On the steps of the Mandarin Hotel in Knightsbridge, Beyoncé Knowles is
meeting the paparazzi. From the hotel foyer, looking out into the filthy
London rain, hair in a functional ponytail, she is a petite silhouette in
the flashbulbs. A couple of young male fans are allowed to step forward for
a moment with their heroine. Instinctively, the first places his left arm
around the singer. No less instinctively, a vast minder detaches the arm
from Beyoncé's sleeveless designer dress and puts it back where it came
from.
It's an episode that flags up something unusual about Beyoncé's brand of star
quality. Fans of, say, Madonna or Cher would never put an arm around their
idol and, although she is only 27, Beyoncé has had plenty of opportunities
to finesse their brand of starry untouchability. It is three years since she
dissolved Destiny's Child after three albums and a run of award-winning
hymns to womanly empowerment such as Survivor and Independent Woman; six
since her duet with the Brooklyn rap demigod Jay-Z served notice to the
world that America's foremost hip-hop star and its emerging queen of R&B
were an item.
In the past year alone, she is said to have earned $80 million (£54 million)
from record sales, film appearances and endorsements. Yet in the flesh, it
all seems a galaxy away from her disarmingly open body language and megawatt
smile.
Two days previously, and it's that lack of celebrity airs that the Strictly
Come Dancing warm-up comic picks up on as Beyoncé prepares to perform her
new single If I Was A Boy. “You know, Beyoncé,” he leers, “you're the kind
of girl I could take to McDonald's and let you go large.” Her vulnerability
is compounded when he inquires the whereabouts of Jay-Z, whom she apparently
married two months before his momentous Glastonbury performance last June,
though they have studiously avoided discussing this with the media. The
gleam of her diamond-studded heels finds an echo in her eyes. “He's looking
for you,” she replies. For a second, the Amazonian Beyoncé of Destiny's
Child is resurrected.
Back at the Mandarin, perched on a sofa, she laughs. “I looked uncomfortable?
That's how I usually feel. When I walk into a room and everyone is looking
at me it's still embarrassing.”
It has been quite a year for the singer - the rumoured wedding, Glastonbury,
then the election. This month the hitherto apolitical Beyoncé travelled
between Tampa and Miami in Florida and then to Virginia “to meet thousands
of people who have been waiting in the lines to encourage other people to
come and wait in the lines. Then, on the night, I was home with my friends
and we had ... you know, red white and blue balloons everywhere, and flags.
I mean, this is new to me. It was like watching a Martin Luther King speech.
He has a light, you know?”
She was supposed to be in Europe promoting herself during the election but,
sensing that she was missing history, flew back to be there for the man who
listens to her on his iPod and for whom she says she would love to sing at
the inauguration.
“I'm there. I feel like all of us, we're ready to do whatever we have to do,”
she said after Barack Obama won the presidency.
Yes, it's turning out to be a good year. She glows with pride at mention of
Jay-Z's headlining performance at Glastonbury, a billing that, despite
offending Noel Gallagher and others who felt that hip-hop had no place at
the festival, was widely regarded as one of its highlights.
“I'd never seen so many people. It was something I would definitely love to do
myself one day. I knew that everybody would love Glastonbury, you know? But,
whenever there's controversy, it's a little like, ‘OK, what's gonna happen?'
It was like the election!” She shoots a playful glare to let you know that
she is aware of the exaggeration.
It now seems only fitting to ask about the third event of the year. Which was
the most nerve-racking - either of the aforementioned, or her wedding? For a
nanosecond she looks as if she might let slip inadvertent confirmation of
her nuptials. “That's a good question,” she smirks.
Does that mean that the wedding-list question is out, too? She laughs. In the
anteroom, ruffling of papers can be heard from her anxious retinue. In all
these years, Beyoncé has never allowed her singing persona and her private
persona to merge.
Far from attempting to reconcile them, her new double album I Am . . . Sasha
Fierce embraces that division. Drop the first disc - the I Am bit - into the
CD tray and, according to Beyoncé, you will hear the purest expression of
the person she is “underneath the make-up”. Take her at her word and it
would seem the “real” Beyoncé of soft-scented power ballads such as Halo and
Satellites bears scant resemblance to the 22-year-old who, in 2003, lit the
touchpaper on her solo career with Crazy in Love.
But, of course, there is another CD to tell us that it's not that simple.
