‘I’m 71 and I’m strong’: Why Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour is not goodbye

It’s only at the end of a story that you really get it. At many other points in Cyndi Lauper’s career, it was easy not to. What was with the wrestling? The Goonies thing? That B-movie with Jeff Goldblum? The country, jazz and blues albums? The one that only came out in Japan? Couldn’t she just do more smash hits about girls having fun?

“Whaddya mean a mess?” she demands. The word, I confess, was chosen for effect. The suggestion that her career arc has been less than linear and consistent was meant to suggest creative bravery, a rejection of predictability. She didn’t call her 16-million-selling debut She’s So Unusual to signal an intention to conform.

“For me, there’s an arc,” she says, at home in New York on a break from her farewell world tour as her pugs Ping and Lulu yap at her feet. “You don’t see the arc. I understand that, because you’re taught and conditioned by society how it’s supposed to go. I’m not. I rebelled against that a long time ago.

“Yes, I did a blues album and a country album, but … guess what rock and roll really is? It’s a combo of blues and country. So if you want to go back and relearn the roots of what it is you spent your life singing, well, you do that.”

Cyndi Lauper’s farewell tour arrives in Australia in April.Credit: NYT

If you grew up steeped in your mother’s Broadway albums, you might even compose a musical: Kinky Boots was a huge success for Lauper as a songwriter in 2012. Her Memphis Blues covers album performed OK too, even if it followed a couple of decades of records that were, well, big in Japan.

“I bumped heads with a lot of record company people when the record company people who actually made me famous left,” she explains of her lower-profile years after those first two (and a half) albums made her one of the biggest names of the MTV boom.

“And then all of a sudden, you’re dealing with the same kind of people you ran away from in your neighbourhood: guys with the comb-over, sitting there like, ‘Why don’tcha just wear jeans and a T-shirt?’”

It might have given her one more shot in the grunge takeover but that’s missing the point. The world knows Cyndi Lauper as a pop star but first and last, as illustrated by the staging of her farewell tour, with its Yayoi Kusama polka dots, Daniel Wurzel air fountains and Sonia Delaunay “living art” cossies, she was always an artist.

Cyndi Lauper during her farewell tour in London in February.Credit: WireImage

“This is the kind of tour I always wanted to do,” she says. “I haven’t done arenas since ’86 or ’89, and I wanted to be able to play a big place and have a real show.

“I was able to work with this wonderful creative director, [Las Vegas events producer] Brian Burke, who helped me to create this thing. We went to museums. ‘What about that? Yeah, what about that? OK, can we do that?’”

The collaborative aspect was crucial. “You try and do it by yourself, and it turns out a little Spinal Tap,” she says with a laugh. “I’m just so thrilled to be able to bring this to Australia and be able to do performance art, which is what I have always loved.”

As a teenager in 1960s New York, music and art were always entwined for the then-Cynthia Lauper. Her 2012 book, A Memoir, describes an unsettled adolescence at a series of art schools while singing in a folk duo in Queens.

It’s telling that when she left home at 17, fleeing an abusive stepfather and a long series of institutional “failures”, her few possessions included Yoko Ono’s book of instructions for aspiring artists, Grapefruit.

“That was very inspiring to me [because] when you’re poor and you’re living out of a freaking duffle bag, you can’t go buy art supplies,” she says today. “But you could still create in your mind. You could still take a pencil and draw what you think something could be, and some day you might make that picture.”

Cyndi Lauper in 1983, the year she released Girls Just Wanna Have funCredit: Sony Music Archive via Getty Images

Some day was long. Lauper discovered and nearly destroyed her incredible belter’s voice in a series of working ’70s bands; failed again with rock band Blue Angel as the ’80s dawned. Come 1983, 15 years of sometimes bitter experience made her a rare pop debutante: one that insisted on control.

A 2023 documentary by Alison Ellwood, Let the Canary Sing, details the many battles Lauper fought – from rewriting lyrics to production, video and artwork – to make Girls Just Wanna Have Fun say, sound and look exactly as she envisaged. “I didn’t wanna just have a hit,” she says. “You wanna sing songs that inspire people.”

When Epic Records’ promo push failed, she staged a bizarre marketing intervention worthy of Andy Warhol or Malcolm McLaren: a World Wrestling Federation stunt that kick-started massive airplay for her signature song. Four more hit singles sealed the pop arrival of the year.

“Am I like my peers? No, I am not like them at all,” she says. “I’m not like Billy Idol. I’m not like Madonna. I’m not like Michael Jackson. I’m like me.

“At one point in my career, I had to say to myself, ‘Look, you cannot take this kind of conditioning of what you are supposed to be. You forge your own path’. And that’s what I’ve always done. And hell’s bells babe, that’s rock’n’roll.”

Artists of the future might be astonished to learn that gender was not an irrelevant consideration. After being dismissed for resistance at two primary schools, Lauper credits her rejection of Catholic education for her lifelong refusal to “behave” as ladies should. She jokes that she finally found God among “the Sisters of Absolutely No Mercy at All”.

“That’s where I come from, so of course I had boxing gloves on … In the ’60s and the late ’50s, look at women’s rights. I had a single mum, and I’m a female. So what do you think I was thinking? Have you noticed that for females, all of ’em, they don’t got a chance in hell here?”

Lauper’s activism for women’s, LGBTQ+ and human rights goes back decades. As Roe vs Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2022, she launched a women’s health fund called Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights. Asked how those rights are faring, she’s typically blunt.

“They suck. But you know, we are communities of people. And if we stand with our community and help each other and educate each other, things change.”

She’ll elaborate, no doubt, on whatever stage she turns to until the canary can sing no more. It’s already clear that a farewell tour is not goodbye: her second musical, adapted from Mike Nichols’ 1988 film, Working Girl, opens in San Diego in October, weeks after this run climaxes at the Hollywood Bowl.

“For me, this is a big thing to do,” she says. “Right now, I’m 71 and I’m strong and I can sing these songs, and I want to be able to do a good job – be good at something, you know. Maybe great?

“What can I tell ya? I only worry about singing well, performing well, keeping intimacy with people and singing the kind of songs that comfort people and inspire them. This show … when people leave, they are very happy. And they feel loved. That’s the best thing.”

Cyndi Lauper plays Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena on April 2, Brisbane Entertainment Centre on April 5, Newcastle Entertainment Centre on April 7 and Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena on April 8.