I’m Paloma’s secret husband
... who she dumped nine months after their wild wedding – no wonder he can’t bear to see her on the TV talent show
MILLIONS tuned in to watch the start of the latest series of the BBC’s The Voice last night. Many were intrigued by new judge Paloma Faith, whose bouffant beehive and outre wardrobe were almost as remarkable as her witty one-liners and onscreen chemistry with fellow coaches Boy George, will.i.am and Ricky Wilson.
With a fourth album on the way, recent big and small-screen appearances, and now a slot on Saturday night prime-time television, the winner of last year’s Brit Award for Best British Female singer has come a long way from the kooky industry outsider she was just a few years ago.
Yet one of her biggest fans, Rian Haynes, couldn’t bear to watch the show, even though he has more reason than most to take an interest in Paloma: she was once his wife.
Paloma, 34, has never spoken in detail about her marriage to New Zealander Rian, 40, with whom she is pictured here – the epitome of youthful cool – on their wedding day at Hackney Town Hall in East London in 2005.
Two years ago, when news of their union emerged, she dismissed it as a silliness, saying: ‘It’s quite insignificant to me because I was really young. I did it in a rush and I took it all as a bit of a joke until I was in it, and then I realised it was serious and got out of it very quickly. I think it was frivolous.’
But that – to borrow the title of her recent super-successful album – is A Perfect Contradiction, according to Rian’s recollection of their time together. And far from the decision being mutual, the budding taxidermist believes it was Paloma’s flourishing career that prompted her to leave him behind. ‘I knew that if fame came it would be too big a ride for me, for us as a couple,’ he says today. ‘At that time we were committed to one another and to our marriage. I can’t speak for her, but I wanted that feeling to carry on for ever.
‘It wasn’t that I wanted to hang on to her. It was pure love, not possessiveness. I just wanted to celebrate what we had together.’
But the marriage lasted less than a year before Paloma’s pursuit of stardom saw her ask for a divorce while Rian was in the bath.
‘I can’t remember her words but she said we needed to go our separate ways because it wasn’t working out. I punched the water and caused a tsunami, which drenched her and she was sitting there laughing, fully clothed and soaking. That made me laugh, too.
‘I didn’t try to change her mind. Even though we hadn’t talked about ending it, I think I felt it coming. She’d been distant – it was clear her focus was elsewhere rather than on me and our marriage. She had thought it through and I knew it was beyond repair. I was crushed. I can remember getting the last things out of our flat and sitting there by myself, then leaving and locking the door. It was heartbreaking, the end of us.’
For Paloma, though, it was just the beginning of the career she so clearly enjoys. It’s one she’s built on an image of warm, quirky eccentricity, yet it’s one she controls closely, banning family, friends and employees from divulging any details of her home and private life.
‘It’s more than my life’s worth,’ one told the Mail on Sunday recently, a sentiment echoed by her estranged father Ramon Blomfield, who told us: ‘I can’t say anything, only that her career is great.’
Which is why Rian’s tale is so illuminating, finally offering some insight into the making of a star who now has the power – as a coach on The Voice – to make or break other young stars. Rian has never spoken about his marriage before and he took a lot of tracking down after fleeing 12,000 miles back home to New Zealand when their relationship imploded.
Although Paloma’s harsh words about their nine-month marriage must hurt, it is clear Rian is still besotted with his former wife. He recalls the singer tracking him down in Melbourne where he was working, but said their reunion five years ago was ‘quite sad’.
And despite the star’s disparaging comments about the marriage, the glamorous wedding snap shows that it wasn’t a ‘joke’. The love story Paloma tried so hard to hide began when the pair crossed paths on the music scene in London’s trendy Shoreditch in 2004.
PALOMA and her first band The Penetrators were mixing with other future stars such as Adele and Amy Winehouse. Rian, newly arrived from small-town New Zealand, was working at fabled vintage clothes store Beyond Retro. He says: ‘She wasn’t the type of girl you come across many times in your lifetime – maybe never.
‘She could bring a room to life, and light up someone’s day by crossing the street to speak to them. She was a very positivethinking person and she projected that – she makes people feel good about themselves. I was 29 and she was 23. I don’t want to sound like I’m from the 1950s but we courted a bit. Then I lost my phone and her number, so I ended up writing her a letter, leaving it at her band rooms.
‘I told her the truth, how I felt. It was out of character and it took a lot of guts but if I hadn’t written she might never have known.’
At that point, Paloma was more of a burlesque act or performance artist.
‘Paloma had a lot of work. She did a lot of crazy acts. I can remember her cutting her stomach open with a bladder inside filled with dead fish which spilled all over the stage. She did a lot of prosthetics like that. She was also a magician’s assistant at that time with a guy from the Magic Circle.
‘She was very busy, doing commercials, some acting.’
Despite her vintage-vamp style, Paloma was modest about consummating the relationship. The couple were inseparable – even sharing a bed at night – before she invited Rian to become her lover.
They had been together a year when they went to Thailand on holiday. Rian proposed as they swam in the sea off the island of Koh Samet, and they bought an engagement ring together in Bangkok before setting a date for the ceremony just three months later.
The wedding was a small affair attended by a handful of the happy couple’s friends and family. Rian says: ‘There was my parents, my best friend Luca, my brother Ronny, who was living in London. Then there was a handful of close friends of hers, her parents, her mum’s partner. Paloma wore a burgundy dress which she got made by a friend and I wore an original 1890s French military outfit.
