Diamanda Galas

[Azat]

Screechy diva Diamanda Galas grants an audience to Rupert Smith

 

Monday September 17, 2001

The Guardian

 

The Centosette Cafe on Manhattan's Third Avenue is only a block or so from Diamanda Galas's East Village apartment, yet she manages to be 45 minutes late for our 11am appointment. This is usually a bad way to start an interview, but in Galas's case it turns out to be the best, giving rise to a perfect display of her very modern brand of divadom.

"I don't sleep in the summer," she explains, after apologetic hugs and kisses and an urgent order for iced cappuccino. "I woke up at 11 and I couldn't find my keys so I just turned into Judy Garland. I swept everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out of the apartment, leaving the door open. Burglars? **** 'em. The place looks like it's been burgled already, by me."

 

She blames her mood swings on medication, or rather the lack of it. She's meant to be taking a course of treatment for hepatitis C, but has had to delay it until the autumn. "So you must excuse me if I don't stick to the point." Anyone who has seen Galas perform - stripped to the waist and smeared in blood for the Plague Mass, or hammering out her lonely, hypnotic blues at the piano - will be astonished that she even contemplated a morning meeting, let alone made it. Surely she should only come out at night.

 

In fact, Galas is a less fearsome proposition offstage - smaller and friendlier without her war-paint. She's wearing black, but then she has only just fallen out of bed. Her wraparound shades have strong prescription lenses. The biggest shock, though, is her sense of humour; she spends half the interview laughing. "Journalists, especially straight male music journalists, expect me to be terribly serious and miserable. But why should I play a one-note samba? If you don't get the humour in what I do, if you think I'm one of these 'alternative music' types, I shudder at the thought, I really do." She delivers these lines in a cod English accent that would make Madonna blush.

 

We're here to discuss Galas's show at London's Royal Festival Hall this week. La Serpenta Canta is a selection from her growing repertoire of blues, hexes, dirges and fractured pop. Advance publicity describes it as "a greatest hits show" - a hilarious concept considering her doggedly anti-commercial career path. "Shall I come on looking all pretty and give the people what they want? I think not. It's a collection of songs that I want to play, including a lot of things that people hate - all those dreadful songs in foreign languages, oh dear. I don't hold my audience in contempt, because you should never **** with people who are nice to you, but I'm a control freak when it comes to performance. I hate the idea of doing things just to please people. I might sing Downtown [Petula Clark], I might sing My World Is Empty Without You [the Supremes], but they make people too happy. I accidentally did an encore recently that people had been shouting for. I hadn't heard them! I was mortified, of course, because I really want to be like Nina Simone. I went to see her recently, and at the end of the show everyone was yelling for encores. She was carried to the front of the stage - she's too big to walk on her own now - and she just stared out at the audience and croaked 'I have nothing more to give. Go to hell!' "

 

Galas's career is not unlike Simone's. A child prodigy, she was raised by Greek Orthodox parents in California and hothoused in classical piano. She played in her father's band from the age of 13 at military bases and bars. ("When you've played the Carpenters' Top of the World 15 times in one night, you have a unique relationship with that song. I have a version of it that's just too harrowing to perform.") After an interlude studying biochemistry by day and hanging out with transvestite prostitutes by night - not something Simone was known for - she began singing and performing around America and Europe, paying her avant-garde dues by working with Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis.

 

In the 1980s, Galas's artistic mission crystallised with the advent of the Aids crisis - just as Nina Simone, two decades earlier, focused her work on the civil rights movement. Galas nursed her beloved brother Philip until his death in 1986, and much of her subsequent work has been "about" Aids, addressing the fear and denial surrounding the disease in confrontational terms. The Plague Mass, the culmination of this work, was performed at New York's Cathedral of St John the Divine, with Galas at full throttle, screaming and whispering biblical texts, spirituals and her own furious lyrics. She has the words We Are All HIV+ tattooed on the knuckles of her left hand.

Galas's Aids work is not done - she continues to perform the Plague Mass around the world. But now she has other concerns too. Her last London show, Defixiones (1999), introduced a selection of songs based on poems by exiled writers from Peru, Syria and Turkey. She is currently addressing the genocides of Armenians and Anatolians by the Turks in 1915 and 1922, war crimes that are now denied by many Turkish historians and politicians.

 

"They're trying to prevent any discussion of it. The Turkish government has paid for chairs at US universities to prevent "unofficial" teaching. I'll speak out against it, I'll address it in my work, I'll talk to the press about it, because as an artist I'm not affiliated to any institution and there's nothing they can do to shut me up. The only thing they can do is kill me, and why would they waste their time doing that?"

 

Galas's days are divided between rehearsing shows and campaigning for the recognition of the Armenian genocides. She is clearly a woman who needs a cause - a fact to which she made witty refer ence by allowing Annie Leibovitz to photograph her as a naked martyr nailed to a cross. But this isn't politics as an accessory; she does not dip into causes for credibility. Her chief concerns - Aids and genocide - have touched her family deeply. Her brother had the disease, and her parents are of Armenian extraction. Not for nothing has she chosen Mahalia Jackson's I'm Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song as a centrepiece for La Serpenta Canta.

 

"I'm performing Defixiones at UCLA in November. There are about 500,000 Armenians in Los Angeles, and a lot of Greeks and Syrians, so it's the American capital of this unrecognised genocide. And they'll understand what I'm singing about, even if nobody else in America does."

This is where the interview lurches into uncannily prophetic territory. Galas was speaking on September 8, three days before the tumultuous events a few blocks further down Manhattan. A flurry of emails establishes her response. "There will be lot of heterosexual conception in town tonight. Well, the Americans now have the opportunity to understand what we've been talking about all along. Nothing like waking up to your own dead goldfish." Pressed for a more serious response, she stayed up all night and wrote an articulate, measured essay, too lengthy to quote in full.

