I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  Philip wasn’t at his shop the first time I visited. There was a hat on display that was a ship, a ship that was a hat. The shopgirls were told by Philip that this hat was never, ever to leave the shop. But as soon as I walked in and did a quick scan of the place, I set my heart on the ship. That one!

  I loved the hat even before I knew how appropriate it was—the Windrush, after all, was a ship. The two or three girls in the shop said, “We are sorry, Miss Jones, but we cannot let that leave the shop. Philip has forbidden it.” In the end I said, “Why don’t you shut the shop and come along with me and look after the hat, which I will wear at the show.” So they came with me, and I wore it. After that, I always went to Philip for my hats.

  I stayed in England for a while when I did the Bond movie in the mid-1980s. That’s when I really started to get the feeling for London and Britain, and it started to fill out in my imagination as a place I could get to know and live in. Even then, though, England was simply a gray, cold, nondescript place, where I stayed in a low-grade generic hotel, and really only passed through, working on set from four in the morning to past midnight.

  It was strange, because Britain definitely liked my music more than America, especially the music I started to make after the three disco albums. Britain was where the positive critical response started to happen. They definitely got the Compass Point music. It made a lot of sense to the British, this stylized border crossing blending of reggae, electronics, pop, and disco, the way I was gazing out from an abstract Jean-Paul designed environment. They had the fashion and the style and a brilliant history of making new forms of pop in the underground and on the charts. They liked it when the underground made it onto the charts. Their magazines were very strong, and new ones being published were connecting fashion and music in the same way I had done with Jean-Paul and the Compass Point All Stars.

  I think people thought I was closer to Britain than I was at the time, because I was signed to a label that was based in London and a lot of the music on the Compass Point albums was very British. But I didn’t really move to Britain to live until the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, which I did because of the record producer Ivor Guest. He had asked me to work on a song for a group he was producing, and I liked the way we worked together.

  I had vowed never to make an album again after some bad experiences in the 1990s. The idea of music had been destroyed for me after some flavor-of-the-month producers had ruined an album I was making. They thought that I was old-fashioned and needed to move into sampling. I fought this, as I didn’t want a whole album of samples. I was being bullied because I still wanted to work organically, like I had at Compass Point. They were more interested in staring at screens, tapping and clicking their lives away.

  I still wrote and thought about music, but I wanted nothing to do with the business once they wanted to produce me like they would produce a new young singer, as merely an ingredient in an electronic process. It was like disco all over again, without the excitement of emerging from something so recently radical. They didn’t want me to sing like me, but like a version of me, one I didn’t even recognize.

  They weren’t interested in the performance, in the theater of it, in me doing different characters, to tell stories. They only wanted me to pronounce words, and then they would feed my voice into the other ingredients. They cared nothing about live performance, and therefore, nothing about life. They might as well have turned me into a machine—perhaps they chose to work with me because they thought I was a machine, because of how I had presented myself. They wanted to work with simulations, not with the human me. They wanted to work with the product, not the designer of that product—and I was the designer, as much as anyone I had collaborated with.

  After working with Chris Blackwell, the All Stars, Trevor Horn, Nile Rodgers, the whole situation was very counterproductive for me. It was definitely a big part of why there were no albums by me between Bulletproof Heart at the end of the 1980s and 2008’s Hurricane. I wasn’t happy. It was not my method of working. They gave me no advice; they treated me like I wasn’t there, excluding me from the making of my own record. I might have taken it from them if they were Nile, and had been in Chic and produced David Bowie, or Trevor, who had been in Art of Noise and produced Frankie Goes to Hollywood. They weren’t.

  I don’t like being bullied into doing something that I don’t agree with. I started to misbehave then, I admit. I was depressed by doing the vocals and then watching producers who couldn’t play instruments make up these sampled collages of beats with my voice roughly chopped into them. To me, they were crushing the performance into powder. I didn’t think I was being old-fashioned. I thought I was being right.

  One night I started to cry. I was so frustrated, I shouted at them and walked out. It wasn’t professional, but it was a horrid situation. They made an album that could not be mixed. It was like a bag of broken bits that didn’t fit together. My songs, containing thoughts and feelings that were very precious to me, had been minced. It felt like all my babies had died. It put me off making music, and I decided to stop. There were plenty of other things for me to do.

  I enjoyed working with Ivor and I still had some material from fifteen years earlier for the album that I’d walked out on, and other songs I was thinking about. I remember the first time we met, after being introduced to him by Philip Treacy. I said to Philip when he told me about Ivor, “I will meet him, but tell him that I will talk about anything, but please don’t talk to me about music.” The first time we met, at a dinner party, Ivor tried really hard not to talk about music. He said later that all the way through the meal, he was absolutely dying to ask why I hadn’t made an album for so long.

  By the second meeting, Ivor had gingerly brought up the idea of me making some new music. It started to seem like something I could do again after more than a decade of not wanting to record. I’d written some songs, guested vocally on records, and still toured, but I got by quite happily not going through what had become an ordeal.

