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XXXXXX Portraits by S t e v e S c h o f i e l d Styled by L a u r e n A r m e s

The lonely one MUSIC SPECIAL

Sam Smith has conquered the world with his tales of heartbreak and being alone.

But can he afford ever to be happy, asks Stephanie Rafanelli

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year ago there were tens of thousands of Sam Smiths in the world.

Now there is only one. His name has been transformed almost overnight from that of a pedestrian everyman to a burgeoning legend, evoking the likes of Sam Cooke and James Brown and, by default, their oldschool appeal, from a time when a singer was just a man in a suit with a great voice, crooning about love and loss.

As I walk down Sunset Boulevard, one week before the Grammy Awards, Sam Smith is everywhere: staring out from the cover of Rolling Stone in the 7-Eleven, like a doe-eyed George Michael; his album stacked next to the cash register at Starbucks; a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show; on a billboard, dwarfing passing Chevies, his eyes and quiff lowered to the ground, in the grip of melancholy.

In just two years, this 22-year-old from Cambridgeshire has gone from being a bathroom attendant in a bar in the City, to that lofty superlative ‘the biggest male artist in the

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Trench coat, £1,495, Burberry Prorsum (burberry.com).

Shirt, POA, Armani (armani.com)

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SAM SMITH Coat, £1,495, Burberry London at mrporter.com.

Shirt, £140, Burberry Brit (burberry.com)

‘This world is a monster. If all you want is fame and there is no creativity behind that want, you’re f***ed’ solo album. Then he sings a cover of ‘My Funny Valentine’. Somehow all of this is delivered without a whiff of cheesiness.

The next morning, Smith and I sit with our feet dangling in the pool of the Ramada Plaza hotel, the sky above us unsure whether it wants to rain or shine, reflecting Smith’s ambivalent mood. He is anxious about the upcoming ceremonies. ‘I don’t like the idea that if we came away with nothing we’d be disappointed, because, in my eyes, we’ve already won.’ (Smith prefers to say ‘we’: he has three managers.) ‘I’ve sold so many records, played so many arenas.’ So he’s not feeling on top of the world?

‘It’s really up and down, you know. I haven’t stopped for two years. There are moments when I love it and there are moments

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where I...’ he trails off. ‘I wanted this life for so long, for a range of things. My insecurities. The need for music to be my therapy. The attention.

The glamour. Getting the love. If all you want is fame and there is no creativity behind that want, you’re f***ed. This world is a monster.’

Smith says that whatever happens at the Grammys, he’s skipping the after-parties and going to McDonald’s. He usually ends up having a burger after awards ceremonies and they’ve been almost back to back since he won the 2014 Critics’ Choice Award at the Brits, and gongs at the MOBOs and the American Music Awards. That’s a lot of burgers.

He is currently on a carb-free, dairy-free Swift rise With Taylor Swift on her Red tour at The O 2 , 2014

diet. I’m disappointed that he’s not more righteous about his right to be a size ‘normal’ — in the words of Adele, with whom he has been consistently compared, he is ‘making music for the ears not the eyes’. He is not remotely fat, just not toned and packaged to within an inch of his life. ‘I do want to be skinny. I’m trying.’

He giggles, as we prod each other like two kids in a tickle fight. Smith is not the sombre, introverted character he exorcises in his music. He is gentle but cheeky, like a giant puppy prone to fits of depression. He confesses he sometimes wishes he had abs like Justin Bieber.

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ieber and I had a sing-off in the toilets on the Ellen show a few days ago. I was doing my vocal warm-up and through the wall on the other side someone started mimicking me, so I started going higher and he was going higher, too. I didn’t know it was Bieber until he came up afterwards.’ Smith has quickly attracted a celebrity following through the sheer quality of his voice: Beyoncé compared it to ‘butter’; Mary J Blige asked him to co-write songs on her new album, The London Sessions; most surreal of all, Lady Gaga commented on her ‘strange, visceral reaction’ to his music. Smith was given

SAM HUSSEIN/TAS/GETTY IMAGES

world’. His album about unrequited love In the Lonely Hour entered the US Billboard chart at number two in November (the highest ever entry for a debut from a British singer), was at number one in both the UK and US album charts and sold more than a million last year.

His debut single ‘Stay With Me’ sold more than 3.5 million copies and he currently has six Grammy (which took place on 8 February, after we went to press) and five Brit Awards nominations, for which he is the favourite to clean up on both sides of the Atlantic. All this without the hype of The X Factor or a BRIT School education.

Physically, Smith is unremarkable. When I bump into him backstage at the Forum, a neoGreek amphitheatre in LA where he is playing tonight, I mistake him, in his white T-shirt and jeans, for a sound engineer. He is six foot two inches of slightly squidgy stockiness, a bulky package of congenial warmth. But his face is expressive and there is something in his almond-shaped eyes — intense, lachrymose, likely to brim at any moment — that draws you in. His music is neither ground-breaking nor cool; it cuts across age barriers with raw emotion. To really understand the effect of Smith, you need to see him — or rather, hear him — live. He is all about the voice.

Each of his In the Lonely Hour hits — ‘Stay With Me’, ‘Lay Me Down’, ‘I’m Not the Only One’ — is punctuated with autobiographical outpourings: ‘I wrote this album because I fell in love with a straight guy last year and he didn’t love me back... Just before I wrote ‘Good Thing’, I deleted his number... I wrote ‘Money on My Mind’ because someone in the music industry pissed me off...’ He launches into a soul version of ‘La La La’, the Naughty Boy track on which he featured, which went to number one in May 2013 and paved the way, along with his breakout vocals on Disclosure’s ‘Latch’ in October 2012, for the release of his

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three days’ detention when he was 17, for bunking off school to see Gaga at The O2 Arena (during the punishment he drew a dream board of his ambitions: a picture of himself with a number one record, another holding a Brit, another playing at The O2 — all of which have come true).

On the subject of his growing celebrity circle he says: ‘Sometimes I have this horrible feeling that maybe people are more interested in what Kim Kardashian smells like than my music. She smells f***ing glorious, by the way, she’s like an angel. I was with her last night, her whole family came to my gig. I saw a video of them singing along. We’re all just people. Even Beyoncé, when you meet her. You build this person up in your mind to be this deity. But they’re just people. Fame is a very warped thing.’

Smith has already had some experience of the warpedness of that world. Howard Stern recently ranted on his radio show that Smith was: ‘An ugly motherf***er. He’s fat. Is he gay?’

Smith says now: ‘People make comments about me all the time and it hurts me. I read it and I’m offended by it. I’m not going to pretend that I’m not. I’m hugely vulnerable. But I don’t want to have any barriers because that feeling of honesty and connection with my fans is just the best in the world.’

Smith is a curious mix of fiercely driven and highly sentient. ‘I’m very emotional, but I’ve also got a massive fire, a hunger for success, for my music to be heard, which comes from my mum.’ He grew up in the village of Great Chishill in Cambridgeshire, and is a perfect blend of the polarised qualities of his parents.

His ambition comes from his mother Kate, a former bank clerk who was talent-spotted for a trading job in the City, which afforded the family a swimming pool. He inherited his sensitive side from his father Fred, a fruit and vegetable stall owner who stepped down as the breadwinner to become a househusband and look after Smith and his younger sisters Lily and Mabel. ‘I grew up in a female-dominated household and I relate more to women, but my dad is also in touch with his feminine side.

He gave me an emotional poem before I went on stage at Madison Square Garden recently

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about being yourself. I just burst into tears.’

His pro-woman upbringing manifested itself in his love of power divas such as Chaka Khan, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé from an early age. His parents took his ambition to become a singer, aged eight, seriously and enrolled him in lessons. He attributes his range to obsessively practising scales and the desire to bend his voice to the heights of his female musical heroines.

His father dedicated his life to his son’s career, ferrying him between classes and taking courses to become a personal trainer to

‘I’m prepared for this all to fail,’ he laughs. ‘I think, if this all goes down the shitter, I can still say I once sold five million records.’

As the only openly gay teenager in Great Chishill, he was often subjected to abuse. ‘I felt isolated. I was called “faggot” many times. I worked part-time in a shop. There was a man in the village who had a massive issue with me being gay and didn’t want me serving him.’

Ironically, things got worse when he moved to London at 18. ‘I got punched in the neck in the street. I used to wear a bit of make-up. I had pink earphones on and was talking really loud.

It was definitely a homophobic attack.’

Although Smith had come out at an early age, he had no real sexual experiences until he left home. ‘To the age of 16, I’d never met another gay person. When I moved to London, the gay scene was a real eye-opener. Some things were amazing but other things are very dark.’ He had a lot of one-night stands but ‘wasn’t very good at them’. He tended to fall in love with straight men — the first was a boy at school, two years his senior, and later came his unrequited love for a married man he wrote about in In the Lonely Hour. ‘I’ve stopped falling for straight men now. After the last one, there’s no way it’s going to happen again. The record was therapy, closure. It saved me.’

I warn Smith never to fall in love and live happily ever after. ‘I know,’ he chuckles. ‘I’ve written a song about another person recently.

You know I split up with someone a few weeks ago?’ He is referring to model Jonathan Zeizel, whom he met on the set of his video for ‘Like I Can’ and had been dating over Christmas.

‘I’ve stopped falling for straight men… I still feel like I haven’t had a proper boyfriend yet’ work on his son’s physique. (Smith has his own bodyguard/trainer now, Adi, and says he feels a little guilty that he’s taken away his dad’s role.) It’s still painful for him that, in the newspapers at least, a public blow to his mother’s career was attributed to his young musical ambitions. In 2008, she was sacked from her City firm for ‘gross misconduct’ and when she sued for £1.5m, the Daily Mail ran the story under the headline: ‘City banker is “sacked for spending too much company time on son’s pop dream.” ’ ‘She was treated so unfairly,’ he says.

‘But what it did was really give me the hunger to look after her. She deserves the world and that’s what I’m trying to do, give it to her.’ The subsequent loss of family friends, who disappeared once the money dwindled, has prepped him, he says, for the ways of the music industry.

Family friend With Kim Kardashian and Kendall and Kylie Jenner at the 2014 MTV VMA awards

‘Nothing dramatic happened. I made a mistake by posting pictures of us on Instagram and making it seem more serious than it was. I flew him to Australia and we had a nice time.’ He tells me about nights on the town and skinnydipping. ‘We just weren’t very compatible, but I’ve learned that I need to hold off before I start getting the public involved. I would say it was a relationship, but I still feel like I haven’t had a proper boyfriend yet.’

Fred Smith recently chided his son for being too honest in the press. And I worry a little, too, about all this talk of no barriers and giving all of himself away. ‘This is where my fire comes out,’ he says. ‘Because I stand up and I say, “Well, f*** this.” I’m not going to be a robot. I’m not going to limit what I say so I’ll please more people. My life is my life and things are going to happen and I’m going to document it and say how I feel. I don’t play a character, I’m just myself.’ He drops his head and looks at his feet in the pool. ‘I want to be a different type of pop star. I want to be a pop star who’s not Photoshopped, who’s straighton human... Honesty is timeless, I’m just trying to make music that stands the test of time. So that, in 400 years, when a little kid who’s gay listens to In the Lonely Hour, or my next record, he will be inspired.’ ES

KEVIN MAZUR/MTV1415/WIREIMAGE. FASHION ASSISTANT: EVAN SIMONITSCH. GROOMING BY CHECHEL JOSON AT DEW BEAUTY AGENCY. SHOT ON LOCATION AT THE RAMADA PLAZA, WEST HOLLYWOOD (RAMADAWEHO.COM)

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GOING IN FOR THE

KILLS

She’s a hip, iconic singer and he’s a handsomely louche rock star married to the biggest supermodel in the world. Together they’re the hottest and most enigmatic band around. STEPHANIE RAFANELLI hangs out with the Kills in Chicago and gets to know the real duo behind the mystique Photographs by NAN GOLDIN

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STYLED BY LIZ KLATETA

REAL AROUND THE FOUNTAIN Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart of the Kills in Grant Park, Chicago.

Mosshart wears goat-hair jacket, from a selection, Roberto Cavalli.

See Stockists for details. All other clothes, their own www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

festival as part of their world tour. Such good-natured tomfoolery is not something we have come to expect from Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart, partly because of the duo’s unflinching dedication to their snarling, attitudinal music (an ever-evolving, pared-back art-rock/punk sound), but mostly because of their belief in the allure of good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll mystery, magnified by an increasing need for privacy in recent years. The reason for the latter I need hardly explain: Hince is the paramour of (and newly wedded to) Kate Moss, the iconic muse of her generation; Mosshart, friend and bandmate of the recently divorced former White Stripe Jack White. When legends get together, the frisson always intensifies; but the Kills would prefer that we didn’t get too acquainted with their lives outside the band.

When art photographer Nan Goldin arrives, flame-haired and somewhat dazed, croaking crabbily to Hince by way of an introduction: ‘Someone had to explain to me who you were last night,’ his eyes widen with a hint of glee. He loathes the fact that his personal life has come to overshadow his music, but in light of his summer nuptials (which created a media fervour second only to the royal wedding), anonymity has become an increasingly tough call.

Still, it’s hard for Hince to disguise his happiness. Immaculately coiffed, he swaggers with a certain buoyancy, his olive skin still luminous from his recent Mediterranean honeymoon and Australian tour dates (where he was accompanied on the road for part of the way by his new bride). ‘The wedding was November 2011 |

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he evening light streams through the bathroom windows of Lake Forest Academy, Illinois, illuminating the lone figure of the Kills’ Jamie Hince: his torso in an exquisitely cut Hysteric Glamour tuxedo jacket, styled up with trademark panache with a crisp shirt and neckerchief; below, nothing but a gleaming white pair of pants. Balancing on his left leg, he is lathering – half frantic, half giggling – his right, cocked in the sink, as if performing an emergency leg shave prior to a date. ‘I went paddling in the lake,’ he says, chuckling and scrubbing fiercely. ‘I’ve had a reaction – I think I’m coming out in hives!’

Minutes later he emerges, three welts now forming on his forehead. ‘Cancel the gig!’ he shrieks, clutching his stomach in mock agony and lurching playfully around the room. Thankfully, his Floridian bandmate (and best friend) Alison Mosshart comes to the rescue, fishing out an unnameable creature an inch or so long, resembling a B-movie monster, from somewhere deep down below his collar. ‘I’m going to die! That will be the last interview I will ever give,’ exclaims Hince, feigning a swoon.

This is not the opening scene to some Amityville Horror-inspired video from their recently released fourth album, Blood Pressures, but the aftermath of Bazaar’s shoot with the Kills, who have just flown in to Chicago from Australia via Japan, to play the Lolapalooza

beautiful, really traditional,’ says Mosshart (best woman to her bandmate) in response to well-wishers on the Bazaar team; despite her daunting rock-goth ensemble, all tousled black hair and towering leopard-print boots, she is gentle and soft-spoken. ‘We had choir boys singing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”,’ adds Hince politely, laid-back and beaming. ‘And 16 flower girls…’

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ntil recently, it had been Mosshart, 32, and Hince, 42, who were the ‘old married couple’. Their close partnership, a ‘twoperson social club’, has stretched over a decade, comprising living-in-your-pocket friendship, the purchase of a property together (a converted pub in Islington) and, of course, the writing and performing of four albums (Keep on Your Mean Side in 2003, No Wow in 2005, Midnight Bloom in 2008 and Blood Pressures), not to mention the co-creation of all their album artwork. They have sung, toured, written music, painted, photographed and filmed side by side in their own mini Warholian Factory – Mosshart the Patti Smith to Hince’s Robert Mapplethorpe. And perhaps, like that legendary duo, their unique bond has transcended their separate love lives. Although the dynamics of the twosome must have changed – Hince moved in with Moss a few years ago, and now he is married – they can both still poke fun at their claustrophobic rapport.

In the video for ‘Future Starts Slow’ – a recent single from the new album, to be followed in late October by the release of ‘Baby Says’ – they appear on tour in America, tucked puritanically into separate single beds. I mention that the scene is reminiscent of something from 1980s sitcom Terry and June. Hince cackles, as we loll together under the shade of the academy’s colonial verandah. ‘We’re probably more like Grey Gardens’ Big Edie and Little Edie.’ He slips into immaculate dialogue (the kind befitting a script-writing graduate from Goldsmiths): ‘Eh? What are you doing here?’ ‘Oh, shuddup! I’m doing my own thing.’

In the early years on the road in America, the double act also summoned the spirit of Bonnie and Clyde.

They slept in the back seat of their car (bought from Mosshart’s dad, a secondhand-car salesman in Florida), with their amps in the boot, arranging their own tours, booking their own gigs. It is a time for which they are nostalgic. ‘We used to take turns in driving. It was so brilliant, getting into so many weird scrapes – we were so wide-eyed back then,’ recalls Hince with wonder.

‘Taking Polaroids of ourselves in the car, in hotel rooms…’ ‘…and a video of being pulled over by the cops,’ Mosshart adds, finishing his sentence. ‘There was one time in Marion County, in Ohio.

Jamie was driving too fast, and suddenly we noticed a cop car had pulled over on the other side of the highway, and we were like, “Oh shit!” So we gunned it. We took the next exit, which turned into a dusty road. I was filming, and suddenly there was dust everywhere. We thought we’d made it. Then we saw these police lights in the distance. And suddenly there was a knock on the window.’ She mimics the blare of an American police siren. ‘He was a really country-bumpkin kind of cop, really livid. But he was shocked by Jamie being English. He didn’t quite know what to do with him. But they took us to jail and we had to pay a fine, and they let us film it all.’ A token for posterity.

Even today, Hince has an uncontrollable urge to camp up his

Britishness in America. ‘I find myself on this real cultural crusade to be more English when I’m here. I just go a bit “lord love a duck”,’ he says, smirking. ‘I had some friends staying last night, and I called up concierge and asked for a camp bed and the woman said, “What?”

I was like, “A camp bed.” “Oh, a roll-away bed,” she said, and I was like, “That’s brilliant. I’ll have an all-the-way bed, please. I could go all the way on that bed!”’

As the story goes, on one American sojourn, Hince barricaded himself in his room with a Union Jack flag. ‘We were writing one of our records in Benton Harbor, Michigan. And I was like a fish out of water there. I didn’t want to make an American rock record. So I ended up furnishing my room with little reminders. I had a Union Jack and a Stones record…’ Mosshart interrupts. ‘There’s always some extreme behaviour happening when we’re making a record,’ she muses. ‘You dive into your imagination, create your own world.

We always cut our hair and dye it and put on crazy outfits.’

And yet, in the beginning, it was from 1960s America that the Kills drew inspiration: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Warhol’s Factory, the Chelsea Hotel, the Velvet Underground – and Edie Sedgwick, with whom Hince was infatuated in his twenties. ‘I remember seeing the picture by Burt Glinn of her, Andy Warhol and Chuck Wein coming out of a manhole. And it didn’t make sense. She just looked so modern. I don’t know, it was electrifying,’ he recalls, toking thoughtfully on a Marlboro Gold. ‘I’m just fascinated when there is a person who completely captures an age. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman, she certainly wasn’t the most talented. We live vicariously through others, and Edie Sedgwick is one of those people. She destroyed herself in the most spectacular, abusive, pleasure-seeking way, and that was a sign of the times.’

Warhol has also held a fascination (Moss – the girl of our very own times – famously threw a Warhol-themed party for Hince’s 40th birthday), but his views on the artist’s Pop Art days are far from naive. ‘He ended up accidently doing some brilliant things. He made low art, which became appreciated as high art. Many people at that time took it seriously. But those movies, things like Kitchen and Trash, they’re not serious. They are goading you to spot the

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emperor’s new clothes,’ he says. ‘Because it was taken so seriously, because there was so much pleasure-seeking and drug-taking, society got flipped upside-down. And all these deadbeats became the icons and the glory boys.’

Would it have been easier for them to be famous back then, before Warhol’s prophecy turned nightmare, and the rabid gorgons of today’s celebrity culture raised their monstrous heads?

‘Absolutely. I mean, it’s just gone haywire. It used to be about people wanting their idols to be untouchable, out of reach, to be like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a view of how the other half lived. Now people are obsessed with the ordinary. They want to see celebrities falling over, being fools, eating in a funny way, having a sweat stain,’ he says passionately. ‘Now you can’t move without being under fire. You’ve got nowhere to go, nowhere to let off steam, you’ve got to be constantly checking yourself. It’s no wonder all these people are having fucking meltdowns. You’re walking down the street and having a meltdown, and CONTINUED ON PAGE 280 www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

‘You can’t move without being under fire.

You’ve got nowhere to go, nowhere to let off steam’ – JAMIE HINCE ON CELEBRITY

CIGGY STARDUST Hince wears his own clothes.

Hair by Karen Brody. Make-up

by Dana Lloyd for MAC www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

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‘KATE’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 192

Bert are getting divorced and they sit down together, because they’ve got to settle on a cause. The first stage of my divorce with Sam came through on that day – on the very day that we were shooting. So that scene is nothing to do with acting.’ It is an immensely powerful and touching episode – redolent of grief and regret, with an unexpected glance of mutual understanding – as is the first passionate encounter between Mildred Pierce and her new lover, played by Guy Pearce. ‘I was nervous before shooting the love scene, because it’s such a profoundly bizarre thing to do with one’s life,’ says Winslet.

‘But I knew it had the potential to be a very revealing moment for Mildred, because she realises in that instant that she is a woman, she can be touched, she is capable of revealing herself to someone else – she can take off her clothes, and remove the smell of chicken grease, and there’s a woman with a heart, a soul, and a genuine capacity for emotion, having not been truly touched for years. I can really relate to that scene, and I hope other women can, as well – because it’s part of life – sex, love-making, those glorious moments of passion between two people.’

As she speaks, her face is alive, and her voice more urgent than ever before. ‘To be beautiful, in those moments – that’s the power of genuine longing and intensity, and I crave those feelings in life, those experiences. That’s why I’ve never needed drugs; I’ve avoided druggy, boozy circles of people; I don’t need anything synthetic to get that sense of elation.’ She pauses, just for a few seconds, and then says: ‘I feel I’m just at the beginning of a new narrative, and it’s incredibly exciting. It’s complicated, I know, and uncertain – but it’s where life happens, between the cracks. It can be a painful process, but I truly hope that never stops for me.’

‘Contagion’ is released nationwide on 21 October. Kate Winslet’s Golden Hat charity collection for Lancôme is available in Selfridges nationwide (0800 123400; www.selfridges.com) from 15 October.

‘DESIGN FOR LIFE’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 228

everything with a critical eye… He sees a kettle, and it upsets him.

You wouldn’t believe the torture over the kid’s things, like the Bugaboo.

‘Marc and I are both total gypsies, and find it very hard to stay in one place for more than five days,’ she continues. ‘Lucienne has flown, like, 20 times since she’s been born.’ They also have a house in Corfu – ‘A really sweet, rambling holiday house with a lovely pool,’ says Grand. Later this year, work will start on a big family house in Ithaca, where Newson has land. (His family originally came from this part of Greece.) Such an accumulation of property was far from intentional: ‘Everything doubled when Charlotte and I got married,’ says Newson. For Stockdale, the house on Ithaca will finally give her a chance to exert her own style again. ‘I need one traditional house in my life,’ she says. ‘I’ve got London and Paris and they’re really super-modern, but now I need some curtains and lampshades.’

‘Just when we thought it would all calm down, it’s all taken off,’ says Newson, as conversation turns to the near future. He currently has projects all over the world – working with a bathroom company in Australia, phones and cameras in Japan and private planes everywhere; a massive book by Taschen is being published in January.

Stockdale, meanwhile, has just taken her first ever full-time job, as fashion director of i-D. ‘I’m sure a part of Charlotte is torn and would like to be with the kids. But we’re too good at taking off,’ says Newson.

‘We’ll often get home to find the other one isn’t there and we’d just forgotten to say where we were going. But that’s the best thing about Charlotte. We still lead very independent lives. I don’t think either of us could be in a relationship that was any other way.’

‘GOING IN FOR THE KILLS’

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then there’s this gaggle of people taking pictures of your meltdown.

It’s just nuts.’ Hince has been one of the media’s prime targets since he began dating Moss in 2007, after being introduced to her backstage at a Kills gig by mutual friend Sadie Frost (‘Jamie is an old-fashioned guy, a bit of a throwback,’ Frost tells me. ‘He’s rock ’n’ roll on the outside, but inside, a bit of a pussycat.’) In the lenses of the paparazzi, with whom he has been known to have a scuffle or two, his face is always tense, visibly uncomfortable – by now a familiar expression, but one that does no justice to his good looks or his laid-back demeanour in the flesh. That is, except on one sole occasion: ‘At the wedding he was very comfortable, he was ultracool with this Cheshire-cat grin,’ Frost adds. ‘It was beautiful to see.’

The constant press glare has been an affliction that has permeated even his music, as he finds himself less free than Mosshart to write from the heart (Blood Pressures was originally titled Sex Tapes, but Hince was aware of the furore such a provocative title would ignite). ‘I’m definitely a huge romantic; I’m a sucker for all of that stuff. That’s what I’ve always concentrated on, in literature, in film, in writing and in music. Something that has beauty and sadness about it – those are always the things that make my heart race.’ He lights up another cigarette. ‘My romanticism has got a lot stronger as I’ve got older but because of my circumstance it’s harder, because I think to really explore that in music and a lyric, you have to be open and honest – and that’s something I struggle with, given the situation I’m in,’ he says, obliquely referring to Moss.

