PINK'S LATEST INTERVIEW

Last updated: Thursday, March 30, 2006

PINK'S LATEST INTERVIEW

Pink (Alicia Moore) arriving at Radio 1 to give an interview on the Jo Whiley show London, England- 23.04.06

In a London hotel room, Pink is telling the apparently hilarious tale of a previous incident in a London hotel. She is slapping her thigh as she recalls the time a paramedic had come to her room because she was having panic attacks. “He took my ECG [electrocardiogram], ’cause I was having stroke symptoms. My mom works in a cardiomyopathy and heart transplant centre in Philadelphia, so I know all the equipment – I’m a hypochondriac as well,” Pink gabbles in the hither-and-thither manner in which she often speaks, cackling away as she does so.

“And he said, ‘Do you smoke weed before you go to bed? Well you have to stop. ‘Cause that’s what’s causing the panic attacks.’ Then he said, “Are you happy?” And I started bawling my eyes out! ‘Does that answer your f**king question?’”

Pink isn’t dwelling on what the stroke symptoms might have meant, so nor will we. Nor is there time to think too hard about why she burst into tears. Instead, we’re focusing brightly and lightly on the effective curtailment of her spliff habit. That she can get her head round. Especially as she still has the odd sneaky joint.

“So, yeah, I can’t really smoke any more,” she says. “Unfortunately. I thought I’d be the silver-haired old lady in hooker heels with a joint in my mouth. But it’s not gonna work out!”

Part lip-curling Elvis, part sassy Madonna, Pink laughs her fearless, big-lunged laugh and takes a sip of her red wine. A pack of Marlboro Lights lies untouched on the little table next to the couch on which she’s sitting cross-legged. In her baseball cap, thick black cardi, black leggings and impressive green boots she looks like a hip hop horse-rider, with extra tattoos – Pink has more than 20.

She’s in the UK to talk about her new album I’m Not Dead. The lead single is Stupid Girls, a perky parody of skinny, ditsy celebrities who don’t wear enough clothes or eat enough food (one scene shows toothbrushes being shoved down throats), and a catchy critique of a dumbed-down pop culture generally.

“The female body is the sexiest creation on Earth and you just don’t have to be dumb in order to be cute,” thinks Pink. “And these girls that I’m making fun of are not stupid. But for some reason they’re making money off acting that way. It’s nauseating.

“I’ve definitely used some very easy examples to attack a general mentality, yes, but my point is there needs to be more alternatives and examples about how you can be cool without a million dollars or acting like a bimbo. Sure, some people are deeply offended, but it’s about a discussion that really needs to be had, not about winning some popularity contest.”

An immediate and positive reaction to Stupid Girls was an endorsement from the National Eating Disorders Association of America who applauded the singer for highlighting Western culture’s “relentless and unrealistic pursuit of thinness and unattainable drive for physical beauty”, albeit in a very humorous, entertaining way.

Pink worked with Max Martin on I’m Not Dead, the Swedish pop maestro responsible for Britney Spears’ … Baby One More Time. Did she take the opportunity to ask him about his experiences of working with the sexed-up poppet?

“You know, I know Britney and I think she’s sweet as apple pie,” Pink demurs. “She’s the all-American southern girl. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. She is one type of thing – I have no ill feeling towards her.”

She’s feeling less favourable towards George W Bush. In the acoustic ballad, Dear Mr President, she lays into, with blunt righteousness, a leader who doesn’t care about the homeless, the poverty-stricken, gay rights and American soldiers dying in Iraq.

“You don’t know nothing about hard work!” belts out Pink. “How do you sleep at night?” As political protest songs go, it’s a crude polemic. As the work of huge-selling, teen-friendly popstrel, it’s fairly remarkable.

“I believe in dissent,” says Pink. She’s not deterred by the hoo-ha that erupted in America after Kanye West said Bush “doesn’t care about black people” during a televised Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. Nor is she fearful of the kind of backlash that beset Dixie Chicks after the country act’s Natalie Maines said she was ashamed to hail from the same state as Bush.

“I love America, I love living in America, I love being American. I enjoy my freedom and I enjoy a good debate. And the best thing about Dear Mr President is it’s the smartest song I’ve ever written. My way is usually, ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, if you don’t agree with me burn in hell and die a slow painful death’!”

The song, she says, goes some way to explaining her fourth album’s title. “I’m 25, I’m awake, I’m aware and I’m present. This is how I feel, how do you feel?’

