1 CROWDED HOUR .... HOW DOES IT FEEL WHEN THERE IS A FEEDING FRENZY AND YOU ARE
THE FEAST? VERY, VERY STRANGE, K.D. LANG TELLS AMANDA DUCKER (Photographer: Carlotta Moye)
"Why the small letters, k.d.?" "What does All You Can
Eat mean?"
"k.d., your background is incredibly diverse. Do you see yourself as a multicultural person?"
Do you, k.d.? Do you? Can I have a piece of you, k.d.? Now, look this way for the picture, k.d., there's
a good lesbian.
The Canadian singer k.d. lang is in Sydney to promote her new album, All You Can Eat, and the
interrogation has begun. Her first appearance is at a press conference at the Sheraton on the Park. Over her five days here, she will give thirty
one-on-one interviews, sign endless autographs, attend a party to launch All You Can Eat in Australia, be photographed innumerable times, and
try to enjoy a private breakfast on her last morning in Sydney....
The rat-a-tat-tat of reporters' questions continues. It's easy to pick the journalists who didn't
score one-on-one interviews. They're the ones going for broke. "Do you remember that guy asking me about the video-clip [for her latest
single, If I Were You, shot in a bathroom] and saying that lesbians don't groom themselves?" an incredulous lang asks later. (She
replied, quick as a flash, "Everyone knows that lesbians don't use soap.") The journalists who have their precious private half-hour
booked sometime later this week keep their questions to themselves - or don't turn up at all. Still, it's standing room only in the conference
room and lang has the pack in the palm of her hand.
lang on press conferences: "I want them to get an essence of who I am so I try
to be as natural as I can. I'm a bit cynical, I'm a bit cocky, I'm a bit comfortable, I'm a bit vulnerable. I try to be articulate and
funny. I agree it's a big call!"
At 7.30pm, two nights later, a handful of press photgraphers is waiting at the foot of the southern pylon of the
Sydney Harbour Bridge to photograph lang when she arrives in a limousine. The All You Can Eat party, loud and lavish, is already swinging at
the top of the pylon. It's the first time the venue has been used for a private function and everybody's talking about the long lift ride and
the 200-odd steps they climbed to get here. There's champagne, outrageous views of the harbour and the naked, body-painted buttocks of a man and a
woman, journalists, celebrities, Warner Music heavies and middle-weights, a gaggle of drag queens and assorted others, about 100 in
total.
Vogue: "I'm wondering what brings you and your friends here
tonight."
Drag queen Ricca Paris (aghast): "We were invited." (Relenting): "We're from a company called
Dragon Management Pty Ltd, we supply drag queens for events." (Paris delves with a gloved hand into her purse and produces a business card, which
gets snared in her wig as she hands it over.)
Man at bar: "Guess who might be coming tonight?"
Vogue: "Cindy Crawford?"
Man at bar: "Yep, and one of the Baldwin brothers." (It was Billy, in town with Crawford to promote
their film Fair Game, but in the end they didn't show).
Vogue: "Is lang here yet?"
Man at bar: "I haven't seen her."
An hour later, lang is still nowhere to be seen. But she is here, I'm told. Just not here here.
Where then? In a private room upstairs blocked by security guards. Unsurprisingly, it's Ricca Paris and her drag queen mates who first catch my
eye in the infinitely more civilised white room, which is encircled by a high-walled wraparound balcony offering even better harbour views and, even
better, comfortable chairs. Then there's the boy musician-cum-soapie star ("I've only been in the show for a week, but it's already
affecting my life," he moans), Home and Away star Melissa George and her pretty sister ("the world's most famous dental
nurse," someone jokes, remarking on fame by association as the sisters smile for a camera) and some twenty more chosen ones.
And then there is lang - tall, quiet and charismatic - talking with a couple of music/media types by the stairs.
It turns out she has been downstairs to greet guests intermittently (escorted each time by Darlene Blaeser, her personal manager, and Warner Music
personnel), before retreating to the ivory tower to retrieve her personal space. She does not like to be touched by strangers, and there's one woman
down there who's been pawing at her. Up here, though, she's relaxed and good-humoured.
Blaeser: "I got married on the ninth of September. I set off with k.d. on the tenth of September [on this
international promotional tour]. We've had four days off since then. (Laughing). My husband can't afford to take me to the places she takes
me!"
lang (laconic, as is her custom, and laughing) "There's some truth in that."
Vogue: "The angle of my story is the phenomenon of fame and the hoo-hah when a star comes to
town."
lang: "You could explain it to me!"
At 11.30pm, a handful of press photgraphers is waiting at the foot of the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour
Bridge to photograph lang when she departs in a limousine.
"If I could only be the queen of popularity.... " lyrics from If I Were You.
lang, thirty-three, was named Kathryn Dawn by her school teacher mother and pharmacist father, and grew up
in the small town of Consort in southern Alberta. She intended to be a jazz singer, but instead she turned to country music, pulling together her first
band, the reclines, in the early eighties, and putting the wind up Nasville.
