The Telegraph Interview/Article

Pop icon Pink on refusing to back down: ‘These days, everybody wakes up offended’

With the voice of Janis Joplin and the body of an Olympian, the outspoken singer has reigned for 20 years. Her secret? ‘I make my own rules’

By
Neil McCormick,
MUSIC CRITIC
11 February 2023 • 7:00am

'Life is supposed to be messy': Pink is the most played female artist of the 21st Century
“I have zero regrets,” insists Alecia Moore. “I could stand naked in front of the entire world and have no shame. Life is supposed to be messy; that’s what makes it interesting.”

Moore, the Pennsylvanian singer better known as Pink, has enjoyed an extraordinarily long reign for a pop star. It has been 23 years since her debut album, Can’t Take Me Home, launched her in the US, and 22 since she got the party started worldwide with the 13 million-selling follow-up Misundaztood. A string of memorable hit singles (including Just Like a Pill, Family Portrait and Just Give Me a Reason) and acrobatic live performances established her as a punky, pink-haired pop firebrand who could roar like Janis Joplin and bend like an Olympic gymnast.

Smashing together rock, hip hop and R&B to make mainstream pop with attitude, Pink has clocked up sales of more than 60 million albums and 75 million singles. She is especially popular in the UK, where she can count herself the most played female artist of the 21st century.

Next week sees the launch of a ninth Pink album, Trustfall. Asked to sum up its theme in a sentence, she suggests “the world is spinning off its axis, and I want to dance my ass off”, then laughs with gusto. For a commercial star, Moore’s songwriting is marked by real depth of feeling and serious intent. Beneath the shiny hooks, you will find her grappling with questions of insecurity, self-esteem and mental health. She often speaks out on political and social issues, and hopes her listeners are similarly engaged. “Let’s be clear: if you believe the government belongs in a woman’s uterus, a gay person’s business or marriage, or that racism is okay,” she tweeted after the US Supreme Court overturned abortion rights last year, “then please in the name of your lord never listen to my music again.”

Online, that went down about as well as you might imagine. “I get death threats all the time, because I’m very vocal about a lot of things,” says Moore, without appearing remotely concerned. “I want to live forever, everybody does, but I’m not going to. So, do I want to die in some cheesy fall off a ladder kind of way? Or do I want to die fighting for what I believe?”

Amid the rise of cancel culture, Moore refuses to be cowed by a fear of causing offence. “Just me getting out of bed with a vagina offends some people. So, what am I going to do?” she laughs. “These days, everybody wakes up offended. I’ve been cancelled so many freaking times. Here’s the thing about me: if I say something, it’s because I meant it. And if you don’t like it, that’s going to have to be your problem.”

 ‘Can I sing this while I hang from the rafters?’: Pink brings a dazzling athleticism to her live shows
 ‘Can I sing this while I hang from the rafters?’: Pink brings a dazzling athleticism to her live shows CREDIT: Christopher Polk/NBC
This applies to her songwriting, too. Among the most powerful songs on Trustfall are Hate Me, Lost Cause and Just Say I’m Sorry, all of which paint a portrait of a particularly fiery and argumentative relationship. Moore says that her husband, Corey Hart, a motocross champion and off-road truck racer, “will listen to the songs, but if it’s not punk rock, he’s not going to listen twice”. They have been together “since I was 21 years old. He signed on for it a long time ago.” In any case, she adds, “we do couples counselling. He’s got a pretty good sense of humour – and some pretty thick skin.”

Moore and her husband both ride motorcycles and share a love of action and adventure sports. She trained as a competitive gymnast as a child, helping develop a very physical performance style involving aerial stunts. At 43, she says, “I’ve never felt stronger. I’m doing the age thing like I’ve done everything else. I’ll make my own rules and laugh about it.”

