Heart on the record sleeve

• Last Updated: November 06. 2009 3:20PM UAE / November 6. 2009 11:20AM GMT

The Funhouse tour is the first time Pink has headlined one in the US. Jeff Fusco / Getty Images / Gallo Images

The autobiographical style of Pink’s songwriting has put her turbulent personal life in the public domain. Michael Odell talks to the singer about her UAE recollections, her marriage and her plans for an animal sanctuary.



It was 2007 in a hotel lift in Dubai that the American pop star Pink confronted an uneasy truth: maybe she wasn’t quite as cool as she thought she was.
“I thought I was always the kind of person who carried herself pretty well. I have confidence in who I am and what I look like. But in Dubai I discovered there is ‘the law of the elevator’. You can swagger all you like in a bar or even in a music video, but if you cannot stand the tension in an elevator when a bunch of guys are looking at you, then you have to think again.”

Pink was in Dubai for a concert at the Media City ampitheatre. She entered the lift of her hotel wearing a mini skirt and a sleeveless tank top that allowed a view of her many tattoos. Immediately she felt a frisson of disapproval. Perhaps her fellow travellers had noticed the two red ribbons on the back of either thigh or the adage “What Goes Around Comes Around” inscribed on her wrist. But who couldn’t be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the one which quotes Ecclesiastes 3:4 below the tattoo of a bulldog: “A time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance. Sleep in peace my darling. I love you”. The dog in question was Elvis, a present from Lisa Marie, the daughter of the two-legged singing legend, and one of Pink’s best friends. The dog drowned in her swimming pool in 2007. Pink was devastated.

“I loved that dog. He was like a child to me. But some people just don’t like body art. It got pretty tense in that elevator. It got pretty tense on that whole trip actually. I went there in a spirit of exploration and discovery and not to offend. I have sensitivity in other people’s countries. But I wasn’t about to stop and explain the life story of my dog.”

It is for good reason that Pink called her second album (modishly spelt) Missundaztood. She is not your average airbrushed, big-lunged belter dressed in evening wear. She is a tattooed punk who pays handsomely into the family swear box, and her music is an engaging hybrid of pure pop and rock attitude.

In fact, Pink is that rarest thing – the artist who gets more interesting as she gets older. She may have started the decade like any other contender for the Aguilera/ Spears girl pop crown – her first hit was the R&B-influenced There U Go in 2000 – but she has ended it in a far more interesting way. Sometimes a little too interesting.

“When I got to the venue in Dubai there was a 10-page rider explaining exactly what I could and could not do, what I could and could not wear. I would not be allowed to perform Dear Mr President – an angry assault on the Bush administration from her album I’m Not Dead. I could wear a mini skirt, though, which was a nice surprise. What made it for me was a woman saying to me afterwards that the show had been her 15 minutes of freedom. She was actually shaking from the experience. I really felt for her but at the same time I was so moved by a country where everyone stops to pray. The call to prayer is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. You don’t get that in Vegas.”

As we speak, the 30-year-old is in a tour bus heading through the streets of Toronto on the final stretch of her Funhouse tour, a live extravaganza that is not so much a rock concert as a circus, with her own hybrid of rock/dance thrown in. In fact, you wonder how she got the insurance cover to be unfurled from the ceiling from a giant ribbon and somersaulted through the air on a wire, all the while singing with guaranteed no lip synching.

If Funhouse finds Pink quite literally “out there” on wires and harnesses on stage, she is equally exposed in her songs, which deal with the many moods following the split from her husband, the American motorcross rider Carey Hart. Pink married him in 2006 after holding up a placard at one of his races that read “Will you marry me?” on one side and “I’m Serious” on the other.

But they separated within two years. Pink went on the attack when writing Funhouse’s first hit, So What, comforting herself over the split in the rousing chorus “So what. I’m still a rock star!” Can such honesty ever be ill-advised in art? Yes, it can. No sooner had So What become an empowering anthem for relationship dumpees across the globe than Pink and Hart got back together. “I do have a problem with honesty in my lyrics. I should be more careful, but I tend to unleash the poison and then think afterwards. If Carey comes to a show, then that’s our special moment… The part where I get to call him a tool is my ‘Did you see how angry I was there?’ moment. I guess some couples have their photo albums. We have that. How many people get to share their domestic spats with 10,000 screaming fans?”

Things, she says, are much improved thanks to marriage counselling. The girl who was once a self-confessed “troublemaker” knows full well that marriage is an undertaking that requires different role models to music. “I’ve grown up quite a bit, I think. Once upon a time I almost saw it as my job to copy the great attitude queens of the past. I would sit and think ‘What would Janis Joplin do or say in this situation?’ That doesn’t really work in a marriage or any relationship. Our problem was that neither of us was prepared to open up our vulnerabilities even though it was obvious we loved each other. It’s scary when you let go of your protection. But you have to. You have to go all out and take the risk of getting your heart broken.”

