FROM WHICH COURSE: AN INDEPENDENT EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING MAGAZINE

Pink: Is the ladette laureate finally growing up?

The recently-wed wild-child singer describes herself as a work in progress. Craig McLean meets her

Published: 29 July 2006

Pink: Is the ladette laureate finally growing up?

Pink gives a frank interview

Think Pink and you might think about the feisty young pop star with attitude (well, she swears a lot) and tattoos to match. The glamourpuss with the platinum-blonde quiff. The vaguely punky rocker who's sold 23 million albums and won two Grammies. The wayward kid from Philadelphia who got on mum's nerves so much that she kicked her out of the house, aged 15. Who was rescued from a runaway life by signing a record deal when she was 16. Who, in Costa Rica early this year, married her boyfriend, a handsome, wild-looking motocross biker named Carey Hart.

Her "bad ass" former self, she says, was nothing compared to her dad. He was a serious, authoritarian figure who left Pink' s mum, a nurse, when the little girl they both knew as Alecia Beth Moore was seven (she also has a brother, Jason). Jim Moore had served in Vietnam. "He was an abused child, he went to Catholic school, then he volunteered for Vietnam to get away from it," Pink explains, underlining just how intense her father was. "Full-contact karate. Guerrilla warfare. He's insane. I grew up with rocket-launchers in my garage."

Dad refused to talk about his war experiences until he was 40. "That was when he started this Vietnam Veterans Chapter 210 of Bucks County. He sought out all of the veterans that he knew in the county and asked them to join this thing where they would have fundraisers for homeless people and senior citizens. And they would get together and they would talk. It was like group therapy."

Pink attended these meetings when she was between the ages of six and eight. "Seeing these grown men get up and weep in front of 20 other men. And women!" she exclaims in her occasionally staccato, grammar-hostile style. "To see military women - my stepmother was an army nurse in Vietnam. We would march on Washington, march for people's rights when I was eight years old. I'm like, 'And I wanna be a pop star!" Pink cackles maniacally. That must have been pretty heavy stuff for a child to experience, I suggest. "It was, but I loved it. It put the fire under my feet."

Eighteen years later, Pink and her dad get on well. They still fight, though. "He's definitely not the easiest guy. But I can get to him like no one else can. And I push his buttons and we've had falling outs and he left and I didn't speak to him and ..." Pause. Exhale. Continue. "We've had our times." *

* Their new-found understanding finds form on a hidden track on new album, I'm Not Dead. "I Have Seen The Rain" is a duet with Jim Moore, who wrote it while he was serving in Vietnam. It's quite a departure for Pink, brassy singer of party-hard songs like "Trouble". It was, she says, the first song she ever learnt, and provided her first exposure to a stage - she would sing it with her dad at Vietnam vet rallies. Still, that must have been tedious and cheesy for a little kid, getting up and performing in front of those intense, damaged old blokes? Pink gives me an "are you kidding?" look. "God," she breathes. "It was awesome."

Pink is one tough cookie. She writes angry letters as a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta): Prince William (animal-killer) and Anna Wintour (fur-loving editor of US Vogue) have both felt the lash of her pen. It's there in the thigh-high green boots she's wearing today, and in the way she confidently stretches her swimmer's body along the sofa in her London hotel room.

She called her new album I'm Not Dead because "I had an awakening. My dad had a heart attack, I turned 25, I started reading the New York Times. I started caring less about my drama and more about the world around me."

The title song, a rock anthem that sounds like Bon Jovi fronted by Bonnie Tyler, is "the first song I've written that's subtle or poetic."

On her single "Stupid Girls", Pink poses some questions. What happened to the dream of a girl President? (Apparently, "she's dancing in a video next to 50 Cent"). Why do airhead celeb chicks travel in packs of three, accompanied by "their itsy-bitsy doggies and teeny-weeny tees"? And "where oh where have the smart people gone?"

"I'm all about options," Pink says, "and alternatives and choices. There's such a lack of tolerance for diversity in the world as it is, that I thought it would help if the rest of the women were represented as well. If it could be like: 'If I'm smart and I read a lot of books and I spend my money on charity instead of shoes, I could be in the tabloids too. Or I could be important. Or I could have a cuter boy. Or I could change the world.' You know, you need examples when you're young."

