by Grace Jones
When they recorded “Private Life,” I couldn’t believe it, it was so smooth and cool. It all worked out better than I could have hoped. There was a punk influence as well in a way, because that was still raging, as an energy, an approach to making records, not so worried about any gloss. Instead of there being a lot of overdubs, and a precise layering of the music, I would get them to play together live. They would start playing, and then when they were locked into the groove, I would tell Alex to turn on the tape. We were so lucky to have Alex; he was responsible for the sound, and he got a sound that is respected to this day, in any form of music. It was a classic sound, and that was down to Alex.
I loved that sound. It was to me coming out of the same balance of sounds as Bob Marley, where I had performed a similar role. I don’t like a crowded sound, I want clarity, but it was a whole different approach. It was rooted in a minimalist sound, but with new, almost abstract details pulling and pushing inside. You could hear everything really clear in the space it occupied, but it was all completely together.
Your strong constituency then was definitely the gay community, coming from disco. I thought I would do some research and see if there were any songs that were doing well in that underground, in the gay clubs but not disco, and I heard “Warm Leatherette” by the Normal. I contacted Daniel Miller, who was both the Normal and also the owner of the label it was released on, Mute. It wasn’t a huge hit, it was very underground, but I was looking for something that you could introduce to a wider audience. It was a calling card; it said there was a new, upgraded Grace Jones. This one was something else.
Chris and his team brought in songs that were unusual pop, or relatively unheard of, or plain unexpected, to suit our new approach. Nothing that was as obvious as the show tunes, perhaps, but in many ways, new forms of show tunes. New-wave show tunes, Iggy Pop as the new Frank Sinatra, ones emerging out of the new kind of songwriting that there was because of glam, punk, new wave, electro, reggae, post-punk. Songs that sounded like the kind of thing that creature lurking in those Jean-Paul fantasies would sing. A creature that was based on me, that was all me, but made more, made bigger. A creature from another land, where the standards are not quite what they are in this world, where the highs and lows, spaces and surfaces are all different. I treated the songs as though they were already classics.
Some of the songs they brought me I didn’t feel comfortable doing—the Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Concrete Jungle” by Bob Marley didn’t work. “Warm Leatherette” sounded really interesting, and I could immediately get into character on that one, sex as a car crash, bodies embedded in metal, metal penetrating flesh, broken glass scattered everywhere, blood staining shiny silver. Been there, done that; it was like Sondheim on the other side of acid, of Studio 54 and the Garage, of performing in semi-naked splendor for ecstatic gays, and watching bony girls in plastic miniskirts masturbate on the other side of a Plexiglas screen in sweaty booths off Forty-Second Street.
When I sing a song I need to get into character, because it is all theater for me. I have to believe in them and see them in my world, where I am, and where I’m going. I could bring all my theater experience into those kinds of songs and that kind of music. I never listened more than once to those tracks we chose. I know as soon as I hear it if it is going to work and reflect my own particular philosophy, and then I leave the original behind. You can feel insecure that you are not doing it the right way if you are too aware of the original. I wanted to drag it off into my territory without worrying I was not being faithful. I don’t want to feel I have to do it like it was done before. That was their voice. I have to find my voice. Make it my song. Take it from Chrissie Hynde, Bryan Ferry, Smokey Robinson into my place, where the view is completely different.
On “She’s Lost Control” by Joy Division, I took it literally. I lost control. I can’t listen to that track now. I lost control to such an extent I scared myself. I let everything build, build, build, and I let the words take me over. I decided, Oh, that’s not written for me, but I think it might have been written about me. It’s hard to listen to myself going insane. I had no idea who Joy Division were. I just loved the song. I heard “lost control,” and that was enough for me. As far as I was concerned it was a self-portrait.
* * *
I was breast-feeding Paulo in the studio during the making of the first Compass Point album, Warm Leatherette. I was doing sit-ups as soon as he was born; six weeks later, I was back in the studio. Paulo was always with me. I guarded him ferociously. He was such a personality. He would bounce to the music, really get into it. He would sing “Burning Down the House” in his high chair. He traveled with me everywhere until he was six and started going to school. I had him in an international school moving between Paris, New York, Los Angeles—wherever I moved, he relocated to the local branch of the same school. He moved around a lot because I moved around a lot, and sometimes that meant staying with friends or relatives when I was too busy. It was a mixed-up, on-the-road childhood. Only he can say what impact it all had on him, but I like to think he’s come through without too much emotional scarring. He’s a lot quieter than me, but probably more stable, and grown-up.
Once, when we were in the studio, Paulo was sleeping to the music peacefully, and I suddenly decided I wanted to water-ski. I’d never done it before. Chris used to give water-skiing lessons when he was a teenager in Jamaica. Here was a way to show Jean-Paul I was still up for action—less than two months after giving birth, I was going to learn to water-ski. I didn’t want Jean-Paul to think that after having the baby I was going to be the fat mom staying at home.
