“I’m not a festival person,” says Annie Clark, not long before St Vincent’s astounding set on the final day of Glastonbury. She’s sipping white wine, looking immaculate and expensive in a Grey Gardens-style headscarf and shades, so her antipathy to festivals barely needs to be pointed out. She seems to be in a playful mood, despite the surroundings of Worthy Farm. She’s funny and flirty – not real flirtation, but a kind of deliberate power play designed to upend the dynamic of an interview. When I ask what she thinks of the perception of her as coldly cerebral or arch, and whether being seen as clever could put off some potential fans, she raises an eyebrow and points to her chest. “But I’ve got big tits, right?” she quips. “Right? You’re not even looking at me!” I’m embarrassed, I shout. “Wonderful,” she roars, and claps her hands together.
She’s flown in from Los Angeles, where she’s been having a lot of “meetings” especially for this show, and it’s clear that talking about herself bores her. “I don’t care about me,” she grins. “Just make it up. I don’t fucking care.”
It’s been such an eventful six months that there isn’t much need to make it up. She’s gone from respected alt-rock curiosity to “the best rock band in the world”, according to the notoriously hard-to-impress Vice. Her fourth album, also called St Vincent, won her comparisons to Prince and made most other performers seem pallid and lazy by comparison. She appeared on Saturday Night Live, a high-profile TV gig that again seemed to perplex and astonish its viewers in equal measure. She’s toured the world with a tightly eccentric live show full of neurotic white funk and experimental party pop, wearing lurid Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? eyeshadow and sporting a shock of gunmetal-grey hair. Finally, for one evening in April, she became the frontperson of Nirvana, singing Lithium with Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear during their first public performance as Nirvana since Kurt Cobain died in 1994.
Clark says that in spite of all this, only two things feel different about her life right now. Recently she went to a friend’s wedding in Austin, Texas, where people wanted to take drunk selfies with her, and a stranger bought her a cookie as she dined alone. “But I think the real gauge of things is when your mother’s friends don’t think you’re homeless,” she smiles.
Clark has been on the alternative rock scene in the US for over a decade. In 2005, having dropped out of the prestigious music college Berklee, she joined the Polyphonic Spree. She played in Sufjan Stevens’s touring band in 2006, made Love This Giant, a joint album with David Byrne, in 2012, and has released four solo records to date, each increasing exponentially in their ambition and acclaim. But in 2014, something has shifted, and not just because her mother’s friends now know she has a job. “The whole everything feels more fully realised this time,” she says. “The loose ends are tied up, in a good way.”
St Vincent is a strong contender for the best album of the year, but Clark’s performances, too, have metamorphosed into an impressive theatrical spectacle of their own. They incorporate jittering choreography and surreal spoken-word interludes, with Clark wearing defined, dramatic dresses that are more costume than fashion. “I find a lot of liberation from structure,” she explains. “If I know where I’m supposed to be, then I can deviate, and live in the moment. The process first became about execution, then about liberation. And I think it takes a lot these days to entice people to be in the moment.” She says that despite the rigidity and planning that goes into the show, she never worries that it will come across as contrived. “There’s always a gulf to be traversed between reality and perception. So if you have a situation where you’ve beta-tested the reality, then you can refine it. I watched videos of things and I went, ‘You know what, that doesn’t translate, that doesn’t do what I wanted it to do.’”
She sounds like she’s describing an art project or a performance piece, but the reality is far more fun than pretentious. “Once you’ve seen the show, it doesn’t come across as cerebral, I don’t think. Especially as we’ve done it more and more. It might come off as crazy, but it doesn’t come across as overly intellectual.”
One of Clark’s favoured musical tricks is to make the normal suddenly unsettling, whether by bending notes to make it seem as if the floor is shifting, or throwing in a guitar solo that sounds like an anxiety attack, or uprooting the mundane with an unexpected lyrical twist. On the song Birth in Reverse (its title taken from a Lorrie Moore short story, Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People), she sings, “Oh what an ordinary day, take out the garbage, masturbate.” I tell her it made me laugh.
