Why singer Pink is leaving her wild child days behind
After a five-year hiatus to raise her children, Pink is back, outselling Taylor Swift, and as outspoken as ever. Helen Brown meets her
It’s no secret that Pink loves a high-flying stunt. The 38-year-old singer, whose seventh album Beautiful
Trauma debuted at the top of both the UK and US Billboard charts in October, has been incorporating them into her stadium act for years. But last month’s performance at the American Music Awards took her daring to a new level. Dangling in the darkness outside the 30th floor of the glass-walled Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles while waiting to hurl herself into a showstopping “vertical dance” performance of the album’s title track, she was, says Pink, “truly, the most terrified I’ve ever been. Something about the dark, the exposure and the sheer drop felt wrong on every level. Every cell in my body was screaming: GET DOWN!”
Then she noticed a guy inside his hotel room, filming the view with his cameraphone. “I couldn’t help myself. I banged on the window as hard as I could and he screamed. I laughed for about five minutes. That took the tension out of it.”
Clutching my knees to steady herself, she roars at the memory, her magnificent milkshake of a hairdo bouncing beneath my nose. On a flying trip through London to promote her first record in five years, Pink is wonderfully raucous company.
When she was first launched on to the late-nineties R’N’B scene, dominated by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, the rebellious teen from Doylestown, Pennsylvania – born Alecia Moore – refused to remain packaged like her peers.
Given “the chance to fail” by her record label in 2001, she hired Linda Perry, the songwriter and childhood hero, to co-write rawer, rockier material for her second album. Pink proved them wrong: the resulting album, M!ssundaztood, became one of the biggest sellers of the decade.
Pink has now sold more than 50million records, but with this latest album, she has said that RCA still sat her down for “the talk” about female pop artists over 35 not getting radio play. Especially female artists who had taken five years out to raise the kids. Yet Pink proved them wrong again.
Beautiful Trauma racked up the biggest opening sales for a female artist at the time of its release since Beyoncé’s Lemonade in 2016.
Dressed in a lacy black bodice, bomber jacket, graffiti-patterned harem pants and white Doc Martens, she rocks back into the sofa of her luxurious Knightsbridge hotel, legs akimbo, and credits her longevity to “being like a puppy, with a deep, desperate, relentless and authentic need for human connection”.
Sweary, thoughtful, cocky and compassionate by turns, she says she’s never stopped feeling like a 12-yearold boy on the inside. Her brutal honesty – both in song and interviews – continues to set her apart. She’s bawled out her pain over her parents’ divorce, her near-fatal drug overdose at 15, and her tempestuous relationship with Carey Hart, her motocross rider husband. She recently revealed that the couple had gone a year without having sex.
Today she tells me: “A rude woman came at me last night and said that must be awful. It had never happened to her.” She sighs. “I felt a bit defensive. It WAS an embarrassing thing to say. It was an embarrassing thing to go through. But it was real. I’m not afraid of giving my truth, because some other woman somewhere is afraid something is wrong with her because her husband doesn’t want to have sex with her. And I want her to know that’s not the case. In my experience, you do the f-----work [on your relationship] and it can be good again.”
She reaches up to finger the delicate gold chain around her neck that spells “Mama”. Willow, her six-year-old daughter and Jameson, her 11-monthold son, are upstairs with their dad. She regularly tours with them all, posting pictures of herself using a breast pump before shows. The rebel has become a role model.
At the MTV Video Music Awards in August, she melted hearts with an impromptu address to her daughter, who had recently said she felt like “the ugliest girl I know – like a boy”.
Pink responded by showing her child images of androgynous pop stars such as David Bowie, Prince and Annie Lennox. She said her own tomboy style and athletic build had caused narrow-minded people to judge her harshly.
“So, baby girl,” she wound up. “We don’t change. We take the gravel and the shell and we make a pearl. And we help other people to change so they can see more kinds of beauty.” She is raising her kids as gender neutral and embraced Willow’s recent plan to “marry an African woman” one day.
Although she admits motherhood did, initially, have an impact on her natural fearlessness, she refused to be diminished by the role. “I rode my motorcycle until I was seven and a half months pregnant and I’m sure I got some very strange looks from people.
“But as soon as I had Willow the voice came on. I thought: I don’t wanna ride motorcycles again. Then another part of me went: No, screw that. That isn’t happening to you. And I got back on that motorcycle the second it didn’t hurt to sit down.”
She worries that childhood is “too easy for kids and too hard for parents” these days. “Childhood used be really difficult,” she says. “People had children for economic reasons. And because there was safety in numbers.
“And now it’s the opposite. The pendulum has swung so far. I grew up with nothing and I think it’s important for kids to earn their own stripes.”
She also fears for the wider world, and challenged President George Wbush about his feelings toward homelessness, LGBTQ rights and the Iraq War on her 2006 song Dear Mr
President. But she throws up her hands when I ask about Donald Trump.
“I remember being in third grade and this kid, Megan, saying she wanted to be the president. That word, president, was such a huge, respected, holier-than-thou thing. I can’t get past the idea that for some kids this is their first idea of a president.”
She couldn’t write a Dear Mr
President for Trump, she says, because “I’d use a big word and the song would go over his head”.
Instead, she spoke up for all the disfranchised people he has “sold down the river” on the album’s lead single, What About Us.
She has hope. “I have a lot of friends in AA, and I’ve learned that rock bottom is the catalyst for change and I believe that great things can happen from desperation, from the need for survival. For me, the biggest recent change has been women supporting women.”
Pink is “sure, dead sure” that the music industry has its share of Harvey Weinsteins waiting to be exposed, and is excited to see “feminism reforming in a real and tangible way now. It’s no longer about what you wear. Be you. Women supporting women changes things. And men supporting women. There are a lot of great men in the world who have our backs. They know feminism doesn’t mean we hate you. Nobody’s taking your truck away. We’ve just got our own truck.”
My daughter is the same age as Willow, and thinks Pink is “like a superhero”. But she tells me her own child is harder to impress. When Pink made that MTV speech for her, the response was a flat: “Whatever.” She gets the same response to her aerial stunts. But she intends to keep going. “I’ll be in my sixties, flying over the stage in Vegas in roller skates, still waving down at them. Hi kids!!!” Pink’s new album, Beautiful Trauma, is out now