  Ivor and I fell in love, and I moved to England to be with him and make the Hurricane album. It was released eighteen years after my previous one. No time at all, in my mind. And after the sampling debacle, working with Ivor reminded me of how it should and could be. I felt calmer being with him, both personally and professionally. I liked his attitude toward making music. It was fresh and inspiring, and that meant recording the album was as much a pleasure as any I’d made before.

  There seemed to be more happening in London than in New York, more interesting artistic people to collaborate with. I had vowed to leave America if George Bush became president, and the day after he was voted in I left. I had a friend in Italy, and I went there. From there, I moved to London to live. That was about twenty-five years after I’d first visited Britain, a stranger in a strange land, because I was promoting a record, and got into a fight.

  In each country you visit, the record label has a list of things they want you to do: favorite photographers they want to use, favorite publications in which they want you to be featured. You move about so much on these tours that everything becomes a blur. Essentially, you do what you are told, and you go wherever you are taken without really absorbing where you are. I do what I usually do to get by and start operating on autopilot. On that promotional trip for “Private Life” I was taken somewhere in the northwest of England, I think, a derelict dockland area to shoot a short film. I think it was Liverpool. It might have been Manchester. The towns all looked the same to me. The only thing I remember for sure is that it wasn’t London.

  The place where we went to make the film was something of a ruin, filled with crusty pigeon shit, a beautiful, rusty shell, unused for years. I am sure it has been modernized by now, but then it was beaten up, with a hint of the end of the world about it. Old crumbling brick buildings filled with broken windows, ghostly cranes, dirty water, piles and piles of bird shit dried up over patches of decaying wasteland. Somebody was no doubt very please
d with it as a backdrop, but it didn’t work out for me.

  My sinuses got infected, and I became unwell. The next day, I had this TV show to do, and after the scuzzy dockland shoot, I was in a bad way and not thinking very clearly. To top it all off, somebody gave me some really bad coke to keep me going, because I was clearly wilting. That’s how it was.

  “No,” I said, “I am not taking that!” That’s not really my thing. I am happy to take something that I think will do me some good, but I was not so sure about sticking this powder up my nose without knowing if it was a weak coke substitute. I was a connoisseur, and it looked suspicious to me. It looked like it had been through a few distribution centers, diluted at each stop, cut down until it had lost its authentic kick. Bad coke was the last thing I wanted before I went on a live television show. The purest form, maybe, but anything else was not going into my body. I am not a big fan of taking something that is meant to give you pleasure but actually causes pain, or even worse. And in my basic state, I am already a little bit perky. Even a coffee can cause me to speed up beyond normal parameters. I’d rather take a Valium tablet, really, to slow me down a bit. I need slowing down, not speeding up.

  After all the traveling I had done in the days before I did this television show, I was basically running on adrenaline. You can end up getting so tired that you enter another zone. You are so sleepy but you can’t sleep. You start hallucinating naturally.

  We had a rehearsal for the television show, which had a theme, I was told. They were going to talk to me about modeling and photography, because one of the other guests on the show was the royal photographer and the Queen’s cousin, Patrick Lichfield. After having become established in music, I was going to be kicked back to talking about modeling, which in my mind I hadn’t done for a few years. But that was okay, I didn’t mind.

  There were other guests on the show as well. I can’t remember them at all—they were completely obliterated from my mind after what happened next. Looking back at it now, they all seem weirder than me, and I seem better dressed for action in a powerful long leather coat. I’d made an effort, even though I was feeling rough. I’d made myself up and looked good. They all looked like they were in a dusty gentlemen’s club about to fall asleep after a big dinner and possibly never wake up again.

  The day started out fairly innocuously, as though it was all going to be very ordinary. The host of the show introduced himself to me. I didn’t properly hear his name. I must have been told it a few times, but it meant nothing to me. My television world was very much American, where I’d had experience on talk shows with people like Merv Griffin.

  He was quite an awkward man—very English, in my mind, very eccentric, probably quite kindly. He explained that he was going to ask me questions about what it was like to be in front of a camera, and ask Lord Lichfield what it was like to be behind the camera. Very nice, an intelligent theme, and it was put to me in a very straightforward manner. I asked someone what his name was, because I couldn’t remember it. Russell, I was told, Russell Harty. Very English. A little odd around the edges.

  We rehearsed the show in some detail; the three of us politely sat all facing each other in a semicircle. There didn’t seem to be anything to worry about, as tired as I was. Just another show where the people working on the show treat it as though it is the most important thing imaginable, whereas for me it was simply another obligation on a tightly packed schedule. Turn up, make conversation, try not to come across as an idiot, sing your song, smile if you can, be polite, and then on to the next engagement. Nothing memorable, and you would probably never think about it again.

  On the live show, the real thing, it was all very different. There was a live audience, which immediately changed the atmosphere. Things moved very fast, and I wasn’t feeling any better. I still felt infected by pigeon shit, rust, and stagnant water. It made me feel sluggish, which I hate. I like to feel the world is crackling around me.