It is hard to believe that the line in ‘DNA’, a song on the new album – ‘Fate, with a single blow, has custard-pied me now’ – took shape in Hince’s cerebral cortex, given the serendipity of his amorous existence (there are some out there who would consider him one of the most fortunate men in the world).

But that was not always the case – at least musically. It has taken the Kills a while to gain the full musical recognition they deserve, regardless of the media attention surrounding their personal lives.

Although they have always had a die-hard underground following, they have deliberately avoided signing to bigger labels, preferring to take the slower route that some like to call ‘integrity’. ‘There seems to be a formula: the more mainstream and popular you get, the more rubbish you become – it doesn’t seem as if you can keep that little spark that you started with. I mean, the most popular newspapers, or books or films, they are always shite,’ Hince says.

‘Sometimes it’s been hard to see friends of ours in bands taking off.

One minute they’re supporting you, the next minute they are enormous. And you think, “This is weird, are we doing the right thing?”’ Now in their early thirties and forties, it seems that their patience has finally come to fruition, with the music press conjecturing that, with the advent of Blood Pressures, the Kills have reached a new zenith of musical maturity.

Certainly, Mosshart has recently fine-tuned her raw, resounding rock vocals, a development attributed to her tour with Jack White last year – she also sings lead vocals for his ‘other band’, the Dead Weather. This, along with her explosive, primal stage presence and her wild glam-rock outfits, has made her one of the most electrifying frontwomen of her generation, in the tradition of Joan Jett or Patti Smith: ‘She’s a grenade missing a pin,’ says White.

It is hard to reconcile such swaggering might with the gentle, befreckled girl who, offstage, hides behind her raven fringe. But music has always been Mosshart’s primitive, cathartic realm – a response to innate introversion – since, as an audacious 14-yearold, she left smalltown Vero Beach, Florida, during her summer

holidays to tour Europe and Japan with her punk-rock band Discount. ‘I was too young to even go in the bars that I was playing in,’ she explains. ‘I’d have to wait outside the venue, then go in the bar and play, and then come back outside again.’

It was on tour in London, almost half a decade later, while crashing in the squat in Gypsy Hill where Hince was living, that Mosshart overheard his trademark grinding guitar riffs floating down through the floorboards. She was instantly mesmerised.

‘I was really fascinated by him,’ she recalls. ‘I really loved the way he played guitar, the kind of music he listened to, everything he did. I just thought he was so cool.’ It turned out the feeling was mutual: the connection was instant, almost ‘psychic’ (that they were both reading the same biography of Edie Sedgwick was just one of many signs). ‘We were fascinated by this electricity that went between us, like a vibration,’ adds Hince.

‘It was something we felt we could capture.’ (Anyone who has witnessed the erotic tension of their live gigs would agree.)

When Mosshart returned to Florida, they carried on writing music together, mailing packages back and forth across the Atlantic, for more than a year; one from Hince contained a jar of coffee to aid Mosshart with all-night listening sessions. Mosshart finally took the leap in 2000, symbolically on Millennium Eve, and travelled to London to join Hince permanently and focus all their energies on each other and their new band.

Hince, too, saw this as his chance to break away from his South London squat scene – which, after 10 years, had become more of a rut – and start at what he calls ‘a new ground zero’. His first great escape had come at 17, when he fled the ennui of village life in Woolton Hill near Newbury, where his family – his father William, an itinerant construction worker, mum Carole and sister Sarah – had settled, for the bright lights of London. ‘I was really into anarchist punk bands, so when I got there I went straight to the 121 Centre on Railton Road [in Brixton], a radical anarchist centre [a squatted house, which survived for 18 years, before the community was evicted in 1999]. That was pretty much all I wanted to do. Demonstrations and riots.’

Music was Hince’s salvation when he was growing up in rural Hampshire. ‘At the age of 13 or 14, I’d hitch into the local town to go record shopping. There were all these punks and mods there. It was frightening. I’d look through all these records, and I didn’t know who all the bands were – it was mind-blowing. You couldn’t listen to them, so I’d buy records on the strength of what the bands looked like on the cover, or their artwork.’

And so began the honing of Hince’s visual instincts and sartorial flair, now so integral to his persona. ‘At school, I started off as a mod. Then one day, on one of my hitchhiking trips, I bought this single called “Witchhunt” by the Mob,’ he says, chuckling fondly.

‘I listened to it, and overnight I threw away my parka, got my mum’s leather jacket and painted a mushroom cloud on it, and I was a punk. Then I spent the next few years getting beat up in town for the way I looked. When I moved to London and started squatting, I just looked like a fucking street urchin. I wore rags, and I used to put flour in my hair.’ ‘Like Hovis or Homepride?’ I ask. ‘Yeah, I liked looking all dusty. So when I jumped, there would be a puff of white flour-smoke coming off me.’

On the other side of the Atlantic, a young Mosshart made her own forays into punk chic. ‘Until I was 10 or 11, for Halloween every single year, I dressed up like a punk rocker. It was the only day that I got to have pink or green hair. It was my favourite day of the year.’

The flour clouds and pink hair aside, Hince and Mosshart’s bona fide self-evolved looks have proved irresistible to the fashion world, with its insatiable thirst for referencing authentic music scenes. The Kills recently modelled in a Zadig & Voltaire campaign and, in 2008, tracks from Midnight Bloom, ‘U R A Fever’ and ‘Cheap and Cheerful’, were used in YSL and Fendi perfume campaigns respectively; the new album Blood Pressures was one of the soundtracks of London Fashion Week. Mosshart’s presence at a show – she has attended Burberry Prorsum, Sass & Bide and Pam Hogg events – lends a certain rock ’n’ roll edge to the front row, although she insists: ‘The fashion world’s come to us more than we’ve ever gone to it. Fashion’s kind of been a fan of the Kills.’

Instead, it is the art world that has provided a greater lure for the duo, who, in the past, have held two exhibitions of their Polaroids. ‘When you’re on tour, the kind of art you make is clip art, things you’ve found, things you make. You find a bit of beauty in a napkin with a coffee stain on it in the shape of a heart’ – he exhales smoke – ‘boxes full of rubbish that mean nothing to anybody until you put them on the wall.’

Mosshart has been offered her own solo shows, and Hince is something of a modest collector; he is an appreciator of the Chapmans’ iconoclastic work (‘Jake and Dinos are kind of friends now’), and owns four Peter Blakes. The legendary Pop artist is also a friend, since Harper’s Bazaar set him up in conversation with the Kills in 2008. ‘That was amazing. His was the first exhibition that I went to, when I was 12 or 13,’ he says enthusiastically. ‘He went to my stag do, and came to the wedding and my birthday party with [Blake’s wife] Chrissy. He’s just so brilliant – I love him.’ Blake is equally enamoured of the Kills’ frontman, detecting in him a certain artistic sensibility: ‘One of the first times I met Jamie, I was paralytic at one of Kate’s parties and he helped carry me out to a cab. That was a bonding moment.’ Blake laughs. ‘He has a real interest in art – and Kate collects as well. He’s sensitive, art-loving, kind of intellectual – very bright.’

Hince was also ‘fortunate enough’ to know the late Lucian Freud, for whom his wife sat for a portrait in 2002. ‘He had this most incredible house. If you want to talk about living art, then oh my God… There’s nothing in it. The carpet up the stairs has just got footprints of paint, and there’s a wall just spewing out some solidified oils where he’s wiped his brush over the years and the decades. There are all these crazy solidified accidental oil sculptures. Then you walk into a room and there’s this fucking Francis Bacon, that his mate Bacon gave to him – “Here, have this!”

It’s absolutely incredible,’ he recounts, his eyes alight with fervour.

‘I went to see him once when he was ill. He’d had an accident with a live zebra! It had bucked him and he’d cracked his hip, at the age of 87. I took him some flowers, and he was like this tiny little bird in bed. Just a beautiful man…’ He breaks off in a reverie.

Such is the imaginative realm of Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart, animated by such poetic visions: the frailness of a dying artist, video footage of an old police chase, collages of Polaroids like Dadaist artworks, and clandestine lyrics about love. Shoot now over and tropical-disease crisis abated, the duo sit quietly astride a wall in the academy’s gardens (Hince barefoot and trousers rolled up, post-paddle) drinking Côtes du Rhône from plastic cups and watching as the sun slowly falls behind Forest Lake. In an era all too often propelled by vacuity and the crude demands of commercialism, the Kills are true aesthetes, modern-day Romantics with a capital ‘R’.

‘Baby Says’ by the Kills is released on 24 October.

MEN’S SPECIAL A M E R ICA NA ON T H E CAT WA L K | F R E S H N E W S H A DE S | A DV E N T U R E HOL I DAYS

EXCLUS

IVE

ON CLOUD NINE WITH

JARED LETO

ES Magazine 21.03.2014

PHOTOGRAPHED BY TERRY RICHARDSON

NICK G R I M S H AW FITNESS A DDIC T THE L E A DI NG M A N AT LOUIS VUITTON RICHARD E G R A N T ’S M I DL I F E R E N A I S S A NCE

JARED PULL T OFF Method actor, rock-star lothario or resolute recluse? Jared Leto is a winner whatever mode he’s in. Between filling stadiums and fielding calls from Obama, the man of the moment invites Stephanie Rafanelli to join him on cloud nine a few nights after his Oscars glory

Photographs by

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JARED LETO

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‘THE OSCARS WERE PRETTY FANTASTIC. I LOOKED OVER AND MY MOTHER WAS DANCING WITH MADONNA’ producer-director, photographer, painter, businessman and activist. ‘I just follow my gut — as Andy Warhol said, “Labels are for cans not people,” ’ he tells me after the gig.

All this makes Leto a very busy man. After partying all night at the Oscars (‘It was pretty f***ing fantastic to see all those Hollywood dreamers letting loose with such abandon. I looked over and my mother was dancing with Madonna’), and taking a hangover hike to Malibu, he flew to Paris for meetings, the Miu Miu fashion show and more fun: his close friend the photographer Terry Richardson was in town and shot him for this magazine before Leto attended an obscure music awards in Finland, his every word and move pounced on by the global media.

At 1am, I am finally whisked past a line of deflated-looking fans into his dressing room.

They eye me up along the corridor, turning a pale shade of green.

‘I’m starting to come down off the weeklong pink-cloud high now,’ he tells me, dishing me up some of his tomato soup and a vegetable curry (he is vegan). I can confirm that there is no beer backstage. And I’m a little disappointed that he’s come down from jacked-up flirting mode. More business at the front, party at the back.

We start sensible: he doesn’t seem the type, I say, to care about Hollywood accolades. ‘I don’t.’ He slumps down on a black leather sofa. ‘But I would never say, “I don’t give a shit about the Oscars,” because it’s not the whole truth. It’s not about the shiny, naked golden man, or the pat on the back, it’s about being able to stand on a world stage for two minutes in front of a billion people and say something that is meaningful, important to you.’ Leto namechecked his older brother, best friend and bandmate, 44-year-old Shannon, his single mum, Aids victims, outsiders in general, and those fighting for their dreams in Venezuela and Ukraine. ‘I could have really taken the piss. But I didn’t want to wing it with this one. I prepared. I wanted to keep it classy.’

By contrast, at the Independent Spirit

Awards, he poked fun at the rumours that constantly trail him: by reputation he is a legendary lothario, recently linked with Lupita Nyong’o, Miley Cyrus and his exgirlfriend Scarlett Johansson. So he thanked ‘all the women I’ve been with, and all the women who think they’ve been with me’ as well as his ‘future ex-wife Lupita’. He tweeted selfies of the pair together in Paris, presumably to cause a stir. It has since been confirmed that they are not in fact dating.

At the Golden Globes he shared with Hollywood’s finest that he had waxed his entire body to play Rayon, but stopped short of a Brazilian and had not used prosthetics.

What did he do with his male appendage, I ask now — strap it back? ‘A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. But, let’s just say, there are times when you’re not as prepared as you’d like to be...’ he answers cryptically, raising an eyebrow.

Leto seems to flit between composed, pale blue-eyed earnestness and cheeky provocation. ‘I thought about dragging up for the Oscars, going as Rayon, because I knew that she would have loved to be there,’ he says. ‘It’s so much work for girls to get ready.

I was brought up by mum, so I always had an appreciation of women. But now I have more respect for the process. It’s a lot, what women have to do to themselves. But in the end, when you put that final dash of lipstick on and your look all comes together, it really is a glorious reward.’

His sassy, fragile and very human portrayal of Rayon — ‘a hot mess’, as he calls her — and his thoughtful acceptance speech made Leto the true hero of Oscars night. The industry seems to have fallen for a man that, by playing the basic principles of hard-to-get, cannot be fully seduced by it. Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, Oprah Winfrey all approached him with open arms on the night, Stevie Nicks gave him the necklace he is now wearing, Al Pacino has since ‘reached out’ — they are due to meet for coffee — and there have been several calls from the White House. ‘There are some exciting proposals.

But I don’t know how much more I’m allowed to say. I probably need to clear it with the CIA first.’ Leto is a vociferous Obama supporter and raised funds for the 2008 re-election campaign. He has protested against California’s Proposition 8, which aimed to overturn same-sex marriage, and raised money for Haitian Relief as well as human rights and environmental charities.

I wonder if he is considering another career, in politics. ‘My mum was a teenager when she had us; she used food stamps to feed us,

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lthough I’m trying very hard to resist, Jared Leto is urging me to stage-bomb. His locks flying behind him like Hermes’ wings, he speed-circles the stage over to the discreet corner where I’m standing, grabs my hand and drags me out in front of the baying 13,000-strong audience, singing to me all the while — and, even worse, goading me to join him in a chorus. Needless to say, this is not the polite Academy Awards podium but, six days later, on a grubbier, strobe-lit stage at Helsinki’s Hartwall Areena, where he has rejoined his band Thirty Seconds to Mars for its remaining six-month world tour.

Leto has made his entrance tonight in a black hooded coat, wielding a baseball bat; more LA drugs dealer than the politically engaged figure in an oversized bow tie he cut at the Oscars. With suitable drama, he throws off the jacket to expose the full glory of his rock Jesus look — shades, manleggings, tunic skirt, sleeveless T-shirt — whereupon he unleashes his power-vocals on to his fans for two adrenaline-fuelled hours: jumping, grinding, sprinting and simultaneously flirting with what feels like every single member of the crowd. ‘I don’t dive into the mosh pit any more,’ he whispers to me on a break. ‘It’s the fastest way to lose your penis. And I’m proud to say mine is still intact.’

The show is part full-on rock extravaganza, part interactive Leto comedy routine. ‘Hey you,’ he cries into his mic.

‘Great mullet, man. That’s my next haircut.

Business at the front. Party at the back.’ This culminates with a stage invasion and a mass selfie, his second of the week: the 42-year-old in a huddle of ecstatic Scandi teens.

It is curious, to some, that Hollywood’s man of the moment would disappear off in the vital afterglow of his Best Supporting Actor win to revel so intimately with the global masses. But then Leto doesn’t follow protocol. Six years before his return to film as Rayon, an HIV-positive, pre-operative transwoman in Dallas Buyers Club, he walked away from Hollywood to tour with his band despite consistent critical acclaim for his gritty, transformative roles. Leto has eschewed the blockbuster juggernaut to success in favour of the slow train, via occasional, challenging roles in the likes of Requiem for a Dream, Fight Club and Panic Room. Plus, he has other commitments. He is not only a method actor and singersongwriter, but a video and documentary

B A L M A I N striped jumper (previous page), £ 6 7 6 SAINT LAURENT BY HEDI S L I M A N E tuxedo, £ 1 , 4 3 0 silk print shirt, £ 4 3 0 patent look jeans, £ 3 4 0

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JARED LETO she got helped by social services to go back to school and train as a nurse to try to give her kids some stability. So if I can help or be of service in any way...’ he says. ‘But you know what? I’m too impatient. I’d probably swear in a speech. As George Clooney says, “I’ve f***ed too many chicks and done too many drugs to be in politics.” ’ It’s hard to reconcile Leto the wild front man with the committed method actor who performs extreme feats of self-remoulding in order to morph into his dark, outsider roles.

The road to this is more lonely and torturous.

During filming for Dallas Buyers Club, Leto only ever appeared on set as Rayon, not ‘meeting’ his co-star Matthew McConaughey or the other actors until after they had wrapped. He even donned lipstick and a pink fluffy jumper and flirted his arse off for his first Skype meeting with director Jean-Marc Vallée. ‘Maybe if I was making romantic comedies, there’d be more immediate silliness, more hanging out in each other’s trailers,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve never really had the kind of joy I experience with the band on set, but then I’m not really looking for that.’

Leto likens his process to ‘being a sculptor’. He lost two stone, lived rough on the streets and abstained from sex with his then girlfriend Cameron Diaz to become the drug-addicted Harry Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream in 2000. He force-fed himself into obesity, putting on five stone to accurately portray John Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27 in 2007, for which he eventually suffered gout and was temporarily confined to a wheelchair (take that, Shia LaBeouf). In Mr Nobody, he underwent six hours of make-up to play a decrepit 118-yearold. Like his character Angel Face in Fight Club, who is happily freed from the prison of handsomeness when he is beaten to a pulp and permanently disfigured, Leto appears to make an effort to mask the pretty-boy looks for which, in 1994, he was cast in teen series My So-Called Life. But there is more to this, I say, something self-destructive...

‘All my roles are masochistic or...sadistic.’

His eyes flash with naughtiness. ‘Is that going to be your headline? “Jared Leto: masochist or sadist? You decide.” ’ The sexual edges of this theme can be found in his music. The S&M-themed video for ‘Hurricane’, which he directed in 2007, was censored by MTV, and in ‘End of All Days’, on his new album Love Lust Faith + Dreams, he sings: ‘I punish you with pleasure, I pleasure you with pain…’

‘I have very strong self-control. There is something very seductive about it,’ he admits when we discuss his crash, three-stone weight loss for Rayon, during which the slight actor virtually stopped eating. (He used to go to the supermarket just to stare at the food.) ‘I got to understand the mentality of an eating disorder. There are the highs of losing more weight; there’s a rush of endorphins associated with that control.

When you have made a severe commitment to losing weight, there is a lot of shame and guilt around eating again. I really suffered that, it’s not a nice feeling...’ But Leto found solace in self-exploration. ‘The process can

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be very monk-like — there is a history of people who have fasted to achieve enlightenment. There is something in that, getting to know who you are. It changed me.’

I ask him if it was easier to get into the feminine headspace because he grew up without his father. Was there already a dash of oestrogen in him? ‘Oestrogen?’ He laughs, a little offended. ‘I guess you haven’t heard all the rumours... No, I became a detective, I met with transgendered people, I asked questions: “What was it like to tell your parents?” “What’s it like to be judged?” ’ He experienced this when he first dragged-up and went into Wholefoods. ‘You don’t have to desire the surgery to have your penis cut off, but you do have to understand it. We all have issues with our identity, or know what it’s like not to belong.’

L

eto grew up an outsider. His father left after he was born, and Leto never saw him again. (He committed suicide when Leto was eight.) Leto’s teenage mother and the boys eventually fled Louisiana, where they lived with her Cajun parents in a one-bedroom house, to join the hippie movement. They lived in communes, mixed with artists and musicians, and moved around a lot — from Wyoming to Virginia, Colorado, Alaska, Brazil and Haiti — constantly having to make new friends and reinvent themselves.

At one point, when we talk about his forefathers, he says that most of his family were probably in prison (though he prefers to keep an apocryphal mystique about his background).

Leto grew up wanting to be either a drugs dealer or an artist. At 16, he dropped out of school, before returning to another in Washington. The Leto boys were wild and unruly; they dabbled with drugs, broke into offices and warehouses to steal booze and motorbikes: ‘Other kids went to summer camp; we stole your car.’ Leto steered himself out of the nosedive when he got into college in Philadelphia to study art, and later on to a film course at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The creative focus was his salvation. Meanwhile, Shannon descended further into drug addiction, car-jacking and trouble with the police — the kind of downward spiral that Leto brutally documents in Requiem for a Dream.

But when he moved to LA to pursue a career in music (he says acting was merely a day job to pay the rent), Shannon joined him and they formed the band in 1998. ‘Music saved his life. It was either that or prison. It saved both of us really. Shannon started drumming on pots and pans from an early age; I played a broken, second-hand piano.’

Life on the road with his brother is, after all, what Leto grew up with; it satisfies his constant need for adventure, newness, change. (Thirty Seconds to Mars recently set a Guinness World Record for the most tour dates, 309, on one album cycle.)

Now in his forties, Leto still looks and acts at least a decade younger. There are no plans to stop touring now that, after years of graft,

Thanks to Finnair, which operates five flights daily from London Heathrow to Helsinki from £109 (0870 241 4411; finnair.com) and the Hilton Helsinki, double rooms from €109 (hilton.com)

‘GROWING UP, OTHER KIDS WENT TO SUMMER CAMP. WE STOLE CARS’

the band has achieved global recognition: Love Lust Faith + Dreams has sold 10m copies and their shows are mainly sold out. ‘We don’t give a shit about our ages. We’re not worrying about that. There are no rules,’ he tells me. And what if he met some girl he wanted to settle down with? ‘Then she’d better have a passport... look at the Rolling Stones, they just keep on going. Maybe me and my brother will be shaking it up there in our sixties. Who knows? Or maybe I’ll just walk away.’

He is even more freewheeling about his future film plans. He’d like to direct a longform narrative, he says. He has already won multiple MTV awards for Thirty Seconds to Mars’ videos, and a People’s Choice Award at Toronto Film Festival for his 2012

documentary Artifact. This charted the creation of the band’s album This Is War and their battle in 2008 with their record label EMI, which sued them for $30m following a dispute over royalties when, after a tour and successful album, the band found themselves millions of dollars in debt. (The case was eventually dropped.)

For now, however, Leto’s eye is set firmly on his tour schedule. His devotion to his band is almost religious. Next up is Russia, followed by Ukraine. ‘I read that they censored my speech in Russia. They cut what I said about Ukraine. But I’m fully intending to sing “This Is War” there.’ Leto usually accompanies the song’s lyrics ‘To fight, to fight, to fight!’ with rampant flag-waving and air fist-pumping. ‘Shit could go down. We’ve

already heard some things on the ground that are concerning. Through the band, we are really engaged with young voices all over the world through our social network feeds.

I’ve learned so much travelling the world these last six years, it’s changed me. It’s made me a better actor...’

More than anything, Leto is fighting exhaustion now. His eyes are glassy, like marbles, and slowly starting to shut. He only has a few hours to pack and get on a flight to Belarus. He reverts to his humble Academy Awards speech mode, and thanks me for the interview. ‘I’m sorry but I really need to crash,’ he croaks gently.

It looks like Jared Leto’s Oscars week has officially come to an end. ES Love Lust Faith + Dreams is out now

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MEN

THE RETURN OF

MR MUSIC ‘I’ve found my comfortable spot,’ says Mark Ronson RIGHT: Performing with Amy Winehouse at the Brit Awards, 2008

With Amy Winehouse he made musical history, with Adele he broke records. Now nearly 40, Mark Ronson is releasing the album of his career, yet, surprisingly, Stephanie Rafanelli finds he’s happier in the shadows. So where did the party boy go? » Photographs Le Ann Mueller

REDONL INE . C O . UK | F EBRUA R Y 2 0 15 | 65

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t’s 9am sharp but still feels like the middle of the night.

Bleary-eyed, Mark Ronson is making breakfast in his Primrose Hill kitchen. ‘Why’s it so early?’ he exclaims to the ceiling, as he stirs a pan of goop. When I ask him what’s on the stove, he mulls over the correct British term, finally settling on ‘porridge’. The London-born music producer is authentically transatlantic by upbringing: he moved to New York as a young boy and, although he resettled here in 2011, still leads a frenetic NY-Lon existence. His accent lurches unpredictably in a tug-of-war between his two home cities. ‘Sometimes, when I get off a plane, I don’t know which accent is going to come out,’ he says, slurring a little.

He is evidently not a morning person.

Of course, I’m more accustomed to Ronson mixing records than breakfast cereals. Since he launched his career as a DJ on the New York scene 20-odd years ago, Ronson has built a reputation as the gentleman super-producer with the Midas touch. The man who suggested Lily Allen ham up her cockney accent on her debut album Alright, Still and produced Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black in 2006 – with which she made history as the first British woman to pick up five Grammys in a single night. Ronson has also worked his magic on music for Adele (the platinum-selling 19), Christina Aguilera, Robbie Williams, Kaiser Chiefs and Bruno Mars’ Grammy-winning Unorthodox Jukebox. He is also the go-to guy for breathing new life into older acts: he produced Duran Duran’s 2011 All You Need Is Now and Paul McCartney’s New in 2013. It’s why Boy George, who sung on Ronson’s third album, Record Collection, nicknamed him ‘the wizard’.

Never knowingly underdressed, Ronson has also brought with him the old-school glamour that has been lacking from the contemporary music scene. This morning, it’s a little early for his trademark skinny suit; he is faintly dishevelled, but the amiable demeanour and politeness are here. Still, there is something different about Ronson from the last time I met him in 2008, when he was a staple fixture behind the decks at the most scene-y parties – and also in the headlines. His association with the soap-operatic lives of Allen and Winehouse, as well as his sister Samantha’s relationship with Hollywood car crash Lindsey Lohan, made Ronson, by default, tabloid fodder.

