I'll Never Write My Memoirs - Softcover

Jones, Grace

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476765081 ISBN 13: 9781476765082

Verlag: Gallery Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Iconic music and film legend Grace Jones gives an in-depth account of her stellar career, professional and personal life, and the signature look that catapulted her into the stardom stratosphere.

Grace Jones, a veritable “triple-threat” as acclaimed actress, singer, and model, has dominated the entertainment industry since her emergence as a model in New York City in 1968. Quickly discovered for her obvious talent and cutting-edge style, Grace signed her first record deal in 1977 and became one of the more unforgettable characters to emerge from the Studio 54 disco scene, releasing the all-time favorite hits, “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “Slave to the Rhythm,” and “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You).” And with her sexually charged, outrageous live shows in the New York City nightclub circuit, Grace soon earned the title of “Queen of the Gay Discos.”

But with the dawn of the ’80s came a massive anti-disco movement across the US, leading Grace to focus on experimental-based work and put her two-and-a-half-octave voice to good use. It was also around this time that she changed her look to suit the times with a detached, androgynous image. In this first-ever memoir, Grace gives an exclusive look into the transformation to her signature style and discusses how she expanded her musical triumph to success in the acting world, beginning in the 1984 fantasy-action film Conan the Destroyer alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the James Bond movie A View to a Kill, and later in Eddie Murphy’s Boomerang.

Featuring sixteen pages of stunning full-color photographs, Miss Grace Jones takes us on a journey from Grace’s religious upbringing in Jamaica to her heyday in Paris and New York in the ’70s and ’80s, all the way to present-day London, in what promises to be a no holds barred tell-all for the ages.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Performer, actress, and musician Grace Jones has been making a name for herself since she left Jamaica as a twelve-year-old in the 1960s. First finding fame as a fashion model in the early 1970s, then as a sensational disco queen during the Studio 54 years, she is as much surrealist as showgirl, as much performance artist as party animal. She has been Bond villain and Warhol confidante, post-modern icon and avant-garde pop star. I’ll Never Write My Memoirs is her first book.

Paul Morley is a writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic who has covered music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. A founding member of the electronic collective Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he is the author of a number of books about music including the bestselling The Age of Bowie and A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music and Decided to Rewrite its Entire History. He collaborated with music icon Grace Jones on her memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, and his two most recent books are biographies of Bob Dylan, You Lose Yourself, You Reappear, and Tony Wilson of Factory Records, From Manchester With Love.

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I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
 

1.

Spanish Town

I was born.

It happened one day, when I least expected it, on an island measuring only 4,411 square miles, a teeming mountainous land of wood and water among a chain of islands in the center of the Caribbean Sea at the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. That wondrous isle in the western seas.

I came out of my mother feetfirst. I arrived kicking and pissed off, sticky with fury, soaked to the skin. I was what’s known as a stargazing fetus as well, my neck fully extended. From the very beginning I was going against the grain and making trouble. Perhaps I was holding on to my mother for dear life, somehow knowing what was about to happen next. I didn’t want to leave the one place I had felt at home, where I had been floating for so long, and enter the darkness. Inside, there was light. Outside, instantly, the unknown. The cord was cut. Startled by a strange newness, I didn’t immediately make much of a noise, so I was slapped and slapped, to prove that I was normal. I cried out. I’ll show you noise. I’ll show you normal. I shrieked. In my own uprooted newborn way, I probably cursed.

Here I am.

Grace Beverly Jones. As was the custom, I would be known by my second name. Beverly. Bev. Later, when I was four or five, my skin was so charcoal black I would be engulfed when the warm, sultry night fell, throbbing with nature and a slithering hint of the supernatural. My nickname then was Firefly. You could only make out my eyes and teeth, sparkling in the dark.

My new home outside my mother was Spanish Town, the oldest continually habituated town in Jamaica. Five hundred and fifty years of history, starting a few years after the island of Jamaica was first found—“discovered”—by a Christopher Columbus of Italy in charge of exploring and marauding Spaniards. As St. Jago de la Vega, the town on the plains, at the edge of wetlands in the south of the island, it became the capital when the Spanish settled. They gave it a distinct Spanish Colonial layout, with lots of internal courtyards and walled gardens and a Renaissance-influenced checkerboard of streets placed around a dramatic central plaza. Spanish interest in Jamaica waned when it became clear there was no gold, and it became a backwater of the Spanish Empire. It became Spanish Town in 1655 when the British conquered the island. They kept it as the administrative capital and introduced grand Georgian buildings, reflecting the growing empire’s wealth and importance.

