Posted August 30, 200717 yr Why I’m desperate to be a housewife Pink was once hailed as the ‘bad Britney’ – a pierced, tattooed hellraiser who talked openly about taking drugs. Do why does she want to swap her hard-partying ways for baking fairy cakes? Interviewed by Caroline Graham. http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/normal_9393199.jpg Since stomping her way on to the public stage, Pink, who’s trademark magenta locks are now a more flattering platinum blonde, has always revelled her rebellious, take-no-prisoners image. But now the thing that pink wants to do more than anything is simply to go home. Ironically, the girl who used to boast that by 13 she’d experimented with drugs – including LSD and heroin – lost her virginity at 14, and was then thrown out of home by her mother at 15, now wants to head back to her new husband and bake fairy cakes. “I suppose that all the time, inside me, there was a little housewife just desperate to get out,” says Pink. “I’m ready to go and be Mrs Carey Hart for a while,” she says with a sigh, blowing a smoke ring into the air. She married her on-off boyfriend of five years, motocross star Hart, 30, in January and now shares a sprawling home in the Los Angeles hills with him and their four rescue dogs, Foxy, Elvis, Nanny and Bailey. “I love what I do and if I ever tire of being on the road, I’ll give it all up,” she says, “I hate feeling trapped. I won’t feel trapped. But Carey and I have hardly seen each other since we got married. I just want to go home and chill out. I want to spend my time in the garden, eat healthily and detox from being on the road.” Pink was once hailed as the ‘anit-Christina Aguilera’, the ‘bad Britney’, a punked-out, pierced, tattooed hellraiser who talked openly about taking drugs and bragged about her hard-partying ways in that glorious call to hedonism Get The Party Started. But since the start of this year, she has become a ‘deliriously happily married woman’ and released a hit album I’m Not Dead, which has been praised by critics for its mature take on issues as diverse as celebrity pop culture and President Bush’s policy in Iraq, of which Pink is highly critical. But flashes of the old ‘rebel girl’ Pink are still there as she lights up the first of several cigarettes. “God forbid I should ever become boring,” she says, letting out a high-pitched snort. “If anyone ever calls me boring I’ll have to kill myself.” But today, in the less-than-glamorous surroundings of a strip-mall hotel in Dallas, Texas, on the final night of her American tour, Pink has shed her neo-punk stage clothes and is wearing nothing more elaborate than a white terry dressing gown. Her face devoid of make up, she looks considerably younger than her 26 years. She is clearly exhausted, her voice husky from the endless cigarettes and nightly performances of hits such as Stupid Girls. While she has talked before about the more lurid aspects of her early life, Pink today is a changed woman. Born Alecia Moore in the working-class suburb of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1979, she claims she knew from the age of three that she wanted to be ‘a rock and roll star’. “I’ve never fitted in,” says Pink. “I just wanted to get the hell out of that town and get on with my life.” Her Vietnam veteran father Jim Moore and mother, Judy, a nurse, divorced when she was nine and she divided her time between both parents. By 12, Pink had become involved with what she calls ‘the bad guys’, and soon after started experimenting with drugs. She was kicked out of her home at 15, but within a year had signed her first record deal. The name Pink was chosen, according to the singer herself, for pretty unglamorous reasons. While some have said it came from a rather lurid incident when she exposed herself at a summer camp as a child, she says simply, “I did expose myself, and I blushed pink with embarrassment. I also loved Mr Pink in the film Reservoir Dogs. And then I was dying my hair from the age of ten. What’s the real story? Even I don’t know.” Her career did not take off straight away. After a series of failed girl bands, she finally released her first album, Can’t Take Me Home, in 2000. But it was not until her second album, M!ssundaztood, that she enjoyed global fame with songs such as the title track and Just Like A Pill. The album sold 12 million copies and made her a global superstar. She also topped the charts with a sassy remake of Lady Marmalade, from the soundtrack of the movie Moulin Rouge. To date, she has sold 23 million albums and won two Grammy awards (for the album Try This and Lady Marmalade). Her current (forth) album I’m Not Dead spawned the hit Stupid Girls, which went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, and her latest single U + Ur Hand. “I was angry for many years,” says Pink, “My mother couldn’t handle me. We get along fine now, but at the time, it was tough. A lot of my rage in my songs came from the unhappiness I felt as a child. “My relationship with my parents now is as good as its ever been. Everyone is psychologically abused by