‘How are you going to survive today if you take yourself so seriously? We live in this weirdly complex culture where everyone is offended all the time... ‘
Popstar Paloma Faith is uncomfortable. Pregnancy complications are making her anxious, as is British politics. Humour is helping her cope, but there’s no way she’d let Boris Johnson mind her child, she tells BarryEgan
PALOMA FAITH TAKES ON MODERN LIFE, PAGE 12
Paloma Faith laughs a lot — “out of discomfort”, mostly. The peals of laughter often come when the singer gets bad news. “That’s how I survive.” When she talks to the Sunday Independent in late December, she is heavily pregnant with her second child. “With my pregnancy, basically, every week there is something happening that is bad. Like last week, they said I had placenta previa, where my placenta won’t move out of the way of my cervix, and potential gestational diabetes. All in one week. I just laughed my way through it,” she says.
“This week, so far, I passed my potential gestational diabetes test and I’m having another scan on my placenta on Thursday. So fingers crossed,” she laughs, “I’m on a winning streak!”
“My placenta is too far down, and it is blocking my cervix. Which means I might die of blood loss. Lol!” she says.
I tell her I don’t quite know where to go after that.
“I can talk about my colon if it makes you feel better? My colon is actually really good at the moment.”
It’s safe to say that you don’t know what Paloma Faith might come out with. In
June 2019 on The Graham Norton Show, she thanked Irish actor Andrew Scott for his sex scene in the comedy-drama Fleabag. The thanks, Paloma confessed, was because she had “a bit of alone time with episode five”
— when Scott’s priest character and Fleabag, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, sleep together. “I had my moment and was very happy.”
Her four-year-old daughter (I don’t learn her name; no one does, it’s closely guarded) is on a mini treadmill eating cookies in their home in London while Mummy conducts this interview via Zoom.
Paloma’s formative years growing up in
Hackney, London, were a “melting pot of Turkish, African and Caribbean communities. It was quite a socialist education. A lot of the teachers and communities were quite left-wing. With the problems in Northern Ireland, there were people from Saoirse [a republican organisation] and all of that. It was quite militant left.”
She says she can remember being brought on left-wing marches in London, protesting Margaret Thatcher and the like, almost every weekend in her pushchair by her “staunch feminist” mother. She was raised to be politically aware and to believe that her voice counted.
“I think that has stood to me in terms of morality, community and a sense of the greater good, as opposed to selfishly beneficial ideals.”
She believes there is no leadership “in the so-called UK — I don’t even feel comfortable calling it that anymore”. Having Boris Johnson lead Britain through Brexit and Covid-19 is, she says, “the most uncertain time I’ve lived through, and I’ve lived through Thatcher. ”
With everything that’s been going on, she’s found herself wondering how long before she sees “the rubbish hurricanes that we had under Thatcher?” By which she means the bin collection strikes. (Although to be strictly fair, these were at their worst before Thatcher came to power.)
Paloma’s partner, and the father of her daughter, is the French-Algerian artist Leyman Lahcine, while Paloma’s own father is Spanish. She is “concerned” over Brexit, she says, because she feels “very European. I feel lucky
because I do have a European and a British passport.”
She worries about the day when they will have to return to that “horrible beige food that we ate for so long. I like sundried tomatoes now. I’m a champagne socialist.” She believes the British Labour party has a “better chance” at the next election than they had with former leader Jeremy Corbyn.
If she were in office, she would immediately “reverse Brexit, even if it was against the so-called popular vote”, before targeting education. Paloma says she would make it possible that at age 14, every child would be given the option to train vocationally. “They wouldn’t be forced to do all these academic things and that be the only thing that is given any value. Skill and craft are important. There is too much emphasis on academia, and it is causing problems because there is no one any more to make anything. There is no industry in Britain any more,” she says, something that she also attributes to the Thatcher years.
As for the royal family, she is not especially a fan. “Of course not,” she says. “What do you think! The royal family is not part of my being. I feel quite disconnected from it.”
But she is interested in the Netflix series The Crown because the Diana story resonates with her, and because Emma Corrin, the actress who plays Diana, starred alongside Paloma in the first series of Pennyworth, the Batman prequel TV drama. “So, Emma is my love-interest. I watched The Crown to see her. And I got really hooked on it because of her and Gillian Anderson’s performance.” She thought it was a “very accurate” portrayal.
