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Before any of her fans start shrieking — and, take my word for it, the shriek capacity of the Anastacia fan base is staggering — let me explain that this is only a video shoot; a glossy promo for one of the songs on her forthcoming album. It's a greatest-hits collection, but as is the way of things in the music business, riding on the back of the CD will be some new songs. One of them is the title track, Pieces of a Dream, and in this video interpretation, the star is marshalling her acting talents to play a woman who loses the plot. Leaves for the funny farm. Goes doolally — apparently as a consequence of unrequited love.
It's a powerful song — with music, as with everything else, Anastacia doesn't do limp, weedy or half-hearted — and as it is replayed endlessly during the long day's shoot, it begins to sound like a 21st-century Total Eclipse of the Heart.
For the role, the singer is being given a mad makeover in the best traditions of Hollywood. Stylists have frizzed out her long blonde hair and found her a weird white dress resembling a straitjacket, and now she is perched in a trailer having ragged, "bitten" extensions attached to her fingernails. "I'm telling you," she announces, "this'll look really like I've lost it. Like I really am in an insane asylum." Her dark brown eyes widen on her catlike face. "I think we should all end up in an insane asylum. I think everybody should." Her preeners, factotums and nail-extension operative all laugh. Anastacia is truly getting into character.
Insanity might be the next logical step for this resilient performer, whose life story contains as many hurdles as an Olympic hurdling event. Born Anastacia Newkirk in Chicago in 1973, she was brought up by her mother after her parents separated when she was a small child. She and her elder sister, Shawn, and her autistic brother, Brian, ended up with their mother, Diane, in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Diane was an actress and, as Anastacia recalls today, "At times we had a lot of money and at times we had nothing." The future pop idol wore glasses to correct her terrible eyesight from the age of seven, and as a teenager began to suffer from Crohn's disease, a vicious intestinal condition that she still has to keep in check.
She started out as a dancer, but ultimately her voice became her saving grace. An appearance on a 1998 MTV talent show led to a record deal, which led to a single in 2000, I'm Outta Love — a song that became a karaoke-bar classic as well as a European chart hit. Anastacia CDs started falling off the shelves (she has now shifted more than 20m worldwide) and fans — particularly women — started flocking to concert halls to watch this 5ft 3in amazon with the trademark dark glasses and bare midriff, and the voice of a black R&B singer. In fact, that avaricious consumer of soul music Sir Elton John, who became a fan and is now a great friend, was convinced she was Afro-American when he first heard her records. Then, just as everything is going swimmingly for her, here comes another hurdle, the big one. In early 2003, suffering from back trouble, the rather buxom Anastacia decides to have breast-reduction surgery. She has a routine pre-op mammogram, and something shows up. She has cancer.
In a way, she was fortunate: as with Kylie, it had been caught early. She had surgery and a course of radiotherapy — neither chemotherapy nor a mastectomy was deemed necessary. The experience was, of course, still a wrenching one for her, physically and emotionally. But in an interview the day before the video production, in a limo travelling from Manhattan to Brooklyn and the site of the photo shoot for this feature, she brings up the subject unbidden and talks at length about it. She knowledgably discusses the different stages of breast cancer, up to stage four — the point at which cancer is detectable in other organs of the body.
"I'm an early-detected breast-cancer survivor: it had not hit my lymph nodes yet, so I was one of the lucky ones. But had I had stage four, I don't know where I'd be right now." Back in March, when she played to a packed Wembley Arena Pavilion, she talked about the "health stuff" she had been through, and sang her moving ballad Heavy on My Heart while wearing a "Survivor Chick" T-shirt. By selling shirts like this, she says she raises money for her Anastacia Fund, which aims to heighten awareness of breast cancer. "And I don't have 10m people working for me: it's just me and my sister, Shawn. We've raised almost $1m just in T-shirts alone — so, you know, that's not bad, for two little chicks from Chicago!" She is a rapid talker, an impulsive conversationalist whose words threaten to collide when they come tumbling out of her; often she will start a sentence, abandon it and approach it from another angle, all within a few seconds; sometimes you are left with an impressionistic tapestry of words that doesn't work brilliantly on paper, but whose meaning is crystal-clear.