Honesty in songs has got her into trouble before. On Family Portrait from the album Missundaztood, she called her mother “a lunatic”. That caused no end of problems. Pink says her mother cried for four days and went to the National Enquirer (a notorious US scandal sheet) to tell her side of the story. “That’s the thing with me. I never wanted to be a manufactured singer, and sing the lyrics written by a professional who has rhyming software. It’s my life. All my heroines were women who spoke what they felt and thought was true. That can be uncomfortable, but then again, what is the point of being an artist if there is nothing real in it? I just think writing songs and taking all the raw emotion out is cheating.”

No one could accuse her of that on I Have Seen The Rain, a hidden extra track on her 2006 album I’m Not Dead. It’s a duet sung with her father Jim Moore, who fought in the Vietnam War. He wrote the song during the conflict and eventually played it for his daughter when she was born a decade or so later. They sang together at Vietnam veteran functions when Pink was a child. “My father, that song... that’s kind of the crucible for the whole of my music right there. He used to sing it to me as a kid and the pain of it just really showed through. We did it together at one of my shows for the first time recently. Forty years on, America is involved in another questionable conflict and the song has an incredible effect on younger audiences.”

The past decade has been very much about female artists – Aguilera, Furtado, Spears, Clarkson, Stefani, Winehouse. Pink is out of the same mould. She was born Alecia Beth Moore and grew up near Philadelphia, a self-confessed “attention-seeker with bad attitude complications” that were exacerbated by her parents’ divorce (hence her poor relationship with her mother). She was a tomboy who resented the “prissiness” that was incumbent on female entertainers before the dawn of hip-hop. When she was 13 she went to see Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs with friends and was unkindly compared with Steve Buscemi’s character Mr Pink, one of the grisly film’s brutal gang of diamond thieves. “Maybe it was because he gets away with it,” she says. The name stuck.

She found fame easily, but dealing with it was harder. She was signed by the producer LA Reid to the then influential LaFace label and had immediate success with There U Go and the album Can’t Take Me Home. But she detested the US music industry’s crass star-moulding process. One night she recalls being invited to an “industry dinner” by Reid. It was a US$8,000-a-plate (Dh29,300) event. Reid was shocked by her manners and asked the record company to find her “etiquette classes”.

“I know how to use a knife and fork, don’t get me wrong,” she laughs. “It’s just that I cannot take functions like that too seriously. I have always had a very vocal inner punk, who just happens to get more vocal when people in black ties start clinking their glasses and taking themselves too seriously. That is not what I got into music for. I never took those etiquette classes and I don’t intend to. ”

Pink made her second album, Missundaztood with Linda Perry, the former singer with 4 Non-Blondes. Perry is a gravel-voiced biker famous for her no-nonsense approach and her ability to galvanise artists’ deepest feelings. Pink says she made contact with her after being arrested singing a Perry song out of a window at 3.30 in the morning. Perry invited her over and they wrote 20 songs in a matter of weeks. “My goal was to make myself like the favourite singer I would have liked if I was 15. There have been a lot of great female entertainers breaking through in the last 10 years, but what troubles me is that how many of them are actually empowering people and how many just make girls feel bad about themselves because they’re not the right weight, don’t have the right looks or money or car? I hate the idea that music, in whatever form, could actually take something away from you rather than actually making you feel better. I won’t name names. They know who they are.”

She’s not always in fight mode. In reality she is a 30-year-old vegetarian who wants to open an animal sanctuary and regularly campaigns for the animal rights lobby group Peta. Her vegetarianism stems from her first manager, a Muslim who also happened to be a vegetarian. “It was actually pretty prevalent among young black men to convert to Islam in the Nineties. There was a great interest from the hip-hop generation in the ideas of Islam. You wouldn’t believe it with the way rap has gone since. But it was very important to be aware of your history and roots and racial identity. My manager was very passionate about the connection between food and the integrity of the inner human spirit. It made a real impression on me and I followed him into it. The religious stuff didn’t really hit home with me.”

With the Funhouse tour drawing to a close, Pink is already thinking about the next thing. It may involve music. It may involve saving donkeys. “Yeah, I like to put my money where my mouth is and an animal sanctuary is something I’ve thought about a lot since I was a kid and I used to help this neighbour out on her farm. That would give me real satisfaction. It’s one thing to make a big deal about rebelling against stuff. It’s something else to get off your butt and do something.”

Incredibly, though, 10 years after her first hit and two years after playing in Dubai, Pink has just conquered another major territory for the first time: the United States. She has played there, before opening for acts such as Justin Timberlake and Lenny Kravitz, but never headlining her own tour.

“It’s the Dubai elevator thing again.” She laughs. “Maybe I’m just not as easy to understand as I think I am. My own countrymen and women didn’t accept me properly until 10 years after I started. It’s been like the longest courtship between two personalities who kinda like each other, but aren’t really sure. Now it seems to be working. But, like I said before, no one’s ever really quite as cool as they think they are.”

Pink’s Funhouse: Tour Edition (including the original album plus live DVD) is out now.