Mumba's the word

IIf you were a completely ungenerous skank or inclined toward professional begrudgery, it would be relatively easy to dismiss Samantha Mumba as yet another teen sensation currently residing on the scrap-heap out the back of Louis Walsh’s place.
Whither Samantha, you’d say. Three years ago, La Mumba seemed prettily poised for world domination of sorts. Spielberg had signed her up for the $100 million adaptation of H.G. Welles’ The Time Machine, international modelling contracts were coming through the letterbox with a regularity normally reserved for utility bills and her album had gone gold in the US at a time when poor old Robbie Williams was scratching about for trans-Atlantic bits and bobs.
Hey, the girl even made the cover of hotpress (“My mummy still has that! She was so proud!” she cries, within seconds of meeting me).
Since then, it’s all seemed a bit quiet on the Mumba front – maybe too quiet. Unluckily, particularly for her Hollywood prospects, The Time Machine proved something of a studio white elephant and, oh yes, we’re still awaiting that new album.
What gives? Is it all over bar the sneering? Would it have something to do with the rumoured rift with Louis, the one-time power behind her throne?
“Definitely not,” laughs Mumba dismissively. “I took a year off. I had to. I needed to, you know, actually live some of my life. When I was 19, I had been touring for four years and I suddenly decided that I had nothing to show for it. I wasn’t even sure what I liked anymore, so I bought a house and domesticated myself and got my head together. I needed that. I needed to grow up.
“As for Louis and I – people assume that because you’re a manufactured pop star, you’re nothing more than a puppet. That perception is fair enough. He’s a pop manager and pop acts are very manufactured. But that was never true of me. I’ve always had my own ideas.”
So he never stood over her waving a celery stick and measuring tape?
“No,” she squeals. “Can you imagine? The kind of person I am means that if you send me to Weight Watchers, I’ll put on weight just to spite you. I tried a diet once and I’ve never eaten so much food in my life.
“It was just a mental revolt. I’ve heard stuff like that in the industry, pressure coming down from labels and stuff. I’m proud of my curves. I love the weight I’ve gained in the last few years.
“I feel all womanly. It’s brilliant. I now think, I look better with no clothes on. I think we all probably do. But Louis certainly never said anything like that to me. He’d be afraid to, apart from anything else.”
For the record, the plastic pop svengali remains Ms. Mumba’s manager here and in the UK and has not, she insists, cast her aside in favour of other bright young things, such as Girls Aloud.
“There’s no crap there,” she says. “My main management is now in America, but he’s still my great friend and he’s always looking out for me.”
“Of course, we fight like cats and dogs, Louis and me,” she grins. “But we always have done. No change there at all. If anything, it’s better now. I’ve always been very headstrong and opinionated when it comes to work. I know how I want things to be. But I think he’s always respected me more for that. And at the end of the day, I’m his only female solo artist. I’m not out to compete with boy-bands or girl-bands.”
One certainly suspects that nobody as seasoned as Mr. Walsh would be inclined to write her off. Occasionally, however, her bright disposition and elegant manners play like a pop icon from an era more given to the niceties than Louis’ current primary unit-shifting charges.
It’s rather difficult to imagine her falling out of taxis with the same regularity as Nadine et al., or indeed going noisily forth to put the sexual habits of the aristocracy of old to shame.
Indeed Mumba claims to have little time for such debauchery. She’s not an illicit substances kind of girl, nor, contrary to popular urban myth, does she live out the back of Lillies’ in a gang comprising Caroline Morahan (“Although I have met her a few times,” offers Samantha. “She’s seems like an absolutely lovely girl.”) and this week’s newly published trash-romance peddlers.
“I really couldn’t be bothered,” she says. “I’ve hung out with the same Dublin mates since I was a kid. I’m not in any little media circle. Don’t get me wrong, me and my mates have wild nights out, but it’s all in the same Drumcondra pubs we’ve been going to for years. I just do my own thing. Always.”
