In a pop scene dominated by crazy, misunderstood girl singers it makes a happy
change to encounter one who settles for being merely misunderstood. Since
Natasha Bedingfield became a star in 2004 she has been misinterpreted, first
as a spokeswoman for feisty, self-sufficient singledom, and then again as a
sell-out ex-singleton, mooning over men and telling them that she wants to
have their babies. She has been represented as a happy-clappy Christian and
faced the humiliation of being cast as “the good girl” of pop, compared and
contrasted with Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse. A little more scandal was
needed, thought one American PR. A swear word in a song might help, another
executive suggested. But help what? The Tash package – complex lyrics, clear
voice, high cheekbones, long blonde hair – sells very nicely just as it is.
In a less mad industry, that she is still not crazy after all these (well,
three) years, would be a plus.
“It’s funny because you hear these songs like Rehab. I could
have been in rehab – but as a counsellor. I studied psychology at university
because I thought it would help write my music, but also as a Plan B, so I
could be a therapist at the end of it if the music did not work out,” she
says when we meet in a West London club one drizzly summer teatime.
I ask her if, at 25, she feels any more “written” than when she wrote Unwritten,
the title song of her first album that would soon be heard over and over
again at American graduation ceremonies where its lyric “Today is where your
book begins/ The rest is still unwritten” must have seemed designed to bring
tears to parental eyes. She replies that she now realises how much she
doesn’t know about the big book of life. There is more to be written than
she ever realised.
She has been driven to our chat from her modest new home in Clapham, South
London, where she settled after spending six months in Los Angeles writing
her second album, NB. It is not so far from where she was brought up in
Lewisham. In every other sense, however, she has come a huge distance from
her standing start in 2004 when she abandoned her psychology degree at
Greenwich University. After five months in America flogging her wares from
radio station to radio station, she became the first British woman to top
the US charts since Kim Wilde 20 years before.
The music-channel DJ who introduced her Single video with “This is what
Daniel Bedingfield would look like with breasts” must be feeling pretty
silly, although Natasha is proud to be compared to her older brother.
Besides, there are two other Bedingfields who will have to put up with being
compared to her: Sister Nikola (trading under her middle name Rachelle) who
has an “amazing, silky voice like Sade” and is two years her junior, and
brother Josh, 18, “who is the best-looking one of us and can sing”. Her
parents, John and Molly, charity workers who emigrated from New Zealand
after Daniel’s birth, suspect there was something in the water.
Daniel became famous in 2001 with Gotta Get Thru This. For his little sister
it was Single that did the trick, with its assertion that her “current
single status” was a “declaration of independence”. It went down very well
among girls without boyfriends. “You know, I wasn’t amazed it spoke to so
many women because at that point I was single and I had so many people
going, ‘Oh you’re single. Don’t worry, you’ll meet Mr Right’, and it was
really annoying. You know what, at that point I liked being single. I’d
chosen. It’s not like I couldn’t get a man. It’s just what kind of man I
could get.”
What struck me about the song, however, was how conservative it actually was
about coupledom. The chorus even promised: “I know I’ll settle down one
day.” She found a boyfriend during her year in America, although she has
managed to keep his identity a secret. She does tell me that he is an
American, a real estate dealer, and that she took him on her recent tour,
supporting Justin Timberlake, for five weeks. The fly in the ointment is
that he still lives in America. “I’m always travelling everywhere, so even
if he did live in London I’d still be away from him. I just have to make it
work for me. It’s not conventional but it doesn’t mean that it’s not just as
meaningful.”
Then in April came NB and the release of her first single from it. I Wanna
Have Your Babies. Its theme, that a primal scream of maternal longing was
only just being kept locked up in her head, appeared to be a terrible
volte-face. But it was a joke song. “I think the problem is that people take
me too seriously. I am not saying I want to have babies. That’s not what the
song’s about. It’s not about having babies. I don’t want babies. I’m
terrified of having babies.” What the song is about, she says, is the fear
of the subconscious bursting forth in inappropriate ways.
If it is the fate of most blondes to have to fight to be taken seriously,
maybe it is Bedingfield’s to be taken too seriously. “When I was first on
the music scene I was telling people, ‘Look, I don’t want to be boxed in by
the fact that I’m blonde and I’m a girl’. And so many people asked, ‘Why
aren’t you on the front page of the magazines on the top shelf? Why aren’t
you pole-dancing?’ And it’s quite offensive that that’s the only way at that
point that a girl could get their music heard, unless they were Dido or
Bjork.”
