Sia becomes even more reclusive after fierce ‘Music’ backlash

The notoriously private star has been under an uncomfortable spotlight lately – and those who know her well say she pained by the backlash.

Sia – the Australian singer-songwriter behind Chandelier and Elastic Heart – rarely gives interviews. On stage, she hides behind wigs that cover her entire face. Privacy is her thing.

But lately, Sia Kate Isobelle Furler has found herself in an uncomfortable spotlight. And those who know the reclusive artist say she is no doubt pained by it.

Her former manager Tim Clark told the New York Post that it can turn one of two ways: “She’ll either be incredibly angry or else go back into herself and retreat.”

That spotlight burned bright yesterday as her film-directing debut, Music, is up for two Golden Globes – Best Picture in the musical or comedy category, and Best Actress in that genre for Kate Hudson. It lost both awards, as hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler dubbed the film the year’s “Biggest Flopparooni”.

While Hudson joined the ceremony from home, Sia was noticeably absent from proceedings.

The movie centres on an autistic girl – played by 18-year-old Maddie Ziegler, who has starred in many of Sia’s music videos and who’s not on the autism spectrum herself – and her drug-dealing sister (Hudson).

Kate Hudson and Maddie Ziegler star in Music, which has been mauled by critics.

RELATED: Kate Hudson responds to movie backlash

The Post’s Johnny Oleksinski described Ziegler’s performance as “an uncomfortably heightened imitation that never rings true and verges on mockery,” adding that the actress “always has her mouth open with a wide grin and exaggerates facial expressions like she’s Marcel Marceau”.

It has drawn fire from the autism community. “[Music] seemed like it made fun of people on the autism spectrum,” Camille Proctor, executive director of the Colour of Autism Foundation, told the Post. “And I don’t guess that Sia feels bad about it.”

More than 55,000 people signed petitions calling for an official condemnation of Music by the film industry.

With criticism piling on, Sia, 45, earlier this month said she would remove scenes in which Ziegler’s character is physically restrained – a dangerous tactic discouraged by autism advocates. “I listened to the wrong people and that is my responsibility …” Sia tweeted. (She has since deleted her Twitter account.)

Sia and protege Maddie Ziegler at the 2015 Grammy Awards. Picture: Jason Merritt/Getty

It was just two months ago that she admitted to having listened to another wrong person: Shia LaBeouf, who starred in Sia’s 2015 music video for Elastic Heart. After the actor’s ex-girlfriend, singer FKA Twigs, filed a suit accusing him of sexual assault, Sia tweeted that LaBeouf was a “pathological liar, who conned me into an adulterous relationship …”.

And those who know Sia say all this public turmoil is likely taking a high toll on her.

“She is an emotional person,” said Ryan Fitzgerald of Fitzy and Wippa, who has interviewed her a dozen or so times. He added that Sia – who has said she suffers from PTSD and neuralgia after a misdiagnosis of Bipolar II disorder – “has had hard times. This will hurt her. She will be finding it really tough.”

Born and raised in Adelaide, Sia came from a splintered family. Musician dad Phil B. Colson was often absent, and her mother, Loene Furler, worked as an art lecturer.

While wait­ressing at age 17 in 1993, Sia fell in as the vocalist for a local acid-jazz band called Crisp.

“She was amazing,” former bandmate Jeremy Glover told the Post. “What resonated, beyond her incredible vocals, was that she was always herself. There was no act on stage, no glitz on her sleeve.”

Sia in 2007, as vocalist in the band Crisp.

As for the lifestyle, he remembered: “We were all drinking. She enjoyed white wine. It got her into the mood.” It became a crutch to get her through shows, as Sia never seemed comfortable performing live.

The band split up in 1997 and Sia travelled to Tokyo and then Thailand, where she met Dan Pontifex, the man who has been described as her first true love. They were set to reunite in London but, before Sia arrived, Pontifex was killed in a hit-and-run by a taxi driver in the city. She ended up still moving to London where, for a time, as she told Australian Rolling Stone, “I drank a lot and did a lot of drugs with all of his grieving friends.”

She also got back into music, joining trip-hop act Zero 7 and signing a management deal with Clark’s company. “She had an eccentric view on life,” her ex-manager said.