Now she gives a long speech, basically addressed to the healthy young women of the world. Here's an edited version. "The point I try to get across to women is, you need to see the statistics that are out there. We were brought up believing that this is a genetic disease, that this is hereditary. But it's not majority hereditary any more. It's something in the environment — whatever we're eating, breathing, emotions, stress . . . You can't stop life, but you can prevent being stage-four if you have early detection. So, as long as you are taking care of yourself and getting those mammograms, it will really save your life."
Before she became a singer, says Anastacia, she had an ambition to join the caring professions, to be "a psychologist/social worker for disabled children". She is now effectively an ambassador for cancer awareness, and, given time, has the potential to become a kind of oncological Bob Geldof or Bono. "In 2006 I will put a very wonderful fundraiser together — I don't know where, I don't know how. But I have a number of people that are very open and willing to help me put that together."
This Xena: Warrior Princess of music, uncompromising in her pursuit of self-belief, seems to take whatever life throws at her and turn it into a positive thing. This isn't always ideal in an interview. Angling for a colourful description of her impecunious upbringing in Manhattan, I get this: "I never felt less than happy or less than a child or less than satisfied in my growing-up. Money didn't really matter. I mean, we had to pay bills, I'm sure, as a family, but it didn't matter to me in my happiness at all. That wasn't how my mother brought us up: she didn't teach us that money made the world go round and made you smile, at all. We didn't know designers from a hole in the wall. We were just kids, and we had a really loving mother and we had a good relationship with each otherÉ" She still has a profound love for her tight little family. "I love them with all my heart. I admire my mom and my sister as women. I respect their values, their morals, their spirits, their beautiful energies."
Strangely, though Anastacia is famous across much of the world, the LA-based singer is not very well known in her home country. Once again she has a positive explanation: it is all part of the big plan. "They don't know me here because I don't choose for them to know me," she says, adding that only the second of her first three albums, Freak of Nature, was released Stateside — and that was only because people started buying it expensively on import and she felt guilty. "And then I was thinking of releasing the third album here, but I never really was able to find the time; and now I don't know that I want to release it at all. I don't know that I want to open up more doors here. For my career, it's not something that I have to have. My record company are happy with the numbers I'm doing. And I'm not into wanting to take another million moments out of the day I don't have and give it to America." The marketing strategy has evidently changed since 2002, when she guested on US TV shows such as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to promote the Freak of Nature release. But then time is more of an issue for her since the illness. "I've learned to take care of the 'me' time that I always used last. I always wanted to take care of everybody else, make everybody happy, and make sure the record company got their promos and the fans got their autographs and duh-duh-duh-duh-duhÉ and I was last on the list for recharging the batteries. Well, not any more, because I'm no good to anybody if I'm run down into the ground, and that's not a fair way to live."
She spends a lot of her spare time watching DVD sets of her favourite TV shows: thrillers like CSI: Miami, Alias and 24, and comedies like Will & Grace. She enjoys reading autobiographies: she just finished Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and says she is in the middle of My Life So Far, by Jane Fonda. "But I'm not a big-time reader. I think, because my brain works so hard and I'm so involved in what I do, I'll start reading and then all of a sudden my mind will start thinking about something in my life and I'll go two pages and I'll be like, 'Okay, what did I just read?' I was thinking about my photo shoot for tomorrow and my this and my that . . . "Astonishingly, she says she doesn't listen to music at home. "I prefer silence. My head is thinking other things and I like to be able to concentrate on the things I'm doing." Her own music has evolved over the past six years as she has worked to achieve a signature style, with the help of talented collaborators such as Glen Ballard (who co-wrote and produced Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album) and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. She describes the sound she finally found as "sprock" — an amalgam of soulful vocals, poppy melodies and rock guitars — and draws the analogy that, as a young New Yorker, she would customise her own perfumes. "I bought all these oils and mixed them up, 'cause I never liked one solid fragrance. Same as my music."
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