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Billie interview... 
Back in 1997, it seemed that Billie Myers’ single, ‘Kiss The
Rain’ was never going to leave the charts. She also had a huge hit
with her debut album ‘Growing Pains’. Then she seemed to
vanish. Recently She released a new album, ‘Vertigo’, in the
US and Germany, to much critical acclaim. Since then she has been a very
busy woman travelling between her home in Los Angeles and Germany
promoting the album. She has been a hard woman to catch up with but I
finally got her on the phone at her home, sitting on the balcony, in the
sunshine under the Hollywood sign.Billie was born in the UK and the first thing she wanted to know was about our summer, "I have been in Germany for the last couple of weeks and the heat was nice. I miss the UK but I don’t miss the weather”. You can take the girl out of the UK but not the UK out of the girl! Her new album tackles many issues head on including sexism, racism and homophobia. The first single from ‘Vertigo’, ‘Should I call you Jesus’ is a plea for religious tolerance throughout the world. In the USA, where religion is a political issue, you may have thought those sentiments would strike a cord but the song is being widely regarded as “too controversial”. Billie says that during the time she traveled promoting “Kiss The Rain” she “meet a lot of nice people and it didn’t matter that they had 10 wives, they were just nice” and she wanted to make a song that might help to unite people. She says when she “sat down to write the song with Peter Vale, it just didn’t occur to us that people would up in arms that the song was ‘anti-religious’.” The song isn’t getting played on the radio and Billie feels it maybe the “kiss of death for my career”. Not content with taking on religion, Billie also challenges racism on the album. She says the track ‘Bitter Fruit (dead weight)’ was inspired by Billie Holidays “Savage Fruit”. “When I was promoting Kiss the Rain people kept saying to me ‘I didn’t realise you were mixed race, is that why we don’t see you face?’ or ‘But you’re black!’. The white press didn’t want to promote me because my music wasn’t ‘black music’ and the black press said I was mixed race and too white. When I realised that 100 years ago I would have been a slave, it really put a bee in my bonnet. I had a choice of tracks for the album between ‘Bitter Fruit and ‘Deep below skin’. ‘Deep Below Skin’ is about how one day all skin colours will be the same, but I decided to be more political and talk about slavery. Even today, driving through some of the Southern states if my car broke down I wouldn’t want to get out.” Billie speaks with a self-confidence about her work that is infectious but she isn’t self-obsessed or self-important. She comes across as an ordinary woman, someone you go out for a raucous evening down the pub with, it’s just that she happens to also be a well-known singer. She says she wrote Vertigo’s bouncy opening track, ‘Am I there yet?’ about not quite knowing if you are famous or not. “I remember being in my flat and hearing that Kiss the Rain had entered the US charts at no.92 and I was just leaping around. Then, as it became more successful I lost the plot, I lost sight of what success was and I allowed myself to believe the smoke and mirrors of entertainment. I think there are two character types - carefree and ambitious or climbing and ambitous. I want to be carefree. I made all the mistakes and hot rock bottom. It was a gift that ‘Kiss The Rain’ was such a success and a gift that the follow up was a failure. It made me bounce back up and have perspective.” ‘Kiss The Rain’ is the song Billie will always be best know for, is she tired of singing it? “No, I don’t do a song the same way twice. But, ask me in 5 years, if it’s the only hit I’ve ever had I might be tired of it! Right now it seems to me that the radio only wants to play dance music. My album isn’t going to be released in the UK yet, Universal want to wait and see what happens in Germany, they say there is a “girlie backlash”. That is the trouble with record companies they sign you because they like you but then they want to change you” So what has Billie been doing for the past few years? “Recording, doing promotion. Writing, I’m always writing. I used to use scrappy bits of paper but I’m trying to use a computer. My spelling is terrible and all those squiggly red lines disturb me. Infact I developed terrible handwriting just so I could disguise my bad spelling - ‘no that is defiantly an ‘a’.” She giggles to herself. She giggles a lot! Billie is also a bit of a joker, she was once asked by a German interviewer to discuss her ‘sex-change’. “I told a joke one time on the radio. I was late and the DJ was saying ‘He will be here soon’ so when I showed up, I made a joke about having had a sex-change and I just kept referring to it throughout the interview. Then I did a serious interview in Germany and right towards the end the woman said ‘Can I ask you a personal question. Can we talk about your sex-change?’. I just roared with laughter”. So now I was sure she was a woman, I wanted to ask her about her much discussed sexuality. Not long after ‘Kiss The Rain’ was a success she was outed as a lesbian. Since then she has been quoted as saying she is ‘non-gender specific’ and on the track ‘Flexible’ she says “I’m gay, I’m straight, I’m black and I’m white”. I asked if she felt people attach labels too easily “Yes. journalists try to jump on the bandwagon and P.R. people try to pitch you this way or that way. If you ask me a direct question about my personal life then you will get a direct answer. I’m the same about my music. When I say I am ‘non-gender specific’ you take it as you will.” It is not the sort of statement that the gay press like to hear. “I did the Democrat National Convention Gay & Lesbian conference and the gay press wouldn’t cover it because I’m not ‘out’ enough.” Billie is a woman with strong