“No,” she corrects, drily. “That was deeply sexual. That’s weird that you weren’t turned on, fuck.” Clark admits she’s a “comedy nerd” (her first album is called Marry Me, after a recurring gag in the sitcom Arrested Development, and she has twice appeared in the sketch show Portlandia) – and there’s often a black humour in her lyrics. “Not in a ‘put the honking nose on the clown’ kind of way. Not like, you know, slapstick. But I think the Nick Cave song, There She Goes My Beautiful World, which I took the name St Vincent from, that’s a hilarious song. It illustrates the squalor, and the grandeur.”
When Clark joined Nirvana, she played with them twice – once at the glossy, televised Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony for HBO, and later that same night again, at the tiny, grimy St Vitus bar in Brooklyn. “I wish that Kurt was alive and no one else had to sing those songs,” she recites, respectfully, but acknowledges that Grohl and Novoselic’s decision to recruit female vocalists (Kim Gordon, Lorde and Joan Jett also stepped up) was fitting. “The thing that was cool to remember was that they came up in that Olympia scene in the late 80s and early 90s, which was really feminist and queer and punk, which kind of gets whitewashed in their history. This was a really nice way to honour that.”
Clark, 31, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma but grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. She remembers the first time she heard Nevermind, playing it over and over on a stereo as she learned skateboard tricks in her friend Doug’s garage: “It really did feel like Nirvana was a band for outsiders, that just happened to reach millions and millions of people.” As a teenager, that appealed to her, and in the past she has referred to herself as a “Texas freak”. “I always felt like a weirdo, and I was,” she says now. She takes huge pauses while she explains how she feels about her home state. “It’s a hotbed of … very conservative values. So even if you stick out by a thread, you’re going to be perceived very much as a freak … So you have to own it … I made a place with music where I could exist and not feel weird and alien.”
She says Texas has “an ambient religiosity, and no matter what’s going on in your household, you internalise that culture of fear. And either accept it, or rebel against it.” Clark and her sisters were raised “half-Catholic and then half-whatever” by her mother and stepfather. Though her songs are often shot through with religious imagery, which she admits she loves (in taking her band name, she in effect canonised herself), she says she is “done with that Catholic guilt”.
“My last day in a church was the day I got confirmed. But yeah, I think it affects you, even if it’s not fire and brimstone in your house.” I ask her if she’s ever tempted to go to back to confession. She shakes her head. “No. I write songs, so I don’t have to.” She changes tack. “It’s pretty sexy,” she announces. What is, confession? “Absolutely! It’s a sexy construct.” How is it sexy? “Really?” she says, incredulous that I’m even asking. “I mean, I’m not saying Father Mac was particularly sexy. It’s a sexy construct, though. It’s a bizarre intimacy.”
The phrase applies equally well to her music. On the song Prince Johnny, one of the best on St Vincent, she sings a fascinatingly ambiguous tale of gender and friendship and affection against a setting of decadence and parties, with a plea to someone to make its characters “a real girl” or “a real boy”. On the surface, it sounds like eavesdropping on conversation, yet in the end it’s so enigmatic that it’s impossible to interpret. This is, you suspect, exactly how Annie Clark likes it.
During her performances, Clark ends Prince Johnny by rolling down a geometric pink podium in slow motion, resembling a crumbling starlet taking her last breath, as the music slows to an abstract blur, and she ends up on her head. On television, even more so than on stage, this looks like something from another world. On Saturday Night Live, she performed Birth in Reverse with a gleefully choreographed wooden-doll shuffle. She’s well aware that these antics are divisive. “A lot of people were very confused,” she says, happily. “I appreciate that it was a little bit polarising. There were certainly a number of people who were like: ‘Yay, that was cool, I’ve never heard of you, I’m going to buy the record.’ Then there was a whole other wide swath of the American public that was just scratching their head. I think that’s great. You might be doing something wrong if you’re beloved by everyone.” She looks completely satisfied.
St Vincent tours the UK from 19 August, including End of the Road festival (29-31 August). ilovestvincent.com
