'I don't fear death'
She spent 10 years fighting for a recording contract. And not even
cancer could stop Anastacia making her third album. By Siobhan Grogan
Siobhan Grogan
Monday March 15, 2004
The Guardian
Anastacia has the sort of voice you hear long before you see her. I
can hear her in the next room, wondering what she should drink
(caffeine-free Coke), ordering a pizza and petting her terrier,
Freak. She is petite, just 5ft 3in, but in her tight, bleached denim
jacket, towering Gucci boots and trademark pink-tinted gl*****, the
30-year-old singer is larger than life.
She introduces me to the dog. "I take him everywhere! He's the only
man who'll kiss me in the morning." Unimpressed, Freak dashes around
the room then flops on the singer's knee and falls asleep.
It is hard to believe Anastacia is not similarly exhausted, much less
that she is ready to promote a new, self-titled album, her third to
follow the 10m-selling Not That Kind and Freak of Nature that saw her
brash, powerful voice compared to the likes of Tina Turner's. It is,
after all, a year almost to the day that she was diagnosed with
advanced breast cancer. A seven-hour operation was followed by two
and a half months of radiation therapy, during which Anastacia
attempted to begin writing her third album. She admits the memory
still blights her perception of the record, due out this month.
"I think the part that's hardest for people to understand is I have
yet to fall in love with my project," she says. "I have yet to say
it's the best work I've ever done. I feel like cancer's still here
and the album's over there. I'm still, to this day, going through
things and seeing a doctor, and once cancer's a little bit further
away so I can't shake hands with it, then I would feel like I could
look at this album and see it as its own entity without remembering
the difficulties of how it was to write it when I wasn't feeling
good."
To make things worse, Anastacia was forced to deal with her illness
in the most public way possible. Just two days after she found out
about the cancer herself, the news was leaked and made headlines
worldwide. Though she says she had every intention of making her
illness public at some point to help raise awareness, it was a shock
to be asked to give a statement to the media before she had the
op****tunity to tell most of her friends.
"It was like, well, let me think about what I want to say to the
dirty bastard who revealed my terrible secret!" she says. "I was
hurt. I never knew who did it and it did affect me a little bit,
trust-wise. I was more hurt because I had no way of calling, in seven
minutes, all of my friends who might have potentially seen this on
the news. A lot of my acquaintances ended up calling me and laughing,
saying, 'I've heard the craziest **** on the TV!' And I had the
hardest time putting the word cancer and my name in the same
sentence."
She was never afraid she would die. "I don't fear death. But I don't
like being dangled out there like a piece of meat on a fi****ng rod to
it either. If I'm going to die, take me out now. Don't let me suffer.
That's not exactly the way I wanted to go. I don't want to be in
limbo, I don't want to know that I might die. The mights don't work
with me. I'm too literal."
Instead, Anastacia threw herself into writing the album. A month into
radiation therapy, it all stopped. "I had nothing left. I couldn't
form a sentence and remember what I said. My voice was completely
weak. I had insomnia, so instead of being extra tired, I was kind of
just dumb and awake. But once I stopped writing, I felt better. I
surrendered to it, finally. And the rest of the treatment was
acceptable, in so much as I was able to accept everything that went
on with all the side effects, without having to add writing an album
that's going to hopefully keep me in this business."
Having spent 10 years trying to secure a record deal, Anastacia
Newkirk had no intention of letting anything hinder her career for
long. Born in Chicago, she was raised in New York by her Broadway
actress mother after her parents divorced. She remembers singing
along to Elton John and Barbra Streisand records, but never once
hoped it would lead to anything. At 13, she was diagnosed with
Crohn's disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestines that left
her with a deep scar across her stomach and still affects her today.
Crucially, it taught the teenager the need to express herself, as
holding in her emotions appeared to trigger her symptoms.
By 16, Anastacia had become an underage regular at New York dance
club 1018, which eventually landed her a job dancing on Club MTV and
in several music videos. Eventually, she realised she really wanted
to sing, so she began to trail round record companies while working
as a hired singer at weddings, parties and bar mitzvahs. Memorably,
she was once asked to perform the same En Vogue song seven times by
Arnold Schwarzenegger at his birthday party.
While record companies were impressed by Anastacia's voice, all said
she could not be marketed sounding and looking the way she did,
particularly as she refused to give up her gl*****. "I really didn't
understand why it would be that difficult to sell me. I'd
think, 'Give me a microphone and an audience and that is all I need.'
I don't need 17 stylists and hairdressers to sing a concert. I'd
heard enough people on the radio to think, 'God, I swear I must sing
better than that!'"
On the brink of giving up, she wangled a slot singing her own
material on MTV's star search, The Cut, in 1999. As a direct result
of her performance, she signed a deal with Epic Records and released
her debut album, Not That Kind. In Europe it sold 5m copies and
propelled her to stardom; America, however, was unimpressed. In fact,
the US didn't catch on until Anastacia released her second album,
Freak of Nature, in 2000. It's clear that that early rejection at
home still irks; even now, she is "putting Europe first" when it
comes to the new album.
The work is an intimate exploration of confusion, fury and
determination. It reflects on the emotional impact of her tough year,
without actually dwelling on specifics. "I am not embarrassed about
what I've gone through," she says. "I'm not getting vulgarly honest
about it, but it was a very hard time and obviously that's going to
reflect a little bit in the songs on my album. That's life."
Anastacia shrugs and falls silent, just for a moment. "I don't know
what people will think of this or where it will take me, but I at
least know I have tackled it like I have tackled everything difficult
in my life so far. I've looked it straight in the eye and done what I
had to do and moved on. I can't do any more than that."
· The single Left Outside Alone is released on Epic/Daylight on March
22. The album Anastacia is released on March 29.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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