Since the release of his last album in 2010, Ronson has kept a significantly lower profile.

‘I just went out too much, to be honest,’ he mumbles. ‘When I look back I think, who was that guy falling out of clubs at 4am looking completely wasted? It was fun, my first taste of success. But I’m married now. If I’m not in the studio, I’m with Joséphine,’ he says, referencing wife Joséphine de La Baume, the 30-year-old Parisian chanteuse, Agent Provocateur model and actress, who’s appeared in One Day and Rush.

Today, there is an air of quiet confidence to Ronson. In September he will turn 40, and, as if to prove his rightful place as a master among producers, he has released his most accomplished album yet: Uptown Special, a funk-based gem inspired by the sure-fire 1970s and 1980s classics he played in his early years in New York. Uptown Funk, the first single, released last November, already has 20 million hits on

garnered a following. ‘One night, I was DJing and Puff Daddy came up to me and handed me a $100 bill and gave me his number. I had the $100 framed, but a year later, I couldn’t find $1.75 for the pizza delivery. So I had to pay for it with Puffy’s note. Such a waste.’

It was around 2006, when he was playing a regular night at London’s Notting Hill Arts Club, that Ronson was introduced to a loudmouthed 22-year-old girl from Camden, who dressed like a member of The Ronettes and sang like Billie Holliday. The rest is history. Sad history, in the end. Amy Winehouse’s public struggle with drink and heroin addiction eventually resulted in her death at 27 from alcohol poisoning in July 2011.

Ronson is clearly still affected by her passing today. His breath shortens and his affable nature retracts when I bring her up. I ask if he would have liked her to sing on Uptown Special, had circumstances been different.

YouTube. Ronson lurks in the background of the video, as is his way, while Bruno Mars and his troupe take centre stage.

I wonder if Ronson has ever been tempted to step up to the mic and be a frontman, as Pharrell did to such acclaim with Happy last year. ‘Bruno is one of the greatest performers, if not the greatest, of his generation. Why would I try to take the spotlight or end up looking like an idiot who can’t dance next to him? I’ve found my comfortable spot,’ he answers quickly.

RONSON LIVED AND BREATHED MUSIC FROM infancy. Born in St John’s Wood, London, in 1975, into a family whose relatives included Conservative cabinet ministers Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Leon Britten, his father, Laurence Ronson, brother of property tycoon Gerald Ronson, was a music fanatic who abandoned the family business to manage Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz and Roachford.

His mother, Liverpool-born Ann Dexter, heiress to the Odeon Cinemas empire, divorced Ronson’s father when he was five, subsequently getting together with Mick Jones, founding member of 1980s soft-rock band Foreigner. (He wrote the anthem I Want To Know What Love Is for her.) A custody battled ensued, in which the young Ronson had to testify, and when his mother won in 1983, she took her children, Mark, aged eight, and his six-year-old twin sisters, Samantha and Charlotte (now a fashion designer), across the Atlantic to settle on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with Jones.

It was here that Ann Dexter-Jones (they later married) gained a reputation as a legendary hostess, throwing parties that brought together the stars of Hollywood, the art scene and the music industry. When the likes of Michael Jackson, Christopher Reeve, Mick Jagger and Robin Williams mingled in his living room, the young Ronson would sneak downstairs and air-drum in front of the guests in his pyjamas.

It was in this environment that Ronson’s musical ear was honed. ‘Mick [Jones] would come home from the studio when we were waking up to go to school. He would always play me the new mixes of the Foreigner albums and ask me, “What do you think of this one?” I was eight and would say, “Well, I think the one you played me last week sounded better.” After that, he would wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “Hey, Mark! We’ve just done these new mixes, I need to get your opinion.”’

His mother’s fabled charm, which allowed her to pull disparate groups of people together, also had a strong influence on his producing skills. ‘My mum is great at making people feel special. That’s a talent you need when you’re a record producer.

You need to take artists and make them feel like they have a superpower. Make them feel 100% comfortable so they go into the booth and give you their best performance.’

When he was 18, Ronson left his affluent uptown neighbourhood each night to DJ in hole-in-the-wall hip-hop clubs downtown. ‘They were always more dangerous because that’s where the drug dealers and gangsters go. But it was cool.

Occasionally my mum would show up and hang out in the booth. People were like, “Who’s that blonde white lady in with the DJ?”’ But the skinny, nicely mannered Jewish kid quickly

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‘I just went out too much. When I look back I think, who was that guy falling out of clubs at 4am?’

singers ever to me. And certainly CLOCKWISE, FROM LEFT: Mark the greatest that I ever got Ronson with ex to get in the studio with.

Daisy Lowe; We had such a strong bond.

Bruno Mars It doesn’t mean you get performing Uptown Funk; to make [albums] forever Ronson with together just because wife Joséphine; you made one great one,’ and with his he says carefully. ‘But mum and sisters yeah, I hope that at the very least she would have been someone I could always be great friends with. When I made Record Collection [his 2010 album], I played it for her. It was Jones, writer of one of the greatest always important to me love songs ever, is quite a lot of what she thought. If she pressure. ‘I look at my wife now, didn’t like something, she’d and say, “I’m sorry, I’m never just say, “Turn that shit off.”’ going to be able to top anything One act that Ronson has like that for you.” English men not yet produced is his wife’s are not the most romantic band, Singtank, although people. But being married to he often pops into the a French woman is a good crash studio to help fiddle with course. It’s like, “Hurry up, you’d arrangements. His musical better learn to be romantic, a Latin instincts may have helped lover, or else.” I’m working on it.’ guide his partner choices over the years. In 2003, Ronson was The couple are part of an extended transatlantic family engaged to actress Rashida Jones, the daughter of legendary – Ronson alone has nine siblings from his parents’ different music producer Quincy Jones; and also dated rock-and-roll marriages. I wonder if they’re looking forward to having offspring Daisy Lowe and Tennessee Thomas, drummer in indie their own kids? ‘Yeah. I think that’s the best thing that band The Like. Then, in 2009, he met de La Baume on the set could ever happen. I don’t know when. But it’s going to be of one of his music videos; they were married two years later. amazing whenever that comes,’ he says brightly. One day, These days, the couple spend a lot of time listening to he might even wake up his own son or daughter to get their records together at home in London. ‘She’s the best litmus test opinion of his latest record in the middle of the night.

Mark Ronson’s new album, Uptown Special, is out now of what I’m working on.’ He says that being the stepson of Mick

To see Mark’s greatest music collaborations, go to...

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ALEXA

Muse, designer, DJ and presenter, Alexa Chung is a multifaceted girl about town who epitomises a uniquely British style. As A/W 11’s catwalks thrill to a rebooted Sixties vibe, she tells STEPHANIE RAFANELLI about her Swinging inspirations, and talks to three female icons of the 1960s – Marianne Faithfull, Penelope Tree and Pattie Boyd – about the ultimate era of fashion invention

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

Photographs by ELLEN VON UNWERTH Styled by CATHY KASTERINE

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TOP OF THE KNIT PARADE This page: Alexa Chung wears cashmere jumper, £1,320, Jil Sander. Cropped jeans, £143, MIH Jeans. Sunglasses, from a selection, Cutler and Gross.

Opposite: black mesh mini-dress, £2,120, Isabel Marant. Black leather ballet shoes, £190, Repetto. Necklace, Alexa’s own.

Previous page: gazar-silk mini-dress, £2,330, Lanvin. Patent slingback kitten heels, £535, Rupert Sanderson

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lexa Chung is jumping like Jiminy the music scene – until recently, she dated Arctic Monkeys frontman Cricket. With one hand securing a Alex Turner – combined with a penchant for Peter Pan collars, shift newly donned black peaked cap, she dresses and loafers) seamlessly resurrect the combined aura of the launches herself high into the air, British It girls of the 1960s. Back outside the flat, she channels alterBambi legs akimbo, landing, somenately: Marianne Faithfull (exiting the abode of Anita Pallenberg how, wrapped around the barrel of a and Brian Jones in 1966, having left artist John Dunbar for Mick vintage lamppost. ‘I feel like a cross Jagger); Penelope Tree’s wide-eyed mascara-laden stare into the between Jean Shrimpton and George lens (‘Goodbye cat-eyes, hello lashes,’ she giggles); Jane Birkin circa Harrison,’ she declares as she slides 1968 calling ‘Nous allons’ in a decidedly British accent to her French her patent loafers back to earth. lover; and a Shrimpton-Bailey hybrid perched on the bonnet of a ‘Every day I wake up and literally 1964 Mercedes, camera in hand. She is a reincarnation of all those don’t understand why I’m not Girls of the Moment, the totemic Sixties muses who came to embody living in the Sixties… This shoot the excitement of an era, while breathing new life into their legacy. is hijacking my brain.’

‘My ex-boyfriend [photographer David Titlow] showed me Rewind 30 minutes and Chung is rollicking in retro heaven. She Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up in my late teens. I remember seeing ferrets through a seemingly time-warped trove of paillette dresses, Jane Birkin. And I couldn’t believe it. She even made just wearing a mini coat-dresses and kinky boots (courtesy of new-season Prada, Burberry and Marni) in the backroom of David Hockney’s former Thanks to her kooky look – a gangly frame, languid lashes and spooked gaze – Tree was hailed by Diana flat in Notting Hill, itself littered with genuVreeland as the face of the Sixties. She was 16. She went ine artefacts: kitsch Murano vases, leather on to become a muse to Avedon, Beaton and Bailey, yellow-submarine-coloured armchairs, the whom she dated for several years in Swinging London. original tobacco carpet and a humongous She gave up modelling in the 1970s, returning only cheese plant that looks as if it could be carbriefly in a Burberry campaign with Kate Moss in 2006 bon dated back to the artist’s student days.

ALEXA CHUNG: You were born in England, but you There could be few better places for moved to New York when you were very young. Your Chung to summon the creative spirit of the mum was a prolific socialite and you were left alone Sixties – it was here that Hockney lived and to your own devices. What did you do when you were worked in his ‘Young Contemporaries’ days running around Greenwich Village on your own? (the 1961 RBA Galleries exhibition alongPENELOPE TREE: My best friend and I were obsessed

by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and folk music in general, so side Peter Blake that marked the beginnings we taught ourselves how to play guitar and harmonise of British Pop Art), and where Andy Warhol and we began busking by the fountain in Washington later attended the artist’s notorious Saturday Square, and in little cafés around the Village where tea parties, filming the Swinging London anyone who wanted to could get up on stage. We scene, as it was invoked by an April 1966 thought we were very cool, dressed almost entirely in black, with home-made bead necklaces and black issue of Time magazine. ‘My mum and dad ballet shoes from Capezio. have a print of David Hockney, Ossie Clarke AC: You became a sensation with the outfit that you and a pregnant Celia Birtwell on their wall wore to Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball in 1966, at 16. How did that come about? at home [Birtwell gave birth to her son PT: When I was around 12, I was taken on a school excursion to see a modern ballet called Albert in 1969]. I’m pretty sure that it was Revelations, choreographed by Alvin Ailey. Everything about it struck a deep chord for me, including the costumes. The Black & White Ball dress I wore was inspired by an taken here in this house,’ says Chung as she ongoing fascination with dance clothes. As for the ball, it was more of an amazing skips around the flat, running her eyes over spectacle than a wildly fun evening. I remember Frank Sinatra showing up with Mia its turquoise walls as if reacquainting herFarrow, who danced with her bodyguard while Frank looked on disapprovingly. self with a familiar habitat.

AC: You were famously shot by Avedon in 1967. But you’ve said you felt you were For all her modernity, as praised in a fraud – what did you mean?

PT: No one considered me a pretty child, but somehow during adolescence I developed aphorism by Karl Lagerfeld, and her lauded a look that some people found striking and others found weird. ‘Go-sees’ with my black position as Girl of the Moment, the allure book were a bit traumatic, as most advertisers, and some photographers, just laughed of Chung – presenter (for MTV, Channel 4 when they saw me. and most recently V Festival), DJ, campaign AC: Legend has it that you moved to London after reading the infamous Time face (currently for Lacoste and Superga), magazine article of April 1966 that named London as Swinging – is this true?

PT: When my mother discovered the extent of my secret bohemian life in Greenwich designer, Chanel ambassador and muse to Village, she sent me packing to a strict boarding school in Massachusetts, where I was British designers (Burberry, Mulberry and very unhappy. One day I came across that edition of Time in the library, and the hope Christopher Kane) – is strongly rooted in of a new life began to dawn again. Straightaway, I began planning how to get to London. her echoing of the past. No more so than AC: Can you remember the first time you met Bailey – he was still with Catherine this season, with the beginnings of a Sixties Deneuve (the story goes that when she saw the photos that Avedon took of you, she said ‘You’re going to run off with that girl’) – was the chemistry immediate? renaissance forming on the horizon. The PT: Yes, immediate, like being swept up by a tornado. He was incredibly good-looking, cultural resonances of Chung’s aesthetic (her funny and shrewd, with a dangerous edge… That was the clincher, of course. We got foal-like limbs, coltish spirit, gamine sexutogether in Paris after he finished with Deneuve. I was modelling the collections for US ality, feline gaze flitting between knowing Vogue, photographed by Dick Avedon. Dick and everyone else except Diana Vreeland and ingénue, and her frisson at the edges of tried their best to stop me from going with Bailey, but I was already gone, gone, gone.

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WINGS OF A DOVE White silk coat, £3,430; cream wool cape, £1,530, both Chloé.

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pair of tights look sexy,’ she groans with admiration, like an adolescent boy. ‘I think the Sixties vibe suits my body type, which is skinny legs and a boyish frame.’

Delve past the niches of Chung’s closet – crammed with thrift-store triumphs and new-season remakes of Sixties dresses (her current favourite is a black pre-Fall 2010 Marc Jacobs shift with a white collar) – into the recesses of her mind, and you will find a psychic mood board crammed with Sixties references: from Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (she has scenes from the 1961 film on her BlackBerry) to Françoise Hardy’s cameo in Godard’s Masculin Féminin in 1966; photographer Sam Haskins’ 1962 book Five Girls (she made Turner use Jill, one of the five girls, shot in bunches, over-the-knee socks and pyjamas for the Arctic Monkeys’ album artwork); and a book by German photographer

Jean Shrimpton provides enduring inspiration.

‘Bailey used to take her to my grandfather’s Chinese restaurant, Chan’s, in East Ham!’

Astrid Kirchherr, the girlfriend of the ‘Fifth Beatle’ Stuart Sutcliffe, a collection of her images of the band during their early Hamburg days. (‘She was really cool. She had a blonde crop and always wore a black poloneck. I really want a black poloneck at the moment…’).

She has dedicated a wall in her Colombia Road flat as a shrine to her multiple muses, covered with cut-and-paste effigies, including paparazzi shots of those halcyon years. ‘I look at images of that time and they just look like they are in this exciting vortex.’ ‘The Shrimp’ provides enduring inspiration; Chung reveres her 1965 space-age shoot for Harper’s Bazaar photographed by Avedon (‘Bailey used to take her to my grandfather’s Chinese restaurant, Chan’s, in No one lived the highs and lows of the Sixties more East Ham!’ she chimes with glee), and conurgently than Faithfull. Catapulted to stardom with her 1964 single, ‘As Tears Go By’, the singer left her artist fesses to ‘ripping off ’ Marianne Faithfull’s husband John Dunbar in 1966 for Mick Jagger. Having peacoat-and-shades ensemble and Jane become a drug addict, she split from Jagger four years Birkin’s picnic-basket accessory. (‘I took that later and ended up living homeless, before her wicker basket to a Chanel show and everycomeback album Broken English in 1979 one was like, “Why are you carrying that?”’)

ALEXA CHUNG: I read that you went to a convent She recently read Shawn Levy’s Ready, school as a child. Was it really strict? Did it affect you Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention in any way? of Cool. ‘It’s like Hello! magazine for the MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Yes, I went when I was seven. The Sixties.

There is one story where Chrissie strictness was fine. It was the religion that didn’t help. It Shrimpton [ Jean’s sister] is having a row meant that by the time I met my husband John [Dunbar], I was a very innocent 17-year-old. I became so sick of with Mick Jagger, who she was dating. that angelic being that I wanted to swing the other way.

And she gets so angry with him that her Now I’m sick of the demonic being that I became. faux eyelashes peel off,’ she snorts. ‘Then AC: Didn’t you spend time in a commune when along came Marianne Faithfull with her you were young? full bosom and flowing dresses, and Chrissie MF: Yes. After the army, my father got involved in the School for Integrity. It was an Iris Murdoch-style was old news. Mick liked Marianne because commune in one of those beautiful Gothic houses she wasn’t all made-up. Whereas Chrissie in Strawberry Hill, and my father ran it like Lenin. would take five hours to get ready, MariI didn’t much like it. As a teenager, I came to hate the idea of community. I believed in anne would just roll with it. “Let’s get some individualism, which was the great ideological clash with my father. Communal life was whisky or speed or whatever. We’re going not for me, though it helped later, when I hooked up with the Stones.

AC: What was your key look at the time? to France? It doesn’t matter. Let’s go!”’

MF: It was a very cool look, which I kind of made up. I remember one outfit in brown Chung is enthralled by the electric frisson corduroy, with a V-neck top and short skirt – not that short, but pretty short for the time. of Sixties couplings. ‘It’s the groupie vibe that When I first went to London, I loved Mary Quant. But I was pretty straight. It was only I’m attracted to. They had these amazing love with Mick that I got away from my straight life – and my mother. She was frightened of affairs, and both the men and the women Mick and wouldn’t come round, which was great. Then with my friend [art dealer] Robert Fraser and all those people, I had to become cool, whether I liked it or not. were made more amazing by them,’ she AC: You married artist John in 1965 and hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Gregory enthuses. ‘The girls in the Sixties were never Corso on the honeymoon in Paris. What are your memoires of that? overshadowed by the men they dated. You MF: We were all staying at the Hôtel Louisiane. John already knew all the Beats. They can talk about Jean Shrimpton without havwere completely wild and really what you wanted them to be. I loved Allen, but Gregory ing to mention Bailey or Terence Stamp first.’

I found very frightening. I couldn’t even talk to him. He was taking Brompton mixture, a medicine for cancer patients that is a mixture of heroin and cocaine in liquid form. He hardly Her own fantasy Sixties existence would ever came out of a coma. That was long before I ever took drugs and it frightened me. be dating George Harrison. ‘Because he AC: In 1966, you went to stay with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg. What was she like looks so much like Alex [Turner], I think. I – how important was her friendship? love those pictures of him shot on the beach MF: If you want to talk real cool and clothes, talk to Anita. She had a great look that was all where he’s got that little cap on.’ [This interabout one colour, a sort of beige cream: leather, suede, silk shirts, lots of jewellery and a red fox coat. As for our friendship, we’re still best friends. I still like the way she dresses. Though view took place before the couple’s break-up.] now she likes the way I dress too. Recently, I sent her a Chanel jacket and she loves it.

‘What intrigues me is that all these women AC: What was it like being Mick’s girlfriend at the height of 1966? were experimenting sexually. In the 1980s, MF: I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t like being that famous. It wasn’t Mick’s fault, it was just Marianne talked about all the people she the way I was brought up. I found it sort of wrong to be so rich and famous. I thought it used to fuck. But women weren’t considered was vulgar. I still do. But I can’t do anything about it now.

MARIANNE FAITHFULL

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ITCHY COO PARKING White cotton mesh dress, £2,485, Stella McCartney. Black patent kitten heels, £475, Rupert Sanderson

the Sixties. In Godard’s 1968 colour documentary Sympathy for the Devil, you see footage of the Stones in the studio wearing turquoise and pink trousers and Chelsea boots. I loved the skinny-trouser-and-mohair vibe, so I’ve done mohair in the collection.’

Chung professes to a little Sixties OD-ing of her own in the past. ‘I fell out of love with the Sixties for a while.

I think because I was so identified with it. It’s like Sienna Miller when she did boho, then suddenly stopped because she was like, “Fuck. What else can I do, because I’ve done it?” Everyone copied my sodding coat for a while too. It was my Harrods kid’s vintage one.

Every girl suddenly had one and I was like, “Arrrgh!”’ She scoffs in momentary exasperation. ‘I got really bored of smock dresses and loafers for a while.’ She pauses, then jolts as if injected with a new shot of adrenalin. ‘But I feel like I’m ready to fall in love all over again.’

‘The dress I wore in New York was very Birkin.

My pants were showing and I wanted to kill myself, but Christopher Kane said it was sexy’

sluts for it back then… At the same time, they were so polite. I saw this clip of Jean Shrimpton on this American TV show with Vidal Sassoon, and she answered all the questions like, “Yes,” “No.”’ She mimics the standard BBC accent. ‘They were just so quintessentially British.’

Chung’s own quintessential British style has been one of her Unique Selling Points, both as a muse to such luminaries as Lagerfeld, whose proclivity towards Les Anglaises is legendary, and brands like Burberry and Mulberry, whose christening of the Alexa bag in 2009 is testimony to Chung’s inheritance from Birkin (her eponymous Hermès bag is still one of the world’s most covetable classics). She accompanied Christopher Kane to the McQueen exhibition at Boyd was 18 years old when she arrived in Swinging London and made it as a cover girl, also modelling for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Mary Quant, and later marrying George Harrison.

Museum of Art this year in a silver transparAfter splitting from Harrison, she married Eric Clapton ent shift dress reminiscent of Gainsbourg’s (divorcing a decade later). Over recent years, many of muse (‘It was very Birkin. My pants were her photographs, taken during her time with Harrison showing, and I wanted to kill myself before and Clapton, have been shown around the world I left the hotel, but Christopher said it was ALEXA CHUNG: You were discovered as a model in sexy’); and kept revellers at the Serpentine 1962, when you were shampooing at Elizabeth Arden.

Summer Party, sponsored by Burberry, Then you modelled for Mary Quant. What was that like? ‘throwing shapes’ to her classic Chung There must have been a real buzz around the shows soundscape, which included the Beatles, and the shoots… what is your most iconic memory? the Rolling Stones and the Kinks, dressed PATTIE BOYD: Mary Quant was one of the first radical English designers in London. She took about five models in a black shift dress by Carven with a white to New York for a show at the Waldorf Astoria hotel; it Peter Pan neckline. ‘I love a detachable colwas terrifying and exciting, as no one in the city could lar,’ she says with an obsessive glint in her believe how short our clothes were. We went to a club eyes. ‘I bumped into a guy from Carven at wearing Mary’s fabulous dresses, and we saw the iconic Colette in Paris the other day and I was and divine model Veruschka dancing like a whirling dervish… There was such a buzz of being on the edge really embarrassed because I wasn’t wearof something very new. ing head-to-toe Sixties. If you go to a Carven AC: You were shot by both Bailey and Donovan – what show you have to wear vintage Sixties, just was the difference in their styles? like if you go to a Chanel show you have to PB: Bailey was far more cheeky! wear black and white.’

AC: How did you meet George? Do you remember what struck you about him the first time you met him? What was racing through your mind?

American brand Madewell, part of New PB: I first met George on a train. It was the moving film set for A Hard Day’s Night, and I had York-based J Crew, has also capitalised on my first and last acting role. At the end of the day’s shooting, George asked me out to dinner. her British modern-retro flair, recruiting I couldn’t believe it – he was so divine, with huge brown eyes, and looking so gorgeous. I Chung last year to design her own collechad to decline because I already had a date, so I asked him to join us – not what he had in tion. ‘Last season was very Sixties-inspired, mind! Amazingly, we were called back the following week for a press photo-shoot. I fired the boyfriend and was thrilled to tell George when we met again that I was free to have dinner. all velvet dresses with white collars,’ she AC: Is it true that Mick also fancied you, but you kept turning him down? says – influenced by the audience on The PB: Dear Mick – I believe he fancied everyone.

TAMI Show, America’s cult music film for AC: You were with George, and John and Cynthia [Lennon] for their first LSD trip – teenagers in the Sixties, a version of Britain’s when your coffee was laced – in 1965? What happened? Were you frightened?

Ready, Steady, Go! (perhaps the kind of music PB: John, Cynthia, George and I were invited to dinner at our dentist’s house. All was fine until we wanted to leave and see a band playing in a club – they insisted we have coffee programme Chung would have presented, first. We drank it, then got up to go, when the dentist said: ‘You can’t leave now, I’ve put had she really been born a generation or LSD in the coffee’ – it meant nothing to George or me, but John went ballistic and stormed two earlier). Her A/W 11 collection is more out. As we followed him, I felt a weird restrictive sensation in my throat, then we all started Seventies, although some pieces draw from hallucinating in the Mini that George was driving. We got to the club and the hallucinations the Sixties. ‘I’ve invented this tartan mac, it’s became more bizarre, to the point that it was frightening. It seemed to last all night, and just as I started to believe it would go on for the rest of my life, gradually it left my mind. like something the Shrimp would have worn.

