Grace Jones

Today we're going back to Disco. We will concentrate on a performer that is not gay herself, but she is a huge gay icon nonetheless. The fact that she had a gay brother whom she adored and was surrounded by gay friends and co-workers makes the argument even stronger.

Beverly Grace Jones was born on May 19, 1948, in Spanish Town, Jamaica. (Some sources have given the year as 1952, and the performer has later stated she doesn't keep track of her age.) She spent her early childhood there and was raised by her grandparents in a very religious environment while her parents established themselves in Syracuse, New York. Jones was very thin and shy as a child and was often teased by her classmates, showing no signs of the bold and unfettered individuality for which she would become famous later in her life.

The neighborhood where Grace Jones grew up in Spanish Town, Jamaica, was surrounded by trees that children loved to climb. But for the girl known simply as Grace, they became synonymous with the punishment meted out by her strict, religious grandparents. "We'd have to climb a tree and pick our own whips [branches] to be disciplined with," she revealed. "When you had to pick your own whip, you knew you were in for it."

Those strict elders inspired the ferocious persona that has become her trademark. "The scary character comes from male authority within my religious family," she says. "They had that first, and subliminally I took that on. I was shit-scared of them."

When Jones was 13, she and her siblings joined her parents in Syracuse, where their strict upbringing continued. After completing her primary schooling, Jones studied Spanish and theater at Onondaga Community College and Syracuse University; however, the rebellious streak that she had gradually developed soon led her to drop out and go to Philadelphia to take a part in a play. Arriving in the city, she decided to stay there, immersing herself in the Counterculture of the 1960s by living in hippie communes, earning money as a go-go dancer, and using LSD and other drugs. She later praised the use of LSD as "a very important part of my emotional growth... The mental exercise was good for me".

She moved to New York City the following year and signed with Wilhelmina Modeling Agency but found limited success. She was, however, introduced to the world of gay clubs. In her own words:

"I started to go out to the gay clubs with Chris [her favorite brother]. My dad was very uncomfortable at the time with Chris being gay. It was one of the worst things for a pastor to cope with in quiet, very repressed suburbia when you wanted your children to set an example for the religious community you were building, to appear pristine and deadly straight within the church family. Pentecostal Christianity is the kind of religion where you command no respect if your own family is seen as being different, or somehow stained."

"It was difficult for Chris. It wasn't necessarily a sexual thing - he was simply born very feminine. I felt as close as I could to Chris without us actually being twins. We easily passed ourselves off as twins, though, and I wonder if we were somehow tangled up inside my mother. I was born a little more masculine, a girl with some of the boyness Chris lacked. And he had some of the girliness I didn't have. In Jamaica, this meant he got beat up and verbally abused a lot for being a 'batty boy.' It's changing now, there is more tolerance, but back then it was the dark ages."

"There is a gene, I am sure, in your DNA that traps you inside a certain gender. For people like Chris, from the minute they can walk, before they know anything, before they can speak, there is a definite feminine element in their movement. Chris was like that. He was teased because it wasn't clear which way he turned. There is a world where he might have ended up conventionally straight and married. Girls, though, saw him as being too feminine to be sexually attractive, and a lot of straight men are attracted to pretty, young, feminine boys like Chris. Chris did admit to me that he was raped when he came to America by a straight family man. Chris was very delicate and feminine. It was tough for him. He played the organ at church, and I would call him 'church gay,' or perhaps it should be 'church feminine.' I think of Prince that way. A whole new gender, really."

"Mom was much more understanding of his sexuality and tried not to put pressure him. My dad denounced him and stopped him playing the organ in church. Piano playing runs in the family, coming down from my mum’s dance-band dad, Dan, my real grandfather. Chris was an amazing pianist from the age ten, a prodigy. He played like the great Billy Preston at age eleven and used to contribute all the church music, help the choir - it was very important for him, this role. My father took that away from him because complaining church members were gossiping that he was gay. Chris was never the same when that was taken away from him."

"He would say, 'Well if I'm gay I'll do what gay people do.' And I'd go with him to the clubs. Being tangled up, having some of the man in me, I loved that. The man in me - as well as the girl -loved men! I felt I was among my own even as I was so far removed. This was when gay life existed deep in the margins of the margins of the mainstream, a system of rumors, innuendo, and scandal."

"I would sneak a little drink, puff on a cigarette that would choke the life out of me, but those were merely early attempts to go out and discover a new world, meet people, different sorts of people, see what they did, good ones, bad ones. I didn't feel disloyal to my parents. I'd been completely loyal to the family I had been given for a decade. It was time to be loyal to myself."

In 1970, she traveled to Paris, France, to pursue her career. The Parisian fashion scene was receptive to Jones' unusual, androgynous, bold, dark-skinned appearance. Yves St. Laurent, Claude Montana, and Kenzo Takada hired her for runway modeling, and she appeared on the covers of Elle, Vogue, and Stern working with Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Hans Feurer. Jones also modeled for Azzedine Alaia and was frequently photographed promoting his line. While modeling in Paris, she shared an apartment with Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange. Hall and Jones frequented Le Sept, one of Paris's most popular gay clubs of the 1970s and '80s, and socialized with Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld. In 1973, Jones appeared on the cover of a reissue of Billy Paul's 1970 album Ebony Woman.

