T.T. not O.T.T.

POP MUSIC doesn’t really offer the best job prospects in the world, does it? The last time Tanita Tikaram was interviewed in Hot Press she was a 20-year-old ex-Basingstoke schoolgirl whose first album Ancient Heart had sold 3.5 million copies and who had just launched her follow-up The Sweet Keeper. But neither this, nor the two albums that followed, Everybody’s Angel and Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness matched anything like the success of her debut album. Subsequently, Tikaram took what her record company describes as a “two year sabbatical” and now she’s back on the treadmill, doing the round of endless interviews and radio and television appearances to publicise her latest album Lovers In The City.

If a week is a long time in politics, then two years is an eternity in pop. As such, perhaps T.T. has left it too late, which means, in effect, that her career may be over – at the age of 25. She certainly accepts that, since she last released a record, a new breed of female singer-songwriter has roared to the fore. Yet when it’s suggested that the work of Tori Amos, P.J. Harvey, Kristin Hersh, Björk and their like, is fuelled more by fire, rage and tales of rape and madness, while she seems cocooned from such feelings, Tanita rejects the suggestion immediately.

“To be honest, I don’t know their work very well, as all I’ve ever seen is Björk and Harvey doing ‘Satisfaction’,” she says in almost whispered tones, as we speak in a room in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel. “But I don’t go along with this idea that, musically, I inhabit a lace-like world where everything is sweet and gentle. Even loneliness. My rage is different. For example, ‘Feeding The Witches’, from the new album, is about prejudice and it’s a relatively angry song. Yet that’s not how I express myself in my everyday life. If I get angry about something I pull back from exploding because if you do, and you’re brown, they think that’s how all your people react. So, from a young age, I’ve taught myself not to behave in a way that would feed into such racial stereotypes and prejudice. It’s like if you’re Irish, people assume you’re going to be a drunk and always fighting.

“So I suppress anger as much as I can, though I will admit I often feel like just lashing out and hitting someone. That’s why I do identify with women like Harvey, at this level. And the album Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness is enraged in its own way. But, I have found that people who have experienced a lot of pain often have a quiet sort of dignity about it and that’s what I aspire towards, rather than screaming about it.”

The last time I interviewed Tanita Tikaram, in 1990, she neither screamed nor seemed to fully express her feelings on any subject as her manager and mentor Paul Charles insisted on sitting in on the interview. One couldn’t help suspecting that Charles, an ex-lyric writer for Northern Irish group Frupp, was exerting a Svengali-like hold over Tanita Tikaram. Or even, that he and Ancient Heart musicians Peter Van Hooke and Rod Argent may even have been using her as a pretty face to sell their own musical vision. This was not the case, she says.

“Not at all,” she stresses. “And Paul’s role, as you describe it in relation to that interview, had less to do with music than with my being scared of doing interviews in general. And terribly shy. I had been like that since I started, at 18, and it’s only now I don’t have any problems in that way. But back then, people also used to really ask me stupid questions like ‘What do you think of the Jesus and Mary Chain and why don’t they sell as many records as you do?’ I couldn’t deal with that kind of thing at all.”

But wasn’t it more the questions related to her private life which perplexed Tanita in those days. More specifically, questions about her love life?

“I drew a line and do still because I don’t see why people want to know those things about me,” she muses. “What does it matter? Why would they want to know?”

Mightn’t fans feel that if they know more about Tanita’s private life they can look deeper into the songs, empathise with her on a more human level?

“I disagree strongly with that whole notion,” she says somewhat defensively. “That’s not how I listen to music and it never was. I listen to things I don’t even understand, that are in Spanish and Italian. And I don’t feel if I knew more about those singers I’d appreciate the music more. I don’t need to know the details of their life and I can’t see why anyone would.”

But isn’t Tanita Tikaram being slightly disingenuous here? Surely the point is that she has the ability to compose and doesn’t, therefore, need other peoples’ songs to act as surrogate forms of self-expression, which is obviously not the case with most of her fans? And if the purpose of art is to put a tongue to other peoples’ silence, can’t she see why this particular process might be helped by disclosing details of her private life?

