This is a country and western-style melodrama up there with the classics of the genre, songs such as D.I.V.O.R.C.E. and Blanket on the Ground. The narrative goes a-something like this . . .
Po’ southern gal from the sticks grows up dreaming of being a star. Mommy drives her from talent show to beauty pageant to dance contest. People just love the little lady with the big voice. Aged 11, destiny calls: she lands a TV show. But back home the stardust is in short supply. Daddy’s drinkin’ again. Or he’s out of town workin’. Or he’s doin’ both. There are, to quote mommy, “knock-down, drag-out fights”. On top of this strife, money’s too tight to mention. Just as our heroine, sweet 16 and (according to the record company spin) never been kissed, embarks on her first tour, her feuding folks file for bankruptcy.
No matter: within eight short months her debut single and album will both be No 1; she’s making enough money for everyone. The intense work rate of that first tour — 26 shopping malls in as many days — doesn’t let up. And so her star rises . . . and so her fortunes fall. Four years later, riding the wave of enormous global success, she splits with her childhood sweetheart. The same year her parents finally d.i.v.o.r.c.e. after 30-plus years of marriage. Two years after that, she gets married. The union lasts 55 hours before she decides to a.n.n.u.l. Eight months later she gets married again. This marriage lasts two years, just enough time for her to have two baby boys.
Then — country ballad key change — things get really tragic: custody battles, legal battles, rumours of substance abuse, enforced hospital treatment in psychiatric wards (twice), rehab, short flings with dodgy men, long parties with bad women in tiny, crotch-revealing skirts. All played out in front of watching millions. The world has a ringside seat when she graphically externalises her interior breakdown by shaving off all her hair. Even her kid sister — sweet 16 and never been properly advised of the facts of life — getting pregnant doesn’t distract from her woes. Our girl is in the gutter, staring at the gutter.
Then, miracle of miracles, she gets up. She might not have got fixed but she’s got back in the saddle. She embarks on another tour. It’s a hit! She’s back! The crowds — her crowds — are loving her once more. They are happy. If only . . .
“You can’t really go there in a complete state of happiness because you’re scared that it’s going to be taken way,” she says in late 2008, eyes big and wet, reflecting on her 27-year-old life and the pitstops, detours and demands of her ten years in the spotlight. “So it’s better just not to feel anything at all and to have hope than to feel the other way.”
Fade to grey. And so ends “The Ballad Of Britney Jean Spears”.
On Wednesday, a superstar makes a Lazarus-like return at the O2 arena in London. No, not Michael Jackson — there’s still some doubt as to whether his already delayed comeback-run will actually happen. But Britney Spears’s sold-out eight-night stand (followed by a night in Manchester and two in Dublin), part of the Circus world tour that has already wowed North America, is remarkable enough. Sixteen years after her debut in The New Mickey Mouse Club TV show, ten years after her smash-hit first single . . . Baby One More Time, and five years after her last tour, Britney’s back.
Her spiral may have begun when she and her fellow former Disney child star Justin Timberlake broke up in 2002, and accelerated after her brief, intoxicated Las Vegas wedding to the old school friend Jason Alexander in early 2004. But it turned into a vortex of self-destructive behaviour — the partying with Paris Hilton, the baiting of the paparazzi, the head-shaving — after her separation from the former dancer Kevin Federline, father of Sean Preston (now 3) and Jayden James (now 2). As Rolling Stone’s Vanessa Grigoriadis observed last year, Britney has endured “the most public downfall of any star in history”.
“Michael Jackson was never taken out of his house strapped on a stretcher with 70 helicopters and reporters watching,” Grigoriadis says of Britney’s infamous removal from her Beverly Hills mansion in January 2007. Britney, wearing only her pants, had locked herself in the bathroom with Jayden during one of her visitations after she and Federline had broken up. For her RS story, Grigoriadis spoke to dozens of associates of the troubled girl from rural Kentwood in Louisiana. “She was running around Los Angeles with a wig on, sometimes with no panties, sometimes with menstrual blood running down her leg. Things that were so grotesque. It was a complete freefall. The question remains: was that just a nervous breakdown? Is she severely mentally disabled? Or did she have some drug or alcohol problem?”
