Pink

Adult Contemporary/Pop Music Forum

SACK THE STYLIST Dec 6 2003

NORMALLY sassy Pink looks like she has taken some fashion advice from Christina Aguilera. The singer turned all girlie with a puffball dress when she performed at the Toys for Tots party in California. Onlookers could have done with sunglasses to shield their eyes from the kaleidoscope of colours.

At least buy yourself a mirror, dear.

SAFETY FIRST FOR PINK

Pop singer Pink has been asked to tone down her wild live performances by her management -- because they risk her personal safety.

The star's managers have ordered her to change her stage show's crazy finale, because it's so daring they can't get insurance to cover it.

Pink, who started her world tour last Thursday, finishes her storming set by walking through the crowd with a group of bodyguards.

She then tops this by traversing headfirst down a giant 40-foot high drape, without a harness.

But the 24-year-old's management team have objected, deeming both stunts too dangerous.

An insider says, "Pink came up with all the ideas for the show. That explains why it is a bit risque and dangerous -- her personality just shines through in it.

"But, that said, the show is not safe for her.

"Pink is a stubborn girl and reckons that she won't hurt herself. She is a trained gymnast and has performed stunts that are regarded as more dangerous than the one in her show.

"But there is also the matter of insurance that we haven't yet got to the bottom of yet."

PINK'S MOM HATES READING INTERVIEWS

Controversial pop star Pink's mother refuses to look at her interviews -- because she's scared of what she might read about herself.

Following her parents' divorce, the feisty singer channeled her anger against mother Judy Moore into the lyrics of hit album M!ssundaztood, and often speaks frankly to the press about their troubled relationship.

Pink admits, "She just gave up and stopped reading my interviews.

"My point was, the truth hurts. And its better to talk about it and move on than suppress it and always have a wall between you.

"So we've come to terms with a lot of stuff from that album, and I think it was good. Because one thing I hate about families -- they don't talk about s--."

PINK'S IN TROUBLE

Feisty pop punk Pink has been attacked by British parents, furious at the sexual content of her concerts -- performed to audience members as young as nine.

The singer's current tour of Britain sees her cavort with topless dancers and perform a lewd sexual scene with an inflatable doll.

And Pink greeted the crowd at Newcastle's Telewest Arena, yelling "Hello [bleep] Newcastle!"

One audience member in Newcastle fumes, "We were really looking forward to seeing Pink perform, but I didn't expect to see her perform the songs like that.

"This should have had a parental warning for the kids who think the world of Pink and I think she did go overboard, especially with the doll."

Pink is currently on her world tour, which ends in Melbourne on May 5.

PINK'S LABEL SUES AUSTRIAN PARTY

Bosses at Pink's record label are suing Austria's conservative party OVP for using the pop punk's name to boost support.

The political organization infuriated BMG chiefs when they printed the star's moniker on flyers promoting candidate Benita Ferrero-Waldner's election campaign, following her sell-out show in Vienna on April 4.

According to her label the party broke "more than one right of the artist. It was a misuse of an artist's name for a political campaign without the written consent of the artist.

"It's not even clear if the artist approves or even shares the political view of that party."

BMG representatives also insist they don't want their protest to be regarded as an approval for rival party SPO and their candidate Heinz Fischer.

Gritty in Pink

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Hello? Pink's like the anti-Britney, OK? And she's not going to back down when Terminator 3 star Kristanna Loken snogs her on the dance floor, reports Laura Barton.

In the gloom of her dressing room, Pink pops her neck and cracks her knuckles like a trucker. She is small and taut, like a neat, pretty bulldog, with black tracksuit pants, vest and glossy, cropped, black hair.

"I just had a cortisone shot and we took a picture of it!" she says, flourishing a polaroid of her derriere. She lights up the first of many Newports, wafting the smoke with her hand and apologising profusely.

Tonight Pink finds herself in Oslo, halfway through her tour. Yesterday was her day off, and she spent it snowboarding. She eases her leg up on to the coffee table.

"Ugh," she says. "Man, that hurts."

It's easy to be a little suspicious of Pink.

Into a music industry picket-fenced with central-casting cutesies such as Britney and Jessica Simpson, Pink is cast as the toughie, the commercially palatable tomboy.

Just another marketing device? It's hard to say. Today she appears the quintessential rebellious American teenager, part Darlene from Roseanne, part Rizzo from Grease.

She keeps her vocabulary stunted and her conversation is speckled with a hundred superfluous "likes" and "f---s".

She wasn't even in her teens when she started to go off the rails. She was born Alecia Moore in 1979 in Doylestown, near Philadelphia, and grew up in a house that was, she says, "like a war zone". Her parents divorced when she was eight.

