The Billie beneath the dark facade

Archetypal bored tough chick or terrifying ‘It girl’, Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell doesn’t really fit either stereotype, writes Grant Smithies.

Billie Eilish is ‘‘tired as balls’’, she tells me. ‘‘Like, just totally exhausted, you know?’’ I don’t. But I imagine being America’s musical ‘‘It girl’’ du jour must really take it out of a person, especially when they’re only 17.

The inescapable cameras. The shrieking fans. Long days in the studio. Long nights dutifully putting your face about at other people’s parties and shows.

I’m knackered just thinking about it, but not as knackered as Eilish who just got back home to California after a big fashion show in New York. Front row?

‘‘Yeah, man! Front row. It was tight!’’ she says, in a soft husky drawl.

‘‘But to be honest with you, I still can’t get over how weird that is. I was laying in bed in New York last night, and at 3am I suddenly said to myself, right out loud – ‘Wow! I had no clue any of this would happen’ .’’ Eilish lay in the dark and let the weirdness permeate.

‘‘It just suddenly struck me how strange it all is, and how I still have no f…ing clue what I’m doing, really. I mean – who knows how to do this shit?

You make it up as you go along, right?’’

Right. Fake it until you make it, and all that jazz. And Eilish has most definitely made it.

Earlier this year, she was proclaimed the ‘‘top emerging artist in the US’’ by Billboard magazine, based on sales, streams, chart placement and social media activity.

Released last August, her debut EP Don’t Smile At Me has been streamed more than a billion times worldwide.

She works hard and tours relentlessly.

And she was going to be down our way for the Laneway Festival at Auckland’s Albert Park last month, but pulled out saying she needed ‘‘more time to finish something very important’’. Now she has announced she’ll be here in April for one show.

She has been to New Zealand before. A showcase gig at Auckland’s Tuning Fork in November 2017 sold out in under three minutes. The joint thronged with teenagers holding homemade ‘‘We Love You, Billie!’’ signs and singing along to every line.

‘‘You know, I didn’t expect anything like this to ever happen to me. I grew up in love with music, like an obsessed fan, so it’s very weird that I’m on this side of that divide now. But at least I understand that fan mentality. I know what it’s like to feel like you’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t know you exist.’’

She also understands what it means to create and maintain a public persona, a larger-than-life version of yourself who can be out there in the world, taking up space, commanding authority, intimidating nay-sayers, while the real you sits somewhere behind, smaller and more thoughtful, figuring out what to do next.

In Eilish’s case, that public persona is your archetypal bored tough girl whose principal response to the world is the eye-roll, the frown, the middle finger.

She appears in her videos as an intimidating hard-ass who has only ever heard rumours of a smile.

She is, professionally, jaded, radiating disdain, awash with ennui, her eyes halflidded as if the sedatives are kicking in. In person, she’s warm, goofy, charming.

‘‘Yeah. People think I’m mean, right? They’re terrified of me. It’s weird, because in real life I’m kind of a smiley