In the song's video, the 26-year-old singer gleefully parodies the silly little rich girls who totter round her adopted hometown of Los Angeles, flitting between parties and paparazzi. There's a bathroom scene too. A girl is sticking her fingers down her throat, trying to make herself sick. All things considered, as mainstream pop videos go, "Stupid Girls" is both very funny and a bit disturbing. "I have always had the same message," Pink says in her forceful, throaty voice. "I'm a girl and I speak for me and my friends and the girls that are like me. But it always goes down better with humour. Bulimia and anorexia and eating disorders are diseases and they're very, very serious." A beat, a thought. "And scary, and rampant! And I make fun of it - but really, I'm making fun of the idea that a girl feels like she needs to do that in order to be important. And I have the same issues. That's why I can write about this stuff. That's why I have to make it ridiculous - 'cause I have to get over it myself as well. You can't be a girl and not have some sort of issue with yourself. I think it's genetic. You see people like Oprah, a lot of different women who have these struggles, but they're so important and so smart that you think, why the hell would you worry about that? And women in Africa who don't have time to worry about how they look because there's more important problems."

Pink has another socially conscious song on her new album. It's a largely acoustic protest number called "Dear Mr President", sung with The Indigo Girls, the cult neo-folk lesbian duo. It's simple, shouty stuff, for sure, but equally, it's hard to imagine Britney Spears or any other teen-friendly junior diva having the gumption or wit to (co-)write such a song.

The funny and sometimes disturbing "Dear Mr President" is, says Pink, a product of her new mental-fitness regime, of reading the big newspapers as well as the glossy mags. "And just a product of my own experiences. I don't hang out with celebrities. I hang out with real, nine-to-five people. My family are working-class people. I'm very much in tune with what's [going on]. I don't sit holed up inside my mansion with my poodles and think that everything's fine. I have people that are in Sri Lanka, in Iraq, in Africa working with the UN. I have women in Philadelphia, friends that are poor, they're single parents.

"I like," Pink says by way of concluding the first of today's full-blooded, occasionally topsy-turvy rants, "stirring things up and creating dissent and creating discussion and highlighting the ridiculousness of it all."

Funny and Disturbing: it could be the title of Pink's autobiography. It might apply to her musical life, in the remarkable way she coolly and skilfully moved from teenage R&B diva (on her first album, Can't Take Me Home) to diary-reading soul-barer (on her second, Missundaztood), to mohawked punk-lite party-gal on her third (Try This), and now to politicised agit-pop on I'm Not Dead.

It applies even better to her personal life, a narrative arc that goes from teenage strife to adulthood success. Pink talks freely about her frighteningly angst-ridden early teens. "Then I was clean," she snaps her fingers, "at 15."

Pink was pressed into therapy by her mother when she was 14 and is still cheerfully attending to this day. "I like people, I like talking!" she hoots. So nothing is private, everything is out, on the surface, ready for dissection. Or for writing a song about. "My favourite songwriters are those who can paint a picture with their words", Pink says. "Maybe I don't do it as dramatically or deeply or as poignantly. But I like to paint a picture."

For I'm Not Dead, she wrote more than 40 songs - "I wrote a song about everything I could possibly think of." Some of which were fairly extreme. "I have the album that's put out, and I have the album I listen to!" she says with a lusty bellow.

Pink was never bottled-up. Her troubles course through her and her songs; she carries them with her in a backpack, full of every journal she's written since she was eight. Better out than in, you might say.

But there are also firecracker party songs such as "Cuz I Can" and "U And Ur Hand", written with Swedish turbo-pop supremo Max Martin, writer of Kelly Clarkson's "Since You Been Gone" and Britney's "Baby One More Time".

Think Pink and think the female Robbie Williams. A performer who celebrates her own neuroses. Who lays all her baggage on the table, then dances round it. A tricksy, forthright, perhaps brave songwriter who, by hiding nothing, leaves less ammo for her detractors.

This survival instinct kicks in within Pink's private life, too. She and Hart have been married two and a half months, "and I've seen him twice since the honeymoon", she says with a matter-of-fact shrug. He's on the road with his job, and so is she. "It will never change." He lives in Las Vegas and she lives in LA. "We see each other when we can. And it's good. I can't imagine seeing someone every day. It's completely unconventional and it's the only way that I could have it be. Him too; he's had some tough times as well. It's perfect."

"You know," says Pink, as she readies to leave, "I'm a work in progress. The point is, I'm a stupid girl too. But I'm trying to be better. I can respect anybody who can admit that they're wrong and is trying to be better. You can always be better."

Pink's new single, "Stupid Girls", is out now on RCA records.

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