FKA twig Elle US August 2016 Interview (text)
WHO’S THAT GIRL?
ELLE Magazine
BY LIZZY GOODMAN · Aug 2016
She’s got the cred, the look, the buzz—and a mystique that hints at a legend in the making. Inside the highly curated world of musician-on-the-brink FKA TWIGS
It’s a cartoonishly perfect late-spring morning in New York City. The air is warm, and the skyline looks like a cutout superimposed on a giant blue canvas. Inside the Crosby Bar in SoHo, a restaurant where the bathrooms are like spas and the lavender matchbooks like little jewel boxes, you can feel the beating heart of the city’s postwinter promise—at least as it exists for a certain kind of clientele. At the table behind me, Claire Underwood clones in expensive neutrals discuss plans to pitch Nike a “branding sync.” To my right, a power blonde in head-to-toe Stella McCartney workout gear tap-tap-taps her nails on a series of Apple devices, and across the room, Diane Keaton, in her signature black fingerless gloves, finishes up breakfast. As Keaton rises to leave, another woman walks in. She’s incredibly slight, with a melancholy, wide-eyed beauty, wearing an oversize motorcycle jacket with bell-bottoms, her hair pulled into two mini Princess Leia buns.
This is FKA twigs. And though establishment types (or most people older than 30, for that matter) are unlikely to have a clue who she is—that is, unless they know her as the arty, aloof-seeming girl dating teen-idol vampire and eternal clickbait Robert Pattinson—the music world certainly does. And many in that group think that the enigmatic 28-year-old British singer/songwriter/dancer/producer just might be the next Björk—even the next Prince.
FKA twigs has three rapturously reviewed EPs and one full-length album to her name. Her two most recent releases—2014’s LP1 and last year’s EP, M3LL155X (pronounced “Melissa”)—both reached number one on the iTunes Electronic chart. She has played everywhere from L.A.’s Regent Theater to London’s Roundhouse and sold out every one of her New York City shows, including three nights last summer at the Brooklyn Hangar, where she performed her high-concept dance/music/theater piece, Congregata (Latin for “coming together”). This July, FKA twigs is scheduled to headline both New York’s Panorama festival and Chicago’s Pitchfork festival.
And recently, she’s crept into the mainstream. That was her performing in bondage garb in the fall of 2014, making Jimmy Fallon blush and stammer, “Oh, man! Oh my goodness! I’ve never seen anything like that before.” That night, her American television debut, she turned the Tonight Show stage decidedly NSFW, singing the slinky, vulnerably erotic R&B jam “Two Weeks” (sample lyric: “My thighs are apart for when you’re ready to breathe in”) from LP1, the same track that then appeared last year in a pivotal scene in the cult-hit TV show Mr. Robot. You might also recognize her from a series of unusually avant-garde ads for Google Glass and Calvin Klein’s #mycalvins campaign. Though, then again, maybe not; she’s downright Cindy Sherman–esque in her ability to inhabit distinct characters, from vogueing power nerd (Google Glass) to enraptured lover (Calvin Klein), while remaining unequivocally herself. Or perhaps you caught her back on Fallon in February, performing her new single, the less sexual but no less riveting ballad “Good to Love,” which may or may not be part of a new album that she may or may not release this year. You see, FKA twigs puts her work into the world without warning, adheres to no strict promotional or tour schedule, and won’t discuss any project until it’s completely finished. “People talk too much,” she says, shrugging. “Everyone’s always chatting and not delivering. I’m the opposite. I like to just deliver.”
The clamor around FKA twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, is in part about her sound, which blends the industrial carnality of Nine Inch Nails, the witchy weirdness of Kate Bush, and the primal throb of trip-hop gods like Massive Attack and Portishead. But that sound is really just a portal into the larger aesthetic universe she inhabits, which includes everything from the informed inclusivity of her look (lined lips, baby-hair curls, septum ring) to the provocative, often grotesque themes explored in her videos and album art (domination, body dysmorphia) to her mystical, metaphysical outlook on life. FKA twigs is a true auteur. “She’s a powerhouse,” says Ryan Heffington, the choreographer behind Sia’s “Chandelier,” who has worked with FKA twigs on numerous projects. “She just has so much inside of her; it’s impossible to call her just a performer or a singer.”
She’s managed to become a singular powerhouse by almost completely sidestepping the standard path to fame. Kendrick opened for Kanye. Grimes toured with Lana Del Rey. And Prince—with whom she performed at Paisley Park weeks before he died—opened for the Rolling Stones before he broke through. But FKA twigs has built her audience entirely on her own by cranking out videos and tracks, and letting the Internet buzz machine do the rest. She works only with a group of highly esteemed intimates, including producers Dev Hynes (Solange, Carly Rae Jepsen) and Paul Epworth (Adele) and video directors Paula Harrowing and Nabil Elderkin.
