Cyndi’s true colours
Sarah Catherall idolised Cyndi Lauper in the 80s. Now her hero tells her about gay rights, country music, Donald Trump and how she used to make her hair go orange.
If I had told my 14-year-old self that one day I would get the chance to interview Cyndi Lauper, I would have dropped my pepper-shaker microphone on to the ground as I danced to She Bop. I share this story with the 63-year-old on the eve of her New Zealand tour, and she laughs down the phone.
In 1983, she mesmerised me with her upbeat pop songs.
Time after Time and Girls Just Want to Have Fun – which rocketed to No 1 in 10 countries – blared out of my pink transistor radio.
She was my equivalent of Adele, my 1980s heroine, and I wanted to emulate her look – the teased, orange locks, jingling bracelets and bright, outlandish outfits. She was partly responsible for the blusher that ran in streaks down my cheekbones.
I’m only disappointed that this is a phone interview. Lauper sounds decades younger than she is, her distinctive, high-pitched New York accent sounding almost child-like.
Now boasting candy-floss coloured hair, Lauper has done a lot since I last thrashed her songs: composed an award-winning Broadway musical, Kinky Boots; starred in her own TV show, Still So Unusual; penned a New York Times award-winning memoir and sold more than 50 million albums.
She has amassed Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards – one of just 20 musicians to do so – and has recently taken a musical departure to the south, releasing an album with a country and rockabilly twist.
Just as she was my teen heroine, Blondie was hers, and our phone call is a promotional one to talk about her first tour to New Zealand with Blondie and its iconic lead singer Debbie Harry. The New York natives will be together on stage over Easter, in Auckland and Christchurch.
Lauper last performed with the now 71-year-old Harry on their True Colours tour through the United States a decade ago. When Harry and the Blondie band began captivating New York in the mid-’ 70s with their new wave and punk hits, Lauper attended their gigs.
‘‘As a young artist, they had such a big impact on me. I just thought that Debbie was so cool. She is still a hero of mine. We are going to have a blast,’’ Lauper squeaks.
Along with her award-winning 80s hits and larger than life image, Lauper is also loved as a gay icon. She has been married to David Thornton since 1991, and has a son. Her sister, Ellen, is a lesbian, and in the late 70s, the musician’s transgender friend Diana was bullied terribly. Lauper was especially close to Diana’s cousin Gregory, who died of Aids, dedicating her 1986 chart-topper True Colours album to him.
Founding the True Colours Fund, she has been a passionate advocate of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights for decades, setting up a halfway house for LGBT youth in Harlem, New York, and her fight for homeless LGBT people has taken her to Capitol Hill, where she addressed the United States Senate, and to the streets of New York, where she has been a marshal for the LGBT Pride campaign.
‘‘These are the kids who we are vilifying. But when kids are different, they are different, y’a know?’’ she says.
And it was LGBT rights that saw her speak out about Donald Trump – with whom she had appeared on season nine of Celebrity Apprentice – on radio early last year. attacking his commentary on gay and transgender communities and other minority groups as ‘‘racist’’ and ‘‘sexist’’.
Asked what it is like to have the man she publicly lambasted now running her country, she goes quiet. CHAPMAN BAEHLER Lauper’s interpretations of early country classics like I Fall to Pieces, The End of the World and the title track – a 1952 hit for Patti Page – featuring Emmylou Harris.
Lauper went south to Nashville, teaming up with producer Tony Brown and legendary Sire Records founder Seymour Stein. In a live performance on YouTube, the petite singer tosses her shaggy, soft pink locks, singing a twostepping piece, Heartaches by the Number, as she taps her black platform boots.
‘‘Sometimes I wanted to slow it down so much, as they came one after another,’’ she tells me. ‘‘I sang with Emmylou Harris, and Alison Krauss, and Willie Nelson, and they all seemed like such big stars. It was just such a wonderful experience.’’
She has said before that she wanted the album to be ‘‘a little dirty. I wanted the beat to be dirty and sexy. It was supposed to be a mix of R&B and country’’.
‘‘Country music now is not all old-fashioned stuff. I went into more of an Americana style. I chose to work with a guy who had a pop sensibility. That was fun, and it was something I really wanted to do in my life.’’
But for those who might cry that Lauper is another pop singer having a stab at country, she is paying homage to the tunes she grew up listening to on a transistor radio atop the yellow fridge in her aunt’s kitchen in Queens, New York.
Detour is a continuation of the roots journey she first took with her 2010 album, Memphis Blues, which she sung in collaboration with BB King, and other guest Memphis musicians, Charlie Musselwaite, Ann Lee Peebles and Allan Toussaint.
‘‘It was a big deal to go down to Memphis and to play with these wonderful artists who didn’t even know who I was. When people don’t know who you are, they don’t have any expectations of who or what you should be. I thought that before I die, I want to sing something like these songs to the best of my ability.’’
L‘ It was a big deal to go down to Memphis and to play with these wonderful artists who didn’t even know who I was.’ CYNDI LAUPER
auper has sung across most genres, and likes to push herself. Detour also takes her full circle. Growing up in Queens, New York, she was born Cynthia Lauper to a Swiss-German father and an Italian American mother, and began writing songs at the age of 12, playing an acoustic guitar given to her by her sister Ellen.
Dropping out of school and escaping an abusive stepfather, she headed for Canada, where she took art classes, and spent two weeks in the Vermont mountains trying to ‘‘find herself’’. Eventually returning to New York, she performed as a vocalist in cover bands, while holding down retail jobs.
But in 1974, she broke a vocal