“Yes, but I really do take more of a purist’s approach to art” she responds. “Even in school, when we were studying literature the teacher always said ‘don’t make the mistake of confusing the artist with their work’. And you can learn to look at a work of art and see that it exists as an entity unto itself, independent of all other forces and can probably be best appreciated along those lines. Likewise, in pop music you can look at an artist and know how much of it is artifice. And a lot of what goes on in pop is artifice. It’s a ploy, a way of manipulating those fans who do need music as a form of expression. So singers sell their ‘sensitivity’, their ‘loneliness’ even when they talk on TV.

“I think it would be better if they shut up and let the music speak for itself. And what I really hate about all this is when fans set these people up as gods they adore and get lost in that whole process, rather than find themselves. Or find a form of self-expression. One of my favourite movies is I Heard The Mermaids Singing which is about this whole idea of having false gods and how we exist only to be disappointed by them and shouldn’t project onto them all we need.”

Suddenly glancing at the hotel television which has the sound turned down while broadcasting a Sky news report on the first days of the O.J. Simpson trial, Tanita pauses before continuing.

“Look at America, how absurd it is,” she says. “They don’t want to believe that O.J. Simpson could have killed anyone, because he’s an idol and an icon and ‘gods’ don’t do that sort of thing, do they? He’s a ‘star’. And in America, in particular, people have been raised to believe in ‘stars’ as a form of royalty. That’s why you have someone as right-wing as Jimmy Swaggart, who ends up manipulating this need within people just so he can get more and more money from them. I don’t think you should look up to people in that way. And when people say ‘how does it feel being a role model for women?’, I pull back from that. I don’t mind being a voice for certain women, but through the complexity of my entire being, rather than just being seen as a ‘pop star’ or whatever. That’s all nonsense. I certainly don’t look up to people. I just admire work that is good. But the real point about pop music is that it’s all a matter of marketing. If, as a woman, you’re not a ‘bimbo’ then you’re a ‘serious artist’. But they’re both equally false, both just a case of the music industry selling its wares.”

So, which is Tanita Tikaram?

“I’m the cheeky chappie in the middle!” she says laughing, while also alluding to the fact that of late, with her newly-shorn hair and tendency to wear mens’ suits, she is often mistaken for a man. Or rather, a boy. Tanita recently claimed that she got on a plane and was given a play-pack by a stewardess who later exclaimed ‘Oh my God I thought you were about 12!’

“Something that happens all the time,” she says, in tones that suggests she is quite happy with the confusion this creates. However, when the subject turns to recent claims that she has “fallen in love for the first time” Tanita draws her designer jacket over her head and says little more than “Oh God!” However, after resurfacing she admits that many of her songs on her new album stem from this two-year-old love affair.

“This is ‘the love album’ I guess!” she says, obviously embarrassed at discussing this particular aspect of her private life and music. “R.E.M. said Automatic For The People was their love album and Monster was their sex album but mine is both! Not that I’m saying love without sex is, in any way, something less. It’s not. In fact, sometimes it can be more. Friendship can be very intense yet remain platonic. Before this I was very much in love with someone, but it remained platonic. In fact, we were both very much in love with each other and often talk about that now. And a lot of my early songs came out of that relationship. ‘To Dream The Rainbow’ sort of sums it up. And what’s great is that this relationship has continued despite the fact that I am in love with someone else.”

‘Love Story’, one of the most moving songs on Tanita’s second album, The Sweet Keeper, relates the tale of a young woman who upsets her family by choosing to go home with an older man. No doubt some fans may have suspected at the time that she was writing about herself, and perhaps, Paul Charles?

“I had a business arrangement and friendship with Paul, not a romance!” she says, laughing excessively loudly at the suggestion. “And ‘Love Story’ was about someone else! I’m not going to fall in love with people I work with! That would be the dumbest thing to do, though I’m sure it happens all the time in the music business.”