Anyone pining for the formidable Beyoncé of old will find her all over Sasha
Fierce. It is just the sort of name that a shy, privately educated daughter
of a medical supplies salesman and a hairdresser might come up with to
explain the volcanic transformation she undergoes when she performs. Indeed,
watching her in a leotard, shaking her superhuman thighs (maybe her wish to
be cast as “the first black Wonder Woman” will come true) on the video to
her other new single, Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), you realise that
it's a part she plays astonishingly well.
It was not, she insists, as premeditated as that. “But there's no doubt that
in Sasha mode things happen that wouldn't normally. A few years ago I was on
stage. I had these earrings on that were designed by Lorraine Schwartz. Now,
Lorraine is a good friend of mine, but they were expensive and if I wanted
them I still had to pay for them. Anyway, in mid-song, one of them fell off.
So I threw it out , and afterwards I thought, ‘what did I just do?' So we
had my cousin - who is my assistant - going into the audience and saying,
‘London, those are my cousin's earrings. Who has them?' And you know what,
she got them back. But after, she's like, ‘You know, we're gon' have to tame
Sasha'.”
The more she talks about Sasha, the more the alter ego sounds like a coping
mechanism in a life that hasn't been terribly normal since she was 10.
That's when she formed Girl's Tyme with the future Destiny's Child Kelly
Rowland.
She resents a lingering perception that she was groomed for success in the way
that Michael Jackson or Britney Spears might have been; that her father was
some Svengali-like figure pulling the strings. In fact, two years elapsed
between the dance classes that she started as an eight-year-old - to help
her to overcome shyness - and the first time he saw her perform (he
eventually gave up his job to manage her).
“The singing . . . when that began it was definitely an escape,” she says. An
escape from what? The answer, she thinks, has something to do with the birth
of her sister Solange when Beyoncé was 5. “When she was born, I became the
protector, and . . .”
The responsible one? She nods. “So, as an introverted kid, the stage was my
place where I could do whatever I wanted.”
She is a very different creature to her diva-esque singer sister. Solange
Knowles, a divorced mother, is far more feisty - if I'd asked about her
marriage to the American football player Daniel Smith, I'd have been thrown
out by now. And whatever Beyoncé chooses to call herself, it's hard to
imagine her penning the title ChampagneChroniKnightCap, the paean to
self-medication that graced Solange's recent album. “My sister . . .” says
Beyoncé, struggling to stifle an almighty grin, “she was born Sasha Fierce!”
In a story that she seems to enjoy telling, the only time Beyoncé got close to
delusions of diva-dom she was publicly upbraided in a Houston record shop by
her mother. After pointedly carrying on singing while her mother was asking
her a question, the singer was slapped in the face and made to sit in the
car. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this story is that Beyoncé was
19 when it happened, and the Destiny's Child album The Writing's on the Wall
was well on its way to selling 16 million copies.
She says that the challenge of keeping her feet on the ground has come down to
taking none of it too seriously. But acting has made different demands of
her. Immersing herself in the character of Deena Jones - based loosely on
Diana Ross - for the Oscar-winning Dreamgirls, Beyoncé admitted that “I had
to be moody and angry to make this role work. I was creating drama in my
life so I had something to feed off. I was mad at everyone.”
At whom, exactly? “Well, like my dad. I would have fake conflicts that weren't
really going on. So now my dad is like, ‘When you're doing a movie, I'm
staying far away'.”
This year she completed work alongside Adrien Brody on Cadillac, in which she
plays the blues singer Etta James. This time she found herself able to
demarcate between life and work: “When you're playing someone addicted to
heroin and every other word is a profanity . . . it was just so different
from me.”
All the same, if no film character is entirely a work of fiction, you wonder
if the same can be said of characters created to make music. Much of the fun
to be had from listening to the second part of I Am ... Sasha Fierce is
spotting where the façade cracks. Graceful, demure, shy Beyoncé would surely
never flaunt her man's USPs as boldly as Sasha does on Ego: “Let's get lost/
Who needs to call into work/ Cos you're the boss . . . I love his big ego,
too much/ He walk like this/ Cos he can back it up.”
It's hard not to see Jay-Z in those words. “I am attracted to someone who is
strong and confident,” she says. So would I be right to assume that the song
is about her new husband? Beyoncé laughs. “You're waiting for me to answer!
Hahaha! I'm not saying anything. I'm just a smile!”
This time, no minder's intervention is necessary. Between them, Beyoncé
Knowles and Sasha Fierce have it covered.
I Am... Sacha Fierce is out on Monday (BMG);
the single If I Were A Boy is out now
