PINK Bits
February 19th 2007 14:49
In the gloom of her dressing room, Pink pops her neck and cracks her knuckles like a trucker. She is small and taut, like a neat, pretty bulldog, with black tracksuit pants, vest and glossy, cropped, black hair.
"I just had a cortisone shot and we took a picture of it!" she says, flourishing a polaroid of her derriere. She lights up the first of many Newports, wafting the smoke with her hand and apologising profusely.
Tonight Pink finds herself in Oslo, halfway through her tour. Yesterday was her day off, and she spent it snowboarding. She eases her leg up on to the coffee table.
"Ugh," she says. "Man, that hurts."
It's easy to be a little suspicious of Pink.
Into a music industry picket-fenced with central-casting cutesies such as Britney and Jessica Simpson, Pink is cast as the toughie, the commercially palatable tomboy.
Just another marketing device? It's hard to say. Today she appears the quintessential rebellious American teenager, part Darlene from Roseanne, part Rizzo from Grease.
She keeps her vocabulary stunted and her conversation is speckled with a hundred superfluous "likes" and "f---s".
She wasn't even in her teens when she started to go off the rails. She was born Alecia Moore in 1979 in Doylestown, near Philadelphia, and grew up in a house that was, she says, "like a war zone". Her parents divorced when she was eight.
"I remember when they told us, I was shocked and, y'know, we cried a lot, but as soon as my dad was gone I was like, 'Freedom!'" she says. "My dad was the strict one, so I was like, 'I can do whatever the f--- I want now!'"
She reels off a shopping list of teenage misdemeanours: "Started smokin', drinkin', cuttin' school, goin' to clubs, runnin' away ...
you name it, I did it. I was a f---in' terror."
Much of this time was documented in her second album, Missundaztood, on which, as she puts it, "I f---in' aired my laundry". Perhaps the album's most revealing track is Family Portrait, in which she sings: "I don't wanna have to split the holidays/I don't want two addresses/I don't want a stepbrother anyways/And I don't want my mum to have to change her last name."
One wonders how her family reacted to seeing their laundry aired so publicly.
"It was good for my family," she says. "My mom cried for, like, four days. But then all of a sudden she was like, 'I didn't know the divorce affected you so much.'
"And then I was like, 'It didn't. You did!' But it was good, y'know? I didn't want to brush it under the rug and move on. I wanted to know my parents and I wanted them to know me."
By 13, Pink was dancing in clubs, and before long was permitted to clamber up on stage once a week to sing one song. She sang R&B then, although her background encompassed a love of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Guns N' Roses and Mary J Blige.
"And Phantom of the Opera," she says. "Loved opera. I trained classically. I would do a rock opera for sure. I just started, kinda, writing one now.
"But it's just really hard, y'know? A lot of people have done it and really sucked ... and I don't wanna do a rock opera and have it suck."
Her belting vocals soon caught the attention of a record label scout.
"So then I started a group and we went to Atlanta and sang for [label boss] L.A. Reid and he signed us that day," she says in one breath.
What would she have done if she hadn't been spotted, if she hadn't gone to sing for L.A. Reid and stayed in Philadelphia?
"I wouldn't be in Philly," she says. "I was gonna get out of there, one way or another. My original plan was to get legally emancipated when I was 16, drop outta high school, hitchhike across country to California and sing on Venice Beach boardwalk until I got discovered."
She raises her chin and blows out a long, unflinching stream of smoke.
Her first album, Can't Take Me Home, went double platinum in the US and resulted in three top-10 singles. When she came to make her second album there was pressure for her to repeat the success by using the same formula.
Instead, she turned to Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes fame.
"I found her number in a book one day and I called her and I stalked her until she worked with me," says Pink. "Oh my God, her voice spoke to me like no other."
Together, they produced the decidedly rocky Missundaztood, which also swiftly and unexpectedly went double platinum. She claims she was relieved when her most recent album, Try This, did not initially sell so well, although the single Trouble did win a Grammy for best female rock vocal.
She lights up another Newport and gives me a guided tour of her tattoos.
"My first one was this one," she says as she indicates a mystical symbol on her arm.
"I got it when I was 12, it means good luck and happiness, and I got that in Philly. I had my tongue pierced there the next weekend. They didn't give a shit."
She shows me the words "Sir Corky Moore" on her other arm.
"This was my childhood dog, who died last year," she says. "We called him Sir. Out of respect." Around her wrist is a symbol meaning "what goes around comes around".
"I'm a big believer in karma," she says. "When I was about 15, I found my spirituality. I kinda found it on my own, on the floor of a club.
"But I always felt like there was a god or a goddess or whatever, like a higher power. I've always felt I had a guardian angel, so when I was 15 I got a guardian angel tattooed on my back."
Her butch image has inevitably prompted mutterings of lesbianism, rumours she fuelled by kissing Terminator 3 star Kristanna Loken on a nightclub dance floor last year.
"Ohhh, yeah," she says, "That was in Monte Carlo, and that's pretty much all I can say. Monte Carlo is a place like it does not belong on this earth. It turns you into a f---in' animal as soon as you get off that plane. It's just a bunch of people with way too much money and way too much free time.
"And I had a little too much to drink. It was just the sort of thing where, y'know, she tried to dominate me. We were dancin' and she kissed me. I wasn't gonna back down. F--- that. You may be taller, but I'm stronger."
Tonight, Pink's show incorporates blow-up dolls, nudity and a considerable amount of lap-dancing. Is she just trying to show she is still the most rebellious kid on the block? To prove she is still the anti-Britney?
"Yunno, it's a f---in' rock show," she says.
"I have a parental advisory sticker on my album, so, helloo?" A tickly laugh blows out of her mouth with the cigarette smoke. "This ain't the f---in' Mickey Mouse Club."
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