As I tried to water-ski, I fell over so many times and the water rushed into me so much it was like I was being given an enema. The water was racing through every orifice. Chris, driving the boat and shouting instructions, would not accept that I couldn’t do it. He refused to stop until I got up on those damn skis. That’s our relationship. I’m stubborn, but he’s more stubborn.
* * *
Chrissie Hynde’s “Private Life” was easy for me to relate to. It was as much about my own history coming into being as hers. I could take that intense perception of emotion right into my world. I could make the timing all mine, and timing is often more important than content. Lovers, relationships, you get angry, you break up, someone’s mad at you because you didn’t have dinner with their mom—singing a love song during the time of Jean-Paul was very easy, because our relationship was so intense almost from the start. I got right inside his head, and I don’t think he’d ever had a woman in there apart from his mother. It was the most intense relationship I had been in, so perhaps it was inevitable that within months I would become pregnant. His ideas alarmed most people, and they ran away. I couldn’t get enough of them, but it also meant that each of us was as driven as the other, and as much as we were very attracted to each other, arguments would ignite all the time.
Minutes before we shot the “Private Life” video we had a fight. Not a serious one, relatively mundane, but I would talk a lot with Jean-Paul about his ideas and give my opinion, and he wasn’t used to that. He still isn’t. We would agree on most things, and if I didn’t agree with him about something, he would try to change my mind. There was a clash of wills. I had strong ideas and he had strong ideas, and this would often lead to a confrontation, because he would always consider his ideas to be better. We were both fighting for dominance in our relationship. We made amazing things because we were so together and at the same time so competitive. We’d have a fight; I’d write a song. I wrote “Nipple to the Bottle,” after a row—You’re never satisfied—and he responded by making a storyboard for a video where I was shooting myself. The worst of us brought out the best of us. (“Nipple to the Bottle” was banned on American radio at the same time as Diana Ross’s “Muscles” and Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” They eventually played Diana and Marvin, but “Nipple” stayed banned. The nipple was too much for them. The nipple blew the mind of conservatives.
)
I remember “Private Life” was the first time I had done a video that didn’t have me jumping all over the place, like you were supposed to. In those days there were so many cuts in videos—everything was shredded, dazzling, empty. Then the rapid cuts went into the movies and then eventually even into the news.
For all my excesses, I was more of a minimalist, taught by Miyake. I preferred stillness, which I thought had greater impact. My expressions didn’t need such fast edits; they relied on being held over time for their effect. Jean-Paul did the video for “Private Life” where I was totally still, and he moved his hands to create shadows—there were no edits, and people thought we were crazy. The music and what was going on with my face made up for the lack of edits—I looked scary, channeling Mas P again, because we’d had a row. We were creative sparring partners, and the fights made the work fresh, giving the encounters with otherness this note of the real, so that there would be something synthetic and analytical, but also emotional and aching about both the music and the image.
I had the track for “Pull Up to the Bumper” from something Sly and Robbie had written called “Pour Yourself over Me like Peanut Butter.” My friend Dana Mano came up with the idea of “pull up to the bumper, baby,” which sounded nicely naughty, and we started to write some silly stuff that sounded good to go with it. There was a double meaning to it, and I liked to write lyrics that had double meanings, but I wasn’t conscious at the time that you could interpret these lyrics as being about—perhaps, if this was how you wanted to take it—anal sex. If you want to take it that way, please do. Take it any way you want. They were some words that sounded good to sing, and sometimes that is more important than the meaning.
Later I would mature more and tell the truth about how I was feeling, but when I wrote that, I was still hiding away from what I really felt. There was nothing personal about it; it wasn’t about anyone. It was a way of having fun with some words that suited a track that sounded like you were having fun. So we have a car, and it’s long, because it’s a limousine, speeding down a Manhattan avenue, all the lights on green, through the steam pouring into the night, and you want to keep it clean, so you wax it and rub it, giving it a shine, and it’s hard to park, because we’re in the city, and it’s so big, so you have to squeeze it into tight spaces, between certain obstacles, and nudge up against the car in front of you or behind you or both. You make it fit, and it is such a great feeling. Obviously, this could sound like you were talking about something else. If you wanted, you could imagine that I am not singing about a car at all. But that’s up to you. If you think the song is not about parking a car, shame on you.
The Compass Point collaboration yielded another informal trilogy; Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, and Living My Life. By the cover of the third album, Jean-Paul was still slicing and dicing me, manning me up, changing my shape, worrying about my humanity, savoring what you can do to a face without hurting it. I wasn’t aging, according to Jean-Paul, who was more concerned with collage and assemblage than with my real age. I was mutating.
I was, abstractly, sweating on the front cover of Living My Life, either because I had been in a fight after some kind of argument—there is a plaster over my eyebrow, and I look like I’ve just delivered a killer blow—or because I had just had sex with someone, somewhere. Or perhaps I was thinking about the world around me, and what was happening after all those parties, and all that togetherness. The sweat of the 1980s, of anxiety and threat, was very different from the no-holds-barred 1970s disco sweat.