Things are different now. Women singers are allowed to be more interesting
than how they look. The trouble is that in Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse’s
cases they are interesting in all the wrong ways. “I feel like in
rock’n’roll it is really in at the moment to be really messed up. I’ve never
been attracted to drugs – or excessive alcohol – probably because my parents
counselled so many people getting over drugs and alcohol. I’ve seen the
extremes and it doesn’t appeal to me. I wouldn’t want to get dependent on
substances like that, because I just see how it swings you and controls your
whole life.”
It might help her publicists if she would at least, even if cold sober, behave
a little wildly. After the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial concert this
summer a red top reported that she had performed her second hit, Unwritten,
knickerless. She hadn’t and, given the length of the skirt she was wearing,
it would have made Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction look very small beer
indeed. Rumours of flings with Adam Levine from Maroon 5 and Jessica
Simpson’s exhusband Nick Lachey never really got going. She did dance with
Prince William. “You know what? I danced with three kings that week. Prince
William, a future king, Puff Daddy, the king of R&B, and the king of
Formula One, Lewis Hamilton.”
You will note, however,that her boyfriend is not a celebrity but an estate
agent. And the nearest she has got to swearing in a song was a line about
“the BS metre slamming into the red” – which the record company man thought
could be improved by making it a “bullshit metre” and she disagreed. “If,”
she says, “I want to swear in a song then I will, but not if someone’s
telling me to do it so they can put an ‘explicit content’ label on the
cover. People are going to see through that.”
I wonder how she stands up for herself in these arguments, and she says she
has no trouble being strong in business when she has to, but she sees
herself as a peacemaker. “I like balance and harmony. I like to get along
with people – that’s why I’m not a diva bitch. I’m a diva who sings and
struts her stuff on stage but I’m not nasty because I can’t cope with it.”
The more the image-makers looked at how to market her, the worse it got.
Hardworking – she says she got her first job babysitting at 11 and never
stopped, going on to work in shops and as a health club receptionist – clean
living, monogamous, Bedingfield was also from a family of churchgoers and as
a teenager formed a Christian band with Daniel and Nikola.
“Actually, I’m not a very religious person. I’m not really into smells and
bells and Our Fathers and Hail Marys. I just have some beliefs, some simple
beliefs that keep me grounded and help me in life.”
In 2004 Daniel broke his neck in a car accident in New Zealand, where the
family had gone on holiday. Did her faith help?
“I think so. It must have been. There were certain things that happened. Like
when he had his accident there was a car behind him that had a lifeguard and
a nurse in it, and the main thing that happens when people hurt their backs
is people tell them to move and that’s when they really damage something.
And people were trying to move him out of the car because they thought, like
in the movies, that cars blow up and they were like, ‘Oh, we’d better get
him out.’ And this nurse and lifeguard came in and they were like, ‘No.
We’re cutting him out, we’re not going to move him.’ And it’s when things
like that happen that you’re, like, well, that’s when you feel like saying,
‘Thank God’.”
Natasha comes from a happy family whose values could not be further than those
of the world in which she plays. Her mother, Molly, runs a charity, Global
Angels, that is due to visit Darfur. Her father, John, runs a studio for
local youngsters to make music. From time to time she had counselling
sessions with one of her parents’ therapist friends. Now her therapy is to
write. She seems such a well-regulated machine that the only mystery to me
is why some of her songs predict a gasket eventually blowing. In one, I’m
a Bomb, she talks about “ditch[ing] her halo”, and in Wild
Horses of “throwing caution to the wind”.
It takes me perhaps the length of our discussion – in which Bedingfield is
thoughtful, funny, and only occasionally displays the gaps of an unfinished
education – for me to realise what the explosive device in I’m a Bomb is.
Here was a girl brought up in a liberal, socially conscious family with a
serious work ethic. It was the expectation that she would go to college and
she duly did. But privately . . .
“I’d been working in studios since I was 17. I was writing. It was my love. It
was what I was crazy about doing and I didn’t tell lots of people about it.
I was just quietly doing my thing. And when I actually came out with the
album it was like, ‘OK, now I’m taking the big leap.’ That’s why you’ve got
songs like If You’re Gonna Jump Then Jump Far.”
The only bomb ticking inside Natasha Bedingfield was her talent. Natasha
Bedingfield’s single Say It Again is released on Monday
