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In Her Dreams . . .
The Sunday Telegraph Magazine 25 October 1998
By Justine Picardie
Webmaster note - Interviewer
Justine Picardie
did NOT do her homework otherwise she would have known that Eden & Deliver
Me are cover songs! And is rather bitchy as she obviously dislikes Sarah
even before interviewing her! Rather sad I think, and not very
professional!
Sarah Brightman is a wild free spirit. But in most of her press she’s a
laughable chipmunk. So where’s the real Sarah in all of this?
Freedom
has always been a key I like to feel I can explore things musically and
explore the world. I love the world.
Poor, poor, poor Sarah Brightman. Why does everyone laugh at her so? Mention
that you’re interviewing her, and terrible snorts of derision ensue. What
has she done to deserve it?
Twenty years ago, when she
was 18, she sang a silly pop song called “I Lost My Heart to a Starship
Trooper”. It was a hit, but you can’t hold that against her. She was just a
young girl, a dancer with Hot Gossip; and yes, they were a fairly ridiculous
outfit, but they must have brought a little pleasure to the lives of some in
the Seventies. When she was 20 she landed a part in Cats. (Nothing wrong
with Cats.) Then she married the boss, Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Well, what’s so
funny about that?) Then he wrote a lead role for her in Phantom of the Opera
(which must have brought a lot of pleasure to the lives of many in the
Eighties). Then they got divorced — hardly a laughing matter — and Andrew
gave her £6 million but she didn’t spend any of it; instead she became a pop
singer again. Last year her hit single “Time to Say Goodbye” topped the
charts all over Europe and went platinum five times. She’s still doing well,
thank you very much. So, stop laughing.
Now Sarah Brightman has got a new record coming out and a new look. She’s
been photographed by Ellen von Unwerth (who usually takes very stylish, very
fashionable pictures for Vogue and other glossy magazines), wearing
expensive, hippy-dippy velvet dresses from
Voyage (the favored label of Nicole Kidman,
Gwyneth Paltrow, Paula
Yates and assorted supermodels). It was Ellen von Unwerth who transformed
another formerly uncool singer, Sharleen Spitieri, into a drop-dead
gorgeous, chart-topping style queen. Her pictures of Sarah Brightman are
rather more conventional but you can see they’re both trying hard; battling
against the odds, against the inevitable sniggers.
As part of
this big reinvention, an interview has been arranged at her record company’s
office but, first, I am to listen to a tape of her forthcoming album, Eden.
I sit down and pay attention, trying to feel generous-spirited and
warm-hearted towards poor, misunderstood Sarah. The first song is called
“Deliver Me” and goes like this:
“Deliver me out of my sadness/Deliver me from all of the madness/ Deliver me
courage to guide me/Deliver me strength from inside me...” It’s not funny at
all; and neither is the title track, which starts with a sort of doomy
monk-like chorus, and then turns into plaintive Euro-pop.
(“Did I ever think of you as my enemy?/Did you ever think of me
uncomplaining? / I’ve never tried to feel, I never tried to feel this
vibration/I never tried, to reach, I never tried to reach your Eden...”)
It’s all stirring, sterling stuff, if you like that kind of thing, which I
don’t particularly, though I quite enjoy the popular opera thrown in for
good measure (“Nessun Dorma” and so on).
After my allotted 45 minutes of attentive listening
and toe-tapping, Sarah herself arrives. She wears a long black Jean Muir
dress which suits her long black hair and pale blue, slightly bulbous saucer
eyes. And she’s looking rather nervous, as though gales of laughter will
accompany her entrance. Perhaps this is why she then proceeds to conduct the
interview with unnatural composure, combined with a kind of smooth
diffidence: as if to say, “Take me seriously, please, because no one ever
does. But I know you won’t, because everyone is always horrid to So I begin
with a very easy question (“Who buys your records?”), she replies, “I
haven’t a clue. I’m glad I don’t?’
We get
only marginally further with the second easy question: Where is her biggest
market? “I
don’t know. It’s hard to tell. In Scandinavia, I’m big. And in South Africa.
Germany, funnily enough, isn’t my biggest
market, even though my boyfriend, who produces all my records, German and I
live with him there some of the time. I feel quite roc tell you the truth.
But it doesn’t bother me, particularly. There
is
something quite
centred
in me. I’m glad.”
Sarah
Brightman uses words like
“centred”
and “free” and “glad” rather a lot
She likes Ellen von Unwerth’s photographs of her cavorting with dogs and
deer in Richmond Park because “there’s a certain freedom in the pictures.