AC: You went with George to India in 1966 as guests of Ravi Shankar – why was George It’s got a round collar and a tie on it, so you so struck by Eastern mysticism? And what was the trip like? can wear it like a cape without your hands PB: George and I met Ravi through friends from the Asian Music Society; they immediately in your sleeves,’ she gestures, suddenly aniliked each other. He wanted to show us the sights, yoga, and all that India has to offer spiritually. mated. ‘I also love the way men looked in It was the most important time in my life, and George totally embraced everything.

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PATTIE BOYD

MISS SIXTIES Duchesse silk dress, £1,095, Burberry Prorsum. Patent shoes, £175, Daks.

See Stockists for details. Hair by George Northwood at Daniel Hersheson, using Kérastase. Make-up by Florrie White at D+V Mangement, using Clarins. Manicure by Mike Pocock at Streeters London, using Ciaté. With thanks to Compass Locations. Stylist’s assistant: Benjamin Canares

Less Help to Buy, more Help!

I’m buying Nails are the new artist’s canvas

ES Evening Standard Magazine 11/04/2014

LOATHED ON THE RADIO

A romantic break as a Tinder tourist Pixie Geldof’s closet confessions

LOVED ON TWITTER

JAMES BLUNT From pop songs to put-downs: how a singer’s

wit won over his staunchest critics

Jacket, £365, APC at selfridges.com. T-shirt, £170, Neil Barrett (neilbarrett.com).

Trousers, £540, Valentino (valentino. com). Grooming by Stéphane Bodin

PULL QUOTE DUMMY THAT CAN BE USED TO INDICATE HOW M

BLUNT Caption kicker This is a swathe of dummy text that can be used to indicate how many words fit a particular space. The text contains [25 words] a couple of different

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Camilla Armbrust Jenny Kennedy

Portraits by Styled by

‘IN THE ARMY I WAS PAID TO CREEP AROUND BUSHES. NOW I’M A PROFESSIONAL TROLL’

REX FEATURES

His quick wit and cocksure comebacks have given James Blunt cult-hero status on Twitter.

So what’s made the 40-year-old former squaddie turned million-selling balladeer into social media’s sergeant major of sarcasm? Stephanie Rafanelli joins him backstage to find out

Not in the army now James Blunt performing in Austria last month

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Can I be Blunt? @jamesblunt’s top Twitter comebacks ‘Why have you got only 200,000 followers?

‘Jesus only needed 12’ ‘James Blunt has an annoying face, and highly irritating voice’ ‘Yes, but no mortgage’ ‘Whatever happened to James Blunt?’

(Posted a picture of himself with four gorgeous women in response) ‘I must be 1 of only 2 who genuinely likes every @jamesblunt song. The other person being him’ ‘Nope, you’re on your own’ ‘Bloody hell why is James Blunt still going?’

‘Viagra and coffee mostly’ ‘Holy ******* Christ your music makes me want to cave my own skull in with a hammer!’

‘Be my guest’ ‘James Blunt is one ugly mother*******’ ‘And how’s your modelling career going?’

‘Why does James Blunt have a new album and why would people want that?’

‘I’m guessing you’re a philosopher’

Balearic heart Blunt at Pacha in Ibiza, 2011

harder to extrapolate truths. He’s pretty good at throwing smoke bombs: ‘In Italy, they are still totally convinced that I played the organ at Kate and Will’s wedding, after I told them I did in an interview’ and ‘I even changed my Wikipedia page to say “classically trained organist” ’. I wonder how all of this tomfoolery plays with the Royals, with whom Blunt has several ‘ins’. A former captain in the Life Guards, part of the army’s Household Cavalry, he served in the same regiment as Prince Harry and the pair are still friends. Harry, Cressida Bonas and Princess Beatrice all attended the Moon Landing launch gig in Notting Hill last year. Blunt has a gig coming up at the Royal Albert Hall, does he have to work hard to control his potty mouth, I joke, when there is blue blood in the room? ‘There won’t be any Royals there. Just because one turned up once. OK, there were three. H, C and B.’ He gestures to zip up his lips. ‘Well, I’m actually hoping for a knighthood. So I’m going to start tweeting that I’ve been nominated for an OBE. I’m pretty pissed off that I haven’t been already…’

Which brings us to his Twitter feed. Recent gems include: @mortal: Why is James Blunt such a bellend? @jamesblunt: That’s Captain Bellend to you; @mortal: Who is the biggest twat Robin Thicke or James Blunt? @james blunt: Me! Me! Pick me! Perhaps he’s just had to become funnier over the years, through sheer adversity. ‘No, I’ve always been fairly

‘I’VE WORKED REALLY HARD FOR TEN YEARS, SO, YES, VERY OCCASIONALLY, I STILL GO HELL FOR LEATHER’ weird. I’ve been writing all this stuff on Twitter for years, but under a different name: I was Dirty Littl’ Blunt before.’ A grin emerges. ‘But my label said I needed to be more visible. I’m now a professional troll, an online stalker. In the army I was a reconnaissance officer so I was paid professionally to creep around bushes. It helps being small in the real world.

When I’m outside your house, stalking you, you won’t even know I’m there.’

He goes on: ‘People have stopped trolling me now. It’s really boring. The only people who tweet me now say, “Follow me! I’m your biggest fan!” My parents warned me about that...

But really, why do we take Twitter so seriously?

The person writing abuse is probably on his own in his bedroom with his trousers around his ankles writing his five little nasty words. So I take the spotlight off me for a second and shine it on him. Then he shits his pants and says: “Oh, so sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

I’m used to showing my weaknesses. I expose myself professionally in my songs. I’m not the kind of singer who says how big and strong I am. Though I am big, I know I’m not tall, but you haven’t seen me with my clothes off.’ At this point he jumps up and motions to unzip his flies. ‘Come on. Let’s get it out right here.

We need to talk about size, and girth…’

You can take James Blunt out of the army, but you can’t take the squaddie out of James

ABACA/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES

B

ack in 2005, Cockney rhyming slang embraced a new term: ‘Don’t be a James Blunt!’ It was hurled liberally at the pesky, the bland, the sentimental and sometimes, for the hell of it, anyone at all. The original target of our pique was, of course, the singer-songwriter behind one earworm of a love song, ‘You’re Beautiful’, which stayed at number one for six long weeks and played on a perpetual loop not only on the airwaves but, infuriatingly, inside our cerebral cortices. His crimes, on top of this? He was short, posh, ex-army, maudlin, and his lyrics were, well, so goddamn earnest.

But there has since been a seismic shift in our national perception of the singer. Blunt’s knee-jerk wit and self-effacing jibes on Twitter — rather than maintain a haughty ‘celebrity’ distance, he out-drolls his trolls with oneliners — and recent guest slots on Never Mind the Buzzcocks (in one skit he drove a tank towards Noel Fielding and Phill Jupitus), Celebrity Juice and Top Gear, where he did the fastest wet lap and admitted he had just discovered that the title of his new album was a phrase ‘used in the gym when men’s bottoms touch while changing’, have elevated him from mainstream pop pariah to cult hero.

I roll up at Zénith, a retro-futuristic music venue in Paris, which looks like the kind of place where Barbarella would go clubbing.

Appropriately, Blunt is playing a gig here tonight as part of his European tour for Moon Landing, his fourth and latest album. A mixture of ballads, trademark octave leaps, Harry Nilsson-esque guitar and up-tempo handclapladen poppy numbers, it looks set to be his most successful since 2004’s Back to Bedlam, which entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in the UK in one year (though few would admit they owned a copy).

Moon Landing, about the joys and pitfalls of finally finding The One (before turning 40 in February, he announced his engagement to Sofia Wellesley, the granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington), is filled with Quixotic military metaphors. Magic FM favourite ‘Bonfire Heart’, which reached number four in the charts, begins: ‘Your love is like a soldier/loyal until the end.’ ‘Blue on Blue’, an army term for friendly fire, is about hurting the one you love.

When I meet Blunt in his dressing room — his hair cropped, he bears less of his former resemblance to John the Baptist and more now to Tom Cruise — I ask why he doesn’t inject a little more of his off-duty sarcasm into his lyrics. ‘No one’s ever spotted the comedy, but it’s always been there. Just listen to my songs!

‘Goodbye My Lover’ started out as ‘Goodbye My Liver’.’ He lets out a hybrid cough-laugh, but his eyes remain glacial, his face almost expressionless. ‘I mean, “Why you don’t you give me some love?/I’ve taken shitloads of drugs.” That’s not funny? That’s f***ing comedy. ‘You’re Beautiful’ started out as “These drugs are brilliant/drugs are pure/I’m so f***ing high…” ’ The thing is, you are always standing on quicksand with Blunt. It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of competitive banter, it’s

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Blunt. And I was about to ask if he felt all grown-up now he is 40… Oh, well. Has he progressed at least to expressing himself with his fiancée? ‘Err. Nope. I’m still as emotionally stunted as I ever was. I still have no need to discuss “feelings”. If a girl brings these up, I say, “I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.” ’ I explain my own theory as to what is behind the vitriolic attacks on Blunt. He represents the repressed British bloke opening up, inciting hatred from those who can’t. ‘My songs often say things that women really want to hear. But I can’t say those things to a woman face-to-face either. I can only ever do it in a song. So it’s put out on the airwaves and then all the women say to their men: “Why aren’t you like James Blunt?” And all the men say: “Blunt, you f***ing asshole. You should have been having a pint in the pub with us.” ’ Blunt has been known to be fond of a pint — and a model or actress — or two. In the past he has been out with underwear models, a Miss France, supermodel Petra Nemcova, actress Lindsay Lohan and Pussycat Doll Jessica Sutta. It is no secret either that he has a club in the back garden of his villa in Ibiza, where he lives for half the year. But he must now be growing weary of it. ‘No way. The older you get, the more refined your clubbing tastes, the more you want a club you can personalise.

It’s still the best club in the world.’ But are ‘the shitloads of drugs’ (I am quoting from his song) coming to an end? ‘No,’ he says. Then after a long pause: ‘People seemed surprised about

Blunt force Above: serving in the army in Kosovo, 1999.

Right: with Petra Nemcova at the Vanity Fair Oscars party in LA, 2007.

Below: his villa in Ibiza, which he bought eight years ago for £1.7m

the partying because I’m famous for some sensitive, romantic tunes. But they’re not.

When you break it down, they are about failed, f***ed-up relationships. I’m a bloke who joined the army, who has a house in Ibiza. I was thrown into the music industry. I had a shitload of fun. What else was I supposed to do? I’ve worked really hard for ten years, so, yes, very occasionally, I still go hell for leather...’

It must have been liberating to be finally free to pursue his dream of being a musician. Born James Hillier Blount on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border, he comes from a family with a history of military service dating back to the 10th century (his father is a retired colonel).

That’s a lot of pressure to sign up. Blunt (who removed the ‘o’ in his surname to make it sound less fancy) was sent to boarding school in Berkshire when he was seven. He plays the mock violin when he tells me this, and that he is much closer to his family now, including his two younger sisters Emily and Daisy: ‘I didn’t really know any of them from the time I went to school to the time I left the army.’ He went on to Harrow on an army bursary. I asked if he was bullied there. ‘No, I was quite punchy and aggressive. A bit of a terrier. Hyperactive. I think I had small man’s disease.’ His name did, however, get the predictable Cockney rhyming slang treatment. ‘I was obviously called James… word that means vagina. That’s what happens at an all-boys’ school. You take the piss out of each other. You give it back. The same in the army. That’s why I’m comfortable with Twitter.’

REX FEATURES. SOLARPIX.COM

JAMES BLUNT

Ev e

JAMES BLUNT The army also funded his degree at Bristol, which committed him to four years of service.

He trained at Sandhurst and rose to the rank of captain in the Life Guards, serving first in Canada and then under NATO in Kosovo, where he worked ahead of the front line and was tasked with securing Pristina airport (with an acoustic guitar that he had strapped to the outside of his tank). He famously refused a direct order to attack Russian forces, who had arrived first and taken over the airbase, later earning him the accolade, in the press, of having averted World War III.

T

‘PEOPLE HAVE STOPPED TROLLING ME. THE ONLY ONES WHO TWEET ME NOW SAY, “I’M YOUR BIGGEST FAN” ’ just plain f***ing wrong. It’s unhealthy. We need to wean ourselves off that crap and go out and get a decent book.’

Blunt was also savaged by the papers for being a singer-songwriter from a well-heeled background. It wouldn’t happen these days, what with a fair proportion of the Bullingdon Club in power and the likes of Old Etonian Damian Lewis and Harrovian Benedict Cumberbatch as our current onscreen crushes.

Is he gleeful about our new Big Posh Society? ‘Well, I think it’s always been there in music. I was just the only one who didn’t hide my accent. I mean, come on, Damon Albarn? He’s right up there. He’s got an orchard full of plums in his mouth. And a silver spoon stuck up his arse… Britain is so obsessed with class. It really needs to let go a little bit, because no one else gives a shit.’

Blunt lives between his villacum-club in Ibiza and Verbier, where

his is one of the few positive headlines that Blunt received after he released Back to Bedlam (which he recorded in LA while staying with a family friend, the original Princess Leia actress Carrie Fisher, after being signed by Linda Perry, who also discovered Pink and Christina Aguilera). The tabloids ran one salacious story after another. It subsequently transpired that he had been phone-hacked by the News of the World. He filed damages against News International in September 2011. ‘The most embarrassing thing they got from my voicemail was me leaving sexy messages to myself.

It was all part of a future project. A solo sex tape, which will be leaked by: moi. When all this music and Twitter thing dies, it’ll give my waning career a whole new lease of life.’ Yes, but seriously, James. ‘The way [these papers] By royal appointment With his fiancée Ev e ni ng_ St a nda r d_ 1 4 . pdf P aSofia g e Wellesley 1 3 at 1 Kensington / 0 3 / 2 Palace, 0 1 4 2013 , 1 4 : 1 feed our national obsession for tittle-tattle is

he is resident and part-owns two restaurants La Vache and Cuckoo’s Nest. In his army days, he captained the Household Cavalry’s alpine ski team, and became champion skier of the whole Royal Armoured Corps. He anticipates my next question on his non-domicile tax status: ‘I don’t live in Britain because I love skiing and I love sunshine. What the f***, doesn’t everyone? Swiss tax is way more than tax in the UK and I pay it… I really am a proud Brit.’ He looks stern for a moment, but, of course, he can’t restrain himself for long. In a second, the banter bursts forth again: ‘The fundamental thing is that everyone is invited back to mine. And you will be getting a personal discount at both my restaurants and your name is always on the door at the club…’

And this is the way it goes on, even after I switch off my Dictaphone, and in preparation for our shoot, he unzips, not his flies but his on-tour suitcase, and reveals a crumple of scraggy T-shirts that would turn his officers at Sandhurst puce.

I wonder if he will give me that discount or whether, instead, he’ll be after me on Twitter.

Whichever, I know James Blunt is always out there in the cybersphere, forever patrolling, forever stalking. ES James Blunt’s Moon Landing tour comes to the Royal Albert Hall on 2 : 4 1 G MT + 0 1 : 0 0 19 April (jamesblunt.com)

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Karen Elson’s otherworldly beauty has made her a fashion muse since the age of 19; in 2010, she branched out to record her debut album.

As she prepares a follow-up, the model, singer and mother talks to STEPHANIE RAFANELLI about growing up in Oldham, her divorce from the musician Jack White, and how life is still sweet

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Karen Elson lies motionless with her back flat against the studio floor, crowned by a halo of cherry blossoms, like John Everett Millais’s Ophelia floating downstream. ‘If I were a flower, I’d like to be a deadly nightshade. Magnolias, tuberoses, gardenias, I love all the night bloomers,’ she whispers, her lips barely moving. ‘They open up at midnight. That’s how I feel. I’m happy being dark.’

In the context of such a gothic statement, it seems apt that, beyond the photographer’s set, the light outside the riverside studios in New York is fading. The sun descends into the Hudson, casting the sky with a tangerine glow. Inside, Elson, now risen and lit in sepia, drifts through the garden of rose bushes, vases of hydrangeas and ornamental willow-trees that has been created for this flower-themed shoot.

For such a pale creature, Elson is a richly exotic bloom. At 34, she still looks as compelling as in 1998, when Karl Lagerfeld anointed her the face of Chanel. ‘She is a beauty for the new millennium,’ he declared of the 19-year-old. ‘A mixture of something from the Middle Ages and a mutant from another planet.’

Fifteen years later, Elson continues to inspire the fashion greats, with campaigns for Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, Alber Elbaz and Miuccia Prada (she appears in Miu Miu’s Resort ads this season, and there was also her poker-faced disco routine in Lanvin’s autumn/winter 2011 campaign video, shot by Steven Meisel, to whom she has been muse since her fashion debut in 1997). And when, three years ago, the model (and long-time closet singer) picked up her 1917 Gibson Style O guitar, tucked a flower behind her ear and turned professional songbird, she only upped her allure.

Elson’s first album, 2010’s The Ghost Who Walks – a collection of haunting Depression-era-style folk ballads brimming with imagery of summer storms, garden weeds and stolen roses – allowed us into her interior world after so many years gazing purely at her exterior.

She proved herself to be, at heart, a dreamer and romantic; the floral allusions in her songs were tinged with her own sense of alienation and loss. Flowers evoke close personal memories for Elson. ‘Lilies of the valley remind me of my first sweet love, Raphael.’ Raphael de Rothschild died of a heroin overdose when Elson was only 21 and already fragile from the often-brutal knocks of the fashion industry.

‘His grandmother Liliane loved them, and I remember seeing them at his grandfather’s house in France. When I smell the scent, I think of him. It’s a bittersweet memory,’ she tells me after the photo-shoot, her eyes cast down at the cup of Earl Grey tea in her hands.

It was not until 2005 that Elson’s next great love blossomed,

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rather appropriately, on the set of the White Stripes’ video for ‘Blue Orchid’. Six weeks later, she and the lead singer Jack White were married on a boat on the Amazon River (with Meg White, her beau’s ex-wife and fellow band member, as maid of honour). ‘Find yourself a girl and settle down/ Live a simple life in a quiet town,’ wrote White in ‘Steady, As She Goes’ for his parallel band the Raconteurs in 2006. By this time, he and Elson had moved to Nashville to a big white house – a former Civil War hospital – with a wide porch flanked with hanging baskets and surrounded by giant magnoliatrees that bloomed, like Elson, at night. ‘Until I married Jack I always felt weirdly detached from everything, one step removed from the world,’ Elson told Bazaar in 2010. ‘It was like I was a ghost. I never let anyone in or gave anyone that much of myself.’

White and Elson seemed to make perfect sense. She was the Helena Bonham Carter to his Tim Burton. They inhabited the same aesthetic realm: the ghostly complexion; the early 20th-century references; the bygone-era chic. Both were outsiders, deemed at one time by others as freaks. White grew up in a Mexican neighbourhood in Detroit, and was one of the only white boys in a predominantly black high school. Elson was a lonely schoolgirl in Oldham, awkward in her own skin, taunted for her lily-white pallor and alien proportions.

(She was rescued by fashion, only to be crowned ‘Le Freak’ at 18 by Meisel on his famous 1997 Italian Vogue cover, her eyebrows shaved off, perching on a fairground ride, which heralded the new ‘ jolie laide’ look.) Her genetic make-up (copper hair, ivory skin) even conformed to White’s strict colour-coding policy of regulation red and white clothing, backdrops and album covers for the White Stripes. The couple’s first child, born in 2006, was named, with some inevitability, Scarlett White (Elson had opened the Marc Jacobs show that year, six months pregnant); their second, Henry Lee, was born the following year.

And so they lived in Nashville together, where Elson opened a vintage store and White founded Third Man Records’ new headquarters, producing her first album (which she wrote, at first in secret, in her walk-in wardrobe). They recorded The Ghost Who Walks together in his studio in their garden, among the trees and the vegetable patch where she grew herbs. Then, in June 2011, on their sixth anniversary, came the public announcement of divorce. It was characteristically unconventional: ‘We remain dear and trusted friends and co-parents to our wonderful children Scarlett and Henry Lee,’ read the release.

‘In honour of [the] time shared, we are throwing a divorce party.’

A month later, White and Elson attended Kate Moss’ wedding together, apparently the best of friends.

‘We are definitely kindred spirits. We both clearly see the good and bad in one another and all the in-between,’ Elson tells me now, nearly all traces of her Mancunian lilt lost in transatlantic Americana.

‘I think we both have a healthy amount of respect for each other and

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‘Divorce is not like splitting up with a boyfrıend in your twenties.

You’re breaking up with a whole life’

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MEADOWLARK Black and multicoloured sequin and muslin dress, £14,750, Chanel. Yellow diamond ring, from a selection, David Morris

that guides everything. But it’s not without its hard work. I’ve got friends who have been through terrible divorces. It’s awful. I’m not saying it isn’t. There were times when Jack and I felt, “What is happening here?” It was emotional. But it’s one of those moments in your life when you realise that you are a grown-up. You have a responsibility to your children. It’s not like splitting up with a boyfriend in your twenties. You are breaking up with a whole life. It’s not an easy process. But you’ve got to be friends, there is no choice. I am the product of a divorced family so I felt a responsibility to make that happen.’ She pauses to sip her tea.

‘At the end of the day, Jack is always going to be in my life, and I in his. Like Meg has always been in Jack’s… I adore Meg. But, of course, being close can create problems for others. It’s not particularly easy for the new people who want to go out with us to know that we are still good friends…’ She trails off.

The apparent harmony of their relationship might be evident in the fact that Elson sung backing vocals on three songs from White’s recent acclaimed album Blunderbuss – his first record as a solo artist. Yet it is hard not to hear the record as evidence of loneliness and break-up, so filled is it with brutal imagery of breaking apart: broken noses, knives twisting in stomachs, mouths slit wide open.

‘When Jack was nominated for all these Grammys I was like, “Go Jack, go kill them,”’ Elson continues, mock punching the air with one arm. ‘I was really proud of him… I reflected on it and finally said to myself, “God, I really respect him for just getting it out there, for taking things that are happening in his life, be it our life, or his life separate from me.” It takes a really brave person to just go out there and say, “This is who I am.” He is fearless in that way. He keeps encouraging me to make a second record. He keeps saying, “Get on with it! Just do it!” I completely admire that, but it’s a stumbling block for me because I’m not sure if I’m ready to share this stuff yet, not really. I’m hanging onto it a little longer.’

Over the past two years, Elson’s musical career has played second fiddle to motherhood and fashion, although she has performed sporadically, at her friend Grace Coddington’s 70th-birthday party in 2011, and in New York with the vaudeville troupe the Citizens Band, which she co-founded in 2004 and which also features Maggie Gyllenhaal and Rain Phoenix. (Their 2012 album Grab a Root and Growl was a protest against political apathy in the run-up to the American presidential election.)

Meanwhile, a second Karen Elson solo record is slowly germinating. ‘I’ve recorded a few songs. But no more excuses. This year is

the year. I take my guitar, lyric book and computer with me everywhere.’ She frowns with frustration. ‘If I compared myself to Jack, I’d drown in the ocean. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.

I mean, he is the voice of a generation. Everyone has their own way of doing things. I have a different process – I have a more female energy when I write.’

Elson admits that her songs come from an intensely emotional place. The Ghost Who Walks (which took its name from the taunts of school bullies) was the catharsis of her lonely childhood years.

‘Those songs came from a lifetime of experience,’ she says. So it is inevitable that the recent changes in her life will be reflected in her new record; for a start, it won’t be produced by Jack White. ‘It’s time to take a step back for myself, to know that I can do this. I have to challenge myself a little. Jack’s so prolific that it’s easy to trust his opinions, but it’s like, can I trust mine?’

Elson has always been plagued by the self-doubt of those who experience profound loss when they are young (and in light of this, it is all the more impressive that she has handled her divorce with such stoicism). ‘There has always been a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other in constant conflict,’ she says. ‘As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised that if I fall prey to the selfdoubt, to the “Oh, I’m not good enough for this,” then it’s pathetic up to a certain point.

These days I say, “All right, I hear you, devil, but I’m going to listen to the angel right now.”’ She pauses, and gives a wry smile. ‘Is there stuff in my childhood that affected me as an adult? Of course. But I can sit around being tortured or I can let it go. I use those experiences to propel me forward. That’s why music has been so good for me, because I’ve had this voice in me my entire life and the music allowed me to let it out, to set free all those ghosts.’

The ghosts still linger in Oldham, however, although they are fainter now.

‘When I go back I instantly feel like a tortured 13-year-old,’ she says. ‘I do miss some things, like watching an episode of Shameless, but for me, under all the humour, there is this sadness that “this is your lot in life”. That’s what I remember hearing all the time.’

Elson grew up in Oldham with her twin sister Kate (now a model and film-maker) and two half-brothers, the daughter of Jimmy, a joiner, and Carol, who worked as a dinner lady and cleaner. ‘When someone is complaining on a shoot about the manicurist turning up late, I think back to the times when my mum picked up pennies from the urinals she cleaned,’ she says. ‘I got my pocket money out of there.’

The divorce of her parents, when Elson was seven years old, hit her hard. She refused to eat for 10 days and was eventually hospitalised, thereafter suffering from a conflicted relationship with both food and her self-image. This seems likely to have been exacerbated by the fashion industry’s contradictory cycle of approval and rejection, after she was discovered in Manchester at the age of 16. ‘It did mess with my head,’ she says, slipping for a moment into the broadest

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‘I can sit around being tortured or I can let it go.