Tanita Tikaram sometimes fears that the rising popularity of dance culture could mean the death of singer-songwriters like herself. Younger audiences, she believes, want trance-like rhythms rather than linear, logical lyrics which, they claim, just get in the way when they dance and/or do ecstasy.

“Sometimes I get very depressed about all this, about wondering where I fit in in terms of contemporary music” she admits. “For example, you can have a song nowadays which takes a riff from one place, a backing vocal from somewhere else and then hammers them together with a pretty predictable attitude in a lyric. That’s so strange to me and doesn’t really mean anything to me, or move me. And it does frighten me when I ask myself where can my career go from here if dance music takes over completely? But, on the other hand, I still love songs and I know other people who do and I think songs are bound to persist. Maybe people will even begin to turn back to songs soon, if they get sick of dance music. But the problem is that you’re not really given a choice these days. Even when you go into a coffee shop you are being brainwashed by that kind of dance music. And radio just plays that all the time, even if there is a rise in the popularity of stations that play old hits. That, to me, is a direct response against dance music.

“What I hope is that, here in Europe, we get what you have in America, where radio stations play music like mine and leave the dance stuff, or ‘indie’ music to other stations. But, the way things are, I do often feel what I’m doing is invalidated when I open a music paper and see the emphasis placed on just following those fashions and catering to people who are part of dance or youth culture at the moment. Everything seems to be aimed at this totally hip 20% of people who obviously have the most disposable income to spend.”

And what about Ecstasy? Where does this preternaturally aged 25-year-old stand in relation to such drugs. Has Tanita ever tried ecstasy, marijuana, whatever?

“I wouldn’t talk about it if I did” she says, coyly.

So does that mean she did?

“No! I didn’t say that! Absolutely never. But the point is that I never understood why people feel they have to be stoned to get into music. That’s strange to me. If you can’t get lost in a piece of music naturally, why should it make any difference if you’re stoned? But then, for a time, I got really paranoiac about this subject, thinking that right now there is a whole generation of people who can’t fully appreciate music unless they do ecstasy. Or, as you said earlier, who can only appreciate certain kinds of music because it helped them to enjoy ecstasy all the more. I always remember when raving was huge and my friends used to go out on Friday and still be up on Sunday, making me wonder where they got all that energy! I was no naive! But then so were my friends naive and they now realise it’s not so cool to do that much ecstasy and that there is a ‘morning after’ syndrome. Or that mid-week dip in concentration in school, work, whatever – after you do ecstasy for the weekend. But it’s these changes that have been brought about by dance culture that make me wonder who is going to listen to my music these days?”

People coming down after a few tabs of ecstasy, perhaps? Wild-eyed, over-affectionate ravers roaming in and out of chill-out rooms in dance clubs?

“Exactly!” says Tanita, laughing again. “I’m definitely aiming for the chill-out market! But, seriously what really frightens me about my friends who did, or do, live on that whole merry-go-round is that so many of them are beginning to look so old before their time, and so wasted. And I’d see kids who, after a weekend raving, would look nearer thirty than twenty even though most were still in their teens. And they don’t eat properly or take care of themselves so what are we producing, a generation of wrecks? I don’t mean to be hysterical about this, but it all is a little frightening to me.”

Where does Tanita stand in relation to rock ’n’ roll wrecks? One notices that by her side is a copy of Peter Guralnick’s biography of the man many claim she resembles: Elvis Presley. So, has Tanita Tikaram learned anything from the way the King slowly slid off his throne into the inferno of drug addiction and an early death?

