`I'm not really a romantic person, but I like the nice little moments in life that everybody looks for. In a performance it's much more interesting to fall into the deep edges, and to have the audience follow you. You can reflect a certain part of reality, disconnect it from all its social value systems and from what education or environment tells you. If you disconnect to a certain degree, you can reach an area where you redefine yourself. You can survive and find your power from these moments. This is the reason why I do what I do."
The Olivier award-winning singer and actress, Ute Lemper, is sitting in a hotel room overlooking London's Hyde Park, looking for all the world like a dominatrix on her day off. A voluminous jersey flops over skintight leather trousers, and blonde hair frames a face that is stern but beautiful. Her theatrical mien is perhaps best exemplified by the way she positions her body, by the way she drinks from her glass of water and by the way her eyebrows arch like the McDonalds logo every time she expresses surprise. Recovering from a slight hangover (out drinking the night before with Neil Hannon and the reprobates from Divine Comedy), she winces slightly every time the room telephone rings. After the third time, it's taken off the hook.
Born in Munster, Germany, 36 years ago, Ute Lemper is now a citizen of the world. Currently living in New York with her actor/comedian husband, David Tabatsky, and two children, Max and Stella, Lemper feels at home there because "everyone is a foreigner. There is no norm. Everyone has an accent, a different culture and tradition." Her own accent is a mesmeric blend of her native German, French, English and American, the latter three assimilated through years of residencies in Paris, London and various locations in the US.
She plans to tour Ireland in the summer with material from her new album, Punishing Kiss, which is unlike any of her other recording work. Previously straddling the works of Kurt Weill, French chanson, Dietrich, Sondheim and Berlin cabaret songs, Lemper's current state of mind is strictly on the darker side of rock. Backed more or less throughout the album by Divine Comedy, Lemper handles songs (by the likes of Neil Hannon, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Philip Glass, Elvis Costello and Scott Walker) in a way that marks her out as much an interpreter of intelligent adult rock as of intelligent adult Kabaret.
"The goal was to ask all these guys to write for me, or at least with me in mind," she says. "A lot of these songs we arranged so they could fit me. If you have a composition you can do anything with it. When you create a musical universe, you can really find yourself in it. You look at the song, the musical line, the psychology of the story and the dramatic evolution to it. Then you make it your own. You create a musical universe. That can be very far from what the composer had in his mind. But as I say, that was the goal."
To say that Ute's goal has scored a direct hit is an understatement. Murder (or, indeed, "oi'll murther yer") ballads by any other name, her theatrical singing voice complements the inherent unhinged aspects of the material.
Writers with strong connections to the heart of darkness have tapped into Lemper's wilfully harsh delivery. Nick Cave's Little Water Song relates a woman's ironically serene thoughts as she is being drowned by her lover; Elvis Costello's three songs (Passionate Fight, Punishing Kiss and Couldn't You Keep That To Yourself) are typically uncompromising; Neil Hannon's three songs (The Case Continues, Split and You Were meant For Me) go for both the joke and the jugular; Tom Waits's two songs (The Part You Throw Away and Purple Avenue) come across like shattered Serge Gainsbourg; and Scott Walker's Scope J is downright strange. The result is a record that expresses a broad internal dialogue between bad and evil. It's a far cry from Ute's early roles in Cats and Peter Pan, and more in line with her latter day self-professed "outrageous" solo shows. "I am at home in theatrical performance," she claims, smacking her lips to the sound of the words. "I don't feel I'm in the pop world with this record. I didn't compromise the performance at all. It maintains integrity with what I normally do. It left a lot of space with exploring the rougher elements of the voice and performance. The only song where I completely submitted myself to a direction of the composer was Scott Walker's Scope J. He really moulded me into his vision of music, and I let this happen voluntarily. His music is in a different world. He's quite specific in his demands. He wanted me to lose my identity and characteristics, and was all about finding the abstracts. Not even singing the lyrics, but whining and howling them. "It's interesting to give yourself up to someone's vision. I like to do that once in a while, because you learn from it. I wouldn't want to do a whole album like it, but for one track it's fine."
While, stylistically, Punishing Kiss is a departure for Ute, she feels her audience ("not at all a typical West End/Broadway audience, more rock") stays the same. Consciously aligning herself to a breed of songwriter whose work, at the very least, recognises the influence of Brecht/Weill - "the loners, the losers, the lunatics, the drunks, the prostitutes, the brothels, the harbours, a world where murder and suicide and death are much more important than falling in love," she says breathlessly, with a smirk on her face - Ute is fully aware of the differences between pop and theatre.
"Pop is very time-oriented, and so violently reinvents itself every year or two that it's damned to be forgotten - except if you have songwriters who exist out of time, like Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, even Bruce Springsteen. Or true songwriters who are committed to survival and passion, such as Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, even David Bowie. Theatre doesn't adhere to the time principle, but then it's not supposed to. Shakespeare is timeless and will forever have meaning. Pop and theatre survive under different laws.
"Pop lyrics these days are mostly terrible, so you don't listen to what Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey or the Spice Girls are talking about. Pop is all about large productions and grooving in nightclubs. It's condemned to have no importance in history."
If pop is romance, then where does that leave the perversely-titled Punishing Kiss? Why are the songs on the record so unromantic? "I can only quote Kurt Weill: that romanticism in art killed the mind due to the fact that it operated with narcotic effects. The intoxication of the creative moment in his present was a thing of the past. It was not about impressionism, but rather laying out cruel realities in the background of society - the first World War, inflation, bloodshed. It was an awakening."
Ute Lemper's current world is in stark contrast to her beginnings - a small German town and environment that, she says with little emotion, was very moralistic, very Catholic, intolerant and judgmental. All that counted when she was growing up was the norm, to be what other people were. Her goal was breaking out of Munster and finding an alternative identity. Once she finished high school in Munster, she never returned, hightailing it off to The Dance Academy in Cologne and the Max Reinhardt Seminary Drama School in Vienna.
"What I truly hated about that world was its petite bourgeoisie and it judgments on people. I hate small-minded people," she says. "I come back occasionally for a visit, but never more than a few days. I sucked out of Vienna what I could suck out. I did all the ballet schools and worked with musicians from the music academy. That was an interesting time, living outside the city in the countryside where they planted hashish in their back yards! It certainly wasn't Munster. To hang out with these people and to be involved in theatre was terrific. To be out of Munster was the main aim. If I'm there now longer than three days, the world seems to stay still. My whole family is still there - they grow older while their world stays the same. They talk about the same stuff. They worry about the same things, and they have the same judgments."
What do they make of you? "They think I'm mad. Completely mad. We don't talk about myself. I think they truly dislike what I am, as a person, what I represent, my statements, my opinions, my state of mind. They are proud, of course, with my certain status of celebrityhood. But I'm spooky to them. I have kids and that is what we talk about. I'm definitely not what I was supposed to be."
A Punishing Kiss is released by Decca records on March 31st.
