Grace Under Fire

It’s a funny feeling, simultaneously feeling sorry for someone and drooling over their outfit. Not that fabulously outrageous crooner and contemporary fashion icon Paloma Faith needs my sympathy – she has, after all, got a platinum album, a string of chart hits and a fairly decent film career to her name – but I can’t shake the feeling that this cheerful Londoner gets a raw deal.

Whether blasting her record company-orchestrated collaboration with Ghostface Killah or wearing what looks like the sartorial equivalent of a snow sled, Faith is fearless in her creativity, an independent thinker who never follows trends, and as a result, generally gets labelled a total nutter.
Faith’s name is rarely mentioned without a preceding condescending adjective – “kooky” and “quirky” seem to be the most popular choice, while “wacky”, “odd”, “batty” and “weird” also turn up on a regular basis. Her image is debated accordingly; a Norwegian magazine once voted her the worst-dressed woman in the world, while one forum-user had the cheek to compare a recent outfit to a “special-needs school art project.” Today, looking every bit the screen siren of yore in a nude pencil dress, with a matching corsage tucked into her victory rolls, I can’t imagine why anyone would judge Faith for wanting to stand out from the crowd, especially in a world where nearly every piece of clothing donned by celebrities and norms alike is mass-produced.
Granted, Faith is not your average brainless pop star – her Twitter account is full of oft-brilliant, oft-baffling aphorisms, anything from: ‘I think eggs are so beautiful’ to quips about her cat being annoyed at being mentioned in articles (sorry, puss!) to almost Aristotelian observation like, ‘The annoying thing about when you are looking for something is it knows where it is and can’t tell you!’ As I prep for my date with Paloma, it occurs to me that I’ll struggle to get a quote as clever as, ‘Outside I’m Shirley Bassey, inside I’m Woody Allen’ out of her (she saved that one for the London Times). But a colourful, tweet-worthy witticism? That I’ll accept.

It’s late in the day, coming up to six o’clock, and many, many words have already been uttered in the library of Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel, mostly, I’m guessing, by Ms. Faith. Again, Twitter tells me that she’s been up since 7am promoting her new album Fall To Grace, so the chances of her dropping a nugget of brilliance this afternoon are looking increasingly unlikely.
“I’ve been chatting my little socks off,” she tells me with a grin, but admits that interviews aren’t a part of the job that she’s particularly fond of.
“It’d be nice if you could just put the record out and people bought it anyway,” she sighs. “Some people have that luxury, but I don’t.”
Far from letting the conversation succumb to a series of celebrity-giving-out-about-celebrity moments, Faith avoids looking like a distraught, split end-suffering Liv Tyler by pointing out that she’s here for a very good reason – as of today, she’s got an album on the shelves.
“I take full responsibility for what I can do to make people aware of it,” she insists. “I’m gonna try my absolute damnedest to at least make people aware of it, which means the long, drawn-out promo cycle.”
For anyone with an album to flog, a day of interviews can be mind-numbingly boring, but when you’ve been landed with the ridiculous role of pop’s mad hatter, I can only imagine how tiresome it all gets. Faith has plenty to say about matters musical or otherwise (last time we spoke, we got into a somewhat politically-charged conversation about the London riots), but because of her progressively cartoonish image, she rarely gets the opportunity to exercise her sharp tongue.
“I’m sort of over the magician’s assistant thing,” she laughs (she famously pulled a Debbie McGee before signing her record deal). “That comes up
a lot.”
I often wonder what’s worse; an interviewer drudging up the same old anecdotes year after year or asking deeply personal questions about the meaning behind specific song lyrics.
“I think they’re both bad,” she says with a ginormous cackle. “Let’s just sit here in silence! No, try me, I don’t mind. I’m not gonna be offended. I’ll just tell you when I don’t want to answer.”
Well, here goes nothing.

