Pitching for Perfection

As She Prepares For Her First British Tour In Four Years, Tanita Tikaram Talks To Mary Miller About Feminism, Fame, And The Feelings Behind Her Hauntingly Lyrical Songs

Primrose Hill, London; the first blue-skied morning in March. Smart women with polite dogs are cruising around the interior design shops. Ruder dogs are sniffing the bins outside the delicatessen, cocking a leg on bulging bags of bottles, cheese rinds and dead daffodils. Tanita Tikaram's manager lives just round the corner, in one of those pretty, slightly peeling streets which the developers haven't quite conquered with cuteness.

We sit and wait. Tikaram is late.

As a sunspot moves like a cursor over pictures on his wall - Tikaram with friends in a club, Tikaram squinting in strong light in Africa, somewhere - Paul Brady describes how he first met her in an Irish club, The Mean Fiddler. She came on with her guitar and her strange charcoal voice, and silenced most of the conversation. One table, though, deep in rich-brogued dispute, talked on. Tikaram, aged 18 and on her first stage appearance, moved across to their table, sat on the edge of the stage, and sang into their eyes. Silence fell.

She arrives now, looking squeaky clean from the gym, and embarks on a long apology to Brady. Clearly, she's been with non-English speakers: her language takes a little while to unravel. Brady needs something from her house, she says its a mess.

She is really sorry, her head hangs, her mother would be mad. Tikaram looks like an elf, a rather exotic eastern variety. Her speech is slow and thoughtful, punctuated by great guffaws of laughter which rocks her small frame, and sighing silences.

Her foreigness is a slight shock: the recording company hype has one expect an English schoolgirl, grown wise with the messages of her own songs.

Tikaram's father is Indian/Fijian, her mother Malaysian. She spent early childhood in Munster as "an Army brat", moving with a bump to Basingstoke when she was 12. She was a clever child, but the British comprehensive system of rigorous streaming distressed her: "There was a real sense of bright kids, thick kids, and of social separation. At Army schools, there is a tremendous acceptance of differences, and of establishing a sense of 'family'.

"Things change so often, people move away, kids come and go. The big ones help the smaller, and the mix is joyful, not a cause for divisions."

At home, music was, for her parents, a means of preserving their culture. Tikaram remembers songs about yearning and lost islands, evenings when she and her brother would tape the music with a sense of wonder. Though her parents both grew up in colonial countries and went to Catholic schools, Tikaram says that her mother, particularly, is utterly Asian. Her upbringing was woven through with stories: Tikaram would ask her mother a question, to be told "there was a tree, and when you touched it _" Or, she sang. To Tikaram, music has always been the means of expressing what cannot easily be said with words.

But her early fascination was not with song, but evocative speech. She loved voices, dark melodious moody voices, and raided the library for recordings of plays, less for the words than the sounds of actresses like Vanessa Redgrave. Music at school was somewhat vague - "30 of us at guitar club (here, a huge honk of laughter) learning Lord of the Dance" - but drama club had particular cachet.

The boys had bands, wild, formless rock groups, which Tikaram remembers with some awe: "The whole 'boys-ey' thing is so weird. It's something women would seldom do, just get together to make an appalling noise and call it music. I don't think a woman would ever 'create' without worrying about the integrity of her statement, probably because we aren't confident enough."

Though she says that in the studios, she works with musicians in an atmosphere of mutual respect, she finds the way that her sex is undermined - not just by men, but between different generations of women - a chilling business. Recently, flying business class to the US, the air hostess challenged her, saying was she sure she was in the right cabin. Tikaram suggested that she think about how her daughter might feel, similarly questioned. But serious issues, domestic violence, prostitution - particularly the sex industry in Asian countries - bother Tikaram sufficiently for her to campaign vigorously with her friends.

And the day-to-day stupid irritations of male to female manipulation irk her. With a mixture of the exasperated sigh and the loud laugh, she tells how, in a group, various feminists were asked to discuss the poster for the new film Pret a Porter (about the fashion industry), where a top model lies near nude in lace-topped stockings and feathers.

"You might think Robert Altman was an intelligent director - no? But we stared at this picture in silence.

"Then one of these women - a Scot, regrettably - said 'Och, she's no got any cellulite', and they all started to talk about working out. We all laughed, really uneasy. But the poster is cheap, stupid and degrading, and really, what it makes me feel is despair.

"Why are we still talking about women composers - and how many do you know, anyway _ and women writers? And isn't it sad, really, that we have to have International Women's Day?

"The media have so belittled feminism, making the image such an ugly, angry thing. The issues apart, it's slanted unpleasantly, always to personal images - and to attack a woman's appearance is to attack a fundamental insecurity."

She will not, though, write 'message' songs, and she treads warily among angry, as opposed to passionate, women. "There is a real danger that the personality becomes the cause, that the anger becomes the crusade, and attaches itself to the issues. I just don't have that certainty."

Certainty, confidence are states which, quite genuinely bewilder Tikaram. She goes all dreamy, weaves in her seat. Now this has seemed a sure person, one of principle and mettle, who, aged 21, had the nerve, when she felt her muse depart, to stop - to take time out to grow. The problem for her was, she says, that she felt no sense of place.

She wanted to write about childhood, but couldn't find the landscape, wanted to describe somewhere but could only find feelings, not words to paint the scenery. She longed - and still does - to write a song such as Penny Lane or Waterloo Sunset, and she still considers herself unable to write any kind of lyrical description.

But, after two years of making space to travel and to talk to her friends, a time came when she had more to say, and more songs to sing. She found that we had all waited to hear, such is the individuality of her communication. Could it be that she is perfectionist? Silence, and a long "Hmm..." as she tries this for size. It fits, with a small, wriggling struggle, and she seems rather pleased.

She has a theory that her voice, not the extraordinary baritone growl, but the thought and spirit comes from her mother, and her mother before her, the women who never were allowed to speak their truth. She'd love to be "the person I am when I write songs, the person who dares to express those ideas and feelings." And can't she be? "No - everyone would find me really boring!" But on stage, she knows that when she starts to sing, the audience start. There's a collective "Aah..." And Tanita Tikaram, enchantress, is singing not just into our eyes but into our souls.

Probably, in five years, she'll do something entirely different, write a book, study psychology, stop the world. Fame affects her not in the least, anonymity would be no matter.

What matters is that she stays in touch with women. Being around her can only do us good.