“I wanna try and delve into the most wondrous, fantastical, complex mind of an icon,” says Gemma Cairney, introducing BBC 6 Music’s Amazing Grace. Spoiler alert: she’s a Grace Jones fan and she’s about to have dinner with her hero.
Jones’s laidback drawl, throaty laugh and Russell Harty-bothering attitude is the perfect foil for Cairney’s sweet, fan-girl approach. Early on, Jones lets slip that she might actually be normal. She loves going to see her boyfriend in Jamaica, but she hates the way the dishes clank when you put them in the dishwater. Although she likes to swim, she’s scared of sharks. “I think if a shark did come at me, you’d get it together, and, you know, you have to punch him in the nose,” she says.
It wouldn’t be a Grace Jones interview without touching on mind-altering fare like acid, disco and Studio 54. “Fear is fear of fear, I think,” offers Jones in a bid to explain how she didn’t crack up on a three-day encounter with a “super-trip pill”. Cairney sticks on some Jimi Hendrix and asks what she was wearing at the time. “Beads,” replies Jones, grandly.
Retaining an air of mystery has always been part of the game. No autographs were ever signed, despite some pretty powerful persuasion from Andy Warhol. “If Andy was here, he’d probably talk me into doing selfies,” she says. As the awkward practice of trying to interview a celebrity over dinner goes, it sounds like both Jones and Cairney are enjoying it.
For an alternative line of questioning, look no further than Sophia Amoruso, the self-styled Girl Boss who has now branched out into podcasting. The first episode of #Girlboss Radio finds Charlize Theron telling her about the time she was so depressed at not being able to pursue a career in dance she took to the couch to eat “pints of Häagen-Dazs”.
Amoruso punctuates the conversation with “Ohmugod, wow,” and uses words like “professionalise” while Theron shares her thoughts on how real friends are the ones who make her laugh until she pees her pants. “Have you ever pooped your pants?” asks Amoruso. She has. Just the once. But as Theron wisely points out: “Life is a very real thing, and it happens to all of us.” Ohmugod, wow.
