FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Natalie Imbruglia

FEATURE:

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Rankin

Natalie Imbruglia

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I am going to come to…

some new interviews with the amazing and awe-inspiring Natalie Imbruglia. I have a very special relationship with her music. I have been a fan since the 1990s. One of my favourite albums from the decade is her debut, Left of the Middle (1997). She has a new album coming out soon. Algorithm will be released on 4th September. That is one I will definitely be getting. You can pre-order it here. She has U.K. dates this and next month before flying to her native Australia. I would love to see her live, as I have been a fan for decades and love everything she puts out. I am going to come to a 2022 interview before bringing things right up to date. Imbruglia released her album, Firebird, in 2021. It was seen as a sort of a return, even though she had gone nowhere and was active. It came six years after Male. Algorithm comes five years after her current album. This is an artist who puts everything into her music. Arguably, she is at her strongest and most confident now. I do want to head back to 2022 and the twenty-fifth anniversary of her best-known song, Torn. The Forty-Five spoke with Natalie Imbruglia for this fantastic interview:

“It’s been 25 years since ‘Left of The Middle’. Can you remember what your hopes for the album were before you released it?

There’s only a first time once. What was beautiful, was that the world was my oyster. I felt so privileged to have a record deal. Everything was ahead of me. And although yes, I’d been on Neighbours and there was the fear of being another person doing music from a soap. But there was this incredible confidence and joy. People talk about manifesting, it was easier to do it because you had no experience of living up to a previous album. I thought: I can be anything, I could do anything. And I was a sponge, everyone I wrote with was teaching me something I had the opportunity to work with Mark Goldenberg – I loved his work with Eels. And, you know, there was Gwen Stefani and Alanis Morissette and I was like, ‘Oh my God, these chicks are so cool!’ And so it was actually really wonderful. You can’t get that back because you know too much. And so, yeah, fond memories.

I was at the recent Olivia Rodrigo show where you popped up to perform ‘Torn’ with her. It must be cool to be influencing this new gen of artists?

It was very flattering to be asked. Olivia’s a good person. It makes me happy that young girls have people like that to look up to. You could see the respect that we both had for each other. We were literally singing to each other and didn’t want to look at the audience because I was giving props to her, and she was giving props to me. It was so lovely.

Was there anyone you looked up to, that offered you support when you were coming up?

Not on the daily, but the person that springs to mind is Tori Amos. I remember meeting her in the bathroom at her show and giving her a rose quartz crystal and having beautiful conversations with her. She was someone I looked up to immensely, who also seemed to have a quirky spiritual energy – she was into crystals and stuff like me.

I would also say Kylie. I grew up watching her on on Neighbours, and wanting to do what she did and obviously followed in her footsteps. She’s always been incredibly supportive, and gracious, and kind. And even now, when my album came out, she sent me a little message. So definitely, Kylie.

I was watching an old interview with you on TFI Friday where Chris Evans keeps referencing the fact that you wouldn’t date him. Was this sort of thing just par for the course or did it make you anxious doing interviews back then?

I want to give props to Chris. He got me on the show because what had happened was he’d started the whole ‘Natalie didn’t write ‘Torn” thing on the radio. And it was interesting timing because I had just shut him down for a dinner date. Anyway, me being the feisty Aussie that I am, I saw him in a pub and I went up to him and got in his face and was like, ‘You owe me an apology’. He looked terrified and I was like, ‘Do you realise what you did?’ So he gave the most genuine, look-me-in-the-eye apology, and then got me on the show and tried to correct that. So knowing what I’ve just told you, it’s actually a very sweet thing that he did, because he kind of owned it and was trying to repair that damage. But 100% you’re right. Recently, I had to look back through some old press articles – and we can’t put all of this on Chris, this is an industry that certain things were a given – but it’s quite shocking now to look back at some of those old articles. I was made of pretty tough stuff, I just took it on the chin but I think what you see in that ‘Torn’ video is someone taking ownership after being exploited in numerous situations and going ‘I don’t need to show my body. I’m gonna draw a line in the sand’. There were numerous occasions I was called difficult because of that, because I wouldn’t wear a dress. I wanted to cover up and it didn’t go down well.

