CityLife

A feisty Paloma is keeping the Faith

TEMPTRESS: Paloma

A LITTLE word of warning: leave a suggestive message on Paloma Faith’s website and the only member of the Faith clan likely to see it is her mum.

“She’s a little bit worried about my career choice because she gets all offended when she reads comments that are negative on the internet; she has this pseudonym and she writes back to people and tells them off,” she howls in a Barbara Windsor cackle.

“I tell her she’s going to have to get used to it, but she’s just like (adopts mumsy voice), ‘I’ve written back to that guy. I’ve told him it’s rude to say that he wants to do those things to you – I think that’s disgusting. I’ve reported him to YouTube’.

“She’s not a stage mum – she kept telling me not to do this. She wanted me to be a teacher; she was like, ‘Get out of that, too difficult. Be a teacher, you get summer holidays’.”

In fact, Paloma tried just about every oddball career that came her way after getting thrown out of theatre school age 12 ‘for being rubbish’.

“I’ve had to prove a point after that – I can be good!” she laughs. 

And you wouldn’t doubt it either. Only her accent (she was born in Hackney, east London) doesn’t quite fit the otherwise perfect Paloma package.

She looks like a modern day Margaret Lockwood with her dark brows, glistening eyes, sumptuous red lips and well positioned beauty spot, and she ought to purr like an enticing French dancer in the Moulin Rouge or deliver her seductive banter in an Eliza Doolittle-style English.

But instead she sounds like she’s readying to be thrown out of the Queen Vic by Peggy Mitchell for messing around with one of her boys. 
The dichotomy of her glam image and homely accent, though, are a big part of her charm. Particularly on stage, where Paloma’s playful, everyman sense of humour melds seamlessly with high-art ambitions.

Arty ambitions, she admits, have always called her. She was born to a Spanish father, and Paloma’s name reflects her heritage and pays tribute to her mother’s affection for Picasso, whose daughter was also called Paloma – the Spanish word for dove.

The Faith part came from her grandmother. “It’s a generational thing,” she smiles, “we’re handing it down. We’re keeping the faith.”

She trained as a dancer (“which I hated,” she barks. “You just get directed – you’re not required to put anything of yourself into it.”) and spent years learning the academics of performance and theatre to masters level at St Martin’s College.

When she was approached on a bus by an artist who was building a ghost train and asked to play one of the spooks, Paloma accepted, and soon found herself working as a magician’s assistant for a fellow ghoul and tasked with handling his eight doves on stage (she currently sports three dove tattoos on her back but has no plans to up that to eight in homage).

Meanwhile, her part-time bar job led to a spot fronting a band.

“My manager said, ‘You look great, you can front it’. He didn’t even know if I could sing.

Cultivate

“I could sing, but my voice grew on the stage. Some people cultivate their voice and then they go out and show it for the first time when they’re feeling confident.

“Well, I went out when I was rubbish and just improved as I went along. It took about two years to get rid of that wobble in my voice.

“People used to say, ‘You’re very confident’, as in, ‘You’re ****, but you look the part’. My voice has only become something I’m proud of over the last couple of years.”

Her film aspirations – fuelled by a fairly high profile role as Andrea the Emo in the St Trinians movie alongside Rupert Everett, Russell Brand, Stephen Fry and…erm… Girls Aloud – continue and she has most recently performed in the new Terry Gilliam film, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus.

For six years behind the scenes, though, she’s been slogging away at making it in the music industry and helping her mum beat cancer (she’s now officially all clear, Paloma tells us excitedly). 

The resulting debut record, Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful?, is released on September 28, and when she tells CityLife that Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf, Etta James, Peggy Lee and Bjork are all responsible for making her want to become a musician, the album makes perfect sense.

A brave mix of rock, pop and jazz, the record takes its cue from all these women – Amy Winehouse and Duffy also deserve a nod, at least – and adds a unique vaudevillian perspective. The next step is bringing that to the stage.

Paloma has an inventive and hungry approach to original staging – “especially when there’s no bloody money,” she adds – and strives for a different gig every night.

“Sometimes when there’s no money you have to use your imagination.

“I go and see a lot of theatre and bring a lot of the influence with me, so I’ve had snowstorms on my stage, a library, a field of carnations, room-sized balloons… all kind of things.

“I can’t tell you anything about my Manchester show, though,” she says when we enquire about plans for her Ruby Lounge gig on Tuesday.

“You have to see it – it’s like a true, old-fashioned freakshow. All I can say is that I’m going to make it as interesting as possible.”

Promises, promises Paloma.