"Freedom
has always been a key word in my life. I like to feel I can explore things
musically and explore the world. I love the world. I find it absolutely
fascinating and colorful and very imaginative?’
She says all this with a completely straight face; in fact, as the
conversation continues, I become obsessed with the literal straightness of
her face: still so smooth at 38 as to be almost blank, like a plump new
cushion waiting to be sat upon. (Perhaps it is this infuriating passivity
that has driven other journalists to such venom: she’s been called
everything from “a chipmunk” to “a cunning mantrap with an unnaturally high
voice and something of a loony-eyed look”.) Her life has not been without
high drama (two marriages, two divorces, and her father’s suicide), but she
either refuses to engage with it, or is genuinely unruffled. The oldest of
six children, she was brought up in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Her mother,
Paula, who had wanted to be a dancer herself before she was subsumed in
family life, took Sarah to ballet class from the age of three. Her father,
Granville, was a property developer who suffered from bouts of depression.
You’d
have thought there might have been room for a bit of neurosis in a childhood
such as Sarah’s but, no: “It
was very happy, very easy,” she says.
Totally? I ask, amazed. “Well,
there must have been a few childhood problems but I can’t remember much. I
had a lovely home, lovely parents?’
After much prodding on my part, she finally concedes
that she hated stage boarding school. But when she was 14, her parents
allowed her to commute from home to a day stage school in London,”
and
then I was totally happy again- I got on with my life?’
She left school at 16, and joined Hot Gossip. That was lovely, too. “I
had a great time’ she says.
It was also great having a hit record with “Starship
Trooper”, though afterwards, “I wasn’t satisfied. My second single wasn’t
a hit. It was quite a frightening time.’
At last, some angst to get our teeth into! But no, everything was soon
lovely again. She auditioned for Cats, and lovely Trevor Nunn and lovely
Andrew Lloyd Webber gave her a job in the lovely chorus, “and I was finally
taken seriously”. She and Andrew were both
married at
the time, to different Andrews and Sarah's (her first husband was a record
company executive; Webber’s first wife was his teenage sweetheart, and the
mother of their two children). Presumably, the divorces cannot have been
trouble-free; nor was their own marriage a bed of roses.
It ended eight years ago, when
Andrew fell in love with a show jumper called Madeleine. Andrew and Madeline
are now married with three children; Sarah lives with her record producer
boyfriend, who is called Frank Peterson; and, if Sarah is to be believed,
they all get on marvellously. She has only good things to say her marriage
to Lloyd Webber. “There
was a huge amount of creativity I probably learnt more about in that time
than ever before. And the friendship have with Andrew is very strong?’
So no unhappiness, no misery
at all, I ask? “I
learnt that in my life I need freedom,”
says Sarah. (Oh God, the freedom thing again.)
“I need my own space. When I
was younger, I was quite self-centred. But I learnt to be considerate and
patient about other people’s feelings. But now, after all the things I’ve
been through, I feel so much happier’
But you can’t be happy about
everything, I say. What about your father’s suicide? (Granville Brightman
was found dead in his fume-filled car in 1992, when his business was failing
and his marriage had ended.) “Of
course, one is upset,”
she says, smoothly.” I
felt sad that he was so unhappy before he did go. Then I felt happy that he
made a decision and went through with it. It may sound blasphemous, but I
understood what he did completely. I knew the nature of the man.”
But what about the shock of
the manner of his death? "
I felt a feeling of huge warmth when I was told,I felt much more aware of
colours, people, the air. Maybe that was due to shock. of it was bad.”
Did she feel guilty about his
suicide? “No, never.
You need a huge amount of courage to do something like one could have
stopped him.”
Had he been depressed? “I
can’t remember.”
A Freudian therapist wouldn’t
have a very good time with you .“No.”
Have you ever thought about
having counselling?
No, because I’m happy!”
For once, Sarah Brightman looks taken aback. Her straight face doesn’t
crumble, but her big eyes widen enough to suggest mild surprise
“People ask for an answer to
something, an end to something,”
she observes. “But most
of the time there isn't an answer. Life isn’t like that. And I don’t
want answers. I’m OK.”
Doesn't she ever wonder why
her marriage to ended? “I
don’t know. There’s nothing I regret in my life. Of course, I regret people
who go and die. But one's here, and here to have a look. I grow more and
more aware of that. I find everything tremendously precious.’