A fine career - despite country music stations' refusal to play her music (it was an image thing) - became a
wildly successful one in 1992 with the release of her album Ingenue, for which she won her third Grammy award and made the leap from country to
the category-free big time. By 1993, when she was "shaved" by model Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair, she was one of the
most famous female vocalists in the world, not to mention the most celebrated gay woman, linked in the tabloid press with women as disparate as Crawford
and Martina Navratilova.
lang on gossip: "Growing up in a small town prepared me for [that mentality].
It's exactly like living in a small town. But I know who I'm sleeping with, I know who I'm not sleeping with, and that gossip is a reality
of the human condition."
In fact, lang is single, and contrary to reports that she's looking for a wife, would be happy to find a
partner in love. People's motives, however, are not always pure when it comes to the seduction of superstars.
"Fame is very, very strange. People are attracted to you based on their own fantasy of who you are,"
she tells me the next day at the Warner Music offices. "People want you at their parties because it makes them look good. It's creepy. At
first, you don't realise that they do it to anyone who's famous. You think, 'God, these people really dig me!'" she
declares.
lang has already done six interviews today, but she looks radiant. She's wearing the favourite outfit from
her suitcase: loose cotton shirt, cotton pants, sandals. For the past three-and-a-half months, she has done up to eight media interviews a day, usually
working six days a week. After a short break over Christmas, she was planning to set off in January on the nine-month long, worldwide All You Can
Eat performing tour (which comes to Australia this May). During that time, she will be working to a six weeks on, two weeks off schedule and on her
breaks, she will stay where she is if she feels like it, or return to one of her homes, in Los Angeles and Vancouver.
Touring is gruelling, but it's worth it. "On a good performance, I'm completely removed. I feel
as if I'm channeling. However you say it, it's devine. I'm surfing music. I see colour patterns, feel musical waves and it's like
I'm floating, and it's absolutely euphoric."
While not exactly ecstatic over giving so many interviews in quick succession, she is sanguine - and generous.
"I am at the point where I have no defences. There's nothing about me that you're going to get out of me that I'm not prepared to
give." By turns serious, considered, wry and restless, with a few dreamy moments thrown in, she is above all as honest as her powerful, plaintive
multi-octave singing voice.
A few hours later, she's signing for fans. It's clear that the crowd filling the city music store and
snaking in barricades up the escalators and out onto the Pitt Street mall really do dig k.d. lang. They're making such calls "You're
beautiful, k.d.". For many of the young women here, she is a role model. First in the queue is Joanna Aitken, a young woman with short brown hair
who took the day off work to stand in line. "She's a pretty girl, a nice girl, but it's the music I like," she says, flushed after her
encounter at the desk where lang will sign her name 1,00 times this evening.
After more autographs and photographs in the storeroom for the shop's staff, and an half-an-hour for a beer
at a restaurant/bar on Oxford Street, it's on to Denton. In the limousine on the way to Seven Network studios at Epping, she's unfazed
by host Andrew Denton's reputation as a clever dick (smiling, "I'll just go with it") and does not seem terribly interested that Cindy
Crawford will be there.
Had a photograph been taken of Crawford and lang as they embraced like faint friends in the corridor
outside the dressing rooms, those photographs would have been published worldwide. But everyone
demonstrated their respect; even Crawford's minders stood at least two metres to one side while the stars swapped news. Besides, had anyone taken a
picture, he or she would mostly probably have been sued.
On-camera, lang shows she's no slouch in conversation; she's a as quick as Denton with her comebacks,
and he is obviously charmed. Afterwards, George cranks up the limo and it's back to the hotel for bed.
We meet there early the next morning, her final day in Sydney, and go for breakfast on Victoria Street,
Darlinghurst. This is lang's time off. But as the second coffees arrive at our table, so does the editor of Lesbians on The Loose
magazine, thrilled by the serendipity of her passing. She expresses her disappointment that the magazines's request for an interview was denied.
lang apologises. The editor presses on, wondering if it's not too late to arrange something. lang thinks it's too late. The editor gives her a
copy of the latest issue of Lesbians on The Loose and leaves, somewhat reluctantly.
lang on celebrity: "The worst thing is that I used to be very social
and very extroverted and to preserve myself, I have become introverted and unsociable. I used to dress really funky and do crazy things in public, but
now I don't. I try to stay as low-key as possible. I miss that other side, because my nature is to be kind of wild.... So much of my life is about
performing and giving and answering that when I'm walking down the street, I don't want anyone to look at me and I don't want anybody to talk
to me. I just want to be alone for a minute."
Ten minutes later, a man approaches the table. "You're k.d. lang, aren't you? I'm
HIV-positive and I just want to say that I think you're really great. You're a great role model, and there aren't many of you. I was
wondering if you could do something for us. A special benefit concert or something?"
lang says she'll talk to her management. The man goes away. lang picks up Lesbians on The Loose
and it falls open on a page bearing a publicity photograph of herself and an article on her vegetarianism and the controversial "meat stinks"
campaign for which she was once a spokeswoman.
She looks down at the page, gives a sad smile, and closes the magazine.
"Shall we go?" she asks. behind us in the cafe, two women are awkwardly embracing on a booth seat,
but she does not seem to notice them.
Published in Vogue Australia, February 1996