People like Billie Eilish have taken a similar stance – covering up because they don’t want their body to be a talking point

She’s able to do it – I got called difficult – but evolution is a great thing. They’ve also got to do deal with social media and things that I didn’t have to so it’s all relative. For the things that we’ve corrected, there’s a whole new wave of other shit that teenagers have to deal with for mental health. I was the right person for it to happen to because I’m very strong. And I was able to say no, and I didn’t really care if people called me difficult.

And now young artists like Beabadoobee are citing you as a style icon.

Listen, if you stick around long enough, you come back in flavour. I’m just like, yes! The 90s are trending right when I need them to be! This is amazing! The truth of it is just that I just wanted to be comfortable. And I wanted to wear my own clothes. I think I was also going through curiosity about my sexuality, which is more evident to me now when I look at myself back then. That exploration was a period of time that I had to go through very privately – another thing that people can go through a lot more openly now. Yeah, there’s lots of things going on there. But for people to say I’m this style icon, it’s just so amazing and cute to me. I was wearing the daggiest army pants, they weren’t event a cool brand. I think that T-shirt’s a cheap Portobello Market print shirt. The cool part was probably from a stylist, which was the Maharishi jacket because they were all the rage. And eventually I ordered Maharishi trousers”.

Let’s move things to this year. Algorithm is going to be a wonderful album from this music queen. Someone who has been releasing brilliant material for almost thirty years now. And yet the quality does not dip! It is great that Natalie Imbruglia clearly had a load of fun making this album. As we learn from this Rolling Stone Australia article, this is her at her most relaxed and free I feel:

“The record, titled, Algorithm, will arrive on September 4th.

“On this record I chose to work with collaborators who also co-produce, so from start to finish we were all so invested in every song,” Imbruglia says. “I really hope that people get as much joy from listening to this record as we did making it. And that they dance their arses off.

“This was by far the most fun I’ve ever had making a record. It also happened to coincide with the most challenging time I’ve had with my mental health. This is the beauty of music and artistic expression. You can take something dark and turn it into light”.

I will end with a recent interview with The Times, as there are some interesting things from that chat to discuss. However, The Guardian fired some reader questions at Natalie Imbruglia for their feature. It is a more light and quick-fire thing, but there are some cool answers that reveal different sides and facets to Imbruglia:

“Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Alanis Morissette because, in my earlier career, she was a big influence on me and had a feistiness that you didn’t see much of in women in the industry. Also, she has been very vocal about mental health issues.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Not having the ability to say sorry when they’re wrong.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
Forgetting the words to my own songs on stage. I’m a very good mumbler of my own songs. You’d be surprised how few people notice – if you smile and do it confidently, they’re none the wiser.

What keeps you awake at night?
I worry a lot about how to juggle being a single parent and working – scheduling keeps me up at night!

What would your superpower be?
I’d clone myself so I could work and be with my son at the same time.

What makes you unhappy?
Living in England when there are too many grey days in a row.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
A hairdresser through the week and a star on the weekends.

What was the last lie that you told?
It was to do with Santa Claus around Christmastime.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
Junk food – Haribos, Wotsits”.

I do want to end with this interview from The Times. There is discussion around her debut single, Torn, and misogyny that was around in the 1990s. How it must have been a challenge for a young woman coming through in that decade. Now, Imbruglia lives this quieter and more peaceful life and is making some of the best music of her career, without all that toxicity that came when she started out. Though there is still a lot of ageism in music, especially when it comes to festival bookings and women over forty and what stations their music appears on:

“It’s such a blessing,” Imbruglia says of the mega-hit single that reached a billion streams on Spotify last year. “I don’t even know how to put into words the gifts of that song landing. I still feel so connected to it. It changed my life.”

Torn was released in 1997 to worldwide success, topping the US Billboard chart for 11 weeks in 1998. As a teenager in that decade, if you hadn’t been “all out of faith” and “lying naked on the floor”, were you even a teenager at all?