"I remember when they told us, I was shocked and, y'know, we cried a lot, but as soon as my dad was gone I was like, 'Freedom!'" she says. "My dad was the strict one, so I was like, 'I can do whatever the f--- I want now!'"

She reels off a shopping list of teenage misdemeanours: "Started smokin', drinkin', cuttin' school, goin' to clubs, runnin' away ...

you name it, I did it. I was a f---in' terror."

Much of this time was documented in her second album, Missundaztood, on which, as she puts it, "I f---in' aired my laundry". Perhaps the album's most revealing track is Family Portrait, in which she sings: "I don't wanna have to split the holidays/I don't want two addresses/I don't want a stepbrother anyways/And I don't want my mum to have to change her last name."

One wonders how her family reacted to seeing their laundry aired so publicly.

"It was good for my family," she says. "My mom cried for, like, four days. But then all of a sudden she was like, 'I didn't know the divorce affected you so much.'

"And then I was like, 'It didn't. You did!' But it was good, y'know? I didn't want to brush it under the rug and move on. I wanted to know my parents and I wanted them to know me."

By 13, Pink was dancing in clubs, and before long was permitted to clamber up on stage once a week to sing one song. She sang R&B then, although her background encompassed a love of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Guns N' Roses and Mary J Blige.

"And Phantom of the Opera," she says. "Loved opera. I trained classically. I would do a rock opera for sure. I just started, kinda, writing one now.

"But it's just really hard, y'know? A lot of people have done it and really sucked ... and I don't wanna do a rock opera and have it suck."

Her belting vocals soon caught the attention of a record label scout.

"So then I started a group and we went to Atlanta and sang for [label boss] L.A. Reid and he signed us that day," she says in one breath.

What would she have done if she hadn't been spotted, if she hadn't gone to sing for L.A. Reid and stayed in Philadelphia?

"I wouldn't be in Philly," she says. "I was gonna get out of there, one way or another. My original plan was to get legally emancipated when I was 16, drop outta high school, hitchhike across country to California and sing on Venice Beach boardwalk until I got discovered."

She raises her chin and blows out a long, unflinching stream of smoke.

Her first album, Can't Take Me Home, went double platinum in the US and resulted in three top-10 singles. When she came to make her second album there was pressure for her to repeat the success by using the same formula.

Instead, she turned to Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes fame.

"I found her number in a book one day and I called her and I stalked her until she worked with me," says Pink. "Oh my God, her voice spoke to me like no other."

Together, they produced the decidedly rocky Missundaztood, which also swiftly and unexpectedly went double platinum. She claims she was relieved when her most recent album, Try This, did not initially sell so well, although the single Trouble did win a Grammy for best female rock vocal.

She lights up another Newport and gives me a guided tour of her tattoos.

"My first one was this one," she says as she indicates a mystical symbol on her arm.

"I got it when I was 12, it means good luck and happiness, and I got that in Philly. I had my tongue pierced there the next weekend. They didn't give a ****."

She shows me the words "Sir Corky Moore" on her other arm.

"This was my childhood dog, who died last year," she says. "We called him Sir. Out of respect." Around her wrist is a symbol meaning "what goes around comes around".

"I'm a big believer in karma," she says. "When I was about 15, I found my spirituality. I kinda found it on my own, on the floor of a club.

"But I always felt like there was a god or a goddess or whatever, like a higher power. I've always felt I had a guardian angel, so when I was 15 I got a guardian angel tattooed on my back."

Her butch image has inevitably prompted mutterings of lesbianism, rumours she fuelled by kissing Terminator 3 star Kristanna Loken on a nightclub dance floor last year.

"Ohhh, yeah," she says, "That was in Monte Carlo, and that's pretty much all I can say. Monte Carlo is a place like it does not belong on this earth. It turns you into a f---in' animal as soon as you get off that plane. It's just a bunch of people with way too much money and way too much free time.

"And I had a little too much to drink. It was just the sort of thing where, y'know, she tried to dominate me. We were dancin' and she kissed me. I wasn't gonna back down. F--- that. You may be taller, but I'm stronger."

Tonight, Pink's show incorporates blow-up dolls, nudity and a considerable amount of lap-dancing. Is she just trying to show she is still the most rebellious kid on the block? To prove she is still the anti-Britney?

"Yunno, it's a f---in' rock show," she says.

"I have a parental advisory sticker on my album, so, helloo?" A tickly laugh blows out of her mouth with the cigarette smoke. "This ain't the f---in' Mickey Mouse Club."

