MUSIC

After troubled times, Kelis is back with a new album and a change of direction – and she’s heading our way to top the bill at this year’s Bristol Pride. Julian Owen joins the boys in the yard.

Chances are Kelis won’t opt to close out her headline set at Pride Bristol by launching into a cover of ‘I Will Survive’. Too obvious, too easy; two distinctly un-Kelisian traits. She’d have unquestionably earned the right, mind. When she released fourth album, ‘Kelis Was Here’, in 2006, she might reasonably have expected the world to fall at her feet. Sassy, sexy and of endless musical variety, its 77 minutes of taut r‘n’b play like a belated female response to Prince’s ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’. Alas, the world didn’t fall. Worse, after a misleadingly healthy first week of sales, it barely noticed.

Things didn’t get easier. In 2007 she was arrested by Miami police and charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct; it would take over a year before she was acquitted on all charges. 2009 saw the end of a four-year marriage to rapper Nas, Kelis filing for divorce while seven months pregnant with their son Knight. And, for years, there was the battle to be shot of her label. “I spent so much time and energy getting out of my contract that, when I finally did get out, I had not made any provisions or had any thoughts about what I was going to do next,” she says. “So I took some time off, really just shut down, even to the point where I was, like, ‘I don’t want to sing anymore’.”

Now, praise be, Kelis is back. Actually, no, not ‘back’ – that would imply a return to the norm. No, Kelis is... somewhere else. “It’s nothing like any of the other albums I’ve done,” she says of long awaited fifth long player, ‘Fleshtone’. Indeed not. Having formed a reputation as one of r‘n’b’s more cerebral performers, with the lyric sheets to match, the new album strikes out firmly into hedonistic dance anthem diva territory. “I’d been feeling sort of animalistic in my approach to things lately,” she says. “It’s body and soul, flesh and bone – when everything is stripped away, you see what you’re made of. It’s just kind of where I was at.” Hence the album title. Musically, she says, she was inspired by clubbing in Paris and London, “sort of falling in love with some of the underground stuff that was happening. I was, like, ‘This is a real movement that’s going on’; honestly, people party differently! I felt like everything had gotten so clean and plush and manicured. I want people to dance again. I want people to sweat. I want people to enjoy the way things used to be, the debaucherous nights that you try to forget about in the morning.”

Kelis was born in Harlem, in 1979, to Kenneth and Eveliss Rogers, respectively a church minister and fashion designer. Back in the day, her father was also a professor and no mean musician himself. “I was a jazz girl all the way,” she says of her youth, “grew up listening to it because that’s what my daddy did: Betty Carter, Nancy Wilson, oldies like Ella [Fitzgerald] and Billie [Holiday].” It was like an urban middle-class version of the classic 50s soul singer upbringing: singing in church on Sunday, but augmented by violin, piano and sax lessons in private school. At 16 Kelis enrolled at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (aka The One From ‘Fame’), formed r‘n’b trio BLU (Black Ladies United) and surrounded herself in everything from punk to hip-hop, rock to classical. “I feel like we suck it all in and somehow make it work for us and turn it into our own interpretation,” she says. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

True, of course, but a good interpretation can still at least feel as fresh as tomorrow’s daisies. Kelis’s breakthrough hit opens with the words “This song is for all the women out there who’ve been lied to by their men, and I know you’ve all been lied to”, and thus traces a line of empowering songs from wronged, strong women like Aretha Franklin, Etta James, all the way back to Bessie Smith. Only the directness has changed: “I hate you so much right now!” runs that joyous cathartic release of a chorus to ‘Caught Out There’, with the late-teens singer rocking her bespectacled prep student look. Most people would at least try to glam up to the max in first announcing themselves to the world – the preternaturally attractive Kelis dressed down. Why so? “Pretty is annoying, pretty is boring,” she says. “And you don’t get any credit for being pretty because it’s what god did and what your parents did. If you can actually be creative and do something, that’s not necessarily always easy on the eye, I can appreciate that.”

The track was taken from 1999-released debut album, ‘Kaleidoscope’, its lithe funk also serving as a calling card for the production wizardry of The Neptunes, before the duo got really big with tracks like Britney’s ‘I'm A Slave 4 U’ and Nelly’s ubiquitous ‘Hot In Here’. The team remained in place for both the second album, ‘Wanderland’ (a holding pattern in both style and popularity), and the third, ‘Tasty’, the one that unleashed ‘Milkshake’. As Venue has discovered while discussing the interview with friends, it’s the track that still stands as Kelis’s calling card (“The one that did ‘My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard’, right?”). So to aforementioned fourth album, ‘Kelis Was Here’, the first to feature no production from The Neptunes, instead replaced by a fleet of collaborators including will.i.am, Raphael Saadiq, Linda Perry, then-husband Nas and Cee-Lo. Thence, of course, to The Difficult Years and subsequent change in direction, ‘Fleshtone’.

If there’s joy in the latest album, it’s no accident. “I recorded most of the album when I was pregnant” says Kelis. “That was something that I couldn’t ignore.” Indeed. Armed with this knowledge, revisit the lead single, ‘Acapella’, and it may be a rather different type of love song to what you first thought: “Before you my whole life was acapella/Now a symphony’s the only song to sing”. As she explains further, “The mood I was in was so robust and full of life. I was full of life! Being pregnant and recording was awesome – I just felt I had so much to say.”

And so, finally, to Bristol. Kelis has headlined Pride events from Manchester to Los Angeles, but would rather not single out the LGBT community as being a key part of her fanbase. “Whoever is supportive is important,” she affirms, “because they are the people that keep you going and avoid you from getting a desk job.” You could hardly blame her for espousing a little pragmatic realism following the travails of the last few years. Happily, though, she’s keen to assert that the future looks altogether brighter: “My mom always used to tell us, ‘Your twenties? Whatever. In your thirties you’ll be your most beautiful, your sexiest, your smartest.’ I’ve been through so many life changes getting here, but she was right!”

KELIS HEADLINED BRISTOL PRIDE ON SAT 16 JULY. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE. SEE ALSO WWW.PRIDEBRISTOL.ORG FFI.

Copyright Julian Owen 2011