‘I was looking for something to wear until the last moment, wanting something a bit eye-opening, and at the last moment someone gave me this suit, which I still have. I basically had to break a rib to get it on and I split the pants on the wedding dance.’
The reception at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club was a different matter, with 200 guests and a show which featured burlesque dancers, nipple-tasseled dancers, drag queens and The Penetrators playing. It was, on reflection, a very Paloma Faith kind of party – a clue to her future.
Even as the couple took to the floor for their first dance, Rian was, in his words, ‘chasing her around trying to stay close to hide the fact that she could dance and I couldn’t’.
Paloma had studied contemporary dance for her degree and was a dancer long before she found her voice as a singer. The vignette more or less sums up the power balance in their marriage.
After a brief honeymoon in a themed hotel in Brighton where they spent their days eating fish and chips on the beach and their nights in a loveheart-shaped bed, they came home to their flat in Dalston, East London. ‘Life was pretty much perfect,’ says Rian.
‘There was no turbulence, we were constantly together and that was very easy. It was very clear when I met her that she was shooting for a big career and I was more than okay to be part of that.
‘Looking back, I wonder if she found it hard, trying to work out where, as her career flourished, I’d be left. I was willing to ride it out and see where it went but it was a distraction and a worry for her.’
If this was a shadow on Paloma’s horizon, it wasn’t on Rian’s as he supported his new wife at home
and at work: ‘You’ve got this very strong woman who can perform and control a crowd and show no signs of timidity or shyness but there were times when she was in need of comfort as much as anyone you would meet.
‘She would just want to cuddle up and be a girl, not Paloma the performer. Our flat was a very quiet, comforting place – she would go to bed at 9.30pm given the chance.’ Yet just nine months after that ceremony, Paloma ended the marriage, though she would not divorce Rian for another four years – just after her debut single had come out. By the time she broke the news to him in the bath she had worked her way through the rock’n’roll years of The Penetrators, explored the jazz legacy of her father and was finding her own musical groove.
She had an agent and was hunting for a producer who would be the perfect fit. She didn’t want to be encumbered by a husband.
Rian was forgiving at the time and remains so today.
‘As much as it hurt when we broke up, it wasn’t about betrayal, it was about circumstances and life taking a different path. The career was pulling her away.
‘She probably started feeling worried that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, or that I would be unhappy she wasn’t there for the relationship. As her life got busier and busier it came to the point where the decision to end it was made. By her.’
Rian adds: ‘I lost my wedding ring. Ronny made them for us on a design I had done. They were silver. I actually designed them so there was a twist in them where the ends didn’t meet.
‘Maybe subconsciously I thought that this girl’s career was going to get big and the chances of the marriage going on forever were slim. I didn’t think it had to be for life – I was getting married because I loved her.
‘Anyone who falls in love wants it to last forever but the chances of that actually happening are slim.’
Rian returned to New Zealand where he went back to his original profession as a chef and rebuilt his remote relationship with Kaleb, his son from a previous relationship. After drifting through kitchens and construction work and by his own admission, drinking and smoking too much, he has taken an apprenticeship as a taxidermist and his ambition is to one day work in a museum.
Paloma cared about him enough to track him down five years ago when he was working as a chef in Melbourne, where she was on a publicity tour. ‘We went to the races and she came back to the bar I had been working in as a chef. We sort of hung out.
‘It was quite sad. I was not in a good place in my life – nothing to do with her. She was worried about me and she contacted another friend of mine to ask if I was okay.’
But his ex-wife can afford to be compassionate. For if theirs was once a marriage of equals, they are far from that now. Paloma is a multimillionaire working on her fourth album, which will doubtless benefit from the publicity she achieves as a coach on The Voice.
She has started to appear in film and on television, and has bounced back from last year’s Rugby World Cup cover of The World In Union, considered by England fans to be as disastrous as their team’s performance on the pitch.
Rian lives a rather more modest life, still a little shambolic, still too fond of a drink and still chainsmoking when he feels anxious.
He is unfailingly polite about his ex-wife but his brother Ronny has said Rian was heartbroken by the split and ‘got a bit wild’. It cannot have been easy that Paloma failed to acknowledge either him or the part he played in her early career. Rian adds: ‘I supported her, went to a lot of those early gigs. I don’t think she thought of herself as a singer but she had the confidence and the stage presence and a belting voice. You could tell that she was the one, the one who would go further.
‘Was she a workaholic? Definitely. I think she knew she had a timeframe in which to succeed and she was 100% focused on that happening. Everything that she was working on was towards fulfilling that ambition.
‘It was probably the calmest relationship I’ve ever had. I can’t picture an argument between us. We always seemed to have fun.’
The rest is a chapter of musical history, as is Paloma’s marriage to Rian. She is currently romancing artist Leyman Lahcine but keeps the details private. Her ex-husband rarely listens to her music these days, branding it too commercial.
‘I never blamed her for anything that happened to me. For someone just out of small-town New Zealand, life in London with her was an amazing adventure.
‘I don’t follow her in the media, I only catch up with her life if I am told. It feels a bit grubby to Google her, so I don’t.’
If he did, he’d see his ex-wife in her new The Voice incarnation, all fabulous hair and bonkers outfits, revelling in being the only woman in the line-up of coaches.
The working title of her forthcoming album is There’s More To Life Than Love. And for Paloma Faith, it seems there is.
She didn’t want to be encumbered by a husband