Helen Brown meets the shy pastor’s daughter who became a man-eating machine

‘I’m a man-eating machine,” intones Grace Jones in the arresting video for Corporate Cannibal, her first new solo single in nearly two decades. Her mouth divides, cell-like, into two mouths. Her eyes roll back into a skull that’s distorting upwards into a skyscraper silhouette. As an industrial guitar grinds away in the background, this relentless cyborg of a woman promises to “Consume my consumers with no sense of humour”.

In an Italian restaurant in South London, the real Grace Jones giggles as she recalls her performance. “I really got into the part, didn’t I?” she says, patting me camply on the back of my hand.

Since striding, semi-naked, into the public imagination in the late Seventies, Jones – model, singer, performance artist – has become a counter cultural icon of female strength.

First she was disco, singing La Vie En Rose with a pink bloom tucked demurely behind her right ear and her left nipple poking out. Then she was the “Demolition Man” of new wave, in a square-cut suit and flat top hair. Her aggressive, omnivorous sexual confidence and her subversion of gender stereotypes delighted and terrified audiences. Andy Warhol loved her, Spitting Image sent her up as a pseud.

I had no idea what to expect from this volatile interviewee who famously slapped Russell Harty’s face on live television in 1981. But the woman I meet is sweet and petite, her narrow eyes glittering beneath a chimney stack Issey Miyake hat. She is 60 but doesn’t look a day over 35 and attributes her youthfulness to a regular intake of red wine. After ordering supper in flirtatious Italian (one of “four and a half” languages in which she is fluent) she begins to talk about the new album, Hurricane, which was produced by her “passionate friend” Ivor Guest (AKA Viscount Wimborne) and featuring contributions from Brian Eno, Sly and Robbie and Tricky. More intimately, her mother Marjorie sings on it and her son Paolo contributes a song.

The family involvement is crucial to an album that takes us back to Jones’s Jamaican roots: to a strict, religious upbringing in Spanish Town where “quiet, naive, vulnerable little Grace” hid up trees and wondered whether the rebellious “Williams Blood” inherited from her mother, Marjorie, would help her escape a future that could offer her no voice at all.

The Williams side of her family she identifies as “the wild side, very talented, burnt themselves up, went to hell… and that’s the side that’s made me the female Casanova or whatever”.

But on her father’s side she’s very proud to belong to “a series of bishops going back to my grandmother’s brother. And then my grandmother’s second husband became a bishop. My younger brother Noel became a bishop.

“Growing up in Jamaica the Pentecostal church wasn’t that fiery thing you might think,” she says. “It was very British, very proper. Hymns. No dancing. Very quiet. Very fundamental. You might see some rastas going by on their bicycles but you were taught to run and hide under your bed if that happened. They were demons, devils.

“You had to wear a hat to go to church. We weren’t allowed to straighten our hair. We couldn’t wear jewellery, nail polish, open backed shoes, skirts above the knee… trousers were forbidden because male apparel on a female was not Godly.”

And Jones really wanted to wear trousers to her Catholic School because she was teased for her skinny frame. “I was called ‘Olive Oyl’ and ‘Nothing-in-the-Middle’ because I had no breasts.

Then that Joe Tex song came out, y’know, The Girl with the Skinny Legs An All? And I was called that too. Hnnph. Jones and her siblings lived with her grandparents, while her mother and preacher father jetted in every now and then, wowing little Grace with their stylish American clothes. “My mum was very glamorous, an incredible seamstress. She made up those Vogue, Givenchy and Yves St Laurent patterns they used to sell. It was Church couture, darling! Because my dad was a pastor she could get away with more than other women. Her skirts were that bit tighter.”

But Jones didn’t like what she saw of the female role in that society. “I knew that I didn’t want to grow up to be like my grandmother. She could never say anything at all. She just lived through all that abuse in the name of religion. If she did object, my step-grandfather (who was 20 years younger than her) would dismiss her with a wave of his hand. Even though my mum was tough, my dad was scarier.”

And trouble was brewing within the Jones family. Grace’s brother, Christian, was “born swishy”. She sips her wine. “He had girlfriends and things but he always walked swishy. And they didn’t like the way he walked.” While Grace struggled with her aunt’s piano lessons – “I was always cracked over the knuckles with her wooden ruler” – Christian proved a natural at the keyboard. Soon he was arranging and directing the church choir.(full article)