After Anastacia had a double mastectomy in 2013, she began to joke about it. “It was wild to look at myself. I said: ‘My boobs look like this!’” She peers at me with her eyes screwed shut. We are sharing a sofa in a photographic studio in London. I’m not sure what she means, but she belts out, “No eyeballs!” (Typically, nipples come towards the end of reconstructive surgery.) Even in hospital, “I would make jokes and be funny,” she says. “I’m lucky.” Lucky isn’t how many people would feel after getting breast cancer for the second time, but preventive surgery was her choice and, she says, “I can accept it when I find humour in it. Being able to take the mick out of myself and my toxic titties! – See! There you go! – it takes the sting out of it.”
Anastacia has always been like this, she says. Back when she used to break her older sister Shawn’s dolls, “cos the arms didn’t go in a certain direction”, her mum tried to punish her. She gave Shawn brand new dolls, and Anastacia the broken ones. But Anastacia was in her element. “I played hospital. I was like ‘Whee! Whee!’” she says, bouncing her hands, busily working imaginary dolls. She made them have a great time despite their mutilations, scribbled-on faces and brutally cut hair. “Which is constantly how my life is. I was born with that in me, and it amplified as I got older and realised: ‘Oh yeah, that’s a better way to live than worrying about things.’”
By her own admission, Anastacia can come across as “a little much”. Apparently, there’s an “isolator” in her: an introvert who shuts the door and decompresses so the extrovert – who has shown up today – can go out to “do my job, sing what I need to sing”. Her voice and vocal range are huge just when she’s talking; she seems always about to burst into laughter or song. Even her yawns are musical, her chatter peppered with klaxons, trumpets and squealing brakes. Her energy and playfulness make it easy to picture her as a sort of doll in her own hands – she has certainly seen her share of hospitals – bouncing about, trying to find joy in the hard things and come up with the story that makes sense of all the breakages.
At 56, Anastacia has flown into London before a European tour to mark the 25th anniversary of her debut album, Not That Kind. Here she will play the megastar that she is in Europe. Back home in the US, she has never toured. Albums that have gone platinum in the UK, Germany or Australia have barely charted there. I’m wondering how she explains this division to herself. “I’m OK,” she says. “Because if I’d had success in the US, I might have been a different person.” As it is, she is happy to say, “I am a continual working girl in her job.”
“Working girl” sounds very humble for someone who has sold more than 30m records, but it wasn’t a “fancy life”, growing up. Pinging between her home town of Chicago, New York (where her father lived and the family later moved) and her grandpa in Florida was Anastacia’s “version of understanding the world”. In career terms, she was a late bloomer. She entered the talent show The Cut in 1998, pretending to be 24 when she was actually 30. When she signed with Sony soon after, “I told everybody [the truth],” she says, leaning forward and speaking with exaggerated secrecy out of one side of her mouth, “I’m just letting you know! They were like: ‘It doesn’t matter. You can pass! Your talent is beyond!’”
But lying about her age was “real hard”. Partly because she was raised to be honest, and partly because it was impossible to keep up with the maths. She eventually came clean – with huge relief – when she turned 40.
You would think that starting later would make her more worldly, but Anastacia says: “Even though I was much older than everyone thought, I had a very innocent, naive approach to the industry.” She had never travelled overseas or worn designer clothes before. While filming the video for her debut single, I’m Outta Love, she went to fetch money because “I had no idea it would be free. I was like: ‘This is nuts!’” At the time, she points out, “I was an out-of-work receptionist collecting an unemployment cheque.” Her early riders sound like a pocket money blowout in the corner shop: “Doritos, candy, chocolate, Diet Coke.”
The truth is, she says, “I never really understood what I had as a singer until much later in life. I didn’t sound like anyone, so I didn’t think [I had] the right voice. I didn’t sound like Celine [Dion] or Madonna. I sounded more like Aretha [Franklin] and Tina Turner. It doesn’t work well coming out of …” she gestures to herself. “Even though I was a white girl, I had this soul in me and I don’t know where that came from.”
Actually, she adds, “I will say, when I heard my father sing, I went: ‘That twang has to be from him.’” A singer and actor, he left the family home when Anastacia was three, and died in 2005. Their estrangement was well publicised, but now she will only say: “I’m good with it.”
More broadly, she didn’t know what sort of an artist she was. Her mother, an actor, thought Anastacia should act, and took the children along to her auditions. “Mum would be in the theatre, and we’d bring the quiet toys … It always seemed easy for her. But it wasn’t easy for me. It was stressful.” She enrolled in a professional school in New York but “hated acting”. “It took me longer to find my own self.”
Where she really felt at home was on the dancefloor. At 16, she was a regular at New York’s Club 1018, where she would go alone. The bouncers looked out for her; her mum gave her money for orange juice. Was she hoping to be discovered? “Oh no!” she says, horrified. “I went because I loved the music and I loved to dance. I was like: ‘Woo woo woo!’ Everyone was drunk, picking each other up. Not interested. I would dance until the club closed. I’d be there in the corner. Creating my own moves.”
One night, a man asked if she could sing. “I thought: ‘Oh God, he’s trying to pick me up.’ He was like: ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m a real producer. You have a great look and you can move.’ And that’s how it started.”
She still had years ahead of singing at weddings and birthdays, dancing on Club MTV, and backing the likes of Paula Abdul and Jamie Foxx. Even after she reached the final of The Cut, and Michael Jackson tried to sign her (she eventually picked Sony), she retained a sense of not being at ease.
In those early days, her midriff was as much a trademark as her powerful voice and tinted prescription glasses. “My famous midriff … my courage of who I was,” she says. She won’t show it now, even on holiday. “I’m 56! A one-piece is fine with me!” Looking back, she believes she exposed her stomach to draw attention away from her breasts. “Because I had very, very large …” she says, indicating her chest, “for a little girl.” (She is 5ft 2in.) “I was very self-conscious. I didn’t like to be looked at like an object. And these are objects to whoever it is that’s objectifying you.”
She decided on a breast reduction and in 2003, three years into her career as a solo artist, had a pre-operative scan – only to learn that she was in the early stages of breast cancer. She immediately had surgery and radiotherapy. She was 34 (but, of course, everyone thought she was 28). What a “positive” being uncomfortable in her body turned out to be, she says: “I would never have [gone for the scan] had I not been insecure.”
She has a habit of finding the advantage in challenging situations, and I can’t help thinking of those broken dolls again. Her best albums emerged from hardship: 2004’s Anastacia confronts her feelings about her father in songs such as Left Outside Alone, while Resurrection, from 2014, was written during her second bout of breast cancer, followed by Evolution – her personal favourite, “a frickin’ great album”.
Just as I’m thinking no lemon is too sour for her to wring lemonade from it, she says she “got a kick” out of her menopausal hot flushes. “I would just be talking – then, phew! Let me take off my jacket!” She starts to fan herself vigorously and look around shouting, impersonating herself in a restaurant, “I was like: ‘Yo dude! I’m on FIRE! Wheew!’” she says, her tongue hanging out. “I didn’t find it embarrassing. I thought, that’s hilarious … I was shocked that my body could do that. It was fascinating.”
Now she is “100% full menopause” and proud. “Halle Berry is talking about it, the Oprahs of this world … we’re all going: ‘Oh my God, we’re in fucking menopause!’ We’re talking about it to take away the cloud. It’s not a terrible thing.” Recently, though, she admitted to having mistaken menopausal migraines for a brain tumour. In her own words, there is always “a health crisis one step away”. She has previously suffered from an abnormal heart rhythm, and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at 13. Does she fear illness?
“I’ve never feared for my life,” she says. “And I’ve never lost faith. That’s just who I am.” But faith in what? “Faith as in belief. If you believe in yourself you’re just like: ‘Hmm, well. Got cancer. That sucks.’ Yes, I cried about it. Yes, I said: ‘God, I didn’t think I was going to die this way.’ But I didn’t wallow. I didn’t throw a pity party for myself.”
Two years ago, she moved to Denver, Colorado, because she had been thinking of “retirement reality”. The reasoning was: “If I’m in Beverly Hills, paying a gazillion dollars to have a 90210 address, what about going somewhere you can actually save some money?” She is not currently writing an album but there is talk of a single, and a possible tour extension, so what does she mean “retirement”? “Meaning, this is where we want to live, where we want to grow old,” she says.
The “we”, incidentally, is “my mum, my brother, my sister and I. It’s always them,” she says. Brian, her brother, is disabled and needs care. Shawn is Anastacia’s assistant. “My as-sister-ant!” she hoots. Even her fans are family. “I’ve seen them get married … I’ve seen their children.” She and Shawn find it hilarious when the ones in front who used to “jump and scream” all night now sit down after half a verse.
So the “we” doesn’t include a partner? “I sometimes include a relationship with that, and sometimes don’t,” she replies. After divorcing her husband (and former bodyguard) of three years in 2010, she stopped discussing her personal life. However, she is wearing a pendant with the number 090622 in script. That is clearly a special anniversary. “Oh, my God!” she howls. “It’s my dog’s birthday! Broady! Broady-on-the-roadie!”
Shawn is bringing the chocolate yorkshire terrier to Spain. “He’ll be on the whole tour. I told my manager, I’ve lived without these things for so long. I know it’s harder. Harder on hotels, flights. But I really do want that in my life. I know it’s very diva, but I’m not a mom, I don’t have a kid, I’m not married. So there’s not much that I do besides work. I’d like to feel fulfilled when I get home and see the dog and I’m like …” She puckers her lips. “Mwah, mwah, mwah!”
I feel sorry for her when she says she doesn’t have much beyond work. Especially when she reflects that with Donald Trump in power, “we’re all in the Upside Down now”. What does she want from life? “I’m getting it,” she says, sounding indignant. “I’m totally getting it. I’m living it right now. I’m in it.”
