I agree. I would like to hear Rachel sing live, just once, though.
This is a really good article on Rachel:
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February 13, 2005
Culture
She’s movin’ on up
Rachel Stevens is absolutely, 100 per cent going places — and her new album’s a real belter, says Dan Cairnsentertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14932-1480090,00.html
As Bowie put it, in his 1983 hit Modern Love, “I know when to go out/And when to stay in” — and, in interviews, Rachel Stevens has this down pat. The 26-year-old former S Clubber and latter-day chart-pop princess ekes out her candour with care. Her favourite expressions are “100%” and “absolutely” — affirmative, yes, but also more a means of shutting down a line of inquiry than encouraging its advance. So you learn to watch her eyes, which brim with tears surprisingly often for an old pro who has been schooled in the promotional game since the tender age of 16. And you listen for her pauses: voluminous conversational gaps, heralded by a long, resonant “um”, which invariably occur at points where the singer’s instinct for discretion comes up against her need to offload, after years of keeping shtoom.
If Stevens is uncomfortable with attempts to pin her down and contextualise her, so, too, are we. Chart pop is currently the genre above all others where real experimentation and risk-taking are occurring, and Kylie is the international exemplar of this trend. But Stevens, to judge by the tracks she has recorded for her new album, is about to give the Australian a serious run for her money, even if, critically, both are destined to go on being damned with faint praise. As Mark Edwards argued in these pages last week, popular music has had to cope not only with the Beatles’ musical legacy, but with their revolutionary impact on the whole concept of creativity. Pre-Fab Four, the singers we bought and adored were mostly interpretative artists, working with the best songwriters, arrangers and producers of the day.
We rarely, then, judged a star by the volume of bitter tears they had shed over their lyric sheets. Yet Kylie, Christina and Britney are now merely pop popsies or camp icons, or both. And here’s Stevens, who has sung on three of the greatest singles released in the past five years — S Club 7’s Don’t Stop Movin’ and last year’s solo efforts, Sweet Dreams My LA Ex and Some Girls — and the world bangs on about her love life, her latest lad-mag cover shoot or her poll- topping appearance in a list of Britain’s sexiest women.
She connives in this, undoubtedly. Yet those great, yawning pauses seem to indicate that she balks at it, too.
“I think we ended up conforming to what people’s per- ceptions were,” she says about the dying days of S Club. “This one was the ditzy one, this one was the singer, this one was the dancer. And to come out of that and be a whole person has been a real challenge for me. I didn’t have my say, really, in the group. None of us did.”
She was spotted at 16, when, as an impoverished fashion student, she went to the record-company canteen where her brother worked to cadge a meal. Two producers approached the diminutive teen and asked if she could sing. “And I said ‘Yes’,” she laughs, “‘I’m a singer.’ And I wasn’t. I was never, like, lead in the school plays, I wasn’t from a drama-school background, I’d never been in a recording studio.”
The band was put together by Simon Fuller, flush with Spice Girls riches and searching for something altogether more malleable. In five years, Stevens and her colleagues sold more than 16m records (so the revelation that they had reportedly each earned a relatively modest £100,000 per year raised a few eyebrows). Puppet on a shoestring she may have been, but when S Club split up, Stevens chose to sign a solo contract with the same management and label. She took just one week’s holiday. And LA Ex, her first solo single, zoomed into the charts at No 2. Happy? “Absolutely, 100%,” says Stevens. But does she still think the speed with which she hurled herself from one career opportunity to another was good for her? “No, probably not,” she reflects. “Um... no. I think it’s more of a control thing, actually. I’m a control freak. I want to be in control of everything I’m doing.” She admits she beats herself up all the time, and you can’t help but conclude that this is one of the reasons she sticks like a limpet to schedules, for fear of what might happen for lack of them. “S Club was just constant,” she says. “I even think, to some extent, I missed out on some social growing as well. I’m 26, and I still find myself in situations where I feel I should know about things. In every part of my life.”
