Posted on 11/17/2001 3:36:59 PM PST by Pokey78
It’s as if St Winifred’s school choir has got its cassocks off for Playboy magazine. Charlotte Church is sashaying swiftly towards adulthood. Tabloids speculate that she has had to ditch a boyfriend to please her record company. She hangs out with Robbie Williams and preens for an eternity before our photo-shoot. Yet despite Charlotte’s growing physical charms, it is salutary to remember she is only 15; so quickly does sexuality now find the young — or the young find sexuality.
Sure, the chanteuse has not done a Vanessa-Mae (no wet T-shirt in the surf photographs — yet), but when you have enjoyed more love-ins with international leaders than Tony Blair and outsold even Whitney Houston, playing with a Sindy doll holds limited appeal. Can there be anyone as world-weary yet to sit a GCSE? She was in New York during last week’s plane crash. What, I ask, was it like to witness such horror, expecting an impromptu song about world peace. Instead she harrumphs that it cancelled her interview on Good Morning America. On the plane back it was her parents — not her — freaking with fear.
“I downplay chaos because they get really stressed. When we met the Pope he blessed rosary beads and mum was clutching them. I was like: what are rosary beads going to do if we crash?” Mourners from the earlier disaster are also dished. “I went to ground zero just as an ordinary person,” she announces, as if a red carpet might have been laid amid the body bags. “It was awful, people taking debris to sell. They were really rowdy, climbing on police cars to get pictures.
“Everyone there has to relate themselves to it. They are like (American accent), ‘Yeah, my neighbour’s dog’s owner’s sister’s dog was involved, but he got out just in time.’ It was a bit sick. People overdramatise and lose perspective.”
Gulp. Even firemen, revered in New York as modern-day gladiators, are put down: “They went from here in society to celebrities. They are even invited here to present television awards, which I just don’t agree with.”
Her perceptions may not be charitable, but they are sharp. She ventures that if good has come from bad, it is America realising it is not invincible: “Their attitude is, ‘Oh damn, we are just like everybody else after all’.”
This self-styled Voice of an Angel saves her least angelic remarks for celebrities: “There was Paul McCartney saying, ‘I witnessed the crash.’ Who cares? Thousands witnessed it.” Few, however, perceived it through the prism of the make-up room on breakfast television.
From my lowly chair — she resides 2ft higher than the sofa she offered me — I ask her to evaluate the statesmen who have held court with her. “President Clinton was like, wow, really impressive. But go to Texas, you see 1,000 George Bushes. Tony Blair has Clinton’s spark. Before I met him I couldn’t stand him, but he was really warm and seemed as if he was trying his best. With a lot of world leaders,” she reflects, “it’s a power thing, but he was different.” She adds patriotically: “Americans kept saying, ‘We want Tony Blair as president’, and I told them, ‘No, bad luck, he’s British’.”
Charlotte translates her personal confidence into national confidence: she’s great, Britain’s great, hurrah! Then, just as I wonder if I’ve been stilettoed by the most lethal ego since Descartes, she plays the poor little rich girl: her Welsh valleys friends “can go clubbing, but I can’t because everybody knows my age. I still do things that 15-year-olds do legally like house parties and sleepovers. But I can’t talk to them about what I do when I’m away. “This fame thing: unless you work in it you can’t comprehend it. If I said, this is the good guy, this is the bad guy, this is the guy who wants power, this is the one who wants money, then my friends would say, ‘Shut up. How do you think I can get this boy I fancy to leave his girlfriend?’ ” Ah yes, boys. According to reports, she had to dispose of a recently acquired Max Hoare because having a boyfriend did not fit her virginal image. “It’s rubbish. We’ve been friends since primary school,” she insists. She admits to two previous relationships but denies any recent skirmishes. “It is hard to say. Oh, I have to go away for three weeks now to have an audience with the Pope, okay? “Guys either want to go out with you for who you are, or they are intimidated by the fame. If I like someone I will go over and talk. And they will just say, ‘Er, hello.’ And you just want to say, oh, come on.”
My sympathies are with the boys: Charlotte would make Mick Jagger nervous. For lovely though she is undoubtedly becoming, it can be no cakewalk being a boy on the Cardiff teenybopper circuit. As she says: “I sort out manipulative businessmen, so I see teenage boys coming.”
The man for Charlotte might have to be at least 60. “Yes, why not,” she laughs.
“I have a real thirst for knowledge,” she says. “When I do finally find a partner I want someone who changes my world view. I’m not going to find anybody like that at this age, so you just look to have fun.”