Spanish Town was the Jamaican capital until the port of Kingston—better placed on the coast thirteen miles away, with more natural vitality—replaced it in 1872. The town’s cathedral, built in the early sixteenth century, rebuilt in 1725 as an Anglican church, was the first such building in this part of the world and remains the oldest ecclesiastical structure from the British Empire still standing outside the UK. When I was born, Spanish Town had traces of grandeur but was showing signs of neglect after centuries of colonial rule and the Great Depression in the 1930s; imposed signs of methodical Spanish life, elegant town planning, and aristocratic British influences peeling back to reveal the undimmed Jamaica underneath. It had a faded glory, a shabby gentility, many parts of it cast aside as useless, and was beginning to meet up with the rough, tumbling edges of the capital city as Kingston’s population grew.

They say I’m a lot older than I actually am. In the press, on the Internet, they add about four years to my actual age. I’m often asked how old I am—the world likes to know a person’s age for some reason, as if that number explains everything. I don’t care at all. I like to keep the mystery. I get onstage and tell everyone I am ten years older than they think, and then I hula-hoop for twenty minutes. That’s my age—that’s how I measure it. I wasn’t born wearing a watch, and I never got used to wearing one, and when I was born I didn’t know if it was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, and I never really know the days of the week now. Days are days, hours come and go, in whatever order, and I keep up with it, in my own way. It’s hard to remember things in the right order, but I will try.

Time for me is an energy. I’m another energy, and the two energies wrap around each other. The present can seem as distant as the past, which can seem as close as the present. The most exciting thing is what happens next, even if it has already happened.

Because I never say my age, and rarely have to write it down, I roughly work it out by basing my life on an historic landmark. I mark time by what was happening in the world rather than how old I was. I remember moving to America around the time that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Before then, I was living in Jamaica, caged inside a certain goddamned darkness, even though there was so much sun and life. After Kennedy died, I was moving around like a gypsy, looking for the light, for what happens next.

Every birthday party I had after my teens, I always said I was twenty-something. I would know I was thirty-something, maybe forty-something, but never really the exact age.

I didn’t grow older. I grew wiser. The world likes to know the age of someone, so I would be often asked. I am honestly never sure, so when it comes to working it out, to work out how old I am, I take something important, like my son’s age, and if he is thirty-three, and I was, say, twenty-nine when I had him, then I do the math. So if you ask me now how old I am, nothing comes to mind straightaway. To some extent, it could be any number. Even then I am not entirely sure; it’s not because I am hiding my age, embarrassed or annoyed by it, but because it is not something I keep to hand. It’s not the most important thing about me. There are more important things about me than my age that will give you a better idea of who and what I am. I was born. Let’s take it from there.

I know just by knowing that the first decade of my life in Jamaica was during the 1950s. The Second World War had finished. It was a few years before Jamaica would win its independence from the British. Many Jamaicans were traveling to the mother country, Britain, to find a new life. To find new opportunities, my parents were preparing to move north, along the East Coast of North America.

My mother was Marjorie, born in 1930; my father was Robert Winston, born six years earlier. They already had two young children when I was born. My mother was extremely fertile and there was no contraception at the time. Five of the children were born in very quick succession; one year, two were born. Lots of juices were flowing. The children kept coming. Robert Patrick was the first boy; later he would change his name to Christian, Chris. Then there Norman Noel, known as Noel. Then, back to front, me, Grace Beverly. After me, George Maxwell, Max. Another girl followed, Yvonne Pamela, and then another girl, Janet Marie. Eventually, there was a fourth son, Randy, born in America, not Jamaican at all, the baby of the family. When she married my dad, my mother was sixteen. By twenty-two, she had six kids. She was a Walters; her grandmother’s maiden name, my great-grandmother, was Powell, and some in our family think the first African-American to serve as secretary of state, Colin Powell, might be a relation.

They went to America to get away from her family as much as anything. My mom was definitely stifled by the world she grew up in. She...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Gallery Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476765081
• ISBN 13: 9781476765082
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 417
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: River House; mail@indigo.de; ; Schlachthofstr. 36 A; Hamburg; 21079; Deutschland