Diamond Days: The Return of Marina and the Diamonds

“It’s quite awkward, talking about things that are important to you. You’re communicating ideas, whether frivolous or not, that are your views. It’s a frightening thing to suddenly have to share with someone who’s a complete fucking stranger. You might have only met them an hour ago!”

Actually, it was half an hour. Maybe it’s just the ol’ Hot Press charm taking effect, but considering that Ms Diamandis has, at this point, happily poured her heart out to yours truly on everything from feminism to the inevitable shadow of death, her reticence to open up seems hard to comprehend.
“Really, I don’t talk about things like that with friends or family,” she insists. “They tend to be issues that I think about deeply, but don’t communicate with anyone. That’s why I became a singer; I saw it as a fantastic vehicle to express large ideas. It’s also why I wanted to write this record alone.”
The record in question is FROOT. It’s the third full-length effort from the Welsh-born starlet, and the reason that she’s curled up on a couch in The Clarence Hotel pondering such weighty subjects. Certainly, these are issues that weren’t on the table when her no-strings-attached, super-producer assisted pop record Electra Heart – named after her bottle-blond, glitz’n’glamour alter ego – landed three years ago.
“Electra was simply a character to help me tell the story of the record,” she says, reflecting on the album that made her a star in the US. “What fans enjoyed about it was the duality – the contradiction of who I am and what I was portraying. I don’t think anyone failed to understand that it was me, Marina, playing with superficiality and identity. I don’t think they ever thought I was Electra.”
With her natural raven tresses restored she certainly looks different from three years ago. That’s not to say, though, that the adventures in platinum – and studio escapades with the likes of Dr Luke, Diplo and StarGate – don’t continue to have an effect.
“It informed everything on this record, in terms of songwriting,” she reports. “While I didn’t really want to co-write, working with others on Electra Heart made me write in a very different way. Diplo would give me a beat to riff on, and suddenly I was freed up melodically. This time, I thought, ‘Hey, I can make a fucking beat’. I started doing that – making something instrumental that I could write over. There was a lot of creative catharsis, in terms of stuff I hadn’t done.”
All of this, of course, is a far cry from the piano-composed indie pop of The Family Jewels, her 2010 debut. At that point – given the tongue-lashings doled out on the record, aimed at the media, the music industry, and almost anybody else – this journo would probably have been asking questions from behind the sofa.
Marina laughs uproariously: “It was so angsty!” Her heart-shaped face contorts into a genuinely horrified cringe. “I sometimes look back and think, ‘God, just chill out!’ I was a very extreme, intense person. I think I’m a little more balanced now.”
That said, the confrontational side does emerge in one track on FROOT; the outstanding ‘Can’t Pin Me Down’. Singing “Do you really want me to write a feminist anthem?/I’m happy cooking dinner in the kitchen for my husband”, it’s fair to say the sentiment will turn a few heads.
“It’s basically defying the efforts to pigeon-hole you,” she explains. “If I want to cook dinner for my husband then I will, and it doesn’t make me any less independent as a woman. People have this idea of what a woman should be. Why? Why does everything have to be so defined? It’s frustrating.
“As an artist I could relate,” she continues. “Because of the work I put out – and have chosen to put out – people had no idea who I was. I mean, I didn’t know – I was still finding out. I was 22 when I got signed; then, Electra Heart probably masked the true parts of me. I didn’t think it weird at the time, but looking back you think ‘yeah, that is a weird thing to go through’.”
After a few rollercoaster years, a break was most definitely in order. A year out of the limelight might not have been what Dr Luke ordered, but was just the tonic for Marina.
“I needed time to live a normal life,” she sighs. “I’d never done that, not since I was 18. My life hadn’t had any stability; I had friends, but not friendships that I had been able to put time into.” She giggles: “Although, for the first six months, I didn’t speak to many people. I was pretty much a hermit!
“I felt no pressure to come back to music. There was one point actually, December 2013, that I can remember emailing my A&R; a week where I was thinking ‘should I even be doing this anymore?’” She pauses, and then breaks into a guilty smile. “I think, secretly, I just wanted to get some positive feedback!”
It was during that reclusive period that FROOT was written, at home in London. Indeed, with an opener titled ‘Happy’, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to reason that the record represents a certain satisfaction – even if it’s not necessarily a ‘happy’ album.
“Well, I am happy as a person,” she reasons. “But the record is more about the experiences to get to this happiness. I hate the word reflective, but it is something of a reflection of what’s happened in my life. I wanted to write songs about my life, and not think about anything else. After the complexity of what I’d done before, I just needed to do something simple.”
To that end, there’s a generous scattering of stripped-back numbers on the new LP. Yes, the infectious pop beats to which we’ve become accustomed are present and correct on the title-track, the anthemic ‘Forget’ and others, but there’s little enough accompaniment for the 29-year-old’s dulcet tones elsewhere; most strikingly on the closing track, the haunting ‘Immortal’.
“I was in Warsaw, looking online for things to do,” she recalls. “There was a war memorial, and some guy wrote something that really struck me; ‘It’s not the most beautiful memorial, but it deserves our attendance to keep alive the memory of those who suffered’. I began to toss around the notion of what we’re here for; no matter what you earn or what status you have, you leave it all behind anyway. It doesn’t fucking matter if you live in a mansion or not. The only thing that you can be rich in is memories, and what you give to people. That’s how you leave your mark.
“I don’t know why,” she smiles, “but every time I see graffiti I find it really funny. It’s like this strange, crude trait of humanity that we want to make a mark, however simple it is.”
What sort of mark, then, does FROOT leave?
“It’s the definitive record of my career to date, a fork in the road.” She hesitates, but goes on: “I’ve got to be careful, because it’s a big comment to make, but in terms of being a pop artist, it’s almost like waving goodbye. I don’t mean that I’ll never have mainstream success again, but if it happens it will happen by accident. I’m on another path now – pop is not a priority anymore.”