I use the bad experiences to propel me forward’

Manchester accent (this only happens when she talks about her teenage years). ‘I was called “skinny whippet” my entire life. I was painfully thin and then I go into fashion and they say, “You’re perfect.”

I was the girl with no boobs, no hips and no bum, who none of the boys wanted to go near. Then I’m the girl in fashion they all love.’

Even her big break was fraught with mixed messages. The year after Meisel’s celebration of her ‘freakiness’ on the cover of Italian Vogue, which seemed at once to counter and confirm the derision of her former bullies, Elson was turned away from a modelling job in Milan for being ‘too big’. In 2002, she came out and spoke about the anorexia and bulimia that she had suffered in her early career. ‘Things don’t hold me under their spell any more. I’ve learnt what is good and bad for me and that I’m not powerless to change things,’ she declares, referring to her life in general.

‘Scarlett’s friend’s mother said to me the other day that her daughter asked her if she looked fat. Scarlett is still blissfully unaware of those issues. But I don’t want my children to ever think that food is taboo. I don’t ever want to heap my baggage on them. I think Jennifer Lawrence is a brilliant role model for young girls, not some of the models that I see on the runway.’

Elson is conscious of the pressure that her own children face, not least the vulnerability caused by divorce. ‘I remember the scars that it gave me and I never want to inflict that on them. They were quite young when Jack and I split up, but they have such a strong relationship with him.’ She lets out a heartfelt sigh. ‘I’m so glad that Scarlett and Henry have each other. There’s a lot to be said for that when your family is going through hard times. They are so sweet together, such good friends. There will be a moment when they will realise we are a little different, that our realities aren’t the same as most people’s. I do worry about that. But Jack is such a good father, and he would never ever let them grow up with a sense of entitlement.’

Like other Jack White fans, I am curious to hear about the creative persuasions of their progeny, after hearing rumours that they had already formed their own band (with Scarlett on drums). ‘It’s funny because they are obviously around music all the time, so if they see their dad in the studio, sometimes they say, “We want to come too and play around.” Then Jack sometimes presses a record [of the music they make together], and it ends up being the most hilarious song. For a minute they said, “We’re brother and sister and we’re starting a band,” but the idea came and went.’ She looks genuinely tickled, then continues, ‘Henry is like me, poor old sod, he’s

a daydreamer. He lives in his head. You ask him what’s going on and he’s looking up at the sky, making sounds to himself. Scarlett looks like Jack, with brown curly hair and brown eyes. Last year, I was in a bar having a drink, showing my friend a picture of Scarlett on my phone, and a random stranger peered over my shoulder and said, “Do you know your kid looks just like Jack White?” It was so funny.’

Scarlett has also inherited Elson’s feel for fashion. ‘She was on my lap in the front row of the Anna Sui show a few seasons ago and she said, “Is this what you do for a living, Mummy?” She was really into it.’ She wrinkles her nose with affection. ‘My Christmas present this year was a dress that Scarlett designed for me and we had it made into an actual dress, which she gave me. It was rainbow-bright with little hearts all over it. I was so proud.’

The children shuttle between their former family home (with a stuffed giraffe and buffalo in the hallway, the result of their father’s penchant for taxidermy) and Elson’s new place. ‘I have to drive a Range Rover to get there. I’m country Karen.

It’s a beautiful house on top of a hill, with floor-to-ceiling windows, a front porch and views of downtown Nashville. When I moved in there, I could see my life. I could see where I was going for the first time. It’s full of light and I think that’s a perfect metaphor for my new life.’

And so another era dawns; yet Elson’s heart still belongs to Nashville. ‘I love the sultry nights, sitting on my back porch, listening to the crickets. I get wistful for all that stuff and the flowers of the American South.’

She looks guilty for a second, almost as though she has betrayed me, then adds: ‘Britain can be beautiful too. I remember driving through the Highlands on a recent shoot. It was so lovely. I’m thinking of renting a house in Edinburgh for the summer. I realise I need to reset my British button for a bit…’

But in the meantime, she has that second album to write and a new back garden to tackle. ‘I own a few acres of Tennessee forest on top of the hill. It’s subtropical, and all lush and overgrown.

It’s perfect for me, as I’m not much of a gardener, although I fancy myself as one when I’m older. I’m really looking forward to it. I do so love flowers…’

For it seems the charming, ethereal, yet newly self-possessed Karen Elson cannot wait for the future. ‘I know I am a much better woman in my thirties. I’ve overcome so much, shaken off so much self-doubt. I’m like, “God, my life is just starting now.”’ Her eyes fill with the excitement of a five-year-old. ‘I have full faith in the second half of my life. I think I’ll be a fun 60-year-old. I’m going to be really young at heart. My kids will be rolling their eyes but they’ll know that their mum loves life.’ And with this, she skips off into her taxi, heading back to the Mercer Hotel bar to make the most of her night out in New York, abandoning me to my own daydreams: Elson, in 25 years’ time, tending to her midnight garden in Nashville, pale under the moonlight, but no longer a walking ghost.

‘I was painfully thin my entire life and then I go into fashion and they say, “You’re perfect”’

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Pearl and diamond earrings, from a selection, David Morris. See Stockists for details. Hair by Kevin Ryan at Art + Commerce, using Unite. Make-up by Tyron Machhausen at Bridge Artists, using Lancôme. Manicure by Rica Romain at See Management. Set design by Todd Wiggins for Mary Howard Studio. Stylist’s assistants: Kristina Golightly and Michael Beshara. Model: Karen Elson at Tess Management www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

May 2013 |

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Evening Standard Magazine 13/06/2014

PLUS How to love the World Cup if you don’t watch football

PARENTAL GUIDANCE ‘I took control of my mum’s online dating’ THE AGE OF THE UBER-NUP Big fat weddings just got bigger NET GAINS The ex-footballers winning in business

THE REINVENTION OF

ELLIE GOULDING

‘PEOPLE USED TO THINK I WAS BORING. NOT ANY MORE’ First there was the insecure indie girl from Herefordshire hiding under a hoodie. Then there was the Royal Wedding singer and everyone’s favourite girl-next-door. Now there’s the stadium-filling diva who wears shorter hot pants than Kylie, has sold 19 million records and hangs out with Katy Perry and Ellen. Stephanie Rafanelli finds out how Ellie Goulding finally became comfortable in her own skin

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ive years ago, Ellie Goulding unleashed her angelic, tortured and breathy vibrato on to the audience of Later... With Jools Holland.

And me. In a worn, shapeless T-shirt (the kind you wear on hangover days), her face partly obscured by a black hoodie, she poured the vocals of ‘Under the Sheets’, from her debut album Lights, into the mic while pounding furiously on a single drum.

Unique voice, but just another indie girl, I thought. I was in a bad mood, having turned up to see Jack White’s The Dead Weather on the wrong night.

Two Brit Awards and 19 million record sales later, and I’m drinking a gin and tonic with Goulding at a hotel in Bethnal Green. ‘People used to think I was boring. Not any more,’ she says, peering out from two sets of arachnoid eyelashes that have been heavily mascaraed for the preceding cover shoot. ‘Because I used to emphasise the fact that I was athletic, I like running, not the fact that I drink and smoke.’

The voice is the same: hoarse, rich, throaty.

But the presence has changed. She is notably slicker, raunchier; less of the timid, plaid shirtclad singer-songwriter, more the commanding commercial pop diva of the tightly produced dance anthems of Halcyon Days (the re-release of her second album, 2012’s Halycon, which went to number one in January). I note several bar staff check her out. Even in her demob gear (a fisherman’s sweater and leather trousers) she is surprisingly sexy, more womanly than most 27-year-olds: all matte vanilla mane and runner’s legs. At her O2 gig in March, she emerged regally on stage in a gold-corseted flesh-coloured body stocking worthy of Gaga (albeit on a low-key day).

Whether all this is the natural progression of a female artist growing in self-conviction, or a manufactured image overhaul, a further cranking up of Goulding as a global brand, is the subject of much debate. ‘Women’s confidence grows with age...’ she tells me, a little nervously. ‘When I’m on stage, I sweat like a mother****er. It’s like a workout. I need to keep cool. I’m not out to look sexy.’ Hmmm.

Others attribute the partial Beyoncéfication of Goulding to the company she’s been keeping of late. Her US tours have led to inevitable mingling with her Stateside peers (Halcyon went to number nine in the US charts), and she has fallen in with a set that includes Katy Perry — whom she supported on her California Dreams tour — Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. She has played the musical field in other ways, too.

Since the break-up with her long-term boyfriend, Radio 1 DJ Greg James, in 2012, about which she wrote Halycon, she has been linked to Ed Sheeran and One Direction’s Niall Horan.

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‘I WOULD ANGLE MY FACE TO HIDE THE SIDE OF MY NOSE OR MY CHIN. THEN I STOPPED CARING. I LET GO. PUT A DIFFERENT ENERGY OUT THERE’

Goulding touch Clockwise from top: Goulding with boyfriend Dougie Poynter last month; with Jeremy Irvine in 2013; with Greg James at the Elle Style Awards in 2011

She is now the official girlfriend of Dougie Poynter, the bassist from McBusted (a hybrid band of artists from McFly and Busted), and former I’m a Celebrity victor. ‘I’m sick of pretending that nothing is going on,’ she says, before erupting in a eulogy to his band’s live performances. ‘I don’t want to not be myself with him because I’m scared of us being photographed.’ Ellen DeGeneres loves her: she’s been on the show three times. She’s even friends with the odd Hollywood star, including, rather randomly, Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul. If she was once considered anodyne, she’s not any more. Today, over three million people follow her on Twitter.

None of this would be so astonishing but for her wholesome associations on home turf: the John Lewis 2010 Christmas ad, which featured her cover of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ from Lights (it also went to number one); the performance of the same song, at Prince William’s personal behest, at the reception of the Royal Wedding; her appearance in the M&S campaign shot by Annie Leibowitz alongside Darcey Bussell and Helen Mirren. They’re not the most rock’n’roll British brands.

Still, the clean-living, patriotic overtones have hitherto worked for her, as record sales in the UK attest. After all, Goulding is a British winner, the apotheosis of tabloid heroine: a working-class girl from a council estate in Herefordshire who remembers bailiffs removing the family television set, who went on to sing for both Queen Elizabeth at the Palace and Barack Obama at the White House. It helps with the dramatic narrative arc that she’s also had to overcome herself along the way.

There is more to her ‘growing confidence’ plea than just defensive media training. Her new self-possession is also the prize of a long, hard-fought internal battle. I sense a buoyancy to Goulding, of someone who has ‘let go’ recently — not least the heavy, protective wall of her extensions (her real hair is now shoulder-length). ‘At one time, I was getting all this musical success, but I wasn’t getting all the things that went with it, like magazine covers.

I was convinced for a long time I wasn’t aesthetically pleasing enough,’ she says, looking much younger for a second. ‘I would have to angle my face to hide the side of my nose, or my chin.’ She demonstrates the camouflaging poses. ‘Then I stopped caring. I let go. Put a different energy out there — then [the covers] all started to happen.’

I feel sorry that someone who was once riddled with so much doubt about her looks should have to endure so much corporal scrutiny. When I say this, she brings up the comments on Twitter after she appeared on The X Factor in a sheer Julien Macdonald dress last October. This is one thing she hasn’t let go

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by Lucy Wearing using MAC. Thanks to Town Hall Hotel, Patriot Square, E2 (020 7871 0460; townhallhotel.com) and Mercedes for the Mercedes-Benz 230 E-Class

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ELLIE GOULDING

of yet. ‘They said my body was “too athletic”.

Too athletic?’ Goulding is enviably ripped. She used to run six miles a day, but now prefers circuit training, power jumps and squats that can ‘design your body the way you want it’.

‘Isn’t it admirable that someone has worked so hard to look good and be healthy?’

Goulding has always worked hard on herself. Her guiding philosophy from a young age seems to have been one of self-betterment. She grew up on a council estate in Lyonshall, near Hereford, with her mother, Tracey, a supermarket worker, who hung out with the likes of Siouxsie Sioux. Her father, an undertaker who was also a guitarist, walked out when she was five: a cataclysmic event that would both drive and overshadow her for years.

She poured her grief into writing poems and songs. Goulding was musically inclined from an early age. She joined the local operatic society, and practised her soprano-range scales and her clarinet in her bedroom, which she shared with two of her three siblings. She says her mum found it pretty annoying: ‘I wasn’t given much encouragement when I was young.

My mum was quite tough love. But I think it gave me a good start. I was never sure if I had a talent or would be famous.’

‘I WASN’T CLOSE TO MY DAD, OR AT THE TIME, MY MUM, SO I PUT THE ONUS ON MY RELATIONSHIP. I’M OVER THAT’

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lthough she briefly dyed her hair black and became a goth when she was 14, Goulding was always focused: a straight ‘A’ student (she studied English, Politics and Drama at A-level at Lady Hawkins’ School) who knew that graft, intelligence and the dexterity of her own voice were her tickets out. ‘I was obsessed with wellspoken people, period dramas and the news.

I got clued into how I could change my singing voice from Destiny’s Child to opera, so I learned I could change my speaking voice too.’

Today, she could be mistaken for an alumna of a public school.

Goulding wanted to work in theatre. By 18, she had moved in with Matt, a 32-year-old sound engineer who encouraged her to apply to study drama at Kent University. (Lights is dedicated to ‘Matthew, who found and saved me’.) It was here, at an open mic talent contest two years later, that she was discovered by Jamie Lillywhite, son of music producer Steve Lillywhite, her future manager, who persuaded her to leave university to pursue music. In 2009 she was signed by Polydor, and won the Critic’s Choice Award at the Brits in 2010 for her debut album, Lights.

But there was more to overcome. In the first year of her success, Goulding had panic attacks (one so severe it led to hospitalisation), unable

Famous friends From top: with Katy Perry in February; with Cara Delevingne in January; with Taylor Swift at the O2 this year; meeting the Queen in 2011

to reconcile herself to the giant and sudden leap in her circumstances that her ambition had fuelled. She was plagued by a persistent fear of disaster. ‘I thought, “How am I here?

Why do I deserve this?” I couldn’t believe in the good things happening to me. I would be waiting for the universe to deliver the bad thing that would take it all back.’

She was helped by a period in therapy.

I ask her if she feels now that she was suffering from Impostor Syndrome (the feeling that you are a fraud) because of her background, and the lack of fundamental security of her father’s love? She pauses, looking momentarily torn between outpouring and holding back.

‘It’s very easy not to believe that you got yourself into this remarkable place because you are a creative person... But as an artist, when you stop believing in yourself you’re ****ing screwed. If I suddenly think, “I can’t write a song,” everything crumbles. So at some point you have to believe in yourself. Even if you’re faking it... whatever works.’

Goulding has not had any contact with her father since she was 19. He has never congratulated her on her success. The song ‘I Know You Care’, on Halcyon, was written for him: a very public message of love that he has hitherto never responded to. I ask if her father’s absence still pervades everything she does: ‘It’s something that’s not really going to go away.’ She bats me away gently. ‘But it’s a very different feeling now. It used to be one of anger, bitterness. Now it’s slight confusion and intrigue. I’m at peace with it.’ This newfound sanguinity has helped her let go of other men in her life, too. ‘In the past, I felt that there was a part of me that was a bit more reliant on having someone around. I wasn’t close to my dad, or at the time, my mum, so I put the onus on my relationship. I’m over that. It feels great to be with someone without needing them...’ She can’t contain a grin.

It’s good to see her so in love but a bit of a shame, creatively speaking. A happy, peaceful place is not always the most fertile headspace for an artist; after a round of summer festivals, she has a third album looming. ‘I write songs when I’m sad...’ She stops. Then switches into therapy-speak. ‘You’re in a good place, you live in the present, no longer constantly thinking about the past (“I can’t believe my dad left me”) or the future (“Is my third album going to be successful?”). But I’ve come to terms with the fact that what I do as an artist depends on me being very sad and reflective.’

Her brown eyes soften under those monster spider lashes. ‘So whatever philosophy I follow, or calming influences I find, nothing should touch that.’ ES Halcyon Days is out now

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ES Evening Standard Magazine 14/11/2014

T H EDRINK, PA R T Y TWERK ISSUE EAT, Where to get your rocks off

TSOBER H E PA RTRUTHS TY ISSUE

The gifts of giving up booze

T H E PA R T Y IVANDELLI SSUE MARK-FRANCIS On how to be the perfect host THE PLUS PA R T Y I S S U Edresses up Jonathan Ross

and Tess Daly’s London

PA R T Y S P E C I A L

JESSIE J KICKS OFF THE FUN TIMES WITH A

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Jessie

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Kristian Schuller Styled by

Nicky Yates

Her new man Her Godgiven talent Not giving a damn

Twelve months ago, Jessie J’s star looked to be fading: she had quit The Voice, sales of her second album had disappointed and she was in deep Twitter trouble over comments that her bisexuality had been ‘a phase’. But what a difference a year makes: she’s top of the charts again, has wooed America, and — whisper it — she’s found love. By Stephanie Rafanelli 48

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Jessie wears jumpsuit, £980, Tamara Mellon at net-a-porter.com.

Shoes, £550, Christian Dior (dior.com).

Eric wears trousers, £496, Burberry Prorsum at mrporter.com.

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‘I’m sad to say that most of the time people want me to be a bitch’

PA R T Y S P E C I A L

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Man crush With ‘new man’ singer/songwriter Luke James last week

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Girl power Jessie J performing ‘Bang Bang’ with Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande at the MTV Video Music Awards in California in August

s I make my way to meet Jessie J for lunch in Shepherd’s Bush I have a rising dread that she’s going to be tricky. There’s no rational basis for this, and yet when we sit down I accidentally blurt it out, recoiling a little in anticipation of the fallout.

Instead, she looks a little weary. ‘I’m sad to say that most of the time people want me to be a bitch,’ she says, arching a raven eyebrow.

‘Apparently, I’m aggressive. I’m the least aggressive person I know. I’m not scary. Not mean. I’m sweet really.’ She looks hurt at being misunderstood. ‘I’ve never killed anyone. Never beaten anyone up. I make mistakes. I get grumpy sometimes. So shoot me!’ And, as it turns out, she is sweet: motormouthed, bombastic, opinionated, righteous, a little pious and overly lachrymose when talking about her social concerns, but unflinchingly honest. A ballsy, warm-hearted Essex girl.

Still, Jessie J would have every reason to be a little defensive. In the past six months she has been savaged on Twitter for doing a public U-turn over her sexuality. In 2010, when she burst on to the music scene with the crotchgrabbing ‘Do It Like a Dude’ — a loud, humorous, rude (in a good way) mouthpiece for tweenage girl empowerment in a Wonder Woman-style leotard — she stated matter-of-factly that she ‘dated both men and women’. Her candidness inspired widespread admiration (she has 6.7 million Twitter followers), allowing her to transcend being pigeonholed as simply a lesbian icon. Then, in April this year, she officially ‘came in’ during a tabloid interview, in what some would consider the most reactionary of terms, calling her earlier relationship with a woman (she was rumoured to be close to one of her dancers) ‘just a phase’ and professing that she now wants to find a husband and have children. ‘Even vegetarians sometimes eat meat,’ she tweeted. Outrage ensued. There were accusations that this was a canny move that would make her more palatable in America.

Personally I suspected that old judgement killer: l’amour fou.

Could it be that Jessie J had fallen in love with — shocker — a man?

I ask if she regrets the tweet. ‘Look, I’m only human. I’m 26, growing up in front of the world,’ she says. ‘I’ve always done and said things I wish I hadn’t and I’ll keep doing it. It’s impossible with the amount of people of different cultures, faiths and preferences that are watching me to make everyone happy. I can’t get it right. I can only do what I feel is right for me and put it out there.’

I imagine, I say, that when the time comes

she will be a mother in the same mould as her The Voice persona: she gave tearful, tough love to aspiring singers as a mentor on the first two series of the BBC show, often speaking out against the exploitation of children on other TV talent contests. ‘I would be tough love. One hundred per cent. I’m all about words and actions. I want to be the best mum. I’d cook all my own stuff at home. I need to learn, you have to be preparing for [the role of mother] all your life. Not every woman wants that,’ she adds quickly, ‘but that’s my prerogative.’ Absolutely.

It’s just that it’s hard to picture Jessie J as a 1950s-style housewife. ‘I’ve always been broody. I don’t know why that’s made such a big deal of. I want to be my parents in 34 years’ time. They’ve been married for 36 years. I want to live to 100 and see my kids’ kids grow up.’ I’m rather taken aback by such conventional statements.

Later, towards the end of the conversation, it all becomes clear. When I casually ask her what she’s doing for Christmas, she says: ‘I’m going away somewhere very hot with my family.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘And my new man.’ Her new man? ‘Yes!’ she chuckles. ‘But the interview is now over, so you can’t ask me anything else.’ A few days later Jessie J tweets a picture of herself with R&B star Luke James, emblazoned with the words: ‘My first ever official #mcm. My man. My crush. My Monday morning. So it’s only right.’ I just knew that this was all to do with love.

Jessie J has always made us gasp at her audaciousness. As a child prodigy, she had a lot of nerve, but always put her money where her mouth was. She could perform the vocal acrobatics of Mariah Carey, and as a late teen had already made it in LA as a songwriter, copenning tracks for Miley Cyrus and Chris Brown. She proclaimed herself to be ‘half singer, half therapist’, a teenage evangelist with a message: Be ‘Who You Are’ — the name of her debut 2011 album that won her a Critics Choice Award at the Brits (won previously by Ellie Goulding and Adele) and the accolade of ‘the first female artist to have six top-ten hits from one studio album’. Worldwide she’d sold 2.5 million albums and 11 million singles by 2012.

The battle cry for ‘girl power’ might have been just another pop platitude had it not been for ‘Do It Like a Dude’, which became a mainstream anthem for young lesbians when she subsequently came out as bisexual. She raged at the commercialism of the music industry in ‘Price Tag’; stuck two fingers up at her school bullies in ‘Who’s Laughing Now?’ and talked, perhaps too earnestly, about ‘accepting my responsibility as a role model and an artist’. To illustrate this, she shaved off her hair for charity in both 2011 and 2013, and soldiered on on a tour of summer festivals with her leg in a cast after breaking her foot in rehearsals for Katy Perry’s 2011 California Dreams tour (scuppering herself as the support act).

On top of this injury, for which Jessie underwent surgery, her second album, Alive, sold relatively modestly in 2013, with some critics mauling her lack of vocal restraint and tendency to overkill on the melismas. But Jessie J is not the kind to take this lying down. In October she released her third album, Sweet

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The J crew Meeting the Queen at the Diamond Jubilee Concert, 2012; with parents Rose and Stephen Cornish, 2003

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Talker, a super-commercial R&B loaded gun with its sights clearly set on America, which debuted at number ten in the US Billboard charts. ‘Bang Bang’, featuring the bodacious Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande, went straight to number one in the UK, topped the iTunes chart and reached number three in the US. In October she won Best Female Act at the MOBOs. Bang, bang, indeed.

‘The song is a celebration of women,’ she says passionately.

‘Nicki’s curves are insane. Ariana is sexy cute. I’m saying, “This is what I’ve got.” The message of the song is “Be powerful. Make the first move in any relationship, with a man or with a woman, whoever you want to go for.” ’ The whole album is rather sexy. The new single ‘Burnin’ Up’ is punctuated by a refrain of ‘Sex, sweat, breath’.

It’s easy to see her making it in the US with her Oprah-style aphorisms, references to God-given talent and high-five attitude: she’s never gone in for displays of false modesty. ‘I want to be remembered as a voice that was one of the best,’ she says. ‘I want to share my gift with the world. That’s what I was put on this Earth to do.’

Jessie attributes this unshakeable self-belief to her parents. She was born Jessica Cornish in Chadwell Heath, near Romford, the youngest of three daughters of Rose, a nursery school teacher, and Stephen, a social worker. She wasn’t academic like her sisters, who are five and seven years older and were both head girl at school, but she never stopped singing: she was thrown out of the school choir for being ‘too loud’. Aged ten, she was cast in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind, but a year later, after a dizziness spell and palpitations, she was diagnosed with a congenital heart condition (Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome).

Her parents told her that she had a ‘special heart’. ‘I wasn’t wrapped in cotton wool,’ she insists. ‘Even when I was in hospital, they would let me go to rehearsals and I would go back at night. They never let anything define me.’

Things were different at school. Jessie was prescribed beta-blockers for her heart, which gave her pale skin a greenish hue. ‘They called me alien, made me feel worthless. So mean!

Kids need us [to speak out about these things].

They need me.’ She doesn’t seem the type to be bullied, I say, weren’t all the boys intimidated by her? ‘I was a boy!’ She breaks into Beyoncé’s ‘If I Were a Boy’ for a few bars. ‘I hung out with boys. My best friend was obsessed with Cabbage Patch Kids. I was like, “I’m off to play conkers and football.” ’ Jessie went on to study at The BRIT School, in the same year as Adele and Leona Lewis, but was forced to drop out just before graduating, after she suffered a minor stroke due to her

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heart condition, while working part-time at Hamleys. ‘God gives you what he knows you can deal with,’ she tells me, getting a little emotional. ‘I’m so happy that I had a stroke — I was told that I would never sing or walk again — because look at me now. I did it.’ She is no longer on beta-blockers, but maintains a healthy lifestyle: she’s only done drugs once, when she accidentally ate a hash cake on tour supporting Chris Brown: ‘I thought I was going to die,’ she guffaws. Perhaps her heart defect has protected her from the temptations of the industry. ‘My parents were so open, I didn’t need to rebel. I don’t understand why people would pay to damage their body. I grew up in hospital and all my friends died. I’ve seen the pain up close.’ She wells up. One of her first songs was ‘Big White Room’, about an 11-yearold boy who died on her ward.