She made the album during a challenging period for her mental health, and while the melodies are upbeat, the lyrics are darker. The lead single, Upside Down, which was released in April, is about finding herself unable to “power through” any more. “What you resist persists,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of spiritual work in my life, a lot of meditation study, and I have learnt that anything you have resistance to, it’s like a tsunami coming at you.”

As was perimenopause, which she hit five years ago and her experience of which has powered the lyrics of several tracks. “Let’s just say it was a grieving process. I was really angry. I fell off a cliff. It felt like someone had taken some of my personality. I’d talk about it and people would try to hush me. Now I’m very outspoken. Thank God for Davina McCall — I bumped into her in a restaurant at the time. I was like, ‘Tell me everything!’ It’s really important that we speak up and stop going, ‘Oh, I just breezed through it.’ How is that helping anyone? Beware, women, if you start saying, ‘I just don’t feel like myself.’ I said that for a year before I addressed anything.”

Her main symptoms were anxiety and anger. “I probably hurt a lot of people that I wish I hadn’t, but until you have the tools and the HRT cream… HRT worked, absolutely. But how wonderful that this is not a shameful topic or a taboo subject. Imagine how it was for our mothers.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Amar Daved

Rather than worrying about revealing too much on the album, she found the experience of making it cathartic. Her debut album, Left of the Middle (1997), sold more than seven million copies worldwide and the pressure to equal it was immense. Eventually that led to a harrowing period of writer’s block. “The best thing that has happened for my songwriting is having writer’s block for five years,” she says. “I got dropped by a label, had a nervous breakdown and was convinced the universe was telling me I shouldn’t be doing this. Not pretty. So I tried to go to LA and be an actress [she starred in Johnny English with Rowan Atkinson in 2003], and that was worse. Epic fail.”

Scarred by her experiences, she was adamant that Algorithm be self-funded and so set up her own label, Landgirl Records, to release it. “I was asking my son what he learnt at school that day and he taught me all about land girls,” she says, explaining the name.

History having revealed the extent to which many female stars were treated badly in the Nineties, I ask how the decade was for her. Was it horrifically sexist? “It was definitely sexist, but I certainly don’t want the tone of this to come across as me being a victim.” She recalls being careful in interviews, knowing that, as a woman, a funny or ironic comment might be twisted. “I was quite feisty and funny but I had to suppress that. So I was very vanilla. Maybe that got me a reputation for being a bit of a diva because I wasn’t revealing of myself. So then a story gets made up about you and how you are.”

It’s sad to learn that she was censoring herself, but unsurprising that she refuses to play the victim. Even at 22, Imbruglia seemed like a woman who knew her own mind. Indeed, if the lyrics of Torn are burnt into the memory, so too is the video, produced during an era when lads’ mags were at their peak and female celebrities were highly sexualised, and featuring Imbruglia dressed like she was off to the small Tesco to pick up a pint of milk, wearing combat trousers, a washed-out T-shirt and a hoodie. With her short hair and face devoid of make-up, she looked like the tomboy next door.

Today she lives quietly in Oxfordshire. “On a farm. In the middle of nowhere,” she says with a grin. “I’m not in the London scene any more. It’s great!” As is being 51. “It’s easier for me, being an older woman. Maybe that’s the opposite to how a lot of women feel, but when you’re given a hard time about the way you look — bitchiness, jealousy — it can be used against you. I used to get asked by journalists if I thought I got here because of the way I look, and I wasn’t allowed to be angry. I had to cleverly answer the question. They don’t give you as hard a time when you get older. I’m actually more comfortable in my skin at this age and haven’t had much problem with getting a wrinkle here and there. It doesn’t bother me. I like this age. I like the wisdom that comes with it”.

I have so much love and respect for Natalie Imbruglia. This amazing and powerful woman who has had this varied and successful career, I am really looking forward to seeing what Algorithm offers! The singles released from it so far are up there with the best stuff she has ever done. Aside from some festival appearances, it would be great if there were any gigs later in the year. Maybe a London date would be awesome, as this is someone I would really love to see live. There is no doubt that Natalie Imbruglia is one of the all-time best artists and has maintained this awesome career. Arguably hitting a new peak right now, I wanted to spend some time showing my appreciation…