On ‘The Graham Norton Show’, she thanked Irish actor Andrew Scott for his sex scene in ‘Fleabag’
An only child, Paloma Faith Blomfield
was born July 21, 1981. Her English mother and Spanish father’s short-lived marriage ended when she was two. “I had a relationship with my dad as a kid just on weekends,” she told me back in 2018. “But, if I’m really honest, I really preferred to be with my mum. She was just much more loving.”
A primary school teacher, Paloma’s mother brought her up in a two-up, two
down terrace house in Stoke Newington, Hackney, which was full of eccentricity, music (Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Annie Lennox) and had her five aunts popping in all the time. Her bedroom was the size of a “broom cupboard”. The street was all “council houses... and we really did leave our front door open all day”.
These days, she lives not far from her mother, who is still in the same house.
She recalls once asking her mother: “What happens if a strange man comes in?”
“Well, [I’ll] sit [him]down and make him a cup of tea,” came the reply.
She would see her mum dancing to music “and shouting at us and the neighbours”, while Paloma would play on the street and chat to the “punk squatters around the corner.”
In her teens, she wanted to be a dancer. She studied at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, before moving back to London where she got a master’s degree in theatre direction and design at Central Saint Martins. She supported herself in London with jobs as a magician’s assistant, a burlesque performer, a life model, a bartender and three years at designer lingerie emporium, Agent Provocateur.
It was there that she met a lot of very interesting but “quite lonely people with obscure fetishes who saw the shop as a refuge. It taught me a lot about empathy”.
In 2006, playing in a band called Paloma and the Penetrators, she was spotted by a scout from a major record company, who got her to sing for her boss. But the audition didn’t go to plan. Paloma asked the record exec to stop texting on his phone as she sang and when he didn’t, the future superstar told him to “f**k off”, and walked out in a huff.
Eight months later, he wrote a letter of apology, telling her how great that performance was.
She signed to Epic records and released her first single in 2008, a duet with Josh Weller, ‘It’s Christmas (and I Hate You)’. In 2009, she released her debut album, Do
You Want The Truth or Something Beautiful?
In the same year, Paloma, who had already been in the 2007 remake of St Trinian’s, played Sally, the devil’s girlfriend, in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, opposite Colin Farrell and the late Heath Ledger.
She was briefly compared to the late Amy Winehouse, and wrote a song about her called ‘Price Of Fame’. Her third album, A Perfect Contradiction, was one of the biggest-selling releases of 2014.
The following year, she won Best British Solo Female at the Brit Awards. During her acceptance speech, she told the audience at London’s O2 Arena: “I used to fly-poster Hackney for my gigs and I’ve been arrested twice for doing that. Now I see that my posters are all over Greenwich Tube station legally and that’s an amazing feeling.”
In 2005, she was married “for about a
month” to New Zealand chef Rian Haynes. It was in New York in 2012 that she met her long-term partner Leyman, who is the primary caregiver to their daughter. “My relationship with my own father was really irregular and I see how lucky my child is to be with her dad a lot,” she told the Guardian last year, “I think it’s really good for her to spend time with a very sensitive, kind man, and that will be her benchmark and mould her expectations of men in a way that I didn’t have. I think I had really low expectations.”
Her 2017 album The Architect featured a duet with John Legend on ‘I’ll Be Gentle’ (“We all need a bit of kindness, all this cruelty is so mindless”), a song about Brexit (‘Guilty’) and some spoken words by Samuel L Jackson (“Do not be fearful of evolution — the time is now”). On her new album, Infinite Things, she sings of finding strength in letting go: “Oceans will drain out and the stars disintegrate, it’s like two roads, I have lost all my control, I look into you, you make me rock and roll.” Now, she tells me, with another laugh “There is strength in numbers; when everyone feels vulnerable, when everyone feels a bit lost. It’s life-affirming. I made amends for feeling f**king insane years ago.”
Paloma has a very kooky sense of humour, which visibly charmed fellow guest Russell Brand in front of millions of viewers on The Graham Norton Show in 2012 when she told him that his brief marriage to pop star Katy Perry was like “getting a tattoo.”
