The Devil and Miss Jones
It has been almost 20 years since Grace Jones seemingly disappeared off the radar, like a planet falling out the sky. The woman who nicknamed herself the “Black Panther”, quietly rode out the 90s, laying in wait for her time to come again. It’s no coincidence then that the lead single on her new album, Hurricane, is titled Corporate Cannibal and has her booming lines like “I am a man, a man-eating machine” in that trademark deep, husky voice. Sound scary? It is. Just when you thought she was gone, the queen of reinvention is back to teach the 21st-century a lesson. Sarah Boothe writes.
Grace Jones, the model, actress, Bond girl, songstress, alcoholic, sex machine and muse to Andy Warhol, is fabulously crazy. “It must be some kind of schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder – I guess that’s what they call it these days – I just call it being me,” she says matter-of-factly. “I wore nothing to a party once. I was in Paris and I just wore teeth and bones from an animal around my neck. Then I sat next to a prime minister. It was great!” Undoubtedly one of the most iconic characters to emerge and survive New York’s equally infamous Studio 54, the Jamaican-American has suddenly teleported herself to the 21st-century, only to find it’s like she never left. At the age of 60, Jones recently played alongside acts such as Gang of Four and Fleet Foxes at the 2008 Meltdown Festival in London, where she had the audience eating out of her hand. Stalking the stage in a catsuit, the “Black Panther” occasionally launched herself into the crowd while belting out hits like her famous club anthem ‘Slave To The Rhythm’. In spite of such a long hiatus, she found her music had made its own way to a new generation of fans. “I didn’t plan it, but my catalogue keeps getting bigger and bigger,” says Jones. “People are sampling it or taking tracks from it and it has a bigger and bigger life on the internet.”
As if to confirm that she is well and truly back from obscurity, Emanuel Ungaro chose to headline his recent summer 09 show in Paris with Jones’ new track ‘This Is’. Furthermore, she was named Q Magazine’s Icon of the Year. On accepting her award, Jones said, “I know I haven’t done any music for a long time [but] coming through the press line people were saying, ‘Grace, you’ve come back’! Only Lazarus came back. He was dead. I’m not dead. I’ve just been on holiday underground.” While on “holiday”, her larger than life presence influenced everyone from artists Róisín Murphy and Massive Attack to Brooklyn pop sensation Santogold.
Fashion-wise Jones is still incredible, with a body made for Issey Miyake and a head for Philip Treacy, whose designs she is rarely seen without. This innate sense of style undoubtedly captured the imagination of Andy Warhol, who photographed her extensively during the late 70s. In typical independent Jones style, she will always say she and Warhol were “collaborators”, but like many who came into contact with her, he was obsessed. From the moment she stalked into Paris half naked to pursue a career in modelling, she had people’s attention.
The 70s saw Jones become a huge hit with New York’s gay community, who branded her the queen of gay disco after producing hits such as ‘I Need A Man’ and ‘La Vie en Rose’. As the anti-disco swing of the 80s approached, she jumped aboard the experimental new wave train and released albums Warm Leatherette (1980) and Nightclubbing (1981) to great acclaim. Nightclubbing’s fabulous album cover shot relaunched her image as the severe, androgynous, flat-topped and terrifying Grace Jones, for which she is famous today. “I’m not scary though,” counters Jones. “The people who really know me know I’m not scary. I’m good at pretending to be very scary.”
Such is the theatre of Miss Jones – clearly an exceptionally talented and creative woman who has managed to re-enter the music market two decades later and succeed where her contemporaries have failed. “I think it’s because I don’t try to keep up,” she explains. “If you don’t try to keep up, you don’t sound like you’re trying to keep up, which would be wrong. You just sound like yourself, which should sound like the moment … I see into the future. I see myself in the future. It’s like I’m throwing myself to grab something that I can sense is ahead of me.”
In spite of this valuable sixth sense, her 10th studio album, Hurricane, is a return to the Grace Jones of the 80s, with the help of some noticeable guests. The co-writers of her 1981 hit ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare feature, along with Massive Attack’s Tricky and the “grandfather of ambient music”, Brian Eno. Harking back to her roots, legendary Jamaican musicians Uzziah “Sticky” Thompson and Mikey Chung provide percussion, while her mother Marjorie Williams and son Paulo Goude (by French art director Jean-Paul Goude) perform special vocal accompaniments. “I realised music is the key,” says Jones, “because it’s still the one central thing. I can go out and sing without a new record, but with a new record I love, I can go out and actually not be afraid to do interviews and become a part of things that are happening, because I know what I have done is strong and powerful [and that] I belong in the way I want to.”
Hurricane is out now through Wall of Sound records
www.thehurricaneiscoming.com
Photography by Lawrence Watson