 

"On September 11, Americans learned the true meaning of war, though they've tended to think of the action not as a desperate act or a retaliation, but as an unadulterated visitation upon the innocent of 'great evil'. As always, these acts have dreadful 'collateral' damage, but that never bothered Americans until this year. Our victims at home are currently faceless because the media is afraid to show our people for fear of demoralising them completely. America's overseas victims have always been faceless. The Vietnamese, Haitians, Serbs, Iraqis, El Salvadorians, Congolese, etc, etc, etc. To quote from William Blum, 'A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force.'

 

"We haven't yet begun to understand why these assaults have happened, and will probably continue to happen. I can make no prediction whatsoever for the future of our country."

 

While most Americans have been overtaken by events, Galas feels that things have finally come up to speed. It's a grim context for her work, but an appropriate one. "I'm quite happy in the role of the vampire or the angel of death," she said at our New York interview. "As long as you do it with humour and style. My dear friend Carl, who died of Aids, had a very good line in gallows humour. When he was looking very ill before his death, he'd go up to men in restaurants and say, 'Don't you remember me? We had a very nice time one night.' And if they pretended not to know him, he'd say, 'Oh darling, what a shame! The dementia's setting in already.' He was evil, in the sense that a gay man would understand that word. I miss him so much, and I try to keep that spirit alive." Well, now she certainly has the chance.

 

• Diamanda Galas is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (020-7960 4242), on Thursday

[Azat]

Rough Diamanda

 

Whatever it was Galas was singing, it was full of beguiling passion and humour

 

Barbara Ellen

Sunday September 23, 2001

The Observer

 

Diamanda Galas Royal Festival Hall, London SE1

Watching Diamanda Galas in concert is a bit like observing the Old Testament come to life in rabid technicolour. Indeed, not for nothing has Galas been dubbed the 'Diva of the Dispossessed'.

 

Since her debut work, The Litanies Of Satan in 1982, her's has been a lengthy uncompromising career, addressing, among other things, Aids ( Plague Mass, inspired by her brother's death from Aids), and the persecution of the Armenians in the first half of the last century (her family is of Armenian extraction). Then there is the four-octave range, the tattoo sprawled across her knuckles ('we are all HIV-positive'), the blood-smeared performances, the prostitution and drug problems (Galas contracted Hepatitis C from sharing needles), and her snarling command of several foreign languages. S Club 7 can sleep safely in their beds. I don't know the numbers, but I think it fairly safe to conclude that Galas does not enjoy much mainstream radio play.

 

It says something that, before I sit down for Galas's performance of 'La Serpenta Canta' at the Royal Festival Hall, I briefly check if the merchandise stall happens to have a copy of her first book of lyrics, charmingly entitled The Shit Of God (Well, Christmas is just around the corner). I don't spot it, which is a disappointment for all my family and friends. What definitely isn't a disappointment is Galas herself. She saunters onstage in a long gothic dress, her black Morticia-locks trailing down her back like a long-dead animal, an expression on her face that suggests she's been drinking cyanide for fun. Rather brilliantly, she completely ignores the rapturous crowd as she strolls moodily and jerkily to the piano situated centre-stage.

 

Once sat, there's no 'hello London', no 'thank you', no 'it's really great to be here', no nothing. With one shoulder drawn up away from us, Galas pulls a disgusted face, slams her long white fingers down on the keys, and starts wailing away, as is her wont, like a cross between a medieval requiem, a wolf howling, and a horror movie exorcism. Looking into my programme, I see that, for 'La Serpenta Canta', she is down to perform a selection from her impressive repertoire of classic dark blues, subverted standards, and her own deliriously macabre and complex material. Which is all very well, but, during the 90-minute performance, I strain to identify the songs Galas is performing, and score a measly four - Screaming Jay Hawkins' 'I Put A Spell On You', Tampa Red's 'Dead Cat On A Line, and Galas's own 'Let's Not Chat About Despair' and 'Baby's Insane'. It's not entirely my fault - the way Galas twists and turns, dips and soars, rasps, trills and booms, back-tracks, inverts, reels, undulates and spasms through her songs, you'd probably need an interpreter to tell you she's singing 'Happy Birthday'.

 

Even when Galas sings in English, the lyrics get flattened through mangles, stretched like toffee, and pounded like dough, to the point of near-intelligibility. When she deigns to speak, I can't work out a word she is saying. There's some growled threat against 'journalists who might think to misquote her', but there's no danger there when Galas's accent is New York crossed with East European crossed with a character from a Noel Coward play. (Which has to be viewed as slightly odd seeing as Galas was brought up in sun-kissed San Diego.) However, despite these communication difficulties, there is no denying that Galas stalks her territory like a big, beautiful cat. Her immediate reference points would probably be Nick Cave, P.J. Harvey, and going back a bit, Lydia Lunch and Karen Finley, but really the original, charismatic, opera-trained Galas is quite unlike any other artiste you could ever encounter. A beguiling, challenging mix of passion, information, culture, history and humour.

 

Indeed, as the performance draws to a close, it becomes clear that Galas, far from being some dodgy old shrieking goth, is what I'd term a Picasso performer - she can sing and play 'properly' but where's the fun, the art, the honesty and danger in that? Clearly nowhere for such an inveterate cultural trouble-maker.

 

As I leave, I am stopped in my tracks by the most astonishing sight. Galas is smiling, batting her eyelashes, and girlishly accepting a bouquet presented to her by a male representative of Royal Festival Hall. I want to yell over to him: 'Run for your life, it's a trick!'