“That book only goes up to the point his mother died, so it doesn’t really deal with the drugs issue” she says. “But what I did get from the book is that Elvis made the mistake of having too many hangers-on, even from the beginning of his career. And it’s claimed that, in the end, some of the same hangers-on wanted to keep him addicted to drugs because that meant they were in control of him, to an extent, in Graceland. I also learned from the book that he completely trusted the Colonel from the beginning, which was obviously another mistake because the Colonel always treated him as if he was a carnival act – like a dancing chicken. And what’s really sad is that his mother clearly saw through Parker but Elvis didn’t take her advice not to trust him. Yet the real revelation for me, was that Elvis was so self-aware in relation to his sexuality, whereas I always thought that was something that just came naturally to him. Insights like that make the book a great read for me, even though Guralnick has been criticised for filling it up with too much information. It’s definitely made me go back to The Sun Sessions with a deeper appreciation than before, even though that’s always been one of my favourite albums.”

But doesn’t this little anecdote undo Tanita’s earlier suggestion that appreciation of an art, or artist, isn’t helped by reading from a biography?

“Not necessarily!” she says, smiling. “Because Guralnick’s book isn’t really about Elvis’ private life at that level. It has more to do with things like what blues musicians really influenced him and who those people really are that you see referred to on the back of The Sun Sessions, like Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup. That’s where the book really is fascinating for someone like me, to whom those people were just names up ’til now. It’s the same in terms of songwriters like Leiber and Stoller, who explain how Elvis didn’t record songs unless his publishing company got half the royalties and how his career was eventually messed up by such things. Stuff like that is what I learned from the book and just give me a greater understanding of Elvis’ work overall.”

Tellingly, the potent mix of sexual and spiritual power which defines the work of Elvis Presley, Tanita also perceives in the voice of Jennifer Warnes who also recorded another of the singer’s favourite albums: Famous Blue Raincoat (Songs Of Leonard Cohen). For both these reasons Tanita used Warnes to provide vocal arrangements and backing vocals on her new single, and album track, I Might Be Crying.

“She has an incredibly sensual voice, in that it can be quite high but still sound sexual, or rather sensual,” she says, a little haltingly, as if hesitant when it comes to describing another woman as sexual. Is she?

“No. It does sound highly sexual and strong rather than girly. That’s what I meant to say! And I do think part of her power is that she mixes the religious and the sexual in the same way that Cohen does, in that they sing of sex as something transcendent the physical reaching towards the metaphysical. And the sense you get from the music is that this, too is a journey she’s attempting to make through singing. She’s really someone very special, like Cohen.”

The same could be said about Tanita’s co-producer on the new album, Thomas Newman, who provided hugely atmospheric, frequently avant-garde soundtracks for movies such as Scent Of A Woman and Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe. Why was she drawn to his work, particularly in the light of the fact that he never operated as a producer before?

“Firstly I was amazed that from the outset I recognised his work. I went to see Fried Green Tomatoes and even when I heard the opening theme I said ‘I bet that’s Thomas Newman’,” she explains enthusiastically. “And I was swept away by how arresting it was, how melodic, so I decided ‘God, I’d like to work with him.’ Then I met him and he was really nice, and more my age and boyish about working as a producer so we got on very well. But, by the time I met him, he’d also done the score for The Player and was even more into abstract music which probably comes through on some of the album’s tracks such as ‘Bloodlines’ and ‘Happy Taxi’. They’re probably the most experimental along these lines, whereas songs like ‘Lovers In The City’ are more like the kind of thing I normally do. But then I really am more melodically rooted than anything else, as in using classical influences in terms of string arrangements and so on. Though, Thomas did introduce me to Ravel! And one thing he said about Ravel has stuck with me. He said that sometimes when he listens to Ravel’s music he stops and wonders what is the point in composing anything at all when people like Ravel have said it all before, and obviously better.”

Does Tanita ever feel that way when she listens to music?

“Moreso when I see a great movie or a great performance,” she says. “I suddenly get depressed wondering what is the point in what I do. And maybe this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, the notion of believing too deeply in gods and heroes. That’s where it all can become counter-productive and damaging. Yet I do try to remember, basically, that the most we can do is the best we can do. And that really is what I feel I’ve done with this new album. But now it’s up to the public to decide whether Lovers In The City actually is the best work I’ve done, or not.”