She says that the stroke was probably induced by pressure. At 16, while at The BRIT School, she had been signed for an independent record deal, then the label went bankrupt.

But Jessie had already lived through worse as a young girl in hospital. At 18, she took herself off to LA, living on nachos and in cheap motels, to do an audacious tour of record labels. She aced the meetings. The result was a publishing deal with Sony (‘Do It Like a Dude’ was originally written for Rihanna) and finally her own deal with Universal for Who You Are.

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ven when fame was only burgeoning, Jessie put herself stridently forward as a role model, talking about her talent in terms of ‘art’.

This is perhaps why her public and the press have come down so hard on her. Historically, those with messianic intentions are usually the first heads to roll. ‘I wanted to be a role model, but I’ve changed my mind... What is a role model? Being what everyone else wants you to be? That’s being dictated to by the world. Now I want to be an inspiration, responsible, but not a role model because it’s not realistic.’ She pauses. ‘Society likes to label things. I said that I’m not a big drinker. Then suddenly, it’s like, “You said you don’t drink.” No, I didn’t. I drink a glass of wine every now and then.’ I’m wondering if this is a metaphor. ‘Social media encourages everyone to have an opinion. It’s always, “You’re too skinny, too this or too that.” I get it. But if everyone’s life was exposed...’ And poor Jessie J has been exposed — quite literally. Her iCloud account was hacked this year and the naked pictures therein circulated in the cybersphere.

It’s no wonder she feels burned.

I ask if she feels as if she’s fallen off her pedestal in the eyes of her fans, her ‘heartbeats’ as she calls them. Without hesitation she responds: ‘I feel the happiest I’ve ever been. I am who I am. Life’s a journey, I can’t clip my wings because a few people aren’t going to be happy. If I phone my mum and dad and they’re cool then I’m happy.’ And with that Jessie J, the old-fashioned girl from Essex, gives me a hug, shooting me a sweet, backhanded compliment in her own inimitable style: “You don’t seem like a bitch to me either.” ’ Embarrassingly, I reach out my hand to give her a high-five. ES The single ‘Burnin’ Up’ is out on 1 December

Jessie wears dress, £2,475, belt, £1,610, and shoes, £1,190, Lanvin (lanvin.com)

CAPTION HERE TK TKT KT K TK TK

HAIR BY ALISHA DOBSON USING PHILIP KINGSLEY. MAKE-UP BY KARIN DARNELL AT ONE REPRESENTS USING NARS COSMETICS. NAILS BY JENNY LONGWORTH AT CLM HAIR & MAKE-UP USING REVLON NAIL ENAMELS. MODELS: ERIC UNDERWOOD AT PREMIER MODEL MANAGEMENT, BARNEY BANKS AT BODY LONDON, TOM BOWEN. SHOT ON LOCATION AT BUSH HALL (BUSHHALL.COM) REX. PA

PA R T Y S P E C I A L

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CAPTION HERE TK TKT KT K TK TK

‘At school I was a boy. I played conkers and football’

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ES Evening Standard Magazine 05/09/2014

MR HAPPY The professor on a mission to cheer up the city DONATE GENEROUSLY Why sperm became a top commodity AUTUMN’S HOT LIST Trends, tunes, tipples and treats

EARLY BIRD Up at 5.30am for Radio 1 breakfast show

NIGHT OWL DJ in demand on London’s party scene

HOW NICK GRIMSHAW CAPTIVATES THE CAPITAL FROM DUSK TILL DAWN

JEREMY Jeremy PAXMAN? Paxman?Hates Hatesmy my sh MILEY CYRUS? a lot CW Will Smith?

FakeBurps nice Miley Yes, Nick Grimshaw is the capital’s Mr Chirpy, rising at the crack of dawn to present Radio 1’s flagship breakfast show, but he’s not afraid to speak his mind either. Stephanie Rafanelli joins him as he flits from parties to personal training sessions and still finds time to watch The X Factor with Kate Moss Photographs by

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S TA N DA R D.C O.U K /L I F E S T Y L E

ANGELINAJolie?

JOLIE?Col Cold myy show Angelina d WILL SMITH? yt Cyrus?

Burps aFake lot nice

Dressing gown, £280, and pyjamas, £135, Derek Rose (derek-rose.com).

Headphones, £539, Beats by Dre at selfridges.com.

Grooming by Kevin Fortune.

All furniture from Habitat (habitat.co.uk)

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ver lunch in Kensington, I’m interviewing Nick Grimshaw...

Correction: I was interviewing Nick Grimshaw. Ten minutes into our conversation, he has dashed outside to do an impromptu live phone interview. Such is life in Grimmy’s world. In the past few months he has hosted BBC Radio 1 live from Glastonbury, after nipping over to Paris for an hour to attend the Louis Vuitton men’s show; presented the Big Weekend festival in Glasgow where Coldplay and One Direction headlined; put together a new album of his regular radio slot The Nixtape; started planning the fourth series of his BBC Three panel show Sweat the Small Stuff; and organised his 30th birthday party. He has pulled all of this off while rising at 5.30am every weekday to present the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show, ad-libbing for three hours of youth-centric banter, and simultaneously being BFF to half of celebrity London, including Kate Moss, Alexa Chung, Pixie Geldof and Harry Styles. It’s all a tightly scheduled balancing act in which he only has to turn up and be... Grimmy.

Today, he is fresh off the plane from ‘Beefa’, as he calls it, where the Radio 1 team has been based for a week to cover the San Antonio club scene at its hedonistic zenith. It’s not surprising that when he returns to the table he looks rather frazzled. His trademark Beavis and Butt-head quiff has collapsed like a novice-made soufflé, his skinny jeans have been traded for a more cocooning loose fit, and his usual wonky grin is less forthcoming. But his almighty gob is still functioning. When I apologise for the in-depth questioning after such a heavy week, he replies, ‘Oh no! I’m self-obsessed, my favourite thing is talking about myself.’ He says he couldn’t sleep last night: ‘I was so paranoid that my alarm wouldn’t go off this morning and it would be so classic that on the day after Ibiza, my bosses would think, “Oh, he’s still there, still out clubbing.” Last year we went out and we pulled an all-nighter. So this year I was conscious we couldn’t do it again. It’s only funny once.’ Surprise number one: Grimmy is a bit of a worrier.

To be honest, I started the interview already a little peeved with him. After all, I’m a member of the over-25s so pointedly excluded from the breakfast show when he was hired to replace the then 38-year-old Chris Moyles in September 2012. His mission: to lower the listener age group to 16- to 25-year-olds in an attempt to lure the YouTube generation back to traditional media formats. As an exiled thirty-something, I tend to dismiss anything aiming its arrow at the heart of ‘yoof’, using a lexicon of hashtags, emoticons, LOLs and general ‘sick-ness’, as just ENC: Emperor’s New Clothes. But after 15 minutes of chitchat, it’s impossible not to start liking Grimmy. He’s witty, low-key and genuine — not the annoying gag-a-minute Jonathan Ross-style show-off I was expecting. Nor, he insists, is he a habitual partier any more: he has been called the ‘youth equivalent of Nicky Haslam’ for his alleged omnipresence on the London scene. ‘It’s just

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Morning person Nick Grimshaw presenting the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show and training on Primrose Hill

NICK GRIMSHAW

‘I get anxious if I have two glasses of wine. I don’t want to be known for going out and getting drunk. I go to bed at 9.30pm on weeknights’ ES M AGA ZIN E

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NICK GRIMSHAW whenever I go out, I always get caught,’ he says.

‘These days, I get anxious if I have two glasses of wine. I don’t want to be known for going out and getting drunk rather than my radio show.

I go to bed at 9.30pm on weeknights.’

I point out, rather rudely, that today he has crow’s-feet. There’s a potential for irony that the demands of a breakfast youth show might cause him to age prematurely. He laughs good-naturedly. ‘I went into Kiehl’s the other day and the shop assistant said: “You need this.” It was called Powerful Wrinkle Reducing

the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of people twerking. The Nixtape session, a mixture of old and new music for the last hour of the show, starts with The Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’. It’s all rather full-on for 9am.

‘He’s always relentlessly chirpy in the mornings,’ sighs one of his team.

Grimmy’s buoyancy is the key ingredient of both his shows and his amassing of friendsslash-connections. In his life, work and play have merged into one. ‘Grimmy never wants the fun to end, he always keeps it rolling over,’

‘When I was a teenager, Eminem and David Beckham were the two men that made me think I was gay’ Cream. What a bitch!’ Sadie Frost’s sister Jade gives him acupuncture for wrinkles. I wonder if he’s feeling the pressure to stay professionally young. There is, after all, a second layer of irony: he is now, at 30, ‘way’ too old to listen to his own show. Does he worry that he is next in line for the guillotine? ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says with the elongated vowels of a Leeds accent. He is, in fact, from Manchester — he doesn’t know why he ended up with the Yorkshire inflection. ‘I don’t think it’s about me pretending I’m a teenager, it’s more about having a grasp of what’s going on in pop culture and not wanging on too much about old songs...’ He denies that acts such as Robbie Williams and Kylie have been blacklisted purely because of their age. ‘We played Foo Fighters today. And I mean how old is David Guetta? 50?’ (He’s 46.) Grimmy hung out with Sadie Frost and Fran Cutler in Ibiza. His older friends (they’re 49 and 51) give him faith, he says, that ‘I’m not going to end up being the oldest person at the party’.

There might be another reason behind his newly emerged ‘laughter lines’. With Grimmy at the helm, the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show dropped one million listeners in three months in 2013. He’s been clawing back his audience ever since. In February, he gained 700,000 listeners. In March, he lost 500,000. In August, it was up by 100,000 again. There is big stuff to sweat about. ‘I really panicked at first,’ he says. ‘It was really bad, even though my bosses said, “This is what’s meant to happen.” ’ At first, he got a twitch in his eye due to anxiety.

‘I still have nightmares about buttons not working or guests not turning up.’

It’s 7am a few days later and, bleary-eyed, I meet Grimmy at Radio 1 for the breakfast show.

Today, his quiff has been re-erected to its full height, making his silhouette in dark spray-on jeans and an oversized shirtdress gravitydefyingly top-heavy. He stands at the DJ booth, meandering through a series of ‘topics’: more ‘Beefa’ anecdotes — he jokes that ‘they’ve erected a statue of Kate Moss in San Antonio as a warning to clubbers’; his obsession with YouTube sensation Tish; and his upcoming attempt to enter Northern souls With his father Peter in 2013 and mother Eileen in 2012

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says one of his best friends, and co-writer on Sweat the Small Stuff, Aimee Phillips. ‘When he did the BBC night-time slot [from 10pm to 12am in 2008], people like Harry Styles would just turn up alone at 11pm at night to do the show.

It ended up with everyone saying, “Why haven’t you asked me on?” ’

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ne of those people was Kate Moss, who made a rare speaking appearance on the breakfast show last year.

‘Kate was the one who came up with the idea for Call or Delete when we were on holiday together,’ says Grimmy of the show format in which celebrities are dared to make a prank call or delete a number from their phone. ‘Kate came on because she knows that I’m not going to suddenly say, “Tell us what you think about being really thin and a role model.” ’ Grimmy’s ‘soft’ interviews are great celebrity PR: they make his guests look self-deprecating and likeable.

‘We got Naomi Campbell to phone ahead to a club and demand for a manatee to be there on her arrival,’ he chuckles. The effect doesn’t work on everyone: ‘I turned up at Angelina Jolie’s hotel suite to do an interview and she looked at me like I’d just come into her house uninvited. She’s so cold. I don’t like fake nice either. Will Smith is fake nice. I loved Miley Cyrus who just came into the studio and started burping.’

But isn’t there a fine line between work and play with his celebrity friends? Has anything accidentally slipped out? ‘I don’t think so.

Well, when I did the Teen Awards last year I hosted it with Rita Ora and she kept farting all day in rehearsals. So I said that the next day on the radio. She was like: “Grimmy, you can’t say that in front of six million people!” ’

Grimmy has an endless zeal for disposable celebrity minutiae. I wonder if he ever finds it a little vacuous. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m still genuinely fascinated with celebrity culture. I have a very short attention span, so I guess that’s why I’m good at that stuff.’ Does he have an in-depth knowledge of another subject: archaeology? Egyptology? ‘Err. No. I’m really boring. I just love Twitter.’ But doesn’t he feel it’s all a little trivial next to the BBC journalists reporting on Iraq and Gaza in the same building? He slightly misses my point. ‘I think at Radio 1 we champion new music and I think that’s really important.’ He pauses. ‘Jeremy Paxman hates the show. He’s always complaining that he has to listen to it in the lifts.’

He continues: ‘I think my dad thought my job was trivial before I was at the BBC. If I interview someone like David Beckham now, he’s like “Wow”. He likes the fact that it’s the BBC. But otherwise, he wouldn’t know who Beyoncé was if she came and sat in his living room. He once moved my jacket off the sofa and I said, “Dad, it’s Marc Jacobs!” And he said, “Who the bloody ’ell is Mark Jacob and why have you got his jacket?” ’ Grimmy is very fond of his dad and mum, he took them to an interview with Lady Gaga once. ‘She performed, and when the music stopped and everyone was silent [my dad] said loudly: “Is that a bloke?” ’ Born in Moss Side, Manchester, Grimmy grew up in Oldham in a family of chatterboxes: his dad Peter, a marketing executive, his mum Eileen, a former insurance broker, and his older siblings, Andy, now 43 and a band manager, and Jane, a 41-year-old financial director.

The baby of the family, Grimmy says he was constantly vying for attention. ‘I used to dress up as Tina Turner when I was six. I got less attention when the football was on because everyone in my family is a die-hard Man United fan. I remember one time putting on every single necklace that my mum had, Y-fronts and boots, and dancing in front of the TV.’ His brother Andy was into the Madchester scene and took him to a day rave at the Hacienda when he was six. ‘He always says, “If it weren’t for me, you’d just be another dickhead.

You wouldn’t be cool or know what’s going on.” ’ These days his siblings call him MCG — Middle Class Git. He puts on a Manc accent: ‘They’re like, “We had to go to Abersoch on our holidays, and he went to Portofino!” ’ Grimmy was a joker at school: ‘I was once thrown out of class for telling a female teacher that she looked like Meatloaf.’ Still, he wanted to please his dad, so for a short while he decided to become a dentist: ‘Because my dentist had a really nice car.’ Grimmy also loved radio and TV: Sara Cox and Chris Evans were his icons. ‘I grew up watching The Big Breakfast and TFI Friday. They sounded like they were having genuine fun, going out, and you’d hear the stories from the night before.’

After working for a few promo companies in Manchester, Grimmy moved to London to intern at MTV: ‘I thought it was OK to use the phone to call my friends. So they’d ask me to get something and I’d be like, “Oh yes, one minute... So it’s me plus two...” My boss said: “I really like having you

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WENN. CORBIS. PLANET PHOTOS. GETTY IMAGES. XPOSUREPHOTOS.COM. PRESS ASSOCIATION

Nick’s clique Clockwise from left: Grimshaw’s first annual award season dinner in February 2013 with Pixie Geldof, Miquita Oliver, Henry Holland, Jaime Winstone, Example, Alexa Chung, Harry Styles and Iggy Azalea; with Rita Ora, 2013; with Daisy Lowe at Glastonbury in June; with Kate Moss, 2012.

Bottom: with Pixie Geldof, March 2014

around, but you don’t actually do any work, so I’m going to hire another intern and we’ll keep you on as the Bez of the office.” ’ It was during his time working as an intern in Camden that he met the aspirant fashion designer Henry Holland and new model Agyness Deyn, the first of his celebrity crew.

‘We were always at The Hawley Arms,’ he says.

‘I was friends with Amy Winehouse. I used to see her every day. She used to say, “Oh, my stalker’s here.” ’ He also met Pixie Geldof, now his best friend, there. It was while he was DJing nightly that he was scouted by the BBC and asked to co-present the youth radio show Switch with DJ Annie Mac in 2007. This led to the E4 breakfast show Freshly Squeezed with Alexa Chung, T4, the night-time slot on Radio 1 in 2008, and eventually the coveted Radio 1 breakfast slot in late 2012.

Talk of Amy Winehouse and Pixie Geldof leads naturally on to a darker subject: the recent tragic death of Peaches Geldof. When I bring this up, Grimmy refuses to be quoted.

(You learn more about him when he stops talking.) ‘He’s the most loyal person I know,’ says his former T4 colleague Miquita Oliver. ‘You can tell him anything, it will never get out.’

Surprise number two: Grimmy is discreet.

I chat to Oliver on one of Grimmy’s daily personal training sessions. We meet on his home turf in Primrose Hill — he lives in a basement flat, which has become a low-key lounge for the second-generation Primrose Hill set.

There is always someone there watching The X Factor or EastEnders (Kate Moss loves both). ‘When people meet Grimmy they attach

‘I loved Miley Cyrus who just came into the studio and started burping’

themselves to him for life,’ says his trainer McKenzie, while Grimmy engages in squat jumps with Oliver and another friend, Colette.

He doesn’t like being on his own much.

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eing the BFF to a large posse of famous female friends has, however, had a detrimental effect on his love life.

He’s had few long-term relationships, although he dated Italian fashion stylist Nicco Torelli last year. I’m surprised to hear that he’s not even on Grindr.

‘Being 30 is like being 90 in the gay world,’ he cringes. ‘I really hate dates. So I’ve always taken my dates out with everyone and then I get drunk with my friends, and they’ll be like, “Thanks for ignoring me all night.” ’ He says the Tina Turner act alerted his family to his sexuality pretty early on, so there was no need for an official coming out. ‘When I was a teenager, Eminem and David Beckham were the two men that made me think I was gay,’ he says. He has a David LaChapelle photo of a naked Eminem today on his wall at home. He also has a framed photo of himself and Jamie Hince taken while on holiday with Moss in Ibiza: ‘I think my cleaner thinks he’s my boyfriend.’

And so the day rolls on...

Next, I end up getting involved with Grimmy’s 30th birthday outfit dilemmas:

he has hired the roof at Shoreditch House and his friends Florence Welch and Mark Ronson are both playing. At Topman he tries on a turquoise glitter 1970s suit, part-Ziggy Stardust, part-Liberace. Then we stop by Louis Vuitton to borrow an alternative option — one of the perks of his fashion ambassadorship of London Collections: Men. We debrief over a drink at Sketch. The day after his soon-to-be-legendary party, he’s off to Ibiza for a chill-out week at Sadie Frost’s house. On his return, he begins filming the new series of Sweat the Small Stuff and starts promoting the Teen Awards. He’s also writing a sitcom about his dad and has signed up to do an art collaboration for the BBC. He wants to work with his friend Dinos Chapman — the tattoo of a weeping eye on Grimmy’s arm next to the word Puppy is the artist’s work, a reminder of Grimmy’s beloved Jack Russell who died in May. I wonder what the future holds for a middleaged Grimshaw: will he be presenting The One Show like Chris Evans? He chuckles. ‘I’d like to do a proper chat show like Alan Carr or Graham Norton. Whenever I do an interview I think, “How would Norton do it?” ’ We finish our drinks. It’s almost Grimmy’s bedtime (9.30pm). But there’s one last question: does he ever get tired of the sound of his own voice? He cracks up. ‘I really do. I’m like, “Shut up!” ’ He shoots me a wonky smile. ‘It’s good to be silent sometimes.’ ES Radio 1’s The Nixtape CD, curated by Nick, is released on 22 September on Island Records

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Worshipped as the embodiment of female beauty and celebrated as France’s 21st-century Marianne, actor and model Laetitia Casta has inspired designers – from Yves Saint Laurent to Dolce & Gabbana – for almost two decades. With a string of high-profile movie roles primed for release, she captivates STEPHANIE RAFANELLI with her eccentric charm

Photographs by SEBASTIAN FAENA Styled by TOM VAN DORPE

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t is raining in Paris. A slate-grey dome imprisons the city – clouds indistinguishable from rooftops – as if the boulevards, the appartements and the pedestrians who scurry along Rue Saint-Honoré are all encased in a giant globe that, when shaken, stirs up not snowflakes but never-ending summer rain.

At the window of a fifth-floor artist’s atelier in the ninth arrondissement, Laetitia Casta awaits her lover, her cheekbones pressed against the windowpane. On a Sixties turntable, a dusty copy of Puccini’s La Bohème crackles; Marcello’s forlorn warbles – at earsplitting volume – silence the downpour. The French actor and model inhales deeply, soaking up the melancholy and melodrama. (‘I love tragic and romantic stories,’ she whispers to me later. ‘The heroines of Italian cinema: Monica Vitti and Anna Magnani. So curvaceous and passionate. These are the women that I love to play in fashion.’) Her cleavage heaves with the fervency of the original Italian lupa, her taupe pout (nature’s benchmark for every surgeon’s implement) parts to expose that insanely sensual toothy gap. But her most exquisite attribute is only barely visible: the trickle of beauty spots under her left eye, like the tears of a Pierrot doll.

For 34-year-old Casta, assignments such as this are a form of art: ‘Life is tragique!’ she declares, with a dismissive flick of the wrist after the last photograph has been taken.

‘When I do a photo-shoot, I want to express something about life. It’s not just about looking pretty. Absolutely not! I watch films to inspire me. I make a moodboard. I get excited.’ She fishes out a series of black and white photographs from her bag: legs in seamed stockings clambering into the back seat of a car; Claudia Cardinale in various poses; stills of Maria Callas and Isabella Rossellini (with whom she was recently a guest of honour at the Dolce & Gabbana couture show in Sicily: ‘She so inspired me in Blue Velvet and when I read her autobiography.

Like me, she crossed over from model to actor’). She slips into playful disgust: ‘Every time I read an interview of a model it is so stupid: it’s about what they eat, what they wear! The image of fashion is such a caricature. Like, “Oh, the poor girl. She doesn’t eat anything.” I mean, don’t they know a model knows about lighting, photography and art direction?’

By now it is 10pm and we are sat on a cow-hide sofa in Casta’s home office in the 14th arrondissement (rain still pelting down), towered over by a giant photograph of Serge Gainsbourg, collar up, like a slightly perverse Elvis.

It was as Gainsbourg’s lover, Brigitte Bardot, in Joann Sfar’s 2010 biopic Gainsbourg: Vie Héroïque that Casta left an indelible impression on international film audiences, a performance for which she was nominated for a César Award in France – although she does not like lingering comparisons to Bardot or any others. When I ask later what she learned from Catherine Deneuve, who she met through Yves Saint Laurent – to whom she was muse and close friend from her teenage years – she replies very politely and simply: ‘Everything I’ve learned, I learned it myself.’ In fact, if you close your eyes and listen, Casta sounds more like a French

Monroe: the soft vowels, the seductive lingering on the word love (‘luuuurve’), with a few delightful malapropisms thrown in; the results, merely, of a long day – Casta is tri-lingual and she meanders in and out of English, French, and Italian according to her mood.

This femme is very far from dizzy.

True, like the aforementioned bombshells, her body triggers many a male’s inner Oedipus complex. When Herb Ritts shot her for his 1999 Pirelli calendar, it was as the quintessence of the 1950s silhouette (in the flesh she is petite, the same 5’7” height as Kate Moss, though the antithesis of that Corinne Day Nineties aesthetic). Like Dolce & Gabbana’s muse, Monica Bellucci, Casta is a real woman – voluptuous, maternal (she has three children), headstrong, though ethereal – but she has also passed into the realm of allegory. At 21, adored by the French fashion greats – Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier (she first modelled for him, aged 15, in 1993) – and already the French face of L’Oréal Paris, with a Rolling Stone superlative (‘sexiest woman alive’) to her name, Casta was voted in as Marianne of France for the 21st century. Since, she has been following in the footsteps of Deneuve and Bardot. A bronze – and slightly racy – cast of her bust has resided in every French town hall, along with a picture of the French president.

Twelve years later, Casta is still lauded by the fashion world (she has been a face for Chanel, Givenchy, Ralph Lauren and Tiffany & Co – and this autumn will launch her H&M lingerie campaign) and by her native people. In April, she was honoured with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contribution to her country, not least in French cinema, in which she has remained prolific.

She has four new films out this autumn, including her first Hollywood role.

‘I think there is a lot of nostalgia in France today, and Laetitia’s look plays into that. She’s the ideal lady from Bardot’s times, from the Sixties,’ comments her friend, fashion illustrator and Gainsbourg director Sfar. Lagerfeld invokes another French icon: ‘She looks like Pauline Borghese by Canova: the same beauty, the same modernity in her way of living,’ he says, referencing Napoleon’s younger sister – who hailed from Casta’s native Corsica. ‘She is the perfect classic beauty, as well as a modern woman who acts, models and raises her three kids.’

