The singer who hid – and won
Sia Furler waltzed to No.6 on the Woman’s Hour Power List by refusing to play by pop’s usual rules, says Helen Brown
Taylor Swift may have taken on Apple and Spotify, but Sia Furler’s top ten place in Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour Power List tells a more subtle success story. In an industry that considers women’s bodies as part of the product, the 39year-old singer-songwriter chose in 2014 to hide her face behind a blonde wig when she performed, staking her fortune on her songs alone.
Born in Adelaide, Furler had successfully sang without the wig for over a decade from the mid Nineties (both as a solo artist and as the lead vocalist with British trip hop band Zero 7) when she decided to step out of the spotlight. She continued to work behind the scenes, creating music for TV soundtracks, most memorably the song Breathe Me featured in the final episode of Six Feet Under, and penning hits for a galaxy of stars including: Madonna, Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Maroon 5 and Flo Rider. As part of their inner circle, she saw the effect that 24/7 media scrutiny was having on them and expressed her frustration on the 2013 song Pretty Hurts which she co-wrote for Beyonce.
When she decided to relaunch her solo career – following rave reviews of her vocals on David Guetta’s 2011 hit Titanium – she decided she wasn’t going put herself through the torment of celebrity.
“I had the idea that, well, if Amy Winehouse had been the bouffant, maybe I was the blond bob.” she says. “I would like not to be picked apart or for people to observe when I put on 10 pounds or take off 10 pounds or I have a hair extension out of place or my fake tan is botched … Most people don’t have to be under that pressure, and I’d like to be one of them. I don’t want to be followed by the paparazzi.”
She has also said that she hopes to continue making pop music for another 20 years and thinks the anonymity will extend her “expiration date” in a field where older women are shunted from the shelves.
Over recent years, Sia analysed the trends of the moment to isolate the components of a hit song. Her 2014 album, 1000 Forms of Fear, saw her showcase the formula she’d developed working for others. She’d figured out that you need to take one evocative word - “umbrella,” say, or “firework” - and spin it into a three-minute metaphor, with some added musical whoosh, designed to take the singer on a journey from “victim to victor”. It was a personal narrative with which she identified – having struggled with addiction and mental illness for many years following the death of her boyfriend the late Nineties.
A canny range of textures (from raw cello through stuttering piano to popcorn-light synths) keep things interesting and there’s a real bravery in her vocals that I doubt she’d achieve were she more personally exposed. Songs like Chandelier, Elastic Heart and Cellophane are so efficient in extracting a visceral reaction when you listen to them that, at times, it feels like Sia presses our emotional buttons with cynical ease.
But she’s really a smart woman who just found the perfect medium for her truth.