So what annoys Sarah
Brightman? Well, she
doesn’t like other people’s misconceptions about her. “It’s gone through
different phases:’ she says.
“The first phase was when the press said I needed to be successful, so I a
rich man, blah blah blah, all that kind of thing. At the time, I was very
young, very much in love. I just went along with everyone, and then I was
interpreted as a kind of Eighties princess — all dolled up to the nines on
opening nights, and so on. But during the day, I was very normal, not
aggressive, just another artist running around in my tracksuit trying to do
my hardest to keep up."
“Then
the second phase was all the divorce stuff. I’ve been surrounded by it for
so long. I’ve done some tremendously good work in the last six years, had an
interesting life, but it gets thwarted. That’s what happens in this
business. It doesn’t distress me now — though it did. I’m not bothered what
other people think. I just think, oh, f—it!”
For once, Sarah sounds
genuinely cross. But only for a moment. Then it’s back to the smooth talk.
The third phase of her life so far, she says, is much calmer. “I’m
very wrapped up in my work. Music is my life, with Frank. We love producing
it together, creating, I feel I’m in my right place.”
Does she ever miss the rich,
glamorous bits of her life with Lloyd Webber? The big houses and the big
dresses? “It’s funny,”
she says, not looking amused. “The
wealth was there but all it did was cushion life a little. I don’t remember
the wealth — apart from the evening gowns and the first nights. I was
useless at the social side. Useless — still am.’
But what about her boyfriend,
Frank? He’s always described as a grand German Count in the press... “He’s
not a Count!” she says.
“My ex-husband used to say, ‘Oh, the Baron, how’s the Baron. It was a little
joke. And then in the papers, it went from Baron to Count. But neither of us
are grand. We’re both workaholics.”
So no time to spend her £6
million? “No. It’s in a
bank somewhere. It always amazes me, when you think of the stars out there
who are worth millions and millions, but you never read about them. And yet
I get picked on, although I don’t quite know why...”
She’s got a point. It’s only
£6 million, after all, and she offered to give it back to Lloyd Webber, but
he didn’t want it. Perhaps she should spend some of it on a few posh frocks
for her new image,! say.
“I’m so dreadful at shopping!”
wails Sarah. “I don’t
have the greatest taste when it comes to buying clothes for myself. I’m not
a mirror person.”
And, really, she doesn’t want
to talk about frocks, or her dead father or her failed marriages (and who
can blame her?). She wants to talk about her music, about being an artist.
”I like to think of my voice as an instrument’
she says, grandly. Her singing voice is very exact, very pure, very..,
straight. Interestingly, she has never written her own songs: she has always
served to channel other people’s ideas, to play other people’s roles.
Perhaps her apparent blankness
is just another useful instrument, an artful device in the profession of
musical theatre. But I think she’s beginning to feel trapped by it. When I
ask whether she wants to start writing her own music, she becomes
uncharacteristically animated. “I’m
desperate to, now, yes. I’ve had music in my head for the last five years,
and the next album I want to write myself. One of the reasons that I got out
of doing musicals was because it was incredibly uncreative playing a part
for months on end. It was driving me crazy. So! put myself out of work. My
mother said, ‘Are you crazy!’ But I said, ’I can’t do this any more.! want
to do my own records, I don’t care what people think!”
This speech is actually a
small yet extraordinary act of rebellion, when you think about it. It says
yah boo sucks to Mrs Paula Brightman, who put her daughter on the stage at
the age of three. Yah boo and double sucks to Lord Lloyd-Webber, who made
his wife famous with the role he composed for her in The Phantom of the
Opera, the story of a young girl propelled to stardom by an older man. And
yah boo and triple sucks to all the nasty people who laughed at Sarah and
called her a talentless chipmunk. Because here she is, still with us, with a
career to call her own. Sort of.
Heaven only knows what she
will make of herself when she starts writing all her own songs. She’s
certainly not giving anything away now. But I imagine the word “freedom”
might crop up rather a lot in her new lyrics.
Ya boo and triple suck to all
the nasty people who laughed and called her talentless. Because she still
has a career to call her own. |
Like
poets working within the confines of predetermined structures, composers on
occasion set themselves the challenge of telling a theatrical story within a
restrictive musical pallette. Few, if any, have ever been as restrictive as
Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Aspects of Love," which opened in San Francisco a few
days ago.
Sarah Brightman at the Royal
Albert Hall 