It would certainly appear that way. There’s a lovely wilfulness about the girl, the sort of determination that, alas, tends to attract wrongly derogatory labels such as ‘diva’. She may have attended Dublin’s Billie Barrie Stage School between the ages of three and 15 – but she has something far more substantial about her than any hothoused brattishness.
Just the same, low falutin’ red-tops have made much of the girl’s careerist streak – she had fired (not uncommonly for her glamorous line of work) three stylists at an age when most women have yet to master a mascara wand, would send interfering assistants home in order to buy her own clothes and, as she fully admits, was never averse to giving Louis an earful when the occasion demanded.
“If, for example, I turn up to do a photo-shoot and the clothes are horrible,” she explains. “I just say what any other girl would say in the same position – ‘no’. If you’re not comfortable doing something then you’re going to look shit anyway, so what’s the point? I’ve always been precocious that way and I think I’m lucky to have been so.”
You’ve gotta love those flared nostrils of hers when she’s making a point. So, is she out to reclaim the term ‘diva’ as a post-feminist honour?
“It’s funny”, she says. “When I was younger, I always wanted to be a diva like Shirley Bassey or Diana Ross. I loved that idea of being surrounded by freshly cut roses and being adored from all sides. I’ve come to realise that’s all it is – an idea.”
Today, sitting in the Westbury Hotel, adorned neither by feather boa or tiara (damn, I’m overdressed), her lack of Mariah Carey-like tendencies couldn’t be more apparent.
Dressed in jeans, a black sweater and less make-up than I’d wear to do the ironing, she still contrives to look all shiny and radiant. There remains, however, a touch of the younger Madonna about her, despite her aptitude for thoroughly sensible attire.
Like Mrs. Ritchie, Mumba possesses a similarly strident, very self-contained sexuality (“When I dress up, put on nice shoes, slap on make-up, it’s for me, not for anyone else,” she states firmly) and, almost paradoxically, a bloody good, very non-diva head on her shoulders.
Before her arrival, a photographer tells me that’s she’s simply the nicest person you could ever work with: easy-going, cooperative and utterly devoid of bullshit. Sure enough, there’s an endearing level-headedness about the girl that’s rarely witnessed outside the lacrosse-wielding head girls of Enid Blyton’s boarding school milieu.
It’s slightly intimidating to think that she’s only just turned 22.
Though rumours abroad would have you believe that she and younger brother Omero are struggling to cope with ‘too much, too soon’ syndrome, she erupts into giggles at the very notion.
“I’m happy. We’re happy. I can’t tell you I’ve achieved all my goals, but I’ve honestly done things I never dreamt possible,” she said. “I had a platinum album. I made a big Hollywood movie. I’ve always thought that if it’s all gone tomorrow, if I never do anything again, I’ve got some amazing stuff to show my grandchildren.”
Not that this relatively quiet professional period has kept Samantha out of the pages of the tabloids. Inevitably, as these things go, she’s been romantically linked with most people ever to wear trousers.
While she packed out American stadiums, she was said to be seeing one or other of the blokes from N’Sync, then it was Puff Daddy (or Diddy as he is to be known this week), Eminem, whom she met for an entire 10 minutes, and in common with most women, the inevitable Craig David date.
“It’s like this, I was in a five-and-a-half year relationship (with Mark Henderson) until I was 20 and then I was single for a year and a bit,” she said. “I dated a few people until I met the guy I’m with now. He’s lovely and very genuine but the relationship is still at that early, tender stage so I don’t want to start talking about it in public yet. I don’t want to complicate things, you know. But I think I’ve found a good one after kissing a lot of frogs.”
Those who take the time to peruse photographs taken in and around red-carpeted entrances will know that Samantha is frequently seen with the rapper Sisqo on her arm. Indeed, more scurrilous corners of the internet recently reported that she was expecting his child, a story that spiralled into epic proportions when her father used it as part of his defence in a drink-driving case.
It forms the latest twist in the already complicated Mumba oedipal history.