With her rigorous commitment to authenticity and diffident individualism, FKA twigs is perfectly positioned to become a Generation Y star. Even her personal background—a mixed-race dance phenom raised in rural England who forged her musical identity in gritty East London—fits the millennial profile in its post-race, post-class, post-genre multiculturalism. And though she’s skeptical about social media (she rarely tweets and only occasionally Instagrams), her fans are taking it upon themselves to fill in the gaps. There’s even a Twitter account devoted to the singer’s baby-hair curls (@twigsBabyHair); FKA twigs, who’s of Jamaican and Spanish heritage and has, like many black women, been wearing the style for years, is often cited as the muse behind Katy Perry’s controversial appropriation of the look. When Paper put her on the cover last fall, the headline read: “The Future Is Here, and It’s FKA twigs.”
Three minutes into our meal at the Crosby, FKA twigs looks around the elegant room and says, “Do you want to get out of here? It’s just so formal.” She lives in London and doesn’t know New York all that well, but she does have a favorite breakfast spot, so we head to the Egg Shop in Nolita.
FKA twigs grew up as the only child of a salsa-dance teacher mother and a musician father. She didn’t know her dad when she was a kid (though they’ve recently reconnected) and was raised instead by the proverbial village. “My mum, my stepdad, and then drama teachers, ballet teachers, my mum’s friends,” she says, laundry-listing the adults who helped shape her. “I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a lot of different figures bringing me up.” Her mother settled in Gloucestershire, in southwest England, in search of a simple, serene life. And to a certain extent, the family found it there, surrounded by pigs and sheep and rolling green hills. They were also surrounded by white people. “I was the only mixed-race girl at my school,” FKA twigs tells me after ordering green tea and two poached eggs with spiced lentils. Though she was a scholarship student (she attended a private Catholic high school) in Britain’s famously class-bound education system, it wasn’t the color of her skin or the fact that money was often very tight (“We had times where there was food in the fridge, times where there was no food in the fridge”) that made her an outsider. Her isolation, she says, is more of an existential condition, a state of being, than the result of circumstance—and it’s what, she says, propels her to make her art. “I do feel lonely,” she says. “Not in terms of company. My mom always made sure I had friends around. She always made sure I was socialized properly, like a puppy.” She laughs. “I feel lonely in a much bigger sense of the word, which I don’t even really understand myself. It’s more that I feel alone, which is different. I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be here, and I have to remind myself that I chose to be here. I believe that every single person, every single soul and spirit, has chosen to be here.”
Barnett—who acquired the nickname “twigs” because her joints would crack when she danced, and who added the “FKA” to distinguish herself from an American band named Twigs—always possessed a fierce drive to work. “I heard this quote by Genesis P-Orridge that goes, ‘Some people feel like a man trapped inside a woman’s body. Some people feel like a woman trapped inside a man’s body. We just feel trapped in a body,’ ” she says. “I’m the last one. When I make things, it makes me feel the most not stuck inside a vessel. It makes me feel bigger than my skin or my bones.” Dance was her initial gateway to that kind of transcendence; she calls it “lifting the veil” between this mortal world and “everything we don’t know.” Throughout high school, Barnett trained in ballet and other styles of dance for four hours a day. “I sacrificed a lot,” she says. “Maybe if I hadn’t danced so much, I would have been on the athletics team at school, and then maybe if I was on the athletics team I’d be one of those sporty girls, and then maybe if I was a sporty girl I would have been more popular and more boys would have liked me.”
The moment she got out of her small town, things changed on the boy front, as well as just about everywhere else. Literally the first night she and her mom spent in London, where they moved when the singer was 17 and where she attended dance school, “this really cute mixed-race boy” asked for her number. She remembers sitting in the car in East Croydon, waiting for her mom to grab some takeout from the chicken shop. Though she’d been strictly instructed to keep the doors locked in the scary big city, when he knocked on the window, she rolled it down a sliver so he could pass her his “shitty little Nokia,” she recalls, giggling. “From that moment on I was like, I’m going to be fine.”
Except that her biggest dream was falling apart. After 10 years of striving for a career as a professional dancer, she was suddenly consumed by uncertainty, and a week into dance school, she decided to drop out. “I hated it,” she says. “I’d really romanticized the idea and I tried really hard, but it just wasn’t for me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I had, like, a massive crisis.” For a while, she embraced her aimlessness, studying a mix of sociology, psychology, fine art, and philosophy at Croydon College in London and working a series of jobs to pay her bills. She was a perfume girl at Selfridges department store (“Hello, madam, would you like to try the new Armani fragrance?” she recites brightly, her hands instinctually cradling a nonexistent bottle) and a barmaid at Tiger Tiger, a chain of comically cheesy nightclubs. But in between, she found herself writing songs and, eventually, producing tracks at home on her laptop. “I always write down feelings,” she says, “and then I love making sounds. Sometimes the sound will remind me of a feeling, and I’ll make that drum or synth sound even more like the feeling. And then the song comes together. It blooms.” What she realized during those early years in London was that her love for dancing had always been mostly about the music. “It was about how my body could be led to the music,” she says. With that cleared up, “I found myself again.”
