Sia Furler: pop star, invisible woman

SIA Furler’s journey from Adelaide girl to chart-topping international music superstar has taken an eccentric detour.

The invisible woman

SIA Furler says she doesn’t want to show her face in public any more, unless it’s for “dogs and queers” — the two causes she supports. Which may be an understandable thing, but Furler is a pop star, and an active one at that. The Australian, last month named as APRA songwriter of the year, has released five albums and is about to release her sixth, potentially her biggest yet. No dice, though: she’ll still not showing her face. “I’m just giving it a go,” she shrugs, pondering her strategy. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but I have to try.”

This trying has made for an interesting campaign. Furler has the killer first single out, and a great video for it, but one thing is lacking — her. The single Chandelier is a helter-skelter pop-reggae paean to the pleasures of living on the edge, and the horrors of falling off it. In the visuals, an 11-year-old dancer flings herself about a room, while only a drawing of Furler looms in the background. It’s surprising, mostly successful, and it’s a template she’s applying across all media: in videos, in concerts, in TV appearances and in print.

ALBUM REVIEW: Sia’s 1000 Forms of Fear

All this prompts several questions, but the most obvious one is: why? It’s not as if she has much to hide — in person, she is a rather lovely, petite, garrulous Aussie, now 38, deeply bronzed and ice-white blonde, with large, blue wandering eyes. The accent, from her native Adelaide, has been dented by long stints in Britain and the US. But she has her reasons, which are quite forthcoming and not entirely absurd.

Furler has written songs for Rihanna, Britney Spears, Beyonce and David Guetta. She lives quietly in a Los Angeles suburb, in a well-alarmed house — but she’s no Garbo. She opens the gate, all hugs, all kisses, with three dogs yapping around her, then sits us all down in her living room. The walls are plastered with her growing art collection, just one sign of her new, sudden wealth. For 15 years, Furler had been a solid alt-pop presence, but recently she has become a top songwriter for hire, knocking out tunes for Rihanna (Diamonds), Britney (Perfume) and, the one that started it all, David Guetta (Titanium) No modern pop album is complete without a Furler track. She is more successful than ever, so you’d think she would want to be more visible than ever. But no.

“I got sober 3½ years ago,” she says, “and I realised that, actually, I had never enjoyed getting even a little bit famous. I thought that, being ­famous, I would be cool, different. It’s not what happened.”

This is an understatement. As her career progressed through the noughties, Furler sank into alcoholism, drug addiction (pills) and acute ­thyroid problems. She also had deep grief to attend to — a boyfriend died young — and undiagnosed bipolar disorder. People just thought she was out there, fun — or, as she puts it, “I was like: Cartwheels! Good times! Wooo!”

Eventually, on September 9, 2010, it all came to a head; she decided to kill herself. Then the phone rang.

“And someone was like, ‘Squiddly, diddly doo!’” (They sounded happy.) “The needle on the record slipped. It was like, there’s a world out there, and I’m not a part of it.”

After the call, Furler called another friend and promptly signed herself over to Alcoholics Anonymous. She went to 90 meetings in 90 days and got sober and clean “immediately”. Her faith in the program was, and is, complete. Even the title of her new album, 1000 Forms of Fear, is inspired by the AA bible, The Big Book. “There’s no copyright on that one!”

She is now applying her extreme energies to a Californian health kick. “I feel so serene,” she says several times — although, when she refers to her medication quieting “the electricity in her brain”, you sense it’s always there, crackling away. She has a few things to keep her balanced: AA, yoga, the meds, meditation, a new ­fiance and a higher power, whose name is tattooed, scrawl-like, on her hand: “Whatever, Dude.” Whatever, Dude is, it turns out, “a queer surfing Santa”; he’s also, she says, “a bit like my grandpa”. She often asks him for guidance, but “what I’ll hear in return is just, like” — she makes a small voice — “ ‘Whatever, dude!’” On her other hand, she has another tattoo. It says: “Don’t Think”.

The next step in Sia 2.0 was Guetta, the godfather of the pop-house genre that rules the charts. Furler had long had an idea that she wanted to make money by writing pop songs for big, proper pop stars. Six months after she started AA, she sat down in a room with 10 Guetta tracks. She picked out the one she liked — a tall order, as dance music is “not really my cuppa tea” — and recorded a demo in 40 minutes. It was called Titanium.

It was meant for Alicia Keys, then Mary J. Blige, but Guetta liked Furler's’s demo so much, he released that instead. “And I was, like, ‘What the f..k?’ ” she recalls. “I’d spent such a long time building what I thought was my own credible music career, and I found myself embarrassed by the commercialism of that music.” We look around us. “But, of course, when it buys you a house, it stops feeling like such a bad thing.”