But Casta is far from the haughty beauty that one might expect. She is enchantingly eccentric and effusive (‘My grandmother was Italian; I don’t feel like a cold Parisian’), animated by humorous outbursts, Marcel Marceau-style mimes, hand clapping to provide emphasis and a comic timing reminiscent of Roberto Benigni. Take this anecdote of a recent shoot with Karl Lagerfeld’s cat: ‘Everyone was talking to me about Choupette. Choupette. Choupette. I’m like, “Who is Choupette?”

Oh, it’s a cat. OK. When it turned up to the shoot, I was like, “Oh my God, that cat has crazy eyes. Like, it’s not a cat.

It’s a top-model cat.” And they showed me her model visit card; she had her own call sheet: “Choupette arrives at eight o’clock.”’

She chuckles. ‘So we’re shooting on this balcony in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and I was so fucking scared that Choupette would step back and fall off and that Karl would hate me for ever because I killed his cat. The cat was like, “maaaiooowarrgh”

‘Love is my fragility and my strength.

I don’t drink, I don’t take coke. But love, it is an addiction.

It is the most beautiful thing in life’

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PRETTY IN PINK: CASTA DAZZLES IN DOLCE’S DELICATE LACE This page: Laetitia Casta wears lace shirt, about £860, Dolce & Gabbana.

Previous page: patent coat, £3,610, Emilio Pucci. Polyester and satin mix bra, £29.50, What Katie Did. Suede heels, £765, Tom Ford

[‘Strangulated cat about to fall to its death’ noise] and I was like, “gasp” [‘Shit! I almost killed Karl’s cat!’ noise]. I did everything with that cat. We even shot on the bed. The whole thing was about Choupette. And she has two nannies…’ her incredulity peaks and fades away. ‘It was a weird job, when I think about it.’

Casta’s triumph is in her ability to move seamlessly between high fashion and film. Her next celluloid release is Arbitrage, a pacey and well-directed financial thriller starring Richard Gere as a corrupt hedge-fund magnate spiralling into a web of deceit, and is her first foray into American film. ‘My mother was like, “Oh my God, Richard Gere, arrghhh! ”’ [She makes an arm-scrambling motion in the air.] ‘And I was like, “Mum, please don’t shout.” I was too busy focusing on my English accent to make sure that people could understand me.’ Casta plays Gere’s lover, who becomes the centre of an elaborate criminal cover-up. ‘When I spoke to Richard, I said, “Do you think they are in love?” I wanted to make it more special, not just some pretty French girlfriend.’

Alongside War of the Buttons, a film set in a village in rural French village during wartime and following the fortunes of a Jewish girl hiding from her fate, another forthcoming project, Tied, is a bold choice. It tells the true story of Edouard Stern, a Parisian banker and close friend of Nicolas Sarkozy who was found shot in the head wearing a Latex bodysuit, the result of a sadomasochistic game with his lover, Cécile Brossard – played by Casta.

‘Sometimes men in power need to be dominated to feel normal. He was a really disgusting person, but he had a cold father and mother who used to beat him up, so he associated it with love.

Cécile’s mother tried to kill herself with her two daughters, and her father asked her to watch him have sex with another woman when she was a child.’ She pauses to contemplate this. ‘So they were both fucked up. They clicked, they understood each other. They played sexual games with guns.

She didn’t want to kill him, but he pushed her to kill him because he couldn’t stand his life any more.’

Casta’s sensibility allows her to find romance in even this sordid tale. ‘It’s about what can happen between a man and a woman in a love affair; how two people can sink down, and how far. I related to Cécile in her devotion in love; that you would do anything for someone you love.’ Would she do anything for someone she loves, I ask. ‘Oh, yeah.’ She sighs blissfully. ‘This is my fragility and my strength. I don’t drink, I don’t take coke. But love, it is an addiction. It is the most beautiful thing in life. Maybe I have felt something like this relationship… When I do a part it’s because I recognise something in myself or in my life, or my past. Acting is about channelling all these emotions, pulling them out of yourself.’

So she has been in negative relationships, I venture. ‘We all have destructive potential within us,’ she replies cryptically.

The S&M scenes, she tells me, were harrowing to film. ‘The most depressing thing was [acting as] two sex objects, abusing and destroying each other. I had to slap him [French actor Benoît Poelvoorde] so many times, but I couldn’t fake it, so I had to do it for real every time. In the end, it’s so dark that it makes you feel sad. It was such an intense experience. It

was like we both went through a plane crash and survived.’

Such an emotionally onerous film is a far cry from the playful evocation of sex games in earlier cameo roles, albeit ones that reference arthouse films. In 1999, then a Victoria’s Secret model, Casta was directed by Herb Ritts in Chris Isaak’s voyeristic ‘Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing’ video and, more recently, she appeared in the video for Rihanna’s ‘Te Amo’, as her sapphic lover, dressed like an R ’n’ B Charlotte Rampling in her Night Porter incarnation.

‘For me, everything has to have a meaning or be artistic and beautiful. I hate vulgarity. I never did Playboy. Never,’ she scoffs.

‘But, of course, a naked woman can be beautiful, like the beauty of a statue. All the great artists were inspired by the nude female form. Why women? Because they were the beginning of the world!

That’s how I see nudity, not something ugly or cheap.’

At first Casta had to fight the stigma of the model-turnedactor (her first role in 1999, opposite Gérard Depardieu in comedy Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar, was met with mixed reviews).

I muse for a while on the way that beauty can impede a serious actor’s career. ‘That’s bullshit, you know,’ she guns straight back at me. ‘If you are getting typecast as the sexy girl, then show yourself in a different way. Go and do theatre, take some risks. [She claps her hands.] If you don’t want to play the sexy girl, then don’t take the role! It’s up to you to surprise people.

Even if you have to play a blonde bitch, it can be exciting if you play it in the right way.’ Her eyes – the colour of the Corsican sea that she swam in as a child – shine with fervour. ‘Acting is a complicated process for everyone… even for Catherine Deneuve.

She had an older sister, Françoise Dorléac, who was a famous actor, who died in a car crash in 1967. What I love about Catherine is that she is so strong. It’s something more special than beauty. But she is tough. You have to be tough.’

‘I don’t think it’s easy for Hedi Slimane taking over a house with a name like that. I don’t think it can be “Yves Saint Laurent” any more.

It can’t ever be the same’

H A R P E R’ S B A Z A A R

| October 2012

www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

A/W 12’S SATIN LENDS A TIMELESSLY ROMANTIC LOOK Pink satin shirt, £455, Stella McCartney.

Pink wool and angora sweater, £120, Boutique by Jaeger. Cream knit skirt, about £1,840, Azzedine Alaïa. Black suede heels ( just seen), £765, Tom Ford ▼

202 |

Tough is not something that Laetitia Casta was when she first moved to Paris, a schoolgirl raised between rural Normandy (her mother’s home) and the coastal village of Lumio in Corsica (her father’s). ‘When I was young all I did was dream, dream, dream. I felt like a ghost, invisible. I lived in my own fantasy world. I just wanted to be alone and to be close to nature, play in the woodland with the frogs and animals.

In my world, everything was beautiful.’ She elongates that word, the way she does ‘love’. ‘Maybe that’s why I took to modelling, so that I could carry on playing the characters in my imagination. I was so shy on the outside, but on the inside I was like a volcano.’

Spotted by photographer Frederic Cresseaux on a beach in Corsica in 1993, she attended her first castings when she was 15.

‘I was so, so shy. But when they said, “You have to lose weight,” I said, “Excuse me? I’m sorry, it’s not true.” I started to feel like I had to fight to be respected. The hardest thing is to be a woman and not be an object. After I’d done a few shoots, women came up to me in the street and said, “You look normal! You represent us.”

Suddenly I felt like I had something to fight for.’

Jean Paul Gaultier soon cast her in her first show. ‘You can see a video of me on that show on the runway and they say, “Hello, how old are you?” And I say, “15,” CONTINUED ON PAGE 307

TEXTURES MINGLE PLAYFULLY IN THE SEASON’S MUST-HAVE EVENINGWEAR This page: pink ostrich-feather dress, to order, Alexander McQueen.

Opposite: satin dress and matching coat (sold as set), £2,825, Jil Sander. Suede heels, £765, Tom Ford. See Stockists for details. Hair by Nicolas Jurnjack at MAO for hairblog.nicolasjurnjack.com. Make-up

by Carol Colombani at L’Atelier 68.

Manicure by Kamel at B-Agency

‘LAETITIA’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 202

and they say, “Sorry, how old are you?” “15”,’ she squeaks, in a minime voice. ‘I remember the casting. I was so, so shy.

‘I had been through puberty, but I was still a child inside.’

Casta grabs her chest. ‘Oh, it was so disgusting to feel and see your body changing. I had no clue what femininity was when I started in fashion. In fact, Yves Saint Laurent was the first person who made me feel like a woman. He asked me, “What do you want to wear?” Nobody had ever asked me that before, so I said, “OK, I want to wear a dress with flowers,” as a child would say, a bit ridiculous. And he made the most beautiful dress for me, covering me in roses for his 1999 show.’

In Casta, Saint Laurent found a kindred spirit: a gentle and creative soul in a beautiful body. In the designer, she found a mentor and protector: ‘We were both so shy and sensitive. We held on to each other. We were like two people in the water that stopped each other from drowning.’ Casta walked his last show in 2002 and remained a close friend until his death in 2008. ‘I miss him very much, because you don’t have many people like that in your life. One, if you are lucky. My favourite memories are of laughing about his dogs, sitting on his knee, flying to New York with him…

But I feel him still, here, all around me. Not a ghost, but his spirit, his energy. I don’t know Hedi Slimane’s work very well, but I don’t think it’s easy for him taking over a house with a name like that.

I don’t think it can be “Yves Saint Laurent” any more. It’s not possible. It can’t ever be the same.’

It was Saint Laurent who recognised Casta’s theatrical potential: ‘Yves knew that I was going to be an actor before I did. He always asked more of me than just being a model; to act, to create stories.’

After the mediocre Asterix and Obelix Take On Caesar, Casta appeared in a raft of arthouse films, such as The Blue Bicycle (2000) and, more recently, in 2008, Born in 68, which followed the social history of the French Left through a group of radical protesters. Casta, like many French liberals, was concerned with the rise of the extreme Right in France, specifically Marine Le Pen: ‘She is anti-abortion, she is anti-everything. But you know what was the scariest thing of all? That young people would vote for her.’ I wonder if she felt any empathy for Carla Bruni, leaving the Élysée Palace on the inauguration of François Hollande. ‘I didn’t care because she didn’t do anything!’ she jumps in. ‘OK, she really looked after Nicolas. And I admired her for that as a woman. But as the first lady of France, she really could have done more.’

At the tender age of 21, Casta stood at the centre of her very own political scandal, when the press found out that the newly anointed Marianne of France was in fact keeping a flat in London.

The attack spurred the famously reclusive Bardot to issue a statement in Casta’s defence. Casta returned the favour and telephoned Bardot when she was offered the role in Gainsbourg. ‘I thought, “If she doesn’t want me to play her, I’m not going to do it.” She said, “You know what, Laetitia? I want you to do it. Do it, and try to do it well.” And she started to talk to me about her life. So it was like an homage to her.’ The resulting performance, played almost entirely wrapped in a sheet sitting astride Gainsbourg’s piano, was electric. ‘Laetitia has this instinct and chutzpah in common with Bardot. She can be highly sexy and completely feminist at the same time because she has the power,’ explains Sfar. ‘It’s about not showing everything. It’s about glamour, it’s about teasing [the viewer].’

Yvan Attal, Casta’s co-star and director in Do Not Disturb – a new French comedy about two straight male best friends who sleep together for an art project – compares her to his own wife, Charlotte

Gainsbourg: ‘They both were in the limelight from a young age and have had to be wary. But when Laetitia opens herself up in front of the camera, it makes you want to cry and laugh – it is really moving.’

This passionate core is the true spirit of Casta: carpe diem, a philosophy that led her to embrace her desire to become a mother at an early age: she had her first child Sahteene (now 11) with photographer and video director Stéphane Sednaoui in 2001. ‘I had a baby for love when I was 23. Everyone in fashion said, “Don’t do it. It will ruin your career.” But I didn’t listen,’ she muses. ‘I used to bring my daughter on fashion shoots with me, and breastfeed on set.’

She now has two more children, Orlando and Athena, born in 2006 and 2009 respectively to Casta and Italian actor Stefano Accorsi, who she began dating after her split with Sednaoui. ‘There have been times when the person that you love doesn’t love you back. Love isn’t eternal, you know? But in your life there are many love stories, not just one.’ She scrapes her hair off her forehead in contemplation. ‘Maria Callas once said, “The moment you depend on your lover, your love affair is over.” But in the end she died heartbroken.’

With Accorsi she owns a country house in Lumio: ‘The children run in the same cherry wood that I grew up in. So they will have the same memories as me.’ It’s approaching midnight now and a single train of thought is tough to follow. ‘I was always old in my head when I was a child. Now I feel like I am getting younger and younger. At the same time, as you get older you have to let go of the things that you had when you were very young. It’s a relief sometimes to let them go.’ Will one of those things be modelling? I ask.

‘I’ve done it for 19 years, so now it’s like breathing. I think I’m going to carry on doing it for a long, long time.’ She breaks off suddenly, as if interrupted by a loud thud. ‘Wow! Can you imagine what a wonderful life I have? When we see famous people that say, “Oh, I just wanted to have a normal life, it’s actually hard for me,” it’s like, “Fuck off, it’s not true.” You never wanted to have a normal life. It’s just so great and exciting.’

My taxi arrives like a royal valet. Casta hugs me heartily, leading me out to the street and sheltering me from the still-pouring rain with a giant umbrella. As we open the car door, my driver explodes in a coughing fit – a seizure no doubt brought on by the sight of this Marianne of France illuminated on the Paris streets like an ecstatic angel in the deluge.

‘JOAN’

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 214

so many sacrifices for my sisters and me. So I bought my father a pick-up truck. My mum’s biggest dream was to remodel her kitchen. When we were kids, she would save up money and then an emergency would come up. Mothers always put themselves last.

So last year, I got my mum the kitchen she always wanted.

DB What challenges are left for you?

JS I want a fragrance contract.

DB You want your own fragrance?

JS No, I meant a fragrance campaign. But now that you say it, you never know.

DB Do it. Here’s your tagline: Smell Small, Feel Big! JS Can we copyright that right now? I want to be on Forbes’ list, too.

I want to become a businesswoman. Look at Heidi Klum, Gisele Bündchen, Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks. These women have made their own paths, starting from modelling.

DB Is that all?

JS I want to take over the world. I want people to look at me and say: ‘Oh wow, that girl is doing something.’

Eva Herzigova stopped traffic with her voluptuous curves in that lingerie advert back in the Nineties, but continues to grace leading campaigns today. Now celebrating the potent energy of her seven-month-pregnant physique, the supermodel tells STEPHANIE RAFANELLI about natural childbirth, being put on a pedestal and rediscovering her ‘wow’ body Photographs by MICHELANGELO DI BATTISTA. Styled by SOPHIA NEOPHITOU-APOSTOLOU

va Herzigova perches atop a set box, her lupine eyes framed by back-combed Renaissance curls, like a louche Venus. Encircled by a triumvirate of preening stylists, a shell-like studio light and fashion photographer Michelangelo di Battista, she sways, gently clutching her fecund form, followed by a cloud of ludicrously floaty feathers (from a vintage-inspired Chanel creation).

As if to counteract such a romantic image, lest it veer into saccharine, Herzigova (and her seven-month-old bump) are then tenderly shuffled into a vampish Lanvin maxi-dress, which seductively worships her outline, which, from certain angles, looks little more than a comely pot belly. ‘Being pregnant is less about being sexy than being sensual. You feel very feminine,’ she drawls later in her Czech-inflected accent, which causes her final syllables to purr. ‘There are all these special hormonal enhancements. It’s like you’ve had all these operations done.

You really blossom, especially in the first three months: my skin and my hair were in great condition; my breasts were like “wow”; it was like I’d had a facelift and breast-enhancement surgery. It’s amazing refinding the body that you used to have in your twenties, and you’re like, “Oooh, I remember what it was like.’’’

Looking around, it seems that the male studio assistants are also reminiscing along the same theme, their eyes glazed over in some collective reverie.

Meanwhile, the 37-year-old supermodel, pregnant with her second child, is seated on a barstool – ‘It’s just too difficult to balance in heels with this weight at the front,’ she laughs – and disrobes behind a Big-Birdstyle Dior couture coat, like a siren from the Folies Bergère. From the fluffy jumble poke those endless legs, unchanged from their Pretty Polly days despite her pregnant state, and that iconic cleavage, once the subject of heated socio-cultural debate.

It was 1994, three years after Demi Moore’s notorious Vanity Fair pregnancy cover (which Herzigova remembers as ‘amazing’), when ‘Eva’ joined the ranks of the first-name-monikered supermodels. That year, her campaign for Wonderbra, captured on jaw-dropping 30-foot-high roadside billboards around the UK, caused – as Gossard legend has it – a temporary leap in traffic accidents (though no official statistics exist). With the media’s tendency to cast its player with Unique Selling Points, Herzigova was crowned the Nineties Monroe. Whatever; the geometric interplay of her contours (voluptuous physique, slashed cheekbones at right angles, ruler-straight teeth and a slight retroussé nose) translated from a sublime mathematical equation into off-the-scale sex appeal.

Her athletic figure (she skied, swam and was a gymnast as a child in former Czechoslovakia before she began modelling at 16) was the perfect frame for the attitudinal, body-conscious designs of Thierry Mugler and Hervé Léger. She went on to work for Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Versace, Roberto Cavalli and Salvatore Ferragamo – among the first of the great Eastern Europeans who, by the turn

of the millennium, would flood the modelling world. By then, a new androgynous aesthetic had replaced the curvaceous look, and Herzigova caused global outrage by slimming down after her marriage to Bon Jovi drummer Tico Torres in 1996 (they parted two years later) and continuing to work for the next decade as a svelte haute-fashion model. She has recently featured in campaigns for D&G perfume, Chopard and Dom Pérignon by Karl Lagerfeld, and designs for French label Un Deux Trois. Despite predictable speculation, she has always insisted her weight loss was just the natural metabolic result of maturing out of her teens.

‘I naturally lost weight in my mid-twenties. Everyone kept telling me I was too skinny and that I needed to eat more. Here’s the proof that it’s just a genetic thing – I put on 12 kilos [in this pregnancy] and my arms and legs are still skinny,’ she says, tugging playfully at the sleeves of her towelling robe as she sips a well-deserved ginger tea between takes. ‘Even if I could put on weight, I could never put it on in the areas people criticise. I put on 16 kilos with George [born in 2007], and I lost most of it naturally within a few weeks of the birth. I didn’t plan on losing it. I felt great a little fuller, and I wish I could have kept it on, but my body just won’t.’ She cocks her head and squints her eyes until they are just a set of black lashes. ‘In an ideal world, I would like to keep on a little bit of extra weight (not the tummy!). I’d like to be a bit softer and cushiony, more maternallooking. Being skinny and being a mother just don’t go together.’

Of course, Sigmund Freud would have had his reasons for linking such a maternal body to Herzigova’s voluptuous Nineties sex appeal (as would many others, from the ancient Egyptians, who found the attributes of fertility sexy, to Simone de Beauvoir); though this is neither the time nor the place. Certainly, Herzigova’s partner of 10 years and George’s father, Italian businessman Gregorio Marsiaj, who she met after 9/11 when stranded in Liguria on a shoot, adores her present form.

‘I love being pregnant,’ she gesticulates with the vigour of an Italian, ‘but sometimes you catch yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “Oh God, my tummy is huge.” Sometimes I feel like a whale out of water,’ she jokes, her eyes widening with exaggerated emphasis.

‘Greg thinks I’m most beautiful when I’m pregnant. And because he tells me that, I feel more beautiful. He puts me on a pedestal.

It’s the difference in your partner’s attitude that can make you feel beautiful or ugly.’

We are sitting now with di Battista, with whom Herzigova chats both in English and Italian (she also speaks French, Czech and Russian), as he clicks through cover options after the shoot. On the screen, the pregnant supermodel experiments with playful, bumpexposing poses behind a swatch of diaphanous fabric. ‘Not all the camera angles are like, erm, super- super-sexy when you are pregnant.

You can feel quite vulnerable,’ she confides, then hoots hysterically at one of her more contorted stances. ‘I was trying to make like Stephanie Seymour in Versace!’ (a Richard Avedon campaign on the mood boards for inspiration). But, in general, she is relieved that, even by her supermodel standards, there are some great selections.

‘It’s a natural instinct for a woman to create a life,’ she adds, once changed back into her civilian clothes (including a checked Isabel Marant empire-line blouse). ‘I think it’s very instinctive for a woman to seduce a male, too. The end aim is to procreate, it’s a cycle, but once you are pregnant, the gate is closed.’ Another hearty laugh.

‘Being pregnant is less about being sexy than being sensual.You really blossom: my breasts were like “wow”; it was like I’d had breast-enhancement surgery. It’s amazing refinding the body you had in your twenties’

H A R P E R’ S B A Z A A R

| April 2011

www.harpersbazaar.co.uk

▼

144 |

This page: Eva Herzigova wears black gabardine dress, £1,785, Lanvin.

White gold and diamond bangle, from a selection, Chopard. Other bracelets, her own.

Previous page: feather dégradé coat, from a selection, Dior Haute Couture

‘It’s no longer about seducing, but about nurturing the baby; it’s much more about intimacy with your partner… It’s natural when your baby is your priority that your relationship with your partner goes on hold for a while. You are exhausted all the time, but then you get used to it and you are able to get that intimacy back.’

There are only seven weeks to go before Herzigova is due, and we catch up a few days later to chat in the calming ambience of Blakes hotel, near her home in Chelsea, accompanied by the occasional chirp of caged lovebirds. She is very pro natural childbirth, which is how she had George. ‘I wanted to give birth naturally at nine months. I’ve heard that some women these days book delivery

by Caesarean early before their due date. I think a lot of them do it because of the fear of pain of a natural birth. But I think it’s important not to judge anyone, because motherhood is a very personal thing… There is a lot of pressure put on mothers in all areas.

Everyone has their say on how and when you do things, just when you are feeling vulnerable, and it’s very hard to speak out.’

George had a bohemian induction into the word: born in Paris to the sounds of Janis Joplin. ‘Summertime’ is a song she particularly remembers. ‘The birth was quick, just six hours. I had been drinking this raspberry-leaf tea for a month before. It’s supposed to help your muscles relax and raise your pain threshold. Greg took stills pictures of me, but only my top half, not from the other side,’ she beams.

‘Some fathers like to rig the whole thing up a like a movie set!’

The delivery was, however, less of a shock than life postpartum.

‘I didn’t want a nanny with George. I did everything for myself.’ She throws her hands in the air at the sheer folly. ‘It was a real rollercoaster. I was exhausted and breastfeeding all the time. I think it was so much harder coming from the life I’d had as a model, where I lived in hotel rooms and ordered room service. For 20 years I’d had this bohemian, nomadic existence. Then, suddenly, I was bound to one place with a child, making mushed carrots [she laughs]. It was a lot to digest.’ After four months, Marsiaj put his foot down and she acceded to professional help.

Herzigova suspects her mothering style is a result of her own upbringing in Litvinov, a coalmining town in the north of the Czech Republic where her father worked as a technician (he was also a national swimming champion and, by her own accounts of his height and virile physique, her key genetic donor). ‘My mother had three small children. She did everything by herself… cooked, cleaned. My dad was always away working or training.’ She narrows her eyes again. ‘My parents were strict. I think I take more time to explain things to George, but I am still strict. It’s maybe because I come from a former Eastern Bloc country, where being a mother is perhaps the most important priority, maybe more so than England, where careers are very focused on… I am always thinking about what George is going to eat, how it’s cooked. I am very responsible – too responsible, from Greg’s point of view. He is much more, you know, dolce vita…’

In recent months, however, Herzigova has been taking breaks on the Ligurian coast, where the couple are doing up a new holiday home (‘I’m fulfilling all my nesting instincts’). The pair remain unmarried, and live separately in the week: Herzigova is in London, and Marsiaj, though based in Turin, travels the world for work. They reunite every weekend, often, rather poetically, in Paris. ‘It’s not the most traditional relationship, but it’s the perfect relationship for us in a way. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have someone next to me every day for the next 80 years.’

How does London fare as an environment for mothers? Herzigova does not subscribe to the cult of the yummy CONTINUED ON PAGE 228

Viscose knit dress, about £2,320, Azzedine Alaïa. Feather dégradé coat, from a selection, Dior Haute Couture. Long rose gold, diamond and onyx necklace, £3,240; rose gold necklace with diamond pendant, £1,740; white gold and diamond bracelet, from a selection (all worn throughout), all Chopard. Other jewellery, her own

Satin, organza and feather dress, from a selection, Chanel. See Stockists for details.

Hair by Kerry Warn for John Frieda at the Milton Agency. Make-up by Polly Osmond at D+V, using L’OrÊal Paris. Manicure by Trish Lomax at Premier, using Dior Vernis

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 146

mummy, she tells me, though she is more empathetic than scathing about the phenomenon, suggesting that such obsessive motherly overachievement is often a symptom of frustration. ‘Perhaps there is more pressure on women to be perfect mothers if they are at home full-time with their children. Maybe you expect more from yourself as a mother,’ she says, thoughtful for a moment. ‘There isn’t a right or wrong answer for any of us; we each have to do what is right for ourselves and our families.’ On other bones of maternal contention: she thinks the hullabaloo over breast-feeding in public is ‘silly.