* * *
My relationship with Jean-Paul was the most 360-degree relationship I had ever had. It felt unlimited until I started to feel claustrophobic. I had the collaboration with him, and also with the two Toms, Richard, Antonio, and then Chris Blackwell, but I also had romance with Jean-Paul. We worked together, we had sex together. Friends and lovers, art and intimacy.
There would be jealousies—Richard became jealous of Jean-Paul, Jean-Paul became jealous of my publicist, and I had to be the peacemaker. Richard still had my attention, but he thought I had rejected him. He was godfather—and art father—to Paulo. But they felt I was leaving them behind. My attitude was Let’s all work together, but I suppose some people thought I was being isolated by Jean-Paul. It was through how Jean-Paul rendered me, imagined me as a realistic fantasy, that I first really entered many people’s consciousness as an original being, an original beast. To some of my old collaborators, it was as though I could not exist without Jean-Paul piecing me together. I was in an ivory tower and he was making it harder for me to work with other people. I didn’t care. He gave me everything I needed.
Jean-Paul would say, later, in a book he wrote, when he was angry and frustrated with me, that he had created me. I knew that wasn’t the case, that I was creating myself before I met him, and that I was still creating myself during our time together and continued creating myself after we parted. I wasn’t that put out by what he said. “People are only going to look at the photos,” I said. “They’re not going to read what you have to say!”
He knew it would hurt me, and he tried to take it back later, but it was too late. It was in the book. It’s okay—I never had a problem with it, even though a lot of people around me got upset because their part in the creation of me got erased. And it was definitely not all Jean-Paul, even if his was the most illuminating expression of the creature creation. But the input of so many others was needed to get me to the place where Jean-Paul could focus his creativity, and the project definitely needed my active input. Not just physically, but also mentally, because from the moment I left Jamaica, my body was an extension of my mind and of my needing to achieve difference after years of being forced to conform.
I fell for Jean-Paul in a big way. I fell for him like a teenager. To some extent, I was a teenager. The first twelve years or so of my life didn’t exist in a normal sense. I was never allowed to be daring, as a child should be for their personality to develop normally. If you say my life started to become less confined when I was twelve or thirteen, then it’s true that by the time I met Jean-Paul I was behaviorally somewhere in my teens. I was still testing boundaries, making trouble, like a rebellious teenager. When he first came across me, he liked that I caused trouble. He liked the daredevil in me.
I was crazy about him. My legs would go weak when I visited him at his studio. It turned out he was born on the same day as Mas P, and it turned out that that, like the church, he wanted me to be perfect. He could make me perfect by turning me into an illustration, a sculpture, a video, a special effect, a record sleeve, a stage show, a car commercial. He could create, and constantly modify, an illusion, plant me in a flawless phase of glamour midway between machine-ness and she-ness. He wanted me to be perfect. He wanted me to represent An Ideal.
As with the church, it was an awful lot for me to live up to. Prick me, and I bleed.
8.
Fight
I was in Britain on a promotional tour for what was becoming a hit single, “Private Life,” with the new Compass Point sound. I had never been to Britain; all my modeling friends went to England during the ’70s, but I never went, even when I was close by living in Paris. I don’t think I realized how close London was—this was before the Channel Tunnel and the Eurostar linked the island with the continent.
The Irish bombings in the 1970s made me feel it was like the country was a war zone. Back then, in my blinkered naïveté, I thought I might accidentally kick something in the road, and it would turn out to be a bomb. When I started coming to London, I would just pop in and out; I never spent any amount of time there. When you visit places only as a part of a promotional tour, you don’t really get to know them. You’re always on the move, and only get a slight, biased view of where you are from the windows of cars and trains, from hotel rooms—mostly brick walls, shop fronts, and endless fields. You’re never actually able to spend any time getting to know the details.
Britain was more another country on my i
tinerary than a central location in my world, a place I only knew very superficially. I didn’t know the culture, and didn’t specifically realize how much of a forced influence it had been on Jamaica. It should have been a place where I felt very at home straightaway, especially considering the close ties between Jamaica and Britain, but for some reason it was very much an alien place to me, and it felt very alien when I visited it.
Years later, I did a gala concert marking the anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush sailing from Jamaica and Trinidad in 1948, bringing the first shipload of Caribbean immigrants. In the early 1980s, I was oblivious to the fact that Jamaican servicemen and women were brought back to England—the “mother country”—from Jamaica after they served in the war. While I was in London for that Windrush show, I went to my friend Philip Treacy’s hat shop looking for something to wear. I didn’t know him then, but my friend Tara Tyson told me I had to go to his shop. She loved hats, I loved hats. It’s a church thing. We all had to wear hats going to church. When you go to my brother Noel’s church in Los Angeles, you see the most amazing array of hats. Philip loves to go to Noel’s church to see the hats.
Women cover their heads in Jamaica—perhaps it goes all the way back to Africa, to make sure you don’t burn your head. It’s common sense, first of all, and then it comes from dressing up. Each hat tells a story, about the person wearing it and what they are doing as they wear it. It is always with me: a hat, or a hood, or a hat and a hood.