The Guardian

PINK
Sydney Entertainment Centre, Haymarket
April 25, 7.30pm
$99.90/$85
Bookings: 136 100

Read my lips

The anti-Britney ... Pink.
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She has turned the tables on manufactured pop and her singing sisters by performing live without the lip-sync, Brett Thomas writes.

Pink had a dream the other night. It was a dream that left her breathless and lathered in a nervous sweat, wondering: what the hell was that about?

"I did a full opera," recalled the 24-year-old singer formerly known as Alecia Moore. "It was my own opera that I had written ... and it was terrifying."

How did the decidedly non-divaesque pop star sound in her dream? "Like an asthmatic smoker singing opera," she chortled.

Pink was ensconced in a luxury tour bus zooming through the Hungarian countryside as she talked to S. It had been hours since she had come off stage at Budapest after yet another sold-out show on what has been a triumphant European tour, but she was still wide awake and wired.

We'll leave it to the professionals to work out the intricacies of Pink's dream but perhaps it was letting her know she had nailed her first major arena tour, was in a comfort zone that has been a long time coming, and it would take something pretty drastic to shake her on-stage confidence from this point.

The reviews for the show - a high-octane performance featuring acrobatics, blow-up dolls, lap dancing, outrageous costumes and no lip-synching - have been rapturous.

"Pink reveals some depths that her fellow pop sirens Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera can't touch," said The Observer.

"Next time anyone moans about that lack of characters in pop, give them a four-letter word beginning with P," The Guardian reported.

"The reviews have been great, the critics have been awesome," Pink said in her now trademark nicotine rasp. "This has been the most fun tour ever.

"You can probably expect to see some pissed-off parents, which is always good, but this show is real fun - it's like a three-act play for me because my albums (Can't Take Me Home, the breakout, 12 million-selling Missundaztood and the current Try This) are all so different."

Many reviewers have gone out of their way to point out that the Try This tour includes no pre-recorded vocals - a sad indictment on shows being staged by the likes of Spears when pleasant surprise is expressed at a singer who sings.

"I think it's actually harder to lip-sync, 'coz I'm real bad at it," Pink said. "I've never really tried it but I think it sucks because I'm a live music lover. I'm a big fan of Paul McCartney and if I went to see him and he was lip-synching, I'd want my money back."

With her tomboy posturing and nods to classic rock legends such as McCartney and Janis Joplin (she sings a Joplin tribute during the show and is rumoured to be playing the late singer in a planned movie), Pink often is described as the anti-Britney.

She's certainly attracting a different type of fan base, if her would-be groupies are any guide.

"They're mostly women who want to strip me of my clothes and do nasty things to me," she boasted with a laugh. "I usually just sic 'em on to my band. The attention can be flattering, depending on how fat I'm feeling. Nah, just joking. Attention is always good but sometimes it can be a bit strange when they're calling up to your window at 3am. But that's fine - I always make sure I toss them down a chocolate bar."

One of the highlights of Pink's show has her crooning a few lines from Aguilera's hit Beautiful at a sex doll which bears an uncanny resemblance to that singer, and it seems Pink concurs with the view she is the antidote to the shallow, image-dominant pop on today's charts.

"As far as the other girls are concerned, I've always been a tomboy so I've never really felt part of that scene," Pink said. "I've always felt like an outsider.

"Probably the main difference is that I don't ******** and I guess people can relate to that. But I've got nothing against those girls.

"Besides, us women are taking over, man! I think all the women out there right now are pretty hot and they're all adding their own little thing to the pie."

As evidence of the female takeover, Pink, Spears and fellow superstar on the rise Beyonce recently all starred in a soft drink commercial together, leading to some flak for Pink, in particular, for apparently selling out.

"I mean, I signed my first major label record contract when I was 16," she retorted. "So, I've been selling out since I started.

"We were flown all the way to Rome to work in a fake colosseum next to the real one and it was great fun; the girls were cool and the director was super cool. Plus I got to meet Roger Taylor and Brian May from Queen (Queen's We Will Rock You was used in the ad) and that was the best part."

Who's Your Daddy?

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News flash! Pink likes to have her nipples tweaked before she performs! "I need my nipples squeezed before every show. It gets me pumped to go on stage. My assistant Jackie has it down to a fine art!" Way to go Jackie! Keep up the good work. Maybe Pink should get her nipples pinched before she records an album to get her self pumped to sell a few more copies.

Pink Shops In Beverly Hills

Pink was photographed on a shopping spree the other day on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, where she stopped at Yves Saint Laurent et Sergio Rossi. Check out pictures from Clasos.

- Pop Dirt

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I never realised she has that many tattoos.
You learn something new everyday