Obviously you shouldn’t be pulling your breast out and showing it off in public, there are subtle ways of doing it’. For herself, she is happy she gave birth in her thirties. ‘I would have been way too old to have a child if I was still living in the Czech Republic.’ She opens her mouth in outrage. ‘But I am much more patient now, and I’ve

had so many experiences. When you’re younger you have more energy, but less wisdom to pass on.’

Taking a final swig of her tea, Herzigova proffers her summation theory on motherhood. ‘It’s like you grow an antenna on top of your head and you are constantly connected. It puts your priorities in perspective, and your everyday choices.’ Her eyes shine with sincerity, and she passionately slaps her thighs. ‘When I’m pregnant, I feel like I could run the country, become president. I feel very clearheaded, quite powerful in my mind. The protective instinct is very strong; you are not thinking about yourself, but for someone else all the time, putting them first.’ She raises herself to her full 5’11” in flat knee-high boots, donning her Vanessa Bruno coat like a veritable matriarch. ‘Pregnant women should be running the country. They should be in very important powerful places around the world.’

ES DELUXE MEN’S SPECIAL | MODE R N M A N N E R S | M E ET T H E S POR NO S E X UA L S | BIG BR E A K FA S T S

ES Magazine 17. 10.2014

PLUS GERARD BUTLER DAVID GANDY ROGER MOORE DERMOT O’LEARY THE MEDICINE MEN DAVID BAILEY

IT’S THE

LAW JUDE JUNIOR IS HERE

Rafferty Law

photographed by Matt Holyoak

N E I L B A R R E T T printed duffel coat, £ 1 , 3 6 0 R A L P H L A U R E N jumper, at harrods.com, £ 3 4 5 C E R R U T I 1 8 8 1 P A R I S trousers, at matchesfashion.com, £ 4 7 8 D R M A R T E N S lace-up shoes, £ 1 1 0

CREDIT

Rings, Rafferty’s own

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‘I CAN GET ANGRY LIKE MY DAD BUT I THINK I AM MORE OPEN THAN HIM’

ALEXANDER McQUEEN

CREDIT

cashmere coat, at matchesfashion.com, £ 1 , 6 9 5 N O 2 1 jumper, at brownsfashion.com, £ 3 4 5 W O O Y O U N G M I trousers, at mrporter.com, £ 3 0 5 D R M A R T E N S lace-up shoes, £ 1 7 5 A C N E S T U D I O S backpack, at matchesfashion.com, £ 2 2 0

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he last time I laid eyes on Rafferty Law, near his home in Primrose Hill, he was six years old, a cherub crowned by a mass of blond ringlets. It was the summer of 2003.

A few months later, the break-up of his parents, actors Jude Law and Sadie Frost, would be considered the end of a brief Britpop cultural era. The time of Rafferty Law’s birth marked the triumphant rise of New Labour, Cool Britannia and the so-called Primrose Hill set, a 1990s echo of the Bloomsbury set, which lured our attention away from Hollywood to the lives of the inhabitants of a small enclave in North London. For just under a decade, the exploits of the Primrose Hill set became the centre of the paparazzi’s world. The legends remain in the collective London psyche, but time has moved on. So much has happened since — the release of Frost’s candid autobiography, detailing her struggles with postnatal depression, multifarious headlines on the daily status of Law’s subsequent relationships, most notably with Sienna Miller, and, of course, phone-hacking — that I’m curious to see how their eldest son has turned out in the midst of all of this.

Rafferty Law is now on the eve of his 18th birthday, and as I sit in the reception of Soho’s Select model agency waiting for him,

‘I DID WORK EXPERIENCE FOR BLUR WHEN THEY WERE REHEARSING FOR THEIR REUNION GIG. I TUNED THEIR GUITARS’

H A C K E T T rollneck, £ 3 1 5 T O P M A N trousers, £ 3 4 D I O R H O M M E shoes, £ 9 8 0

I can’t help imagining Jude Law’s furrowed brow hanging over me with a touch of menace. I’m about to take his son’s interview virginity, so to speak, and as I’ve met both his parents on several occasions, I feel rather nervous — Dad is not exactly a fan of the press at the best of times, let alone when it concerns one of his young brood. Suddenly, a face pops up before me. Composed, with steel-coloured eyes and fine bone structure, it could belong to Jude circa 1994 in his breakthrough role in Paul WS Anderson’s Shopping (the film in which he fell in love with Rafferty’s mother) were it not that it is also so feline, a physical quality passed down from Frost.

He introduces himself as Raff and holds the lift for me as we make our way to a nearby café — his parents have done a good job on his manners. ‘I don’t really like the name Rafferty,’ he confides later in a gentle mockney accent, an updated version of his father’s. Law is witty, laid-back and open, not defensive as I was expecting. He is a little excited, though, because he turns 18 tomorrow and will finally be ‘legal’. A big night out with his friends is planned at Soho club The Box, as well as a family dinner at The River Café along with his girlfriend,

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‘I’M NEARLY 18 AND I’VE SEEN EVERYTHING MY PARENTS CAN DO THAT’S EMBARRASSING’ guitar heroes. ‘I did work experience for Blur for two weeks when they were rehearsing for their reunion gig, because Damon [Albarn] is really good friends with my dad. I tuned their guitars and stuff,’ he says. He also knows Paul Simonon, The Clash’s erstwhile bass player. ‘He’s such a lovely guy. I know his sons Louis and Claude from around.’

Cora Corré, the daughter of Agent Provocateur founders Serena Rees and Joe Corré (whose parents are punk mavericks Vivienne Westwood and the late Malcolm McLaren), is one of Law’s best friends. ‘She has the coolest family, but she never talks about it. She’s so over it,’ he laughs fondly.

The connections are endless. It was somewhat inevitable that the progeny of the close-knit Primrose Hill set would eventually take over the baton and form Primrose Hill Mark II. Anaïs Gallagher, daughter of former locals Noel Gallagher and Meg Mathews, is a friend of Law’s sister, 14-year-old Iris. Then, of course, there’s Lila Grace, daughter of Iris’ godmother Kate Moss (who is married to The Kills frontman Jamie Hince); not to mention Radio 1 DJ Nick Grimshaw, the godfather of Law’s 12-year-old brother Rudy and a close friend of his mother. ‘I’ve known Grimmy forever. Somehow, he ended up living in the basement of my mum’s house after he moved down from Manchester when he was 20. I don’t know where he came from, he just appeared. Then he started pretty much living in the house itself,’ he sighs with mock weariness.

All this is simply everyday life to Law. Such frissons with the musical scene extend back generations on his mother’s side. Frost, who grew up in Primrose Hill, was married to Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp from 1988 to 1995, with whom she has a son, 24-year-old Finlay. Her stepfather, the rock photographer Robert Davidson,

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photographed Frank Zappa and The Move, and her father, the late David Vaughan, was a psychedelic artist in the 1960s, who painted Paul McCartney’s piano and The Kinks’ car, as well as helping to organise one of Jimi Hendrix’s first gigs at the Roundhouse in Camden. The Dirty Harrys recently played an acoustic set at a retrospective of Vaughan’s work, put on by Frost and The Kinks’ Ray Davies.

But Law’s father is not without his musical influences: ‘My dad took me to my first ever gig in New Orleans when I was seven: Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin.’ As a child, the young Law also played saxophone, practising on the very instrument that his dad played as a beatnik rich kid in The Talented Mr Ripley.

Law was three when his father appeared in Anthony Minghella’s film: ‘I was so young.

It’s just a blur, but I remember flashes of sunny Italy, and there are pictures of me running around with long, blond curly hair,’ he cringes. He often attended film sets on his father’s films. ‘Sherlock Holmes was cool.

Robert Downey Jr. What a legend. My dad introduced me to him on set, and he just said, “Iron Man or Batman?” And I said, “Iron Man, definitely.” And he was like, “Good answer.” One of my favourite films of my dad’s is Dom Hemingway. I went to the premiere last year with my girlfriend.

The opening scene! Jesus!’ This refers to

Hemingway’s rapturous soliloquy dedicated to his own penis, delivered while on the receiving end of an act of fellatio in prison.

H

e has also witnessed his father’s thespian renaissance with turns as Hamlet and Henry V. Surely only a short leap would be needed for Law Jr to follow his actor father on to the stage and screen. Rudy has already appeared in a short film, produced and directed by his mother, but Rafferty insists that, although he has acted in school productions and enjoys going to see plays regularly with his theatrephile father, music is where his heart truly lies. ‘I did feel a bit of pressure when I joined my first boarding school [Bedales in Hampshire]. In my drama lesson, I think everyone thought: “Oh God, he’s going to be so brilliant.” Then they realised that I wasn’t that good, so they just let me get on with it.’

He is aiming to get an A* in his A level drama, which he is studying alongside English and photography at a college in Hampstead. ‘I’ve never been that hardworking, just enough to get by. I got an A, B and a C at AS level. The goal is to move them all up one grade. Once I’ve done that and shown my parents that I can work, then I can go and do my own thing,’ he says. ‘My dad is very strict. My mum is more chilled. If I miss

Family ties Right: Law with his mother Sadie Frost in 2012.

Below: with his girlfriend Ella Dallaglio in 2013

Boys’ club Above: with his father Jude Law in 2011.

Left: with Radio 1 DJ Nick Grimshaw in June this year

G E T T Y I M AG E S . R E X . O I C . F LY N E T P I C T U R E S . C O M . G R O O M I N G B Y S V E N B AY E R B A C H AT FA C T O RY U S I N G K I E H L’ S . P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N B Y M A M M O T H R E T O U C H ( M A M M O T H R E T O U C H . C O M )

former England rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio’s daughter Ella; their burgeoning amour has been well-documented on Instagram of late (more on this to come).

There are even more reasons for Law to be energised. He recently made his fashion debut as a model for DKNY, and Tiger of Sweden, as well as appearing in the pages of British Vogue. More importantly to Law, his band The Dirty Harrys — which he founded a year and a half ago with his best friend Marley Mackey, son of Pulp’s bassist Steve and stepson of Love magazine editor Katie Grand — are now playing regular gigs around London. Blur and The Clash are his biggest musical inspirations. Luckily for Law the Younger, these bands are not just distant

G E T T Y I M AG E S . R E X . O I C . F LY N E T P I C T U R E S . C O M . G R O O M I N G B Y S V E N B AY E R B A C H AT FA C T O RY U S I N G K I E H L’ S . P O S T- P R O D U C T I O N B Y M A M M O T H R E T O U C H ( M A M M O T H R E T O U C H . C O M )

two Lewisham teachers] is that I’ve been brought up with fame. Everyone always asks me what it’s like, but to me it’s just normal.

I don’t know any different.’ So young and yet so sanguine. ‘I can get angry like my dad.

I’ve got that anger in me, but I think I’m more open than him. My mum’s a lot more open than my dad, more sociable. My dad’s got his five friends and he sticks to them. He always tells me, “You don’t need loads of friends,” which is true.’

L A C N E S T U D I O S suit jacket, £ 4 9 0 , and suit trousers, at mrporter.com, £ 2 6 0 P A U L S M I T H shirt, £ 1 1 0 A L F R E D D U N H I L L knitted tie, £ 9 0 M A R N I socks, £ 3 0 , and shoes, £ 4 5 0

a lesson, my dad comes down on me really hard.’ I ask Law if he’s a bit of a rebel — it wouldn’t be a surprise, given the laws of nurture and nature. ‘I don’t like being told what to do a lot of the time. That’s why boarding school didn’t go so well with me.

I’ll conform if I respect my teacher, but if a teacher is rude to me, I’ll say something back to them.’ Fair enough. He has his father’s strong sense of justice. ‘I try to do the right thing. Sometimes my parents or school will disagree with me, but I’ve never gone out of control.’ Still, press rumours have circulated that Law Sr confided in his son’s godfather, Jonny Lee Miller, about his concerns for Rafferty’s welfare; to which Miller (allegedly) replied: ‘Jude. You were a maniac at 17. He’s a carbon copy of you.’ Indeed.

Law Jr does admit to being a difficult child.

‘I was pretty naughty. Very loud. I slept in my parents’ bed until I was six. They say they lost their social life for about five years.

They’d spend hours trying to get me to sleep, and by the time they came downstairs, their friends would all have left.’

That’s not the way the press painted things.

In those early years, his parents were deemed to be the ringleaders of the Primrose Hill party, their every movement followed by attendant paparazzi; dissected, speculated upon, scandalised and regurgitated. True or not, there has been a lot of muddy water under the proverbial bridge.

I wonder if he was ever embarrassed by his parents’ behaviour back then. ‘I used to hate it when my parents danced. My dad dancing?

And my mum? It’s like the worst thing,’ he laughs. ‘But I’m nearly 18 now and I’ve seen pretty much everything they can do that’s embarrassing. So I’m past that stage now.

They can’t really embarrass me any more.’

I ask how he feels about fame, in the light of his closely scrutinised upbringing, and the recent phone-hacking trial in which his father testified against the News of the World.

He pauses to think for a second. ‘I’m not going to be anti-fame. I think sometimes maybe my dad can be too, too...’ he trails off.

I think I know what he’s going to say: angry, maybe? ‘If you have a following and you’re doing well, you should be grateful. I guess where I’m different from my dad [the son of

aw Sr has been repeatedly burned by the media; in both its fevered coverage of his on/off relationship with Sienna Miller between 2003 and 2011, and his fathering of a half-sister to Rafferty, Iris and Rudy, five-year old Sophia, with American model Samantha Burke — not to mention being phone-hacked.

One would expect his son to be excruciatingly guarded about his own private life. Not so far. But then why shouldn’t he post pictures on Instagram like any other normal teenager? ‘That keeps being brought up, doesn’t it?’ he says, impressively unflustered. ‘It’s just because I’m with her [Ella] all the time, and we take a lot of photos and I like Instagram. Too much. We’ve stopped it now. I’ve made my Instagram account private.’

The young couple plan to go backpacking in South America next summer after their A levels. The ulterior motive for the trip might also be to get some time on their own.

‘My mum’s house is very sociable. There’s always someone there. My girlfriend and I came back from a festival this summer, while my mum was away, expecting to have the house to ourselves, but when we got there, Grimmy was there with his friend. I think they’d had people over the night before. I was like, “Not what I need right now.” I do love Grimmy, though.’ Can the Primrose Hill circle get a bit too much sometimes? ‘No. I never feel claustrophobic, but I could definitely move out in the next year or so.’

On returning from his travels, Law hopes to enrol in a foundation course in music technology at the London School of Sound to pump up his producing skills while juggling gigs and recording with the band. This January they will release an EP (on vinyl, of course) during his mock A levels, and they are currently looking for promotion and a manager. The addition of another Law member to The Dirty Harrys also looks imminent: ‘I’ve got Rudy playing bass. He’s going to join the band. But not yet. He needs to grow up a bit first. I don’t know what Iris is going to do. She’s a brilliant writer, she likes doing short stories.’ As for the eldest Law sibling: ‘I just know that I want to be working in music for the rest of my life.’ I imagine him as an older version of himself, touring the world, his face more bearded and angular; those intense steel eyes, a little life-worn, mesmerising his own set of rock’n’roll groupies. As long as he stays on the straight and narrow — and this level-headed — Law the Younger’s plan cannot fail. ES

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t’s not often that a girl can truly say she relishes such a comment as: ‘I love your dress – it’s got that real touch of the white trash about it.’

But when the remark comes from the pop singer and all-round style icon Róisín Murphy it becomes the sort of compliment with which you can bore strangers at parties for years. And so I try not to blush, at the Stella photo-shoot, when the slender, honey-haired Murphy adds in a smoker’s drawl, ‘It’s what the Texan wife would wear in that Coen brothers’ film No Country for Old Men.’ Murphy then pads off in bare feet, hairgrips and a beige bra to ferret through a rail of Vivienne Westwood and Yves Saint Laurent, and Philip Treacy objet d’art hats, before throwing on a mismatched tweed jacket and feathered headdress as if she were late for a meeting and just running out the door. She looks fabulous. For a second we all stare in awe; then an Iggy Pop track bursts on the radio and she starts headbanging violently from the vertiginous heights of a pair of Jonathan Kelsey heels.

Such behaviour is typical Murphy, and has led to the press labelling her ‘quirky’ and even ‘a nutter’. But for those who ‘get’ her, it’s what makes her a star. Now others, it seems, are finally beginning to get it, too: at the age of 35 and after 13 years in the industry, first as the frontwoman of the arty boyfriendgirlfriend dance-music duo Moloko, Murphy is becoming more widely recognised as a musical maverick. Her second solo album, ‘Overpowered’, was critically acclaimed, and earned her comparisons to Kylie, Madonna and Gwen Stefani. Yet it’s hard to think of Róisín (pronounced Roe-sheen) Murphy as mainstream. She writes and produces her own music, and likes to style her own shoots. There aren’t many female singers

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Photograph by Jo Metson Scott

who would appear in a video brushing their teeth on the loo in a giant inflatable black-and-white checked Gareth Pugh ensemble, or look as good in it (as she did for the song Overpowered).

There is, however, more to Murphy’s theatrical antics than mere eccentricity; they have more in common with the performance art of the singer Grace Jones and the role-play of the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman (who depicts herself in self-portraits as the lead actress in a series of film stills).

Today, now decked out in a Viktor & Rolf

THE ROISIN MACHINE Singer, show-woman, fashion icon and her own best stylist… is there no end to Róisín Murphy’s talents? Stephanie Rafanelli meets a musical maverick of many, many guises

winter coat, thigh-high boots and swooping winged coronet, Murphy enacts Tippi Hedren in The Birds, radiating gooey sexual chemistry at the lens. She shifts from one reference to another, transforming each outfit as if with a flick of her transparent-blue eyes.

‘I don’t really know if I am thought of as a style icon,’ she says, visibly shrinking into her chair in an old-fashioned boozer some time later. ‘I don’t feel like that at all. Music comes first, but I also just enjoy being creative in whatever I’m doing, be it wearing clothes, making images or performing. I just wouldn’t enjoy standing there like a paper doll,

having someone else stick paper dresses on me. That would be no fun.’ (Even her accent defies definition, flitting between Irish R’s, by ’eck northernisms and dropped Cockney T’s.)

In a world in which women such as Victoria Beckham and Katie Holmes frequently appear in (the same) headto-toe straight-off-the-catwalk looks, Murphy’s ability to animate designer creations has won her friends in the highest echelons of fashion. One of those friends is Frida Giannini, the creative director of Gucci, who chose Murphy to represent Gucci at the Swarovski Fashion Rocks event last October and who approached her to record a cover of Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love for this autumn’s Gucci by Gucci men’s fragrance campaign. ‘They asked me to play at the Gucci party in Milan [in June], and I was wearing this beautiful floorlength beaded gown and I had my hair up in this classic do,’ says Murphy.

‘I floated elegantly out on stage – and the next thing you know I’d hitched up my skirt and I was doing “the running man” [a comedy dance reminiscent of a Charlie Chaplin chase scene]. My performance is always about mixed messages.’ She chuckles. ‘It reflects the complexity of life… Humour is ahead of everything creatively. I think if things aren’t humorous they are just crap.’

Humour, complexity and music are three things that featured heavily throughout Murphy’s upbringing in small-town Arklow in County Wicklow, Ireland. Her grandmother, a progressive woman who wore mannish suits, ran her late grandpa’s entertainment businesses, a restaurant and a snooker hall. Her Uncle Jim played in a jazz trio, and her father, an ‘entrepreneur’, was a born performer. ‘He should have been Terry Wogan – he’s got a singing voice like Guinness,’ Murphy says, sighing.

For the Murphys any excuse was a good excuse for a knees-up. The young Róisín always dreaded the inevitable special

Jacket and shirt by Alexander McQueen, from Selfridges. Trousers by Yves Saint Laurent. Shoes by Jonathan Kelsey. Stylist: Hew Hood. Hair and make-up: Emma Day, using Tommy Guns and Crème de la Mer. Location: the Ragged School

interview

interview request: a solo rendition of Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.

When Murphy was 12 the family moved to Manchester, and it was there, bullied by the girls at school, that she began fully to embrace being ‘different’, wearing head-to-toe 1960s clothing and exploring the Madchester nightlife. When her parents separated in 1988 and her mother, an antiques dealer, returned to Arklow, Murphy asked her if she could stay behind, lodging with a friend. In 1990 she moved to Sheffield with the intention of enrolling in art college.

Murphy only stumbled into the music industry – falling madly in love at the same time – in 1994, when she sidled up to an older man at a party in Sheffield with the chat-up line: ‘Do you like my tight sweater?’ The man turned out to be the music producer Mark Brydon and ‘Do You Like My Tight Sweater?’ became the first of four albums (and included the club anthems Sing It Back and Time Is Now) that they would produce together as Moloko, before splitting romantically in 2001 and professionally in 2003.

‘Moloko was a relationship at first, not a career,’ says Murphy. ‘We were just falling more in love, and making music was a by-product of that. We had a ball. But after we broke up as a couple I got scared that this could be my last chance to make music.

That was the moment I thought, “What I’m doing is right. I am a performer.”

Suddenly I got really focused.’

We just meet at weddings and funerals.

We’re not going to get together to talk about music, not any time soon.’

Murphy now lives in down-to-earth Cricklewood in north-west London with the artist Simon Henwood, who painted Murphy for the cover of ‘Ruby Blue’ and directed the video for her forthcoming single, Movie Star. ‘Simon’s brilliant.

I think I’m a bit of a nightmare to go out with, to be honest. I’m so passionate and have big highs and big lows. Being Irish is a bit like being Italian: “Whadda ya trying to do with my mind?”’ she says, throwing her hands wildly in the air in mimicry of herself.

Murphy on stage with moloko and, below, vivienne westwood

‘I’ve got crap teeth, crap hair, I never have facials.

I need to start shaving in a few places before I think about Botox’

Redferns. Rex

A

fter the last Moloko gig Murphy began working with the producer Matthew Herbert, and in 2005 released the experimental jazz record ‘Ruby Blue’, which won her critical acclaim, and a deal with EMI for a second album.

Did she miss Mark after going solo? ‘Of course. I still miss him.’ But she doesn’t still love him? ‘Do I still love him in a sexy way? Oh no, I love him in a sexy way.

He’s a sexy man. He was a massive part of my life,’ Murphy says, smiling. ‘He’s never said a word about my music…

But at the moment things are going extremely well for her, and the success of ‘Overpowered’ has signalled a serious bid for mainstream stardom. ‘I would love to be a massive cult, I won’t lie to you,’ Murphy exclaims with a grin, peering over her pint. ‘But I’m not looking for adoration in the way that nine-year-olds are. What’s important to me is being creative – on a scale that’s relevant to people.’

Kylie is, of late, the singer to whom she has most often been compared – how does she feel about that? ‘[The singersongwriter] Kate Nash said something brilliant recently – she said: “You know, being a woman isn’t a genre.” I thought that was genius. If I was a man they wouldn’t compare me to Will Young.’ She pauses. ‘I’m not there to shake my booty – I mean I do shake my booty – but I’m not there to be just a “woman” singer.’

Shake her booty she does. Murphy has played 22 festivals in the past two months alone. Her stage performances are electrifying: high-energy affairs packed with robotic dancing, headbanging and myriad cutting-edge outfits, from a Shadows & Dust leather jumpsuit to Martin Margiela’s futuristic ‘spacesuit’.

‘Sometimes I wonder if my body is physically capable of doing what it’s doing,’ she says, looking momentarily weary. ‘But I’ve actually got a lot more stamina now than when I was younger.’

In October last year Murphy sustained a serious eye injury while vigorously head-banging at a gig in Moscow, and had to undergo corrective surgery. Last month she turned 35 – would she ever be tempted to have a little help so that she continues to look as young as she behaves? ‘I’ve got crap teeth, crap hair, I never have facials. I still have hairs in the middle of my eyebrows,’ she says, giggling. ‘I need to start shaving in a few places before I think about Botox.’ She breaks into an ironic rendition You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.

There’s more of the ‘natural’ Murphy to come, it seems. She has recently bought a house in the Irish countryside, which her mum has helped her furnish.

Having always been thought of as a party girl, could Róisín Murphy be mellowing with age? ‘I’ve upset my parents a few times in the past year because I’ve been swearing or done an interview pissed-up after a gig, and I really, really regret that.

But my dad always says to my mum [she adopts a County Wicklow brogue]: “At least she’s not that Amy Winehouse.”’

She adds: ‘I’ve had times when I’m a party girl – and I even have the odd week now – but I’m a real homebody.

I love me boyfriend, and I love me dog, and I love trimming the roses.’

She delves into her bag. ‘Oh, I’m gaggin’ for a fag, darling.’ And with that she’s off. Leaving me to picture her pruning roses in the rolling Irish landscape in a Viktor & Rolf number and YSL stilettos, like some beautiful, curious Edward Scissorhands. £ ‘Movie Star’/‘Slave to Love’ double A-side is released on 29 September.

Róisín Murphy’s new tour begins in November stella 27