The first time Sia met him and his partner David Enthoven at their office, “she took off her shoes and asked ‘Where’s the dunny?’ In Australian lingo, that is an outside toilet. David and I ­decided that Sia is the girl for us.”

She had mild success at first, with a break coming when her song Breathe Me closed out the 2005 series finale of the HBO show Six Feet Under – playing while each character’s death was revealed.

Sia began performing at increasingly larger ­venues and seemed to be gaining a foothold in the States. But there was a problem. “She was brilliant at touring but didn’t like it,” Clark recalled. “We’d tell her a show was great and she’d tell us she hated it.”

The eccentric singer’s star rose after Six Feet Under.

Sia was also self-medicating on the road and beyond. “Drugs took me down really quickly. It was painkillers and opiates that were a real problem,” she told Australia’s KIIS-FM.

Clark saw his old friend become someone else. “We were trying to organise various radio promotions … All of a sudden she was insisting that one of her dogs would accompany her … We told her that it’s kind of not [OK],” he recalled.

“Then she would say that if she flies to America it has to be first class. We couldn’t pay for it and the record company wouldn’t — her [album] sales did not support it … she became a real diva.”

Sia got sober. But she revealed to The New York Times that, in May 2010, she reached out to a drug dealer and ordered “two of everything” except meth and heroin. She kept her stash close and, months later, began planning her own suicide.

She wanted to check into a hotel and take the pills. She got as far as writing a note to her dog walker and another to the hotel manager. But a friend’s call came at the right moment, and she changed her mind – and her life.

She began writing songs for others – Beyoncé, Rihanna – and it seemed like that might be her legacy: behind-the-scenes hit maker.

“When she works with ­Rihanna or Katie Perry, she meets with them, learns their pain points and becomes a kind of empathetic character,” music journalist Steve Knopper, who interviewed her for the Times, told the Post. “It makes for good songs that capture the artists’ internal conflicts. She winds up being a therapist character for these pop stars.”

Everything changed in 2014 when her own song Chandelier became an inescapable hit. She was everywhere, but no one really knew what she looked like – after all the self-loathing and stage fright, Sia had found a way to obscure herself: by casting Ziegler, then an 11-year-old star of the reality show Dance Moms, as her Mini-Me.

Ziegler stood in for Sia in the videos to her biggest hits.

Former bandmate Jeremy Glover recalled being in a Berlin supermarket in 2016 and hearing Sia’s Kanye West collaboration, Wolves, playing over the PA system. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, wow, Sia is singing with Kanye,’ ” Glover told the Post. “My second thought was that Kanye needs Sia more than Sia needs Kanye.”

Sia was married to filmmaker Erik Anders Lang from 2014 to 2016, but the two didn’t have children. Then the singer saw the 2018 HBO documentary series Fosterand something clicked. One of the teens in the doc, Dasani, was about to age out of the Los Angeles foster-care system – which can often lead to homelessness.

Sia is known for being tender-hearted. She has paid for groceries for strangers and spontaneously gave $US100,000 ($A128,00) to down-on-their-luck listeners of Fitzgerald’s radio show.

But it was a shock when she tweeted: “Hey Dasani from ‘FOSTER’ on HBO! I’d like to adopt you … ”

The doc’s director, Mark Jonathan Harris, and Dasani’s lawyer, Barbara Duey, both declined to comment on what happened. But Sia did end up adopting two 18-year-old men who had been in foster care and welcomed them into her Los Angeles home – where she’s been known to joke about how a song she wrote for Zayn Malik paid for the $US1.2 million flooring.

Sia in a rare public outing, spotted paying shoppers’ bills at a Walmart. Picture: Twitter.

Last year, she revealed that now, at age 45, she is a grandmother. “My youngest son just had two babies,” she said on DJ Zane Lowe’s Apple Music podcast. “I’m a f***ing grandma … I’m just immediately horrified.” She added that the children call her “Nana,” but she’s trying to get them to call her “Lovey.”

For the past year, she’s been quarantining with her new family and has said that the kids in her family are “doing educational stuff that is good for them.” And they have undoubtedly been a comfort as she’s weathered unwelcome public attention.

Still, said Clark: “I don’t think she will give up on filmmaking in the same way she would not give up on songwriting and making records. I think she will keep going. I hope she will keep going.”

This article originally appeared on Page Six and was reproduced with permission

Originally published as Sia becomes even more reclusive after fierce ‘Music’ backlash