their parents. Isn’t that what parents are supposed to do? I didn’t want my dad to leave and I fought with my mum to the point where she couldn’t handle me any more,” she says. http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/9393193.jpg “I started taking drugs at 13, I did everything. I drank, I partied. But looking back on it, I’m glad I got it out of my system while I was young. My life was insane, but I knew nothing about mortality – until I buried three friends from heroin overdoses. Heroin is a horrible thing. I’ve seen first hand what it can do to people and its not pretty.” In a perverse display of maturity, at 14 she went to the local library to research how many drugs she could take without killing herself. “I saw friends of mine die of drugs but it didn’t stop me taking them,” she says. “Now, I have something to lose. If you start doing drugs when you have something to lose, you’ll lose it all. I think I always had a guardian angel looking over me. I was abused, I was angry and I was so rebelled.” When pressed about the subject of abuse, Pink clams up, “I’m not talking about that,” she says. Was it physical, sexual or emotional abuse? “Everyone is emotionally abused at some stage. As for the rest, no comment.” What she is happy to talk about, for the first time, is her relationship with her husband. She proposed to Hart last summer, shortly after they had reconciled a three-month split. “I’ve never been conventional,” she says, “I didn’t know I was going to propose. He was racing at Mammoth Mountain in California and I suddenly got this deep urge. I had a large vodka and Red Bull for courage and then grabbed one of the boards they use for pit stops and I wrote on it: “Will you marry me?” “He came around the track and totally ignored the sign. I thought he’d snubbed me but later he told me he just couldn’t read the sign because he had dirt on his visor. The second time he came around he saw it and nearly crashed. “In our wedding vows, which we wrote ourselves, he thanked the bottle of Absolut vodka that gave me the courage to propose.” Their wedding, on a beach in Costa Rica in January, was, by Pink’s standards, a very conservative affair. She wore a dress by Monique Lhuillier, who also designed Britney Spears’s wedding dress, and accessorised with a nose ring. The cake was topped with models of the bride and groom on motocross bikes. The couple sported matching ‘Tru luv’ tattoos on their wrists. There were just 100 guests, including Pink’s best friend, Lisa Marie Presley, another former troubled teen of whom she will only say, “She’s a greet girl. She digs me. We understand where the other is coming from. She’s crazy. Our personalities match well.” She adds, “I wanted to be a girl for a change. I wore a lovely white dress. It was the best weekend of my life. I never really believed in marriage, but I do believe you can make things your own. I had my princess version. There’s a very traditional, boring girl inside of me screaming to get out. It’s just that for most of the time I don’t let her. We partied, we laughed, our family and friends were there. It was just a regular wedding.” http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/pink_0.jpg But with Lisa Marie Presley? “Yeah, but she’s just a friend. It really wasn’t a big deal.” Even now, Pink is hardly the image of domesticity. She admits she has only seen her husband a handful of times since their wedding, adding slyly, “Maybe that’s the secret of a happy marriage. “Marriage hasn’t really changed me. Apart from the fact that I want to spend more time with my husband and bake cupcakes. I’d like to have children one day, but for now my kids are my dogs. Carey and I always talk about what our kids will rebel against? They’ll end up playing chess and wearing little uniforms.” http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/IMAGENS_8.jpg For now, Pink is intent on developing her career. She has written or co-written most of the songs for her new album. The song Stupid Girls is a tirade against the ‘porno paparazzi girls’ – think Paris Hilton and her like. In the video she pokes fun at singer Jessica Simpson, spoofing one of Simpson’s videos in which she washes her car in a bikini. Pink also has digs at the ultra-skinny Olsen twins, Paris Hilton (wearing a long blonde wig, Pink puts a toothbrush down her throat) and Lindsay Lohan, who has her poor driving record mocked (Pink runs over a man while chatting on her mobile). The video was downloaded from the internet by 8.6 million people. “It was more a social commentary on these girls, who think they have to be stick thin and have the latest handbag. It was a rage against the pressures on being a woman today. There’s nothing wrong with being sexy, but you have to be sexy for yourself, not society. “There’s a lot of ridiculousness going on today. I’m attacking the general idea that you have to be cute and dumb to be successful. The video was easy material. I just used easy examples of what I thought was mindlessness. I’m not trying to do that whole role-model thing. I’m not perfect – don’t