How does she think the world sees her? “The people who like me see me as disarmingly honest and reassuring because I am very open about my fallibility. I think that the people who don’t like me see me as annoying and not very cool, because I don’t hide my ambition or my enthusiasm. People who are cool don’t like people who are ambitious or enthusiastic. You have got to pretend that you’re blasé about everything. And then there’s another group of people who find me quite annoying because they think I laugh at everything and I’m too flippant. But that’s because they take themselves too seriously.
“How are you going to survive — especially now — if you take yourself so seriously?” she continues. “We live in this weirdly complex culture where everything goes to sh*t versus hyper-sensitivity, which is bizarre... these two things happening at the same time. Everyone is offended all the time.”
The bottom line is Paloma doesn’t care what people think of her. She has her own belief system. For a time, after her daughter was born in December 2016, she kept the child’s gender from the public. This led people to speculate as to whether she was raising her daughter gender neutral. She wasn’t.
“I was misunderstood — the media reported that I wasn’t dictating gender stereotypes,” she explains. “True, I don’t encourage gender rigidity with toys, but really, I was traumatised by the birth and protective of our privacy.”
Paloma wanted her child to “develop into herself” before the world “decided” who she was. She felt, she says, like a “lioness.” Her daughter “makes me look at the world in a way I’ve neglected for a long time”.
The values her mother instilled in her
gave Paloma an empowering sense of self. In 2017, she described the video to accompany her song ‘Loyal’ as “a feminist statement — about the fact that everyone perceives women who have had a child as having to be this subservient mother character. Often it seems socially acceptable for men to stray when their partner has a baby, but actually women have the same desires.”
The reason why she is political (“with a small p”), she says, is partly because nobody else dares to be. They hardly dare to have an opinion. People tell her to “stick to singing”. She finds this particularly “weird”, because we are all affected by political decisions.
“So, why shouldn’t we have an opinion on those political decisions? People say to me all the time, ‘Leave politics to the pol
iticians’. I wouldn’t let Boris Johnson look after my kid...”
Nor, it appears, would she let her mother. Even though she lives around the corner and pops in when Covid restrictions allow, says Paloma. “But I don’t let her babysit.”
Is that in case she comes home and finds her four-year-old watching Question Time with her leftie gran? “That, or she’s eaten her,” she laughs. “With some sun-dried tomatoes. A yuppie cannibal snack...”
“My mum is really into politics,” she continues. “She likes anything that gives her anxiety, whereas I try to combat my anxiety. Most of my mum’s sentences begin: ‘I’ve been researching...’ Which usually means her finding any bit of information online that will make her feel anxious.”
The last time I spoke to Paloma, she mentioned that Hanif Kureishi — her friend and the author of London Kills Me and The Buddha of Suburbia — had told her that “happiness is the absence of anxiety.”
“And it all made sense to me,” she says. Now, I ask Paloma whether she is feeling anxiety. “At the moment, being pregnant in a pandemic is pretty anxiety-inducing. It’s like, I’m the breadwinner, so I must go to work. And every time I go to work, I feel like I’m putting myself and the baby at risk. That’s kind of hard and a bit of a contradiction. And then I get anxious about any illnesses because I hate being ill, and I’m a bit of a hypochondriac. I get anxious.”
The baby is due any day, “but it is very
hard to say with me. I had quite a bad birth and pregnancy last time”.
She gave birth prematurely to her daughter by emergency Caesarean in 2016 and spent a week in hospital after losing a lot of blood.
She suffered from postnatal depression for a time. “The only time I’ve been really unwell mentally was post-baby,” she said afterwards.
“[I felt] alone. Something was really wrong with me and no one guessed or saw it in me — people were just focused on the baby. I hallucinated and lost touch with what was real and what wasn’t, just disoriented.
“It lasted for some time, where I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to be the mother I’d envisioned. I put myself under way too much pressure. I was very angry with how my body responded to pregnancy and I think I really punished myself.
“So, I worry that [the baby is] going to be slightly premature,” Paloma says now. “It could be any time, really.”
In the meantime, her daughter has come off the treadmill and is eating something.
“She definitely has determination,” Paloma says. “She got a cookie off me and then went upstairs and got another cookie off her father. I can’t really tell her off for that because that is quite admirable! She has run six kilometres and eaten three cookies!”
There’s strength in numbers; when everyone feels vulnerable, when everyone feels a bit lost