Spears’s woes run so deep that she lost custody of her children and her father, Jamie — a former alcoholic from whom she was for a while estranged, in part because of his role in forcing her into rehab — is now her court-appointed conservator. He has enormous legal and financial control over the life and affairs of his eldest child, a woman who has sold almost 100 million records. Also back on board with Team Britney is Larry Rudolph, the entertainment lawyer who was her first manager. Why did things go so spectacularly wrong for the singer? The Hollywood online gossip columnist Perez Hilton thinks he knows the answer.
“Drugs,” he alleges, flatly. “Yes, there are issues of mental instability. However, had she not gone down the path of drugs and alcohol then those other issues would not have become exacerbated.”
Hilton speaks as a fan. On the Circus tour he’s the star of the introductory video, in which he plays a bellowing ringmistress clad as a drag-Queen Elizabeth.
“It’s one of the most successful tours of the year,” he says. “It’s working because there’s a whole team around her who have completely turned her life around. Even simple things like everyone involved with the tour has to be drug-tested. There’s no alcohol at all backstage. If she’s having celebrity guests come visit, you can’t go get booze backstage, you have to go to the arena. Her life is very controlled.” Maybe not running the Circus, then, but at least she’s not its clown any more. (The singer’s camp, as is its policy these days, declined to comment on Hilton’s claims.) Grigoriadis, having dug around, thinks drugs were not the issue. A degree of post-natal depression could be part of it. Her dysfunctional background plays a role — as it may in the fact that her little sister Jamie Lynn, star of the Disney channel’s Zoey 101 show, fell pregnant. But the “bottom line” may be more prosaic, and also troubling. “Was it just a really sheltered, not very bright person just reacting to things?”
Performing is all Britney Spears has ever known. All, says her mother Lynne Spears, that she’s ever desired. “Does a bird need a nudge from its mother to sing? Britney sang from the depths of her young being,” she wrote in Through the Storm, the gloopy 2008 (auto)biography that was subtitled A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, “because I believe that’s what she was meant to do.”
“Dancing is a huge part of me and what I do,” Spears said in For the Record, an MTV documentary from last year. It was one of the few promotional activities that she — or her management team — agreed to undertake in support of Circus, her generally well-received sixth album. “It’s something that my spirit just has to do. I’d be dead without dancing.”
Putting aside the troubling idea that a young woman is fulfilled only by prancing about in public, it is undeniable that from the moment she burst into the charts in 1998 that Britney Spears was a preternaturally gifted pop star. Her biggest songs were written by proven (older, male) hit-makers and her provocative videos played up to the (older, male) fantasy of the naughty schoolgirl. But she had something, a charisma that burnt out of the screen. After her came a wave of overly-sexualised female performers, from the fellow Mouseketeer Christina Aguilera to the Pussycat Dolls. Spears, though, was the first heroine to tween and teenage girls. Her supposedly virginal relationship with Timberlake was a deft bit of PR, lending her Girl Power and coquettish allure.
“There’s something special about her,” Hilton says by way of explaining Spears’s enduring appeal. “She can sell it unlike anyone else. Christina may have a better voice but Britney has that It Factor.”
Of course her girl-next-door quality made her more pliable. “When Britney came out she was such a massive sensation,” Grigoriadis says, “they just worked her so hard for five years. It was just unparalleled. She was just working every single minute of every single day.”
And those qualities also made her more needy. “With Justin he was part of the magnitude of what I’d become,” Spears says in For the Record. “So then when he was gone I was like, ‘What am I supposed to do with myself?’ I was so young. I didn’t know . . . And I was really famous. I would go out just to keep my mind busy, so I just became a goer . . . a party girl.”
When I interviewed Timberlake in 2006, I asked him how he would reboot his former girlfriend’s career. He replied, “Well, I think this goes for anyone: it all starts with the songs. The truth of it is, she had catchy songs. I have catchy songs. If she had catchy songs again, I don’t think anybody would be chasing her as much as they are.”