Jones's success as a model soon opened new doors for her, and after landing a small role as a drug dealer in a little-known film titled Gordon’s War (1973), Jones eventually signed a recording contract with Island Records.

Her debut single, in 1975, was I Need a Man. It was co-written by Jones and by Pierre Papadiamandis, a French pianist and composer of Greek origin. Its initial release passed fairly unnoticed. The track was later released in the US and became a modest hit, reaching the top of the dance chart. It also contributed to Jones' growing popularity among the gay scene.

Her first big European hit came from her debut album, Portfolio (1977). La Vie En Rose, Edith Piaf's first international hit, reworked for the discos, hit the top 5 in France and the Netherlands, as well as the top 10 US Dance chart.

Tomorrow (from the musical Annie) wasn't a single, but it was very popular:

In 1978, Jones and Moulton made Fame, an immediate follow-up to Portfolio, also recorded at Sigma Sound Studios. The album featured another reinterpretation of a French classic, Autumn Leaves by Jacques Prévert:

It also included two songs that peaked at #3 on the US Dance Chart; there was Do Or Die:

... And then, there was Fame:

Am I Ever Gonna Fall in Love in New York City was a single in Australia:

Muse (1979) was the last of Jones' disco albums. The album's single, On Your Knees, was written by D.C. LaRue and Jerry Corbetta:

The album also features a re-recorded version I'll Find My Way to You, which Jones released three years prior to Muse. Originally appearing in the 1976 Italian film, Colt 38 Special Squad in which Jones had a role as a club singer:

This is the earlier, movie version:

This is the version from Muse:

Don't Mess with the Messer was another song that she co-wrote with Pierre Papadiamandis:

When popular music began to change at the dawn of the 1980s, Jones transformed with it, abandoning Disco for a New Wave-influenced sound and adopting a more androgynous look to accompany it. Produced by Jamaican duo Sly and Robbie, the next two albums that Jones released are arguably her best known. Featuring cover versions of songs by the likes of the Normal, the Pretenders, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, and the Police, Warm Leatherette (1980) and Nightclubbing (1981) both yielded chart-making singles.

Warm Leatherette completed her evolution from disco to a fusion of funk, reggae, and new-wave rock. Her appearance underwent a startling transformation too, under the direction of her then-lover, Jean-Paul Goude. Born and raised in Paris, Goude trained as an illustrator and worked in advertising. He came to prominence when the editor of American Esquire asked him to art direct the magazine's 35th-anniversary issue, then move to New York to become its full-time art director. It was there, in the late 70s, that the normally reticent Frenchman met Jones. But their relationship was rocky. "It was a period of decadence," he recalled. "People were still doing lots of drugs and I had been working so hard for so long and she made me part of her lifestyle; made me go out dancing at Studio 54. She became an obsession and we did everything together."

"At a time when everyone loved to dress up, Jones and Goude took it to the extremes," said Paula Reed, author of the Design Museum's Fifty Fashion Looks That Changed the 1980s, in which the pair feature. "Goude as art director and photographer was the arch manipulator. Jones's look was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Her skin was darker and glossier… Her physique was more toned. She had that catwalk hauteur but a street fighter's snarl. She was a spectacular contradiction: a one of a kind."

A Rolling Stone (with Deniece Williams as part of the writing team) became the lead single from Warm Leatherette in the UK:

Love Is The Drug (Roxy Music's classic) quickly followed the unsuccessful A Rolling Stone, but did not make any chart impact until six years later, when a remixed version of it garnered considerable attention:

The most successful single off the album and Grace Jones' breakthrough song (and one of my favorites) was Private Life, which entered the top 20 in the UK, becoming her first chart entry in that country, and has since become one of her signature songs. It was written by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders:

The Smokey Robinson classic, The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game, cracked the US Hot 100:

The album's title track, written by Daniel Miller, the founder of Mute Records, was a top 20 Dance track in the US:

Warm Leatherette was critically praised and had some commercial success, but the follow-up, Nightclubbing (1981), did even better in both fields; it received mostly glowing reviews and was undoubtedly more successful - in fact it was her most successful album ever: It achieved platinum status in Australia and New Zealand, gold in Germany, it made the top 5 in France, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and entered the top 40 in the US and the UK. The album's first single was, however, unsuccessful, although would later become one of Jones' signature songs; it was Sting's Demolition Man:

For the Nightclubbing cover, Jones's body and face were coated in maroon paint and she wore nothing but an Armani jacket and a glare. The renowned stylist Christiaan Houtenbos, who lived in the same apartment block in New York, created her signature flat-top haircut using a men's razor. "She yelled out of the window at midnight that she wanted a haircut," he said. Under Goude's direction, Jones became a star. "It could be equally said that he could not have achieved the status he did without her," said Reed. "Individually they were impressive…together they were atomic."

The single that would come to define Jones was a remake of the 1974 hit by the top Argentine tango composer, Astor Piazzolla: Libertango was given English and French lyrics (the latter written by Alain Delon's wife, Nathalie) and was renamed I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango). It made #1 in Belgium and was a big hit in the rest of continental Europe:

Another big hit and a gay favorite was Pull Up to the Bumper. The highly suggestive lyrics coupled with the strong beat made it a club classic and a top 5 US R&B hit. The song would re-emerge in Europe in 1985 as a major success, especially in the UK, where it became one of Jones' highest-charting singles in that country.

The next two singles from this album were unfortunately