opinions but feels it a mistake to make grand announcements, especially where sexuality is concerned. “Someone like Sophie B Hawkins was hounded for saying she was ‘omnisexual’ and it is just not relevant to her music. People come out and they make sweeping statements and like with Ellen and Anne, if Anne now dates a man, everyone will say she’s jumping on the bandwagon. I would say the same to straight people, you may be straight now but maybe you’ve never seen someone of your own gender that you found attractive.” As a woman who has been asked about her personal life a thousand times Billie is quite pragmatic about people making personal questions about her private life “I think it’s reasonable to enquire but it’s also reasonable for me to select how I answer. If you talk about you personal life on your records it’s a fine line not to discuss it with your fans, but I expect my fans to give the same level of revelations back." Billie has a very close relationship with her fans via an excellent website and is a big fan of the internet. “It has enabled me to know my fans by name and I speak to them directly. Some are teenagers or going through a change in their lives, illness, sexuality or heartbreak. Some touch a close nerve and I like to respond personally by email. Days when I’m depressed, going and reading nice stuff can really put a pep in my step. The ability to have a relationship with my fans is precious. If used wisely the Internet can be a great community and I love being able to discuss on the internet. In fact I learnt about the different religions from my fans online for ‘Should I call you Jesus’”. There is an area on the site for fan poetry and I wondered if Billie was ever inspired by what she was sent. “Some are very poignant and so good they make you question your own talent. One day I would like to work with someone and make their poem into song. Give someone the sort of chance I’ve had in the past.” Billies music is based on personal experience and she says “couldn’t sing day in day out if it didn’t mean something. This whole album is based around one period in my life when I fell in love with totally the wrong person. Falling in love is stomach churning.” So has she ever written anything too personal and decided not to turn it into a song “No, because the more personal, the more driven I am to express them. My concern with the album is that I sounded really pathetic because it was about being in love with the wrong person. I asked my friends and they sat me down, said I was a mess but that it was OK. Sometimes I will use metaphors instead of the nitty gritty - say I was writing about sex I wouldn’t say ‘I did this and you did that’.” She giggles again “I was listening to KD’s album with all that ‘fallling into my ocean’ stuff and I was just thinking “you GO GIRL!!!”. She dissolves into giggles again. From the pictures on her album cover you can see that Billie is a very beautiful woman with sultry good looks that far surpass those of Scary Spice, but she has been mistaken in public for Mel B in the past. “It’s happened twice, once I was about to appear on Jay Leno and I nipped into Rite-Aid (chemist) for some tampax. I literally had my hand on the box trying to decide between super plus or regular when this woman walks up, points and says “You’re Scarey Spice!”. The second time I was in a club with my friends, dancing to “Wanna be” and a girl came up and said “I know who you are, but I won’t tell anyone”. The next week I went back and the guy on the door said “You think you look like Scary Spice, but you look nothing like her because she was in here last week”. I would love to be a Spice Girl for a week, they are great, non-offensive.” Vertigo is very eclectic in style and Billie’s CD collection ranges from Dalai Lama Chants to Alison Moyet, so just what were her influences. “The radio. I didn’t know anything about music and I just used to listen to my transistor radio. I am the modern day equivalent of a melting pot. I get bored if it’s too samey.” Billie also toured with Lilith Fair tour and met Sinead O’Connor “We just said hello and I gushed “I was a fan since forever” and went red. She seems very shy and I thought she was endearing. She is VERY sexy, but unaware of being sexy which make her even more sexy. She was very elf/pixie like backstage and then she went on stage and sang like a Bette Midler/Divine/Tina Turner. She gets a bad rep. because she is outspoken, she’s grown up before us and I’m sure she realises that ripping up a picture of the Pope was a bad idea at the time. Her album is the best album of the year, ‘Jealousy’ is damn near perfection.” So with the album release on hold in the UK, is there any chance she will tour? “I’m probably at my best live and I would like to do some dates in the UK. Right now I am touring and doing promotions, but this is L.A. so I’m being encouraged to try acting” What would you like to do - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I’d been watching it before I made the call and it was the first thing that came into my head!)? She laughs “Yeah, I’d be Buffys love interest!!” Billie is hoping that Vertigo is enough of a success to allow her to have a third album. Will she ever come back to the UK permanently? “I would like to come back home and have success in England, I love the UK but I’m not so sure about winters. I also love L.A. and Miami but my little socialist heart always remains in the UK” Billie Myers is a woman with a big talent and a strong focus. She’s funny, genuine and very likeable. She is also just what she wants to be, “carefree and ambitious”. Her outstanding album will hopefully be released here soon but in the meantime you can buy it from online Amazon.com. article reproduced by permission 06 October 2000 interview by, and special thanks to Mercedes Clark-Smith, Women's Content and Technical Developer http://www.rainbownetwork.com |
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