There were half-hearted attempts to get such songs. Spears met LCD Soundsystem, the hipper-than-hip New York producers/artists. LCD’s James Murphy was intrigued by the possibilities of working with a huge global pop star-cum-empty vessel: “She’s a Mousketeer, what the hell does she know?” he said to me. “You might put on a record by [the New York proto-punk duo] Suicide and she’ll be like, ‘What’s this?’ It could be a really interesting next coupla years in pop music. But, um, it wasn’t, and it didn’t happen. I left with a sketchbook of little drawings of flowers that she did. And that’s about it.”
The Spears revealed in the MTV documentary — which was shot over 60 days — is a haunted, damaged and lonely young woman with nails bitten to the quick. She talks of the distress of seeing the demise of the “dream home” she’d built in Malibu with Federline and their sons. Post-split, she cut off her parents and her professional handlers, hooking up with a dubious manager-type named Sam Lutfi and embarking on a relationship with Adnan Ghalib, one of the pack of paparazzi who make her life a 24/7 fishbowl torment — a mindboggling situation, it has been observed, a version of the Stockholm Syndrome (see also the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, who famously sided with her captors). Both Lutfi and Ghalib are reportedly now the subject of restraining orders, keeping them away from the woman over whom they exercised such (brief) control.
In For the Record her lack of eloquence makes the sense of a woman adrift and crying out for love even more vivid.
“I married for the wrong reasons. Instead of following my heart . . . I just did it for the sake of the idea of everything. It just led me on a weird path. And when it ended I just felt so alone. I didn’t want to really think about the reality of it. It was like, ‘I’m OK. I can do this. It’s gonna be OK.’ I never really faced it. And I just ran.”
And the world watched her run. More than Jackson, Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty, the tabloid interest in Spears reached manic proportions. Naomi Wolf, the political consultant and feminist theorist, says: “I don’t think our fascination with Spears is indicative of anything more profound than the fact that it is always narratively compelling to see very talented or promising young people — and certainly talented, beautiful young women — in trouble or in pain: will he or she make it?”
There was also a theory that she had bipolar disorder, which made her “a lot more interesting . . . It is an innately dramatic illness and one from which many very gifted people have suffered. Mental illness is much more widespread in the population than is discussed, and many in her audience will be suffering from such an illness or have loved ones who are doing so.”
But now Britney Spears is back with the Cirque du Soleil-goes-Moulin Rouge extravaganza that is the Circus. The show’s costuming may rely on the old S&M/bondage tropes, and Britney is widely reputed to be lip-syncing. But the reviewers have been largely impressed with the spectacle, while the kids have been coming out in droves to see it, and they have the $20 Britney souvenir thongs to prove it. It’s not just the sex that’s selling, even if her current single is the crassly-titled If U Seek Amy (you’ll “get” the “edgy” acronym in the title if you hear the chorus: “all of the boys and all of the girls are begging to If U Seek Amy”).
Who, then, has turned things round for Britney Spears? Who is the ringmaster? Not her mum who, judging by the MTV documentary, is largely off the scene. It could be Larry Rudolph, a music biz veteran who knows his charge inside out. It could be her dad Jamie — his conservatorship, granted over a daughter he and his wife described in a statement as “an adult child in the throes of a mental-health crisis”, was made permanent by the California court last October.
What about the woman herself? On stage, the place she grew up dreaming of, she seems to be running the show. Back in the spotlight, back in the hearts of her still-adoring fans. They love her even more for the difficulties she’s endured — a mum desperate to be with her babies, a woman desperate for a good man. But offstage, it seems, she’s less happy.
“I don’t feel like it’s out of control — it’s too in control,” she says of her day-to-day life. “There’s no excitement, there’s no passion. It’s like Groundhog Day every day. It’s really boring . . . If I wasn’t under the restraints I’m under right now with all the lawyers and doctors and people analysing me every day . . . I’d feel so liberated, and feel like myself.” The curse of her fame, was never ending — “Even when you go to jail there is always the time you know you’re gonna get out.” Those around her seemed to hear her complaints and concerns “but they’re really not listening. They hear what they wanna hear . . . It’s bad. I’m sad,” she says quietly in For The Record. Then she starts crying.
We know why the caged bird sings. It’s because it’s all she has.
The Circus tour plays the O2 arena, SE10, June 3, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14; the MEN Arena, Manchester, June 17, 02 Arena, Dublin, June 19, 20; For the Record is repeated on Sky Real Lives on June 6 at 11pm
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