being famous. Meeting other famous people is one! So you can talk with each other and say, “Isn’t being famous a drag? Don’t you wish you could still do what you do without being famous?” When you walk through that door, through to the other side, where there is fame, you cannot believe how different it is.
You can get all the pussy and dick you want. Everything becomes available. It goes to your head. But how do you know how to deal with all the people suddenly around you who are only really interested in you as a famous person? How do you work out who likes you because of who you are, not who they think you are?
You drink too much. You take drugs. You get arrested. You are in a situation where your new position is always being celebrated. Every day is like a wonderland. You start spinning.
You see your fans look at you—Oh my God, oh my God—and it’s not clear how to handle that. I remember when I was on my first Tonight show with Johnny Carson, and everyone was going, Ooh, you’ve made it now, your life will never be the same again. For me, it was a part of my job, which I liked doing. It didn’t make me into a goddess or anything; it didn’t make me immortal. It was just a good way of telling a lot of people who you were and what you did. You don’t want to make a record and have no one know about it. There was plenty of promotion I didn’t want to do, but there were some things I couldn’t turn down.
I like chat shows. I like the feeling they have of private conversation. You can make a connection. I always wanted to interview the person interviewing me. Sometimes, doing big shows, it’s like you are connecting with no one. I never really like a huge audience. I find that I have to have fun on my own, by myself, and hope the audience does too. I find it very hard to get fifteen thousand people to enjoy what someone is doing in unison. Arena-sized venues never suited my minimalist approach.
I am not a big mover. I like to move in slow motion. As slow as possible. I prefer the power of stillness. I prefer the power of the preacher, who is more about getting you to listen, to focus on what you are doing. I don’t go in for distraction. I don’t want anything to distract the audience but me.
This is what I would say to my pupil: You have become only your fame, and left behind most of who you were. How are you going to deal with that? Will you lose that person forever? Have you become someone else, without really knowing it? Do you always have to stay in character for people to like you? Do you know that you are in character?
Doris, I would say, fame is all well and good if you want to take it to another level. If you have some greater purpose. Me, I am just a singer, on one sort of stage or another, who likes to have an audience, but not all the time. Listen to my advice; I have some experience.
In a way, it is me being a teacher, which is what I wanted to be. I still feel I could go into teaching. What is teaching but passing on your knowledge to those who are at the beginning? Some people are born with that gift. With me, the teaching side morphed into the performing side. It’s in there. And these are my pupils—Gaga, Madonna, Annie Lennox, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Miley, Kanye West, FKA twigs, Doris . . . and Russell Harty: I think he would have liked being in that class.
I wonder if sometimes this really is an inevitable Norma Desmond moment. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got smaller.” I am being replaced, now that the movies are in color and have sound, rather than simply mourning a loss of subversive power and deeper meaning. I am isolating myself, cutting myself off from new influences, as opposed to continuing what I have always done, craving the next, from occasion to occasion, event to event, day to day.
Am I holding on to the past? I don’t feel that I am. I don’t ever feel that I think of time as being past, present, and future, so I don’t feel like I am yearning for better days. I still think of better days as being then, and now, and soon. I am as young as I ever was, because I can move and think, in the real world and the unreal world, exactly like I always have done. If I am from another era, everywhere I look, at the electric sheep all around me, it all seems to indicate that we are still inside that era. There is no new era, only the one I am still part of being stored and restored.
If I were Norma, that would mean I have already retired. I will never retire. When I retire, I’m dead, and even then, I will be reincarnated. I will remain on the move. Even death won’t stop me. It never has. You can find images of me from centuries ago. Faces that look like mine carved in wood from ancient Egypt, Roman times, the Igbo tribe of southern Nigeria, and sixteenth-century Jamaica, fierce enough to turn people pale, to shrink their hearts. I have been around for a long time, heart pounding, ready to pounce on my prey, blurring borders, speaking my mind, believing that the world is full of visible and invisible forces, crossing the water, tripping, grieving, loving, hunting, conquering, seducing, fighting, dreaming, laughing, and I always will be.