Katy Perry, a minister’s daughter from California, kissed a girl, liked it,
wrote a song about it and became the biggest pop sensation of the past year.
Well, second biggest. I wonder if she lies in bed at night grinding her fist
into her palm and muttering: “One of these days, Lady Gaga, one of these
days.” Anyway, it took Perry years of graft to make it big, though she still
felt the rush of overnight success. This time last year, she was a nobody
living in LA, who spent her days pretending to be Doris Day and trading
vintage clothes for “better vintage clothes” at thrift shops. The day we
meet, she’s wearing a polka-dot Thierry Mugler cocktail dress from 1992,
which — the girls in the Style office gravely inform me — is a sure sign of
success. As is the fact we’re also in Cannes, having tea in the lobby of the
Carlton hotel while her entourage and various gooey-eyed fans look on from
nearby tables.
Perry, 24, is under the weather. Her eyes are a bit glassy and her long, pale limbs
keep shivering. She prides herself on being a trouper, though, so she has
trowelled on the slap, and every time she shivers she pretends that her body
has been charged by some erotic tremor. “Come sit with me on the love seat,”
she breathes, stroking the velvet banquette she has flopped down on. “We are
going to be lovers.” It’s all a bit half-hearted, and reminds me that the
gravest accusation levelled at Perry is that she is less a natural sauce pot
than a faked-up, record-company creation. Certainly, she is a master of
low-level titillation. She wears her make-up “a notch below tranny”, pores
over stills of Kubrick’s Lolita to perfect her look and has done more for
pseudolesbians than any woman since Vita Sackville-West.
Yet we can’t shake her. While most new popstrels peter out after their second
single, she’s still working her first album and is all over the festival
circuit this summer (T in the Park, the V Festival). This is mostly down to
the fact that her shrewd pop ditties have a nasty habit of boring into your
brain till you beg for mercy.
I Kissed a Girl — her signature song — still blares out of cabs and Costcutter
a year after it was released. A simple tale of a straight girl’s moment of
madness with a gal pal — with details of cherry chapstick and fears her
boyfriend won’t like it (because men hate that sort of thing?) — it went to
No 1 in 20 countries. She managed to simultaneously outrage both the
Christian right and several gay activist groups; the former for inciting her
impressionable, little girl fans to kiss each other at her concerts, the
latter for turning their meaningful lifestyle choice into a cheeky way to
flog CDs. While this was the first official single, Ur So Gay — about the
perils of dating metrosexual men, which Madonna said was the best thing
she’d heard on the radio in ages — was also a hit, and three more have
followed since. Meanwhile, she got into a spat with Lily Allen by describing
herself as a “thin” version of the British singer (nice!) and was blasted by
The Sun for posing with a knife. She’s currently having a tiff with Beth
Ditto, the gay singer of Gossip, who has taken exception to Perry’s lesbo
credentials.
Perry arches her back like a Playboy bunny, and begins. “Okay, so before you
ask, the answer is yes.” Yes, what? “I f***ing kissed a girl!”
Smart-arse, I think. Did you do more than just kiss? “No. It was just a kiss
with a friend,” she says with a sly smile. “It’s a girl thing. If you sat a
group of teenage girls down and asked them, they would be like, ‘Yeah, duh,
I’ve kissed my best friend before. What’s the big deal?’ It was also tongue
in cheek — cute and flirty. I didn’t have an agenda, but some organisations
are dying to be offended.” But you milked it. Didn’t you once say you wanted
to kiss Miley Cyrus, the darling of the Bible Belt? “Yes, so I don’t
complain about the controversy now — how could I? But am I a lesbian? No. It
was just a kiss.” Are there any women you would get it on with? “Agyness
Deyn,” she says instantly. “She’s a little, punk-rock Lolita. Beautiful
face, beautiful shoulders. I look at her and think, ‘Ooh, I’m so turned on.
What’s happening?’” Do women hit on you now? “Only when I go to gay clubs,
but I hit on women too.” What’s your type? “Beautiful ones. I’m attracted to
cool, alternative women. But I’d only ever have a drink with them,” she adds
hastily. “I’m such a tease.”
Perry could patter on coyly like this all day but, sadly, I fear her Sapphic
shtick is just for show. “I’m an entertainer,” she says, more than once. “I
know that’s what people want.” It’s what they’ve wanted since she was nine,
when Perry (née Hudson — she changed it to avoid confusion with the actress
Kate Hudson) stole her sister’s instructional singing tape and unleashed her
guttural vocal stylings on her family. The Hudsons had recently returned to
live in Santa Barbara after touring America, setting up Methodist churches
in Florida, Arizona and Oklahoma. Both of her parents are ministers with the
church, so the strumpet’s childhood was closeted, to say the least.
“There was only church,” she says. “Church friends, church school and, of
course, actual church. I thought it was normal at the time, but it wasn’t.”
Her parents banned everything from rock’n’roll to the Smurfs. “I could only
go to the movies if they reviewed it first. They let me see anything with a
remnant of God — Sister Act 2, The Preacher’s Wife, that kinda thing,” she
laughs. She heard her first devil music at 15, when she smuggled a Queen
album into her bedroom. It was a coup de foudre, and she soon abandoned her
dreams of becoming a gospel star in Nashville (though she did record an
album there) and, at 17, convinced her astonished parents to let her move to
Los Angeles on her own to become a pop star. Their acquiescence defies
belief, but I suspect Perry isn’t so much rebellious as pushy. She is
thrillingly overconfident for a girl who has been famous for only 10
minutes, telling me at one point: “I feel invincible.”
But though her parents have reportedly been “outraged” and “confused” by her
pop message, they needn’t fear for her soul. One of the first things Perry
did on arriving in LA was to get the word “Jesus” tattooed on her wrist.
Given that every second word out of her mouth is “f***”, it’s very odd. She
mentions the pressure Obama must be under and concludes: “He’s handling it
very gracefully. He must pray a lot.” Do you? “Of course,” she says,
quietly. “Every night. You have to say it out loud, to put it out to the
universe and give thanks to God.” Only in America.
Lily Allen doesn’t find Perry so saintly, since Katy essentially called her
fat on her MySpace page. The feud escalated when, earlier this year, Allen
threatened to post Perry’s mobile number on Facebook if she dissed her again
in the press (how modern). When I raise the subject, Perry looks panicked
for the first time that day. “Everyone loves girls who have a catfight, but
I don’t get involved in that stuff any more, because younger kids really
believe this stuff, so you have to worry about what you’re putting out
there.” So you’re scared and backing down? “I love smart women, and I think
Lily is very smart.” Smart women still don’t like it when you slag off their
weight. “Look, I’ve said all I’m going to say,” she says. “It was just a
little joke. And all that is just fluff. My job is to sing and play music,
not have catfights. That’s my only magic trick.
“Wherever I went, restaurants or whatever, I would get up and sing Amazing
Grace — not that I was one of those stage kids. There was no JonBenet Ramsey
inside of me waiting to burst out. I just started playing guitar at 13 and
writing little songs about God or this boy I liked — the two men in my life
at the time,” she laughs. She is down to one man again since she split from
her boyfriend, Travis McCoy, of the band Gym Class Heroes, earlier this
year. Perhaps it’s time to try a girl for real, I suggest. She scrunches her
nose at the idea. For all the talk, I’d wager if a real lesbian cornered her
in a dark alley, she’d peg it as fast as her 5in heels could carry her.