While working with longtime collaborator Tic on what would become the self-funded, self-produced four tracks for her debut EP, FKA twigs was establishing herself, without exactly meaning to, as a professional dancer. That’s her mugging in Jessie J’s 2010 video for “Do It Like a Dude,” and in Ed Sheeran’s 2011 “You Need Me but I Don’t Need You.” “She could do it,” Heffington says of those fly-girl years. “But she’s too individual to be a part of the chorus.” By December 2012, she had self-released EP1 via Bandcamp, and by September 2013, she’d signed to Young Turks, a subsidiary of powerful British indie label XL Recordings (Adele, Vampire Weekend).
When you ask FKA twigs about her influences, she talks about people like Josephine Baker, David Bowie, and, yes, Prince, citing a kinship in what drove them as artists: to get outside their own minds and reach into the unknowable. Barnett says she feels like an island in her industry. “I rely on myself for inspiration,” she says. After the first performance of Congregata, her stylist found her in her dressing room sobbing. “I was like, Everyone is clapping and I just realized it’s not real,” she remembers. “My stylist is like, Oh, dear, you’ve lost your little mind, and I’m like, No! I’m more in my mind than I’ve ever been!” For Barnett, as soon as the show ended, the magic was unplugged. “For some artists, that clapping is the most real bit, but that’s when I feel most alone.” FKA twigs also refuses to use the word fan. To her, it feels “derogative,” so she opts instead to call them “people who like my music” or “people interested in me as an artist.” “They don’t influence what I make,” she says, “but they have a role in us all coming together and creating something genuine.”
By late afternoon, we’re the only ones left in the Egg Shop, and the staff is politely removing empty water glasses from the table. We’ve talked about everything from Hindu mythology (FKA twigs has been channeling the goddess of empowerment, Kali, of late) to the stresses of aging in the modern world. A few weeks ago, she went for a facial and was cheerily told that she needed fillers. (For the record, she declined them.) But mostly, we’ve talked about fame and art in 2016. “Being in the public eye is so weird,” she says. “People want to shame you. It’s not a celebration of a talent.” She speaks wistfully about an era before social media, when Josephine Baker could dance on tables all night, then “go out for vegetables in her T-shirt” the next day and not have it all documented.
Of course, this is coming from a woman whose personal life is catnip. While Barnett resolutely declines to speak about her relationship with Pattinson, a quick Google search produces their story in detail. The couple were allegedly introduced by mutual friend Florence Welch; they began appearing in public together in 2014 and have been objects of paparazzi and fan obsession ever since. Aside from both speaking out against a flood of racist hate speech spewed at Barnett in the initial months of their relationship, the pair rarely so much as mention each other to the press.
Barnett is also beloved by the fashion world. She’s been dressed by Versace and Christopher Kane, and the costumes for Congregata featured pieces by Alexander McQueen. “FKA twigs is a highly creative individual, passionate and devoted to her craft,” says McQueen creative director Sarah Burton. “She is a truly unique performer with an independent and strong sense of identity and style. I love that she goes against the grain and finds her own way to express herself.” Artist Matthew Stone, a frequent collaborator of FKA twigs’, adds, “She’s part of that old-school tradition of music influencing fashion.”
A few days after our breakfast-turned-lunch, at a grimy but well-lit Midtown dance studio packed with dancers and singers, FKA twigs rehearses for an upcoming project. It’s a short, dynamic performance starring her and a male dancer, and, of course, she can’t tell me anything about it. But when I arrive, she greets me, in her army-green half shirt and low-slung dance tights, with a big hug, a genuine smile, and an apology for being sweaty. After running through the steps again, she collapses, breathless, into a folding chair next to me. When she finds out I had a date the previous night, she’s ecstatic. “Did you kiss him?” I nod. “Did you do more than kiss him? Did you do rudies with him?!”—South Londonese for everything but sex—“Oh my God, you did!” she squeals. “You’re going all red!” The thing that gets missed most about FKA twigs in the press is that she’s a lot of fun. She is preternaturally self-possessed and, clearly, exacting in her work, but she’s not combative, abrasive, or, God forbid, a brat. She’s just sure of herself. And that frees her up to be unusually present, which makes her really good company.
After rehearsal, we head downstairs. Behind the elevator bay, near the in-house snack bar, hangs a bunch of swag with the studio logo for sale. “I grew up in places like this,” she says, gesturing to the hoodies on the wall. “And I’d be like, Mum, can I have one, puhleeze!” We head out for Barnett to catch her Uber back to Brooklyn, where she’s staying while in New York. As we wait, up bounds a young woman in workout gear, carrying a stack of schoolbooks, her mouth full of rubber-banded braces. “Oh my God, are you FKA twigs?!” she asks excitedly. Barnett smiles and nods. “Can I give you a hug? I love you. You are sooo beautiful.”
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