Gem Fatale

Marina Diamandis is being ever so coy. In a corner of Dublin’s Morrison Hotel, the singer has been explaining the inspiration for her second album, Electra Heart. It’s a proudly bubblegum affair, featuring Britney-esque anthems and a cover shot of Marina with knockout bottle blonde hair. Behind the image shake-up – on her first record she was the quintessential indie babe next door – is a tale of real-life heartache and woe, she reveals. As her career was taking off, Marina became ‘involved’ with a dodgy heartbreaker. Many of the songs on Electra Heart are about the mysterious paramour, the way he ground her self-esteem to sawdust. She is, you feel, on the verge of a juicy revelation. Only then she clams up. Marina! You can’t tease us like this.

“It was a relationship with someone who was extremely dysfunctional,” she says, after further prompting. “On reflection, it made me think about love in a very different way. To question my attitude towards it really. It was weird – it wasn’t as if it was a particularly big love affair. Which was telling in its own fashion.”
She won’t go any further and, to be honest, the sense you have is of someone bamboozled by a weirdo rather than suffering long-term romantic trauma. Then again, Marina has had plenty of other things occupying her time lately. Such as the backlash she suffered in the UK after the local music media, aghast at her blonde transformation, decided to get the knives out. While Electra Heart was feted across Europe and the US, in London the press decried the album’s poppy trappings as shameless sell-out. She’s had to come to terms lately with a significant percentage of her former cheerleaders – including some tragic media scenesters in this country – turning their backs.
“There was a backlash,” she admits. “That’s fair to say. The press had this idea, ‘Oh, she’s changed’. As if that was the worst thing in the world. I wouldn’t say it was hurtful. It certainly wasn’t much fun. In Ireland most people completely got it. A community of critics in London didn’t see things the same way. There’s nothing I can do about it. Hopefully they will listen to the album again in six months.”
There were further surprises. Sitting opposite this bubbly Welsh-Greek singer – she has the filthy chuckle of a brickie who’s just cracked a particularly inappropriate single entendre – it seems ludicrous that anyone would liken her to wallflower of the moment Lana Del Rey. When Electra Heart came out, that was exactly the charge levelled. People took one look at Marina’s Instagram-y press shots and decided she was trying to rip off ‘Video Games’. She laughs now but you can tell it has caused a few nights’ lost sleep.
“At the start everyone was comparing me to Lana,” she nods. “You will always be compared in that way when you are a girl. People zero in on the fashion, on stuff like, ‘Well, she’s a got a curl and Lana Del Rey has a curl… they must be the same thing’. I adore her, think she’s tremendously talented. However, I’m glad the comparison has gone away.”
If you take pop stars and their pronouncements seriously, you might tag Marina as a contradiction. She’s stridently feminist, has strong opinions about the way the music industry manipulates women. So it seems strange that, for Electra Heart, she elected to work with a team of hired-gun songwriters, all men. There are several co-writes with Greg Kurstin, best known for collaborating with Lily Allen. More surprising are the hook-ups with Britney wing-man Dr. Luke and Stargate, the New York-based Norwegians best known for their part in Rihanna’s ongoing campaign for global conquest. She can understand, surely, why some fans have cried ‘sell-out’?
“I went over to Stargate in New York and there was a real sense from them of, ‘Why are you doing this?’,” she remembers. “Because I was from an indie background, I think they couldn’t quite work it out. They treated me differently, because they know I’m a writer. They saw we could bring the best of two worlds – their pop thing and my alternate approach.”
She’s received a lot of flack for bringing in outside writers, which strikes her as ludicrous. “We have so many amazing female artists in the UK and they all co-write. That includes the ones we deem credible. I was interested in that. I wanted to get into bed with the devil in some ways. With Stargate, their set-up was not as cynical as some sort of ‘hit factory’. However you could tell you were around people whose aim was to make hits. They were pretty direct about that. It fascinates me.”
Truthfully, it’s hard to make out whether Marina is tongue-in-cheek about this pop thing. In the video to forthcoming single ‘How To Be A Heartbreaker’, for instance, she flashes lots of flesh and mugs with some bronzed male dancers. At first glance it’s a perfectly bland pop promo, the sort Britney and Christina used to churn out in their heyday. Marina being Marina, people assume she’s taking the piss.
“It’s up to you to decide,” she says. “It’s not like I’ve written these songs because I want to do a massive pastiche of the pop industry. There are elements that are ironic. They also reference pop because I’m interested in it. I am deeply fascinated by the psychology behind pop.”
Marina’s first record, The Family Jewels, was released amid a fair amount of hype in 2010. It did well, shifting nearly 400,000 copies. But Diamandis, who is upfront about her aspirations towards global stardom, was by all accounts deeply bummed out by the sales figure. Her aim was a million plus. To fall so far short plunged her into an extended funk.
“I look back and laugh,” is her assessment today. “I was lucky to sell what I did, for a leftfield artist. The thing is, I want to be a great artist for a generation. So I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve let myself down’. Looking back, I think, ‘Actually, that was really fucking good’. It affected me. Three weeks after The Family Jewels came out I was back writing Electra Heart. It had nothing to do with my label, with the people around me. It was all me. I was desperate to show people what I could do.”
She’s happier today, she says. No less ambitious – just more realistic about her goals.
“I went blonde because I felt so deflated after the first album,” she confesses. “I felt people might like me if I changed my hair. I recently reverted to brunette. It’s nice to have gone back.”
As an out-of-the-pop-closet entertainer, she has an opinion, surely, on the ongoing sexualisation of the genre? Rihanna simulating S&M sex in arenas full of squealing 12-year-olds, Lady Gaga putting ten thousand hairdressers off their Coors Light when, at her recent Aviva gig, she simulated being ‘eaten out’ (sorry) by a gentleman friend – it’s all vaguely icky, isn’t it?
“I don’t think I can moralise about it,” says Marina. “Sexy isn’t a bad thing. What’s happened is that there are artists who are extremely sexual but are also relevant to young kids. You have Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga and they can’t dress for four year-olds. At the same time, they have songs four year-olds like. It’s up to the parents really. Some of these singers want to be grown-up artists. You know… if you have a problem with it, well don’t buy your kid a Rihanna record.”

Marina and The Diamonds play the Olympia, Dublin on November 20, with new single ‘How To Be A Heartbreaker’ out on November 9.