The last time I saw Paloma perform, she was blissfully knocking out a rather impressive version of Etta James’ ‘At Last’. In the first five months of 2012, we’ve witnessed the deaths of James, Whitney Houston and countless other musical legends, including, in the month of our chat alone, disco legends Donna Summer and Robin Gibb, and Beastie Boys man Adam Yauch. How does Faith react when she finds out that one of her favourite stars has passed away?
“I get more upset when they’re young,” she explains, “like I got really upset about Amy (Winehouse). I thought it was sad because she was very young and it was like an unfinished career. Obviously, they’re all dying pretty young, but the thing that’s different about these older people is that they’ve had such a substantial career, it’s good that they were able to reach their own potential.
‘I don’t let it get me down but I do my bit, like, ‘Today all we’re listening to is Etta!’ I like to celebrate people’s lives that have died rather than sitting around being morose about it.”
Speaking of the divine Ms. James, her glass-breaking performance of ‘Something’s Got A Hold On Me’ was sampled in not one, but two massive chart hits this year; ‘Levels’ by Swedish producer Avicii and ‘Good Feeling’ by Stateside rapper Flo Rida, both of which are currently approaching 100 million views on YouTube.
“You could argue that it brings old classics to the mainstream again,” Paloma reasons, “and it opens people’s minds up or whatever, but when you know the original you’re always miffed. But then, when you hear something and you’re like, ‘What’s that? What was the original?’ and you hunt it out, then you feel glad.”
Of course, Faith’s got her own troop of adoring fans to worry about (minus the patronising collective nickname), as well as a handful of naysayers who appear to be obsessed with her age (26, according to all available sources).
“Aren’t people always?” she laughs, “I remember being young and loving Madonna and people going, ‘Is she really that age?’ I dunno, people are always speculating about that and I think they do it more about women than they do about men. I’ve actually read articles in print where a male artist has been mentioned with no bracket after his name and the woman has the age in a bracket, and I do think there’s a sexist undertone there of how godforsakenly horrible it is to be an aging woman, compared to like, a distinguished older man.”
Having spent the last three years getting compared to every other female singer on the circuit, Paloma is as qualified to comment on sexism in the media as anyone.
“I’d like it to change though,” she adds. “I
mean, I’d like it to be that nobody’s age is mentioned. We’re just talking about their work. Male or female.”
Faith admits that she did “a lot of compromising” during the making of her platinum-selling debut record Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful?, but there’s no evidence of backing down on the charging, throbbing follow-up.
She found a kindred spirit in producer Nellee Hooper, whose name you’ll find on dozens of unforgettable pop tracks (Björk’s ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’, Tina Turner’s ‘Golden Eye’ and Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ to name but three) and who Paloma insists understood her language better than any other collaborator.
“I sort of communicate in visuals,” she says, “so I send a lot of pictures and I have a lot of film references and stuff. I’ve always communicated like that and I always felt up to that point that people had got a certain level of it, but never really got what I wanted sonically. In this case I think he completely got it, like this is genuinely what
I meant.”
Despite being the main man behind Björk’s highly-influential Debut album, Hooper’s been going around telling anyone who’ll listen that Fall To Grace is the best thing he’s ever done.
“I keep telling him off for saying that!” Paloma squeals. “I’m like, ‘Let them make their own minds up! Stop it! It’s making me feel under pressure.’’”
The album borrows its title from one of its ballsiest tracks, optimistic disco pop number ‘Freedom’, or rather, the other way around.
“I thought, ‘I want to call it this!’ so I was like, ‘Better put it in a song!’” Paloma admits. “When I was writing I was thinking, I’m writing melancholy songs but with a kind of hopeful edge to them. You know great songs like ‘Young Hearts Run Free’? When you actually read the lyrics on a page they’re just so sad but in the song, they’re so full of life and hope, so I wanted to write a bit like that. It was about turning tragic situations into celebratory ones or ones that had hope or even just... acceptance. I thought Fall To Grace was a perfect title for it because I feel like I’m coming out of some negativity and I’ve garnered something hopeful from it, rather than just being down in the dumps.”
Anyone who’s seen Paloma’s frequently glittering live shows will be itching to see what the former theatre student has conjured up to accompany the new tracks.
“We’ve kind of been designing bits and bobs,” she tells me, keen not to give too much away. “Some of them have started to appear on TV and stuff but we’re like building something that’s like a jigsaw puzzle, you add more and more as you get bigger, so I’m really excited about that.”
Faith was typically vocal about her frustration when her label chose not to promote her first
album in America; will she be heading Stateside this time around?
“I hope so,” she beams. “I think a lot of it depends on how well it reacts in the UK and Ireland and Europe first and then if it does well, I will, but there’s much more fluttering of the possibility of it than there was with the first one. We’re actually speaking to American people this time!”
From where I’m listening, the most striking lyrics on the new album appear on the Ronettes-esque ballad ‘Black & Blue’, on which she bellows out lines about single mothers and lonely millionaires. ‘I know people who use chat rooms as confessionals / I know down-and-outs who once they were professionals,’ she proclaims, before warning, ‘Wipe it off your sleeve, your superiority.’
“The whole song’s a bit of a social commentary about modern life I suppose,” she muses, “it’s sort of an amalgamation of loads of things, of the fact that I’ve sort of come from nothing and I’ve also had experiences of how the upper classes live. I’ve been in the gutter looking up at the stars and I’ve now been with the stars who look down at the gutter, and it’s just about me saying, ‘We’re all the same!’ I’ve seen it, ‘cos I’ve been in both. The chat rooms as confessionals thing is just an observation of the fact that I think that the internet has taken over from what people would have spoken to their priests about! It seems very… sometimes, to me… uncomfortably exposed, like people on Twitter whilst in labour, you know what I mean? All that stuff just freaks me out. I find it all a bit cringey.”
‘It’s like it’s sort of saying everyone should stop judging each other, that’s what this song’s about. Too much judgement I think, not enough acceptance of people. Vive la différence, that’s what I say.”

Fall To Grace is out now on RCA Records.