It is as if some ripe vamp like Jerry Hall has got inside the body of a young girl; she has it all worked out. I ask if she is worried about ending up like so many child stars: ex-stars.
“It’s easy to get drawn in — people fill your head with crap about how great you are. A lot of artists only have employees who were with them when they were famous. But my parents are there purely for my happiness,” she says, without blinking to think that mum and dad might have their own lives. “Whatever I want they will try to get it for me.”
She is, by her own admission, a curious mixture: part child (and an immature one at that); part knowing diva (and cynically amusing, too). Mama receives bad press for trailing her around (a perception that Charlotte blames on Jonathan Shalit, her former manager who won a £2m severance deal). What mother should have done (send her 12-year-old daughter to sing for Clinton alone?) is unclear. But does Charlotte crave freedom from the parental leash? “Oh, all the time,” she howls. “We have completely opposing opinions. Teenagers and parents don’t get on anyway, and being with them 24/7 you just feel: get out of my face, I can’t stand you.”
Most parents can say, “Just do it”; it must be hard saying that to Ms Church. She denies it, but in the next breath she breezes: “I make all the major decisions. If there is something I don’t want and I have a valid reason, fine, they will back me all the way.”
She would not admit it, but my hunch is that she rarely obeys, even if the dispute is trivial. “They will say, ‘Are you going to pay all that money for a dress and wear it twice? Go to Top Shop and get the same thing for a fiver’.” What, with all that bunce in the bank, being sent to Top Shop doesn’t bother her? Come off it. “Sometimes it does. I think: why are they being so annoying?” The last word is almost a scream.
So when will she ask mama and papa to lay down their Air Miles? “My 18th birthday, my parents are off. We joke about it all the time. I say, when I am 18, you are unemployed, dad.” A joke that, unless he has a particularly hearty humour, can’t seem quite so funny to dad.
She claims that “fame makes you vulnerable”, not looking the least bit vulnerable. What she means, I suspect, is that it makes you worried about losing fame. This makes her catty about wannabe stars. “There is an obsession with celebrity, everyone wants to be famous now,” she says, forgetting that her own journey from suburbia to stardom began on a televisual talent show.
Even established stars get handbagged, including another retired angel, Britney Spears. “I think she’s great.” Pause. “I mean, she might not be the best singer in the world, but she works hard spewing out those albums. There is a contradiction in the way she says she is going to keep her virginity and then sings ‘I’m a slave to you’.”
Following the example of Spears’s writhing snake, is Charlotte pressured to sex up her act? “Quite the opposite,” she says sadly. “They want me to stay looking 12. I tell them I’m growing up; whether my audience follows I can’t help. My appeal was that I had the innocence lacking in this industry.”
The cross the angel has to bear is this: she is one of that rare breed of songstress to be asked to show less leg and chest, not because the view is unpleasant but because innocence, not temptation, is what selling Charlotte Church is all about. The problem is that she knows her innocence is the product and in that act of recognition she is no longer innocent.
“Everything was raunchy and sordid and I was ‘the voice of an angel’.” She laughs bitterly, almost with a hint of disgust. “I have to say to high-powered businessmen: no, I don’t want to do that, this is my career. Listen to me. I am not going to be moulded just to make the record companies millions for my tiny percentage.” She may be busy promoting her new album, Enchanted, but Charlotte Church, I suspect, is gearing up for a big row.
Playing the angel must be hard. “Most people don’t know the truth,” she says with throaty laughter. “My fans would be so offended if I wore a revealing outfit, their attitude is that I must remain a little girl, just like dad.” She does an impression of her father: “ ‘No, you can’t go out like that, you look like a whore.’ Thanks, dad.”
She laughs. She will win the argument. After all, she ain’t no angel.
Well Charlotte, KMCA.
She will learn...only open your mouth to sing.
Her age deifnately shows in this comment. I thought she had more sense.
So, someone is getting after the mum because she wouldn't let Charolette sing for Clinton alone?
certainly it does for anyone who thinks that it's important to hit the note and not merely some place more or less near the note, as ms. church does. her schick was the "isn't she cute, and she tries so hard" thing that when you're 11 or 12 works. the record companies are pushing the little girl thing because she can make noises, but she cannot sing. she damn near todels her high notes, and has never hit a note square on. she is a flash in the pan; the advantage of this article is that we'll not feel guilty for saying "good riddance" when, in a year or so, she's history.
dep
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