Deeper digging reveals a risky blurring of Stevens’s professional ambitions and personal development, and how the former sometimes dictate the way she measures the latter. “What makes me frustrated is breaking down those barriers I’ve put up, to just be myself and totally let go. People expect you just to be nice.” Later, she says, almost resignedly: “At the end of the day, I am a performer. I have to go out there and perform. I have a support system.
And my life is how my life is.” In six years of performing, Stevens has taken precisely two months off. When the title track on her debut album, Funky Dory, was released as her second single, it flopped. “I was absolutely gutted,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh my God.’”
But the cavalry arrived in the shape of the maverick pop producer Richard X and his song Some Girls, which returned Stevens to the Top 5 last summer. If Funky Dory the album was, in hindsight, too rushed a project to be coherent, Stevens and her management seem to be applying the lesson to its successor, which is stuffed with potential hits. Xenomania — responsible for last year’s superb Girls Aloud single The Show — is on board, as are the former Mud guitarist Rob Davis (Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head), Richard X and writers responsible for hits by the likes of Sugababes, Dido, Madonna and Jamelia. Stevens herself is now lending a hand. The first single, Negotiate with Love, is a bizarre mash-up between Kraftwerk and the theme from Rawhide that will satisfy those who like a tune you can whistle — and those who prefer to take their popular culture surreptitiously, contained within the intellectual inverted commas of irony.
Stevens isn’t too sure about the second constituency. When I describe another new track, I Said Never Again — an absolute belter that harks back to the golden glam days of the Sweet and Suzi Quatro — as manipulative and brutal, and say that it made me feel used, she quite rightly pokes fun at my need to deconstruct it. “Did you?” she teases. “What, filthy, dirty?” Then she mocks the notion that her music isn’t valid “unless it has been written by me and I play every single note”. What, she asks, about “the people that get up at their auntie’s wedding and dance to Don’t Stop Movin’ and have a brilliant time?”.
She has a point. Get too hung up on qualitative cultural definitions and we end up unable to see the unimpeachable three-minute pop gems for the angst-ridden, Church of Me indie wailings. Thus, if our foot taps to LA Ex — or, as it surely will, to Never Again and Negotiate with Love — it does so involuntarily, jerked into life by an impulse for quick thrills and unthinking, populist rabble-rousing. Any pleasure it gives us has to be a guilty one. What a mess we’re in.
“We really are, aren’t we?” Stevens laughs.
What also gets lost is the fact that Stevens is, like Kylie, but like, too, many of the leading singers from the period before Lennon and McCartney, a great artist: as in, someone who can “own” a song, project it to the gods and define it thereafter. She doesn’t, mercifully, suffer from that dread stage-school habit of note-perfect delivery bled of any but second-hand emotion (what she herself calls “eyes and teeth” singing). She may be taking things too fast — or, rather, not slowly enough — but she has been that way since 16, when, just after her parents divorced, she was swallowed whole by the S Club machine.
“That was really hard,” she says, barely audibly. “Why would this happen? We were a very tight family, then all of a sudden, it fell apart. Nobody explains it. And you store it all in your own head, and then it gets really bad.” What has happened to those feelings? “Um ... I’m still coming to terms with that, really. I went through a real chunk of my life just saying, ‘I’m fine’ — everything on the surface was ‘fine’. You build up these barricades, and to knock them down is the hardest thing. But nobody else can do that for me. I’m the one who has to.”
Again, there’s the blurring of personal and professional.
Is she learning when to go out, then, and when to stay in; to express herself more freely and take the occasional week off? “That is something that I know is an issue with me,” she whispers. I ask her how she’d hate to see her- self described in five years’ time — after, she predicts, many more career “ups and downs” — and what she’d be happy to read.
“I would feel really uncomfortable to be described as Rachel Stevens, nice, sweet, occasionally released a good pop track,” she says. And then, pell-mell: “I would like to be described as an artist in my own right and I make great albums and I’m a great performer and people like coming to see me and like to play my music.” So, Glastonbury in 2007? No pause this time. “Absolutely,” she says, “100%.”
The single Negotiate with Love is released on March 21 on 19/Polydor