  The seating plan seemed different, and I quickly felt that, as the musical guest, I was not part of the main discussion. A couple of perfunctory questions, and then my time was up, and Russell Harty didn’t seem to be particularly interested in what I was saying. For some reason, he spent a lot of time with his back to me—once he had finished with me, he turned away completely to talk to Patrick. This totally infuriated me. I was not having any of it. I’m thinking, How many miles did I fly to do this show, and I end up sitting with a back turned to me? Where I was brought up, you don’t turn your back on someone who is your guest. If I have to turn my back on anyone for whatever I reason, I will always say, Excuse me. Turning your back on someone, to me, is an absolute insult.

  I knew I was going to be on the show for the duration. I sang at the beginning and the end, and for the rest of the show I was meant to sit next to Russell Harty and keep still and quiet. I was all dressed up like an Amazonian seductress, and treated like the hired help. I thought, This is no way to treat a guest. This wasn’t at all what we’d rehearsed. Being stuck there while he ignored me made me feel very uncomfortable. He started sucking up to Patrick big-time, and I was effectively dumped, or so it seemed to me. Also, I had no idea who Russell Harty was. I had no understanding of British TV. I didn’t even know much about the BBC, that this show was on BBC 2, or that it was, I was told, very important. It was all very new to me. I didn’t care. I was doing what I was told, and quite prepared to be fairly docile and do my job.

  I knew nothing of Russell Harty’s history—that he actually had a reputation for making slightly quirky, fairly silly programs and had quite an ego himself. I knew nothing about his camp reputation. He was simply some snooty-seeming plummy-voiced English guy hosting a show, and he was being rude to me. Apparently that was part of his provocative technique, but I didn’t know anything about that.

  He had probably worked out that I was highly strung and easy to tease. When I was teased by my brothers as a kid, I would fight back. That was my default position, to defend myself. I felt I was provoked. I was feeling exhausted, had no idea where I was, and was coated in pigeon shit; now it seemed I was hallucinating that I was on a live chat show and the host was ignoring me.

  Pissed off, I poked him in the back. He made a slightly irritated move like I had interrupted him mid-flow, and looked at me like I was dirty: Oh, what do you want? He turned away and then acted like he was going to carry on ignoring me. That made it worse. I started pouting like a little girl. I was rolling my eyes. How dare you! I was thinking. I’ve come all this way to be treated like garbage! He said something like, “Just sit there and behave yourself.” Like he was a schoolteacher putting a pupil in her place.

  I said, “If you turn your back on me one more time I am going to walk out.” He scolded me some more. I thought, He’s using me as the butt of some joke I don’t really understand. It all kept escalating. I kept hitting him more and throwing his script at him. Slapping, not to hurt him, but to get his attention. I really thought about tipping his chair over, because I could see it was teetering on the edge of the small stage where we were sat. That was very tempting, but I remember thinking, Well, he might break his neck, and then I will really get into hot water. I didn’t want to hurt him, not really.

  When you are on a tour like that, you are not expecting people to act unprofessionally. In the end, I think it was he, not me, who was overwhelmed by the situation. Not so much having me on the show, but having Patrick Lichfield. He seemed damp with excitement about that, and I was getting in the way of his time with the Queen’s cousin. Afterward, I heard he tended to treat artists and singers a little perversely. He could be very impatient with them, and verbally beat them up. Well, if this was his routine—it stops with me!

  I wasn’t attacking him because I was drunk or stoned. I was lashing out because I felt he was not being proper. You can see if you watch it. I am being very sensitive rather than unruly. In fact, because I was tired and disoriented, everything was heightened. I never wanted to do these kinds of shows high. If
anything, I get high afterward. Everyone who knows me will say I have to be in control of myself—and everyone else around me! That’s where the problem started. More than anything, I behaved like a very tired child trying to get his attention. I was being naughty. But I would have done anything to get his attention, and he wasn’t paying me any.

  I started to entertain the studio audience while he was talking. That was a way of getting some attention! He didn’t know why they were laughing during some parts of the conversation he was having. He didn’t understand what was happening behind his back. The audience were giggling, and he was trying to take control. I started slipping off my chair like a very agitated child who has to sit still in church. I was bored out of my mind. I was also wearing this metal breastplate that was very awkward, and I was in no mood to be left behind while he got on with his show. When he did turn around and look at me, I started to see Mas P in his face, and an irritable expression that seemed to say, women are the root of all evil. I was looking right at Mas P and he was looking at me like he was about to lash out. I needed to defend myself.

  I kept lunging at Harty, hitting and hitting him, in an almost girly burst of defiance, more to humiliate him than to hurt him. That was it. I don’t remember what happened next. The show ended, and both of us were in a state of shock and walked off in different directions.

  I was ignored by everyone. Afterward, I was sat in the green room all on my own. No one wanted to talk to me. I was totally shunned, like I’d done something really terrible and unprofessional. I could feel waves of contempt. It was like people would be cursed if they talked to me. I thought, I am in the shit now, but I don’t need this shit. I was in a foreign country, feeling like a foreigner. I didn’t know anyone outside the publicists looking after me, except someone I was seeing in London, who I don’t want to name. Or can’t name, after all these years. I felt so alone. I didn’t know England at all, and this had happened. I felt totally adrift.