Her father, Peter, a Zambian immigrant who settled in Ireland following his homeland’s tumultuous 1964 independence from Britain, separated from Samantha’s Irish mother some years ago. The father and daughter relationship has not been easy since.
“That was the worst thing I’ve ever read about myself,” she says, quite visibly upset by the recollection. “It’s bad enough that someone on the internet would write that you’re pregnant with Sisqo’s child when obviously (points to her concave tummy) I’m not.
“That was just ridiculous. And then you end up with more rumours – did she have a miscarriage or did she have an abortion? It upset me. It upset my mom and my dad. I can only think he read it and believed it. I can only think it upset him, but he still could have called home just to check if it were true.”
Is she inclined to forgive him?
“It’s like this. There was no big row. I haven’t had any contact with him to have a row,” she adds. “There’s no animosity. We’re not close but if I saw him on the street I’d give him a big hug and talk to him. I’d be glad to see him. But I haven’t seen him or had a conversation with him in two years. It’s something I’d like to sort out but I sort of know it’ll sort itself out. I have a full and happy life. It’s not something I feel the need to do right now.”
An even more bizarre story surfaced recently claiming that Mumba featured on the target lists of Irish based neo-Nazi groups.
“You know as much as I do,” she shrugs. “I just read it in the paper myself. I never got any threatening letters or anything. I’ve honestly never experienced any racism in Ireland at all. I hear stories and I suppose there’s an undercurrent of racism but I was born here and grew up here. There was never anything said in the playground. And colour was obviously never an issue at home.
“I suppose when I was a kid, if people were looking at me I would have totally assumed they were thinking ‘oh look at the beautiful little princess’. But it works both ways. I have heard stories – and I hope they’re not true – about black shops putting up signs saying ‘No Whites Allowed’.
“If that’s the case, it’s very disrespectful coming to a white country to do that. All I know is that I’m proud of both my heritages and I don’t even want to think about people like that.”
It hasn’t all been celebrity squares and neo-nazis for the still scandalously young Miss Mumba. She has, despite her recent hiatus, been beavering away on her film career. As we speak, she’s just finished shooting Johnny Was in Belfast, a crime flick that casts her as a junkie femme fatale. More pertinently, one can soon see Sam back in the saddle mowing down legions of the undead with a Massey Ferguson for Stephen Bradley’s splendidly gory Boy Eats Girl.
“I wasn’t really a zombie movie girl before, but I’m mad about horror movies,” admits the new scream starlet. “Even with the ones that are a bit crap, you’re guaranteed an hour-and-a-half of entertainment, and I just love being scared.”
Fashioned from the same delightfully campy material as The Serpent And The Rainbow and Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, in Boy Eats Girl a voodoo spell unleashes a zombie plague upon the unsuspecting populace of Howth. While it’s tempting to characterise the film as an Irish Shaun Of The Dead, the posh leafy school setting also enables sharp-shooting American high-school derived comedy in the wicked mode of Mean Girls.
“I thought the script was so funny,” beams Mumba. “And I loved that it was Irish. It’s like nothing that’s been done before. I couldn’t put the thing down until I’d finished and then it was straight on the phone to the director. So I’m really proud of myself now. I think it’s brilliant.”
Well, you won’t get any arguments from me. Does that mean, however, that her pop career is now further down her list of priorities?
“No. Definitely not. Ideally, I wanted a single out before the end of this year with the album next year, but I’m attached to Boy Eats Girl while it’s opening in Australia and all over the place until November, so it’s not looking likely,” she says. “But I’m going to put my head down in the New Year because I’ll have two movies out and I can switch focus for a while. I’ve been recording all the time because singing is my passion and I’m always afraid that if I don’t get everything down I’ll miss that one killer song.
“I really want to think about lyrics. I was 16 when I co-wrote the first album and I can’t listen to it now. It’s all boyfriends and crushes. It’s like reading a really embarrassing diary from that age. I’ve just done a song about my dad. That’s probably the most personal thing I’ve ever done and musically, I’m trying to bring in something Irish and African into the mix. It’s who I am. It’s going to be me.”
Of that, we can be sure.