Lauper at last

By GLYN BROWN

Here's the thing about Cyndi Lauper: you ask her a question and she gives you the answer in chapters. Not just that, but the chapters can seem strangely unrelated.

Added to which, as you sit there dazzled by the family tree of each sentence and wondering where it might end, you're genuinely intrigued by the subject matter.

Because she's funny, with a wise-ass demeanour and gum-chewing Noo Yoik delivery. She's sensitive, too, which some may not have anticipated. Ah, and she's a firm feminist. It's like talking to a cross between Bugs Bunny, your best friend and Simone de Beauvoir.

Lauper strolls into London's Grosvenor Hotel sleek in black-leather drainpipes and immaculate white shirt, blonde hair in a chignon, unlined pale face and scarily red lips. Final surprise: she's 50. Looking good, Ms Lauper. A handshake and, in a Judy Holliday twang, "Thenk you. It's those creams."

Which ones? "Tracie Martyn. She's an English dame, works in the States. She does this amazing facial, makes you look young, and this cream heals your skin.

"It's a serum — and between you and me [lowers voice conspiratorially] they all do it. Every famous starlet ['stoilet'], they all go there, plus queens and princesses. They walk in and you hear [snooty voice], 'Her Hoighness will be riddy for her car soon'." Lauper relaxes. "Yeah right. Get out there and hail a kyab like everyone else."

After several false starts Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper burst on to the pop scene in 1984 with her debut album, She's So Unusual, a work so fresh and exuberant it wiped the floor with another debut, Madonna's vacuous, self-titled effort.

La Ciccone, however, masterminded the career that followed with a grim concentration on fame. Lauper is an idealist but she insists she has been lucky. The fits and starts she has endured to get to where she is now mean she probably has to see it that way, or go mad.

Unlike Madonna, Lauper was never sexy. DayGlo hair, an abstract makeup technique, interesting costumes, it was a brave, post-New Wave approach that would never work.

Listen to Time After Time, the vulnerable, self-penned and much-loved ballad and you can't keep believing she's nothing but a genial scatterbrain, the Lucille Ball of pop.

And then there's the voice — not the speaking voice, or even the skin-peeling howitzer of the early days, but the multi-octave, pitch-perfect instrument that, on slower numbers, can deliver startling emotional depth.

Because of that voice, she has won several Grammys and sold more than 25 million records. Still, after her second album, True Colors, there was a two-year sabbatical during which she managed wrestlers, split from her partner David Wolff, and sank into depression.

She returned with A Night to Remember (critically acclaimed; no one remembers it), married actor David Thornton, released more albums which sold steadily and remained low-profile.

During the 90s she flirted with movies, co-starred in a sitcom with Michael J. Fox but failed to get her own sitcom off the ground, lost her deal with Epic and turned to indie label Edel, which went bankrupt.

She started on the comeback trail in 1999, touring with Cher. In 2000, she went back into the studio, working on a set of standards. When Epic heard the music, they offered her a new contract and now here she is, promoting a collection of torch songs called At Last.

From the Etta James title track to Makin' Whoopee (a fantastically embittered version with Tony Bennett) we have heard them all before, but now they are somehow slightly different, dark and resonant.

And they tell the story of Lauper growing up, in a low-income house in the shadow of the Singer Sewing Machine factory. Lauper's father left when she was 5; her mother, a would-be musician, supported three kids by working as a cocktail waitress.

Lauper is still fighting, in her way. The subject of her son, born when she was 44, comes up, and I mention her luck in conceiving at that age. She nods.

"And I'd had endometriosis during my 30s. So I would do an album and go to hospital, then do another album and go to hospital.

"When you have an operation, they give you a contract to sign. Well, I looked at the stuff and I crossed out what I didn't like, and I called the doctor and told him, 'We're not doing this, and we're not doing this. You are not touching one tube, or one ovary, you're not doing anything but getting rid of all the bad stuff'."

She still couldn't get pregnant, and eventually, at 43, visited a fertility doctor in Chinatown. "He gave me acupuncture, teas to drink that tasted like dirt. I couldn't even understand what he was saying sometimes. He'd say [assumes cod-Chinese accent] 'Yo yuray!' And I'd go, 'What'?" She blinks for comic effect.

"He'd shout louder. Apparently, all the guys at the end of the counter could hear him real well. Finally it would occur to me what he was saying, and I'd look down at those guys and yell: 'Didja get that? Cos I just got it. It's uterus, right? Glad to share with you'!"

Genial scatterbrain, then? Well no, not really. But quite fortunate. Because, if attitude is what counts, Lauper's is remarkable. "You gotta be open-hearted," she's telling me. "And be grateful about what ya got." Indeed.

- INDEPENDENT

* At Last is out now.