With three double-platinum albums to her name already, Paloma Faith is back with new LP The Glorification Of Sadness. She is currently battling Idles for a No.1 album this week.
Here, Paloma Faith looks back on her career, from an explosive audition with Epic, to winning a fan in Amy Winehouse and texting Pharrell Williams at the Met Gala…
Interview: Colleen Harris
During my first major label audition…
“I swore at [then Epic president] Nick Raphael. I probably wouldn’t do it now. I think that life chips away at you, and eventually you just don’t have that confidence. I really admire that person and I feel like I’ve lost her a bit. I’d come from East London, state school, and felt a bit cocky about that. I was a bit streetwise. I didn’t feel that I needed to kiss arse in the way that I do now [laughs]. I’ve got so much to lose now; I’ve got two kids and have to behave responsibly. Now I understand the intricacies of navigating this industry.”
Relationships with executives are important…
“Jason Iley has helped my career a lot. I’ve been lucky that he’s been the head of Sony for so long because a lot changed during that time and he’s been the anchor that’s kept me tethered to the shore. Also, I still have a lot of respect for Jo Charrington and Nick Raphael; they first signed me and continue to support me. They’re always like, ‘Play me the music, we’ll have a listen.’ I’m really proud of that, it’s like a relationship that broke up but stayed friends. Now, with Glyn [Aikins, RCA co-president], it’s probably the first time in my career that a head of my label has known all of my musical references. I come from London and the spirit of music that came from there, then went off the beaten track into rock and other genres. I’ve always had execs that have understood portions of it, but never one that has understood all of it.”
I called my new album The Glorification Of Sadness because…
“It’s a strange relationship between real lived experiences and commodifying your own pain. It isn’t like a tokenised representation of something that’s slightly fictionalised, it’s intensely real. A really good friend of mine died last year; he was a poet and he wrote this poem that I read at his funeral and one of the lines in it was, ‘Every artist’s pain is for sale.’”
The industry needs to understand working mothers better…
“I can’t do what I did at the beginning pre-kids, which is be at the opening of an envelope all day every day, promo, up all night, doing gigs… That work ethic is laudable, but I can’t do that any more because my children will grow up and hate me. It would be great for the mental health of the artist, and for their longevity, if the people around them would consider the fact that they are no longer a single person entity, that they have dependents. I think I’m coping well because I was my little sister’s legal guardian when I started and that motivated me. I went commercial in a way that I might not have if I didn’t have a dependent.”
Amy Winehouse asked me to be in her band...
“I know London jazz is having a resurgence, but I was part of that era, after her Frank album. I was really into vintage and stuff and she saw me dressed like a pin-up, because I used to work at Agent Provocateur and that’s how I used to dress. I was doing jazz clubs, but an older style than what she was doing. She just saw me and was like, ‘Oh my God, you look amazing, can you be in my band? I don’t even care what you do, I just want you to stand with me.’ I told her I sang and she said, ‘You can be one of the backing vocalists.’ I was already doing my own thing and told her I was really bad at doing anything where I’m meant to do something. I’m more of a front person because I make a lot of mistakes. And only the front person is allowed to do that.”
Pharrell once put his number in my phone…
“I met him at the Met Gala and I had a few albums out at that point. I was so starstruck because I used to be a massive N.E.R.D fan. He came up and said, ‘I love your song New York,’ and started singing it to me. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ I couldn’t believe it. And he took my phone out of my hand, put his number in it and said, ‘I want to work with you, call me!’ Then we were all seated, he was miles across the other side of the room and, me being me, I texted him saying, ‘Just checking this is your number and not a number for the insurance claims.’ And he stood up miles away at his table, waved and put his thumbs up! That was quite funny [Laughs].”