In fact, she knows it’s “the best thing to happen to my career”. It has given her more leverage, a new audience and an extra bounce to her material. Her own music has always been wilfully eclectic, much of it guided by her swooping, crooning, yelping voice.

The new album, though, while still intense and baroque and not quite mainstream, is also polished and hook-laden. So, how do you write a proper chart hit?

Well, narratives or journeys — for instance, Victim to Victory — work a treat. Also, a strong title: “Artists are always looking for a strong title — something that’s Google-able.” The title then has to be repeated a lot in the chorus and the post-chorus: “It’s the bow that wraps the ­present.” If you have a metaphor, then work it. Finally, she always tries to make sure there’s a “sound hook” in there — “Like an ‘ooh’ or an ‘aah’”. She gets a lot of her ideas from watching reality TV. Pretty Hurts, which Beyonce eventually recorded, took its name from a show about a Botox injectionist.

Furler is complimentary about everyone she has worked with, especially Katy Perry (“a weirdo”) and Beyonce (“my queen”). Is there anyone she wouldn’t write for? “Avril Lavigne. Maybe she’s different now, but bratty people? No.” It’s a no to Kelis. Ever since the New Yorker joked about eating dog, her card has been marked.

Furler’s non-face approach has had a few false starts. First up, she wanted to use the faces of the superstars with whom she had worked. She even emailed Robert Pattinson, asking him if she could wear his face on a lolly stick, on the cover of Rolling Stone. (He replied: “Eurgh — I hate being famous, too.”)

She soon twigged that few would let her use their image to sell her product and that it could all look like a joke at their expense. So she searched closer to home.

“I thought, well, what about my blonde bob? If Amy Winehouse was the beehive ...”

The Furler haircut, deployed across a decade, now has a life of its own. It will be used in performances throughout the year by different performers, while Furler sings in the background. Lena Dunham recently put on the bob for a TV show, while Furler sang face down in a bed.

Off stage, though, Furler’s bob has gone, as she tries to be less recognisable. “I got myself a weave,” she says happily, playing with a long platinum plait.

Trying to erase your face in the era of Google Images is, really, sticking a finger into the digital dam. Only a week or so ago, her engagement was announced and Furler was snapped, face out, with her man. But she is sticking to her guns. Will she be turning around in 10 years? “No. No way.”

In the northern autumn she says she’s going to do three live gigs in Australia — though there has been no confirmation from her management — still with her face hidden, and only because they’re paying her a huge amount. She shrugs. “If you wanna pay me a million bucks to do three shows with my back to the audience ...” And who wouldn’t, for a million?

Naturally, the dogs will get half.

The Sunday Times

1000 Forms of Fear is released by RCA on Monday.

THE RISE, FALL AND RISE OF THE GIRL FROM ADELAIDE

Four years ago Sia Furler was at a crossroads. As she prepared to release her fifth album, We are Born, the singer was pondering the dilemma of whether she wanted to be a star on stage or to linger behind the scenes, creating hits for other people, as she does now.

“The idea at the moment is I just become a songwriter or I get some therapeutic help … psychological help … and I learn how to deal with it,” she told The Australian.

Furler was looking forward to being back in Australia for a holiday, when she could catch up with friends and family she hadn’t seen for a while.

That isn’t something she has been able to do regularly since leaving Australia in the late 1990s, first for London and later for New York and Los Angeles.

Her lifestyle now is in sharp contrast to how she began as a performer.

Furler has family in many parts of Australia, but she grew up in Adelaide, where her parents were in a rockabilly band, the Soda Jerx. She went to North Adelaide Primary and Adelaide High School and briefly attended the University of Adelaide, studying Italian and politics.

Music, however, was her passion. The artist began performing at 18, singing in the jazz-funk outfit Crisp, which released two albums in the late 1990s.

After leaving Crisp she released her first solo album, OnlySee, which sold 1200 copies.

Her grand plan was to move to London with her boyfriend, Dan. He was killed in a traffic accident in the English capital while she was on her way there.

Of that tragedy, after which she moved in with Dan’s friends, she would later say: “We were all devastated, so we got shit-faced on drugs and Special Brew. Unfortunately, that bender lasted six years for me.”

Furler stayed in London, however, and — after signing to the Sony dance label Dancepool — never looked back as a recording artist, songwriter and performer.

In 2014 Furler is bigger than ever, but her decision not to show her face as she promotes her new album, reviewed on page 12, suggests fame isn’t how she pictured it while playing the small pubs and clubs of South Australia 15 years ago.

Perhaps the songwriting that has made her fortune will become her focus in future years.