follow me,” she says. “But if I can send out the right message, then great. “Women have fought long and hard for everything we have today. And this force-fed image that Paris and the rest of those girls portray is taking us back 30 years. I wish there were more examples of people being intelligent and sexy.” http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/193653.jpg I ask whether she has ever been tempted to get thinner, her chunky figure, while athletic, is hardly model-girl slim? “Of course, I’d love to be thinner,” she says. “But I don’t have the discipline to be anorexic or bulimic. Thinness has got out of control in Hollywood; anorexia is rampant. I’ve felt the pressure, of course, but I’m happy with the way I look. I am a work in progress, but I’m athletic. I work out, but I also smoke, drink and love fried foods. I’m practically a vegetarian, and I try to be good, but its just too hard. I like my comfort food too much. I want to send a message to girls, through my music, that being 6ft and weighing the same size as a bag of popcorn isn’t healthy. “It sounds corny, but you have to love yourself and accept yourself. I’m finally getting there, but its taken me some time.” What about Britney Spears – Pink’s saccharine pop opposite? Does she feel sorry for the fallen idol, now pregnant with her second child and seemingly never out of the headlines for her marriage woes and questionable parenting skills, including driving along a Malibu highway with her baby son, Sean Preston, on her lap? “Yes, I do. I’ve always loved Britney,” she says. “I’m her friend in public and in private. I have always defended her. She’s a nice girl and she’s getting a bad press. I feel sorry for her.” One person she had a famous public rift was with Prince William. He wanted her to perform at his 21st birthday party. She wrote back refusing, say she hated his pro-hunting stance. “I’ve never heard back from him, which was a bit rude,” she says. “I wasn’t having a go at him; I was simply trying to make a point to him that hunting furry animals isn’t a good thing to do. I’m sure if I met him, we’d get along fine.” Pink truly sounds lke a woman trying to heal the rifts. On her latest album she sings a track with – and written by – her father, called I Have Seen The Rain. It was a song Moore wrote shortly after coming back from Vietnam and one Pink and her brother Jason, two years her senior and in the US Air Force, grew up hearing. “It was the first song I ever learned, ever heard,” she says. “When I told Dad I wanted to record it with him, he had tears in his eyes. It’s the first time I saw my father cry. My father, like every other father to a little girl, was my hero when I was growing up. I told him I would make him proud and buy him a motorhome. I hope I’ve made him proud and I keep offering him a motorhome but he doesn’t want it any more.” http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/spnphotos316494.jpg The singer is now hoping to branch out into acting, her transformation from ‘bad girl’ to conventional superstar complete. A recent project, a film about her idol Janis Joplin, fell through. “I love Janis, but that wasn’t to be,” she says. “I also love Bette Midler, (Aerosmith’s) Steven Tyler and British bands such as Artic Monkeys and the Sugababes. And I love classical music. Carey doesn’t like it but when I’m home alone, I like a blast of Beethoven or Bach. “People think I’m this angry white girl, but that’s more of a public image. My brother is getting married soon and I have to wear a blue periwinkle bridesmaid’s dress. The ‘old’ Pink wouldn’t have been caught dead doing that, but I realise that the day isn’t about me. It’s about my brother. So I’ll wear a $h!t dress is I have to – and just hope the pictures never become public. “I’m looking forward to coming to England on tour,” she says. “People get me there. I love looking out over the crowd and along with the angry young kids there are blue-rinse grannies and rockers. My fans are the best there are. There are a lot of people out there who dig my music and get what I’m all about. “I love going out with my friends to pubs in the middle of nowhere and just having really greasy fish and chips. The people in pubs outside London are older so they don’t have a clue who I am, and I like it that way. “The biggest misconception about me is that I’m this serious, angry, bitter, scary girl. I don’t think I am. I just want to go home and play in my garden. “I’ll keep doing this as long as I enjoy it, but I think I could become a bartender on a beach somewhere in Costa Rica. I’m a sunshine-and-beach girl. My dream is to have my dogs and maybe a couple of kids, and just live with my husband and have a quiet life. I’m not tired of rebelling; there is still a lot of stuff in the world that makes me mad – politics, injustice – but I am definitely maturing. And that’s not a bad thing.” ‘U + Ur Hand is released tomorrow. Pink will tour the UK in October and November http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e15/pink_princess01/new%20album/deborahanderson_2006_01.jpg
