A leap of faith

On first impressions, she’s a flame-haired kook with more outfits than sense, but whether she’s holding her own against Noel Fielding on Never Mind The Buzzcocks or bouncing around Glasto strapped to two car-sized balloons, it’s clear that Paloma Faith is that rare type of woman – a brain who acts like a ditz. Only when it’s called for, mind.

“Yeah, I was around during the riots,” the Hackney girl hums down the phone line, “I was brought up in that borough, so I completely understand what triggered it.” It’s probably the most politically-charged question I can ask a girl who wears bunny ears and animal skulls, so I’m delighted to receive a sharp and insightful answer.
“I have an empathy for those young people,” she resumes, “but I think unfortunately those kids have let down the actual, original cause, which is actually a very valid one, the fact that the next generation have very little future due to our stupid right-wing government. Also in those areas, the police are very corrupt and they do ill-treat certain people. I’m not sure if, in that particular case, they were wrong or not, but I do know from my experience growing up there that people are just arrested because of their race.The police and those youths do not behave much differently to each other. Something needs to be done on both sides, otherwise potentially, we could have a bit of a war going on.”

From here on out, I give Paloma Faith, political commentator, a rest and direct all my questions at Paloma Faith, performer. I wonder what she’s up to, and am dutifully told that she’s spending the day doing “a million interviews”.
“It’s quite fun because you can’t see me!” she teases. “I could be wearing a chicken costume or something!”
I ask what she’s actually wearing, which immediately makes me sound like an unimaginative adult chat-line user.
“This is like a pervy sex call now!” she giggles. “I’m in the house all day, so nothing special.”
Faith’s next excuse to wear emerald is on September 22, when she’ll be returning to Irish shores for two shows to celebrate Arthur’s day.
“I’m more excited about the pub gig than the one in the Academy” she squeals, “because I started playing in pubs. I did it for years, so I feel a bit nostalgic about it. We’ll do it with my keyboard player and we’re pretty good at improvising, we can just wing it. It won’t be as set as the bigger gigs, so the audience can shout out a song and maybe I’ll do it!”

Her hit-and-miss debut album Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful? did little more than paint Faith as a flamboyant blend of Winehouse, Duffy and Gabriela Cilmi, but when it comes time to lift those curtains, the feisty 26 year-old has every other British neo-soulster beat. Taking into account costumes, props and sets, the latter which she designs herself, a Paloma show is unlike any other show on the international stage.
“I don’t really do it on purpose,” she chirps. “I suppose I just perform the way I perform. Is it really different?”
Well, you tell me. Last year, clad in a bejewelled yellow jumpsuit and a fruit basket turban, Paloma transformed Vicar Street into an outrageous Ziegfeld-esque wonderland, complete with harlequin stairs, glimmering props and a 15ft mirrored room divider. A couple of weeks later, Rihanna used two ginormous machine guns and a hot pink army tank (God only knows how she got them through customs...) to illustrate a point that nobody could quite grasp.
“I guess the difference between me and those people is that I come from an art background so I’m able to make sense of things. I think sometimes they just say, ‘Oh, on the song about sweets, we should bring loads of giant sweets on stage!’ and it’s not particularly individual.”

Clearly, someone’s seen Katy Perry’s California Dreams Tour.
“I’m trying to make something a bit more beautiful,” she concludes, “without losing the realness of the music.”
So no two-storey lollipops, then?
“Nah, I don’t have the budget for that!”
In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with a second album, which Paloma seems no more informed about than I am.
“It’s hard to tell where I am with it,” she whines, “record labels are really vague. I personally feel that I’m nearly finished writing, but I don’t really know. I can only do my bit. Release dates and all that stuff are controlled by the powers that be.”
“The powers that be” really rubbed the Londoner up the wrong way last year, when they released a remix of her single ‘New York’ featuring a cameo from Ghostface Killah.
“I thought it was really tacky,” she admits. “I thought it was a tacky thing to do, to get a rapper in on it who obviously didn’t even know what the song was about! The rap he did had nothing to do with the bloody song. I’m very angry about that particular remix. I think he’s brilliant, but he probably just did it for a good cheque, you know? And I think that was a bad move on the part of the label. They learned their lesson, though, because I told loads of journalists that I wasn’t happy with it! They didn’t expect me to do that!”

I’d imagine badmouthing her own tracks all over town has gotten her quite a few tellings off from label bosses...
“They try, but I’m not listening! Do what you like without my approval, but don’t expect me to lie for you, ‘cos I won’t!”
Luckily, Faith has slightly better things to say about her
debut LP.
“The first one was a good kind of practice run,” she hums, “but judging by how this next album does, it’ll determine how much freedom I have to do what I really want to do.”
Which is?
“Anything is possible.”
This is certainly not a view Miss Faith takes lightly. For
one thing, she’s already been in the studio with cult rapper
MF Doom.
“Yeah, I got him involved in something, but I don’t think it’s going to be on the album, it was like an experiment. We met in Atlanta years ago and we got on really well because we liked all the same books. We were talking like a couple of geeks in
a library!”
With Dublin still reeling from Prince’s dynamite performance at Malahide Castle, I have to ask how Faith got on when she was recruited for support duty on his European tour.
“It was just earth-shattering,” she tells me. “I can’t even explain. He came on stage to watch me and he invited me to every after-show thing. I sang with his band one of the jam nights. I was in his hotel room, I was getting career advice from him! Larry Graham, the bass player from Sly And The Family Stone was like, giving me moral support! It was mental. I never expected, coming from where I come from, to have ever been in that situation. “

Kicking it with His Royal Funkiness is nervewracking enough, but Faith says nothing will top the night Chaka Khan called her up on stage for a stab at the seminal ‘I’m Every Woman.’
“I don’t even know the bloody words!” she pains. “But she just called me on and I couldn’t say no because she’s like, the Queen of Soul and all that!”
Dear Lord. What’s a girl to do when she finds herself stumbling on the words to one of the most famous songs in
pop history?
“I sang the choruses and then sort of did a bit of ad lib around her. Literally, I didn’t enjoy it, that’s how obsessed with her I am. I came off stage and I just felt completely inadequate and inferior. And it’s completely unrecorded, I’ve looked for it on YouTube, can’t find it! But in my memory that is the most incredible moment of my career.”

Paloma Faith plays The Academy, Dublin on Arthur’s Day, September 22.