I’m Not Dead is a title entirely in keeping with the Philadelphia native’s defiant, contrary approach to, well, everything. To her credit, she ’fesses up to being all over the shop, and to having immediate, knee-jerk emotional responses, but then she is just in her mid-20s.

“I forget to think,” she admits. “But that’s a good thing. Fear tempers everything and waters it down. I don’t believe in it.” Her passion finds form in her activities on behalf of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).

“I rescue all my animals – I have four dogs,” she beams. “I have gotten into a lot of trouble ’cause I think that people who wear fur are disgusting.” She wrote to Anna Wintour at American Vogue taking her to task on the subject of fur in fashion magazines, and to Prince William, to try and dissuade him from hunting on royal estates. “I’ll never be in Vogue and I’m not welcome at the Palace,” she proclaims, rather proudly.

“The vice-president of PETA is a good friend and he calls me a work-in-progress! He’s gotten me off chicken. I eat fish. I’m vegaquarian! And I’ve managed to get my husband, who was a huge carnivore when I met him, to only eat fish with me. And we’re working on that as well ’cause I saw Finding Nemo, so I’m kinda off fish too!” It’s hard to tell if she’s joking or not.

To be frank – and she always is – Pink occasionally does a fair impersonation of a melodramatic teenager. But she also talks a lot of no-holds-barred sense, perhaps because so much disturbing stuff happened in her life even before she became an international pop star in her late teens. And perhaps because she’s been in therapy from the age of 14; she talks chirpily of her regular sessions on the couch, as if it’s a hobby. What didn’t destroy her made her stronger, if also a little extreme.

Alecia Beth Moore landed the nickname Pink as a youngster, either because she was easily embarrassed, and/or because she reminded friends of Reservoir Dogs’ Mr Pink. Her parents split when she was seven, and she became adept at surfing the ups and downs of her broken family. Her mum kicked her out when she was 15, and she and her equally iron-willed dad – a Vietnam veteran – clashed repeatedly.

She’s long come to terms with having been a drug-taking adolescent tearaway; being clean of heavy narcotics since the age of 15, she has enough perspective to make light of most of her troubles. By the age of 16 she’d signed a record deal and moved to Los Angeles.

Her inability, or unwillingness, to self-sensor finds form in brutally honest songs such as the new song Long Way To Happy, which she says is about abuse (“I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the sleepless nights and the tearing me apart”) and the older song, Family Portrait, all about her warring parents when she was child (“It ain’t easy growing up in world war three). She’s got a great relationship with both her parents now. But how do they feel when they hear these songs?

“They learn a lot!’ she laughs. ‘The most f**ked-up experience was playing Family Portrait to my stepmother. There’s a line that says, “I don’t want a stepbrother anyways and I don’t wanna have to split the holidays.”’ Pink shudders – when she first played it her stepmother cried. “But we talked about it for the first time in my adult life. Instead of sweeping shit under the rug, I was writing music so that we could all talk about it.”

Was it difficult to write?

“Difficult to talk about! Nothing is ever difficult to write for me! Unfortunately I always forget I’m gonna have to talk about it.”

All told, Pink’s crazy life and dogmatic views makes for a conversation that is never dull and couldn’t be further from the bland platitudes favoured by most mega-selling pop divas. Pink might make your head spin, but she’ll never bore you to weary tears.

She says her mini-meltdown in the London hotel room happened four years ago, around the time that her second album Missundaztood was busy making her the then-biggest selling female artist in the world. A lot has happened on Planet Pink since then.

Her third album, 2003’s Try This, sold four million copies. She won a Grammy for the single Trouble. She had a cameo in Charlie’s Angles: Full Throttle and sang a song by Beck on the sound track. She did a big production number ad campaign for Pepsi alongside Britney, Beyoncé and Enrique Iglesias. She split from her boyfriend, extreme motorcyclist Carey Hart, went out with Pamela Anderson’s bad-boy ex Tommy Lee, then got back together with Hart, before marrying him in Costa Rica at the beginning of this year.

All good stuff, you might think. But Pink was having a bit of a ’mare. This didn’t do so well in the US, and despite its hefty sales internationally, its four million tally wasn’t a patch on Missundaztood’s 16 million total.

That humungous sales figure “was unfortunate”, nods Pink slowly. “I never wanted to do that. I knew that anything you do after that is gonna suck.” She wanted to stay at three million sales, because that’s what her first album Can’t Take Me Home had sold, and because three is her lucky number. “Anything you do after 16 million – well, you might as well just go die.”

So for Try This she tried to mess up her new mainstream appeal by working with Tim Armstrong of punk band Rancid. “I really didn’t want to go on a big promotional tour, or do a big tour, and I didn’t want people to give a shit about me for a while, and I wanted to do something that was just like, ‘Hell, I don’t wanna be in therapy any more’. Then all of a sudden people were like, ‘Oh, you’re a failure’.

“I’m a really tough girl, but I’m also extremely sensitive, and I do listen to what people say about me and sometimes it hurts.”

It got worse: someone posted Pink’s mum’s home address on Pink’s website with the message “she’s a kike Jew bitch, go kill her”.

This, says Pink, “was the epitome of everything I asked for”.

What does she mean? “I asked for this. I always wanted to do this.”

You invited people into your world? “Yeah. Then it just became, well, if people can tell me that they love me, they can tell me that they want my mother dead.”

You can see why kids, especially girls, have fallen for Pink in their millions. She speaks her mind. She admits to her confusion. She’s angry, but not in a foot-stomping Avril Lavigne way. She’s cool, in a “punk Madonna” way. She’s funny and tough and singularly glamorous. She rocks.

Now, in some ways but not in others, Pink’s all growed up. She and her new husband each have their own homes, she in Los Angeles, he in Las Vegas, and their itinerant careers mean they’ve barely seen each other since they married. She likes it that way: she isn’t ready to settle into domestic bliss, and might never be.

But she’s making more mature-sounding music. She’s singing about politics and contemporary culture. The One That Got Away apes Neil Young’s The Needle And The Damage Done. Conversations With My 13-Year-Old Self is the orchestrally-epic sound of Pink telling young Alecia to slow down and take care. I’m Not Dead also features a duet with her dad, Jim Moore, on a folk song that he wrote during his time in Vietnam.

She says that her brother Jason, who’s in the US Air Force, is “a very closed person” so she’s not sure what he makes of Dear Mr President. What does dad, a staunch Republican who runs a Vietnam veterans’ group, think?

“Well, we [her and brother] don’t agree politically. I played it for him the day that we recorded his song. And I expected … I dunno what I expected – a good debate, a good fight. And he got goosebumps. And he said, ‘You know what: I fought so that you could have the freedom to say the things that you wanna say. And whether I agree with the sentiments or not, that song makes me feel like I’m back in the Sixties.’ To me that was the ultimate compliment: I don’t agree with you but you made me feel something.”

Pink plans to mark her mature, adult relationships with her parents by “dedicating my arms” to them. Taking advantage of the fact that hubby has his own tattoo shop (“the Hart And Hunnington Tattoo Shop, the first tattoo shop ever to open in a Las Vegas casino,” she says proudly), Pink plans elaborate inky tributes.

Her Jewish mom will be honoured on her right arm, “with Hebrew writing and a cat ’cause she’s a snob and she’s a nurse and all that stuff,” she says cryptically. “And my dad is this country boy and he’s a wolf, or a tiger – I’m not sure which animal yet. And my mom grew up in Atlantic City so I’m gonna have all sort of casinos. And Carey has tattoos of Las Vegas casinos… Then for the country I want a spider’s web, Charlotte’s Web, all that stuff.”

Cool. First though, before permanently altering her arms, Pink wants to follow her other dream: to star in a biopic of her heroine, Janis Joplin. Last year she filmed a low-budget horror film called Catacombs, a job she took partly to help her overcome her fear of scary movies (it didn’t work). But the Joplin film is her dream gig. She says the role is definitely hers, but funding and scripts keep falling through. Maybe it’s not supposed to be, she shrugs. “And if it is meant to be then nobody could do it like I could. I know that. I know that like I know that I’m left-handed. So, we’ll see.”

Pink’s come a long way since dropping out of high school. While her classmates were taking maths exams and graduating, Pink was beginning her musical career in two short-lived R&B bands called Basic Instinct and Choice. What did those early musical experiences teach her?

“That I’m not good at allowing other people to make decisions for me,” she grins. “I always wanted to be in a band, to be the drummer or the singer. But in a band, having three people who are afraid and one person who’s not – it doesn’t work. It worked out well being solo because it was up to me.

| Thursday, March 30, 2006

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