In June, she embarks on a UK stadium tour, which she claims will be the most spectacular she’s ever attempted. “When I am writing a song, it’s about what’s happening in my heart: what am I ashamed of? What am I confused about? What hurts?” she says. “But as a performer, it’s more like, ‘Can I sing this while I hang from the rafters?’ ”

Moore is speaking to me via Zoom from the 200-acre ranch in Santa Barbara County, California, that she shares with her husband and their two children, Willow, 11, and Jameson, six. She is wearing big, tinted spectacles, enormous hooped gold earrings and a matching necklace. An acoustic guitar leans against the wall behind her. Beyond is the organic vineyard where she produces her own Two Wolves wine label. If this is what success looks like, it suits her.

'There’s so much to fight against. It’s a crazy world': Pink has never shied away from making herself heard
'There’s so much to fight against. It’s a crazy world': Pink has never shied away from making herself heard CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz
The first time I interviewed Pink was in 2006, in Amsterdam, where much of the conversation revolved around drugs. She recalled her first visit to the city, aged 19, when she “went straight from the airport to the Bulldog Café, bought a thousand bags of weed and smoked them all by myself”. She then had to perform on a TV show. “I was borderline collapsing on camera. The producer said, ‘Would you like to do that again, because that’s the most awful performance I’ve ever seen in my entire career?’ I looked at her and said, ‘Do what?!’ It was halfway through dinner after the show when I came out of my coma.”

Today, she laughs at this glimpse of her former self. “I’d be under the table checking my pulse if I did that now,” she says. “A glass of wine is as far as it goes.” Although they are still young, she is frank with her own children about her rock ’n’ roll past. “I don’t hide anything from them. It’s all in the public eye, anyway. I have to show them what this world is like, and how to be in it. I’m sort of a rebellious mentor, because there’s so much to fight against. It’s a crazy world. It’s nuts.”

Moore was a difficult child. “If there’s one person in your family that just f---- up Thanksgiving repeatedly, I’m that person. It forces you to have tough conversations, to pull the rug up and really examine everything you’ve been stuffing under there. So it was hard, but it was also healing.”

By the time she was 10, her parents had divorced and she was already convinced about her path in life. “I told my kindergarten teacher that I didn’t have to bother about maths, because I would have an accountant.” By the age of 15, she had been expelled from school and kicked out of home. “In the most clichéd ways, I got screwed over by everyone that had anything to do with me for the first five years of my career.” She hung out at punk clubs, formed an R& B girl group, Choice, got signed by a record label at 16, moved to Atlanta and made an album that was never released. “My memoir should be called How to Get F----- 101. But I was a fighter, I was singularly focused, and I just kept believing.”

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She reckons her fieriness and political activism comes from her father, Jim Moore, a Vietnam veteran who worked as an insurance salesman. “If something was bothering him, my dad would be like, ‘I’m either about to go beat the s--- out of that person, so tell Mama to bail me out, or I’m going to write a letter and try and change the world.’ But it was never, ‘I’m just going to sit here and do nothing.’”

Moore’s father died in August last year, after a long battle with prostate cancer. The opening song on Trustfall is When I Get There, a ballad about meeting again in the hereafter. “That was a hard one,” she admits.

She insists she will go on speaking her mind and fighting for things she believes in, from women’s equality to LGBTQ rights. “It’s easy being united in hate. It’s such an organising principle. It’s like, God, they’re so goddamn good at hatred!” she says. “How does love get organised? I don’t know – but I truly believe there are more good people than bad, if you have to put it in simple terms. The other side is louder right now, but it has always been a battle, and we will always be up for it. The second we get complacent, it’s over.”

Trustfall is out on 17 Feb. Pink’s Summer Carnival 2023 tour (pinkspage.com) hits the UK in June

Is there an article in the actual newspaper aswell?

corey 😩 every time I see this it feels like a unprofessional interview

I wonder what she performed at 19. Was Can't Take Me Home released then?

Was this released in the actual newspaper?

Interesting part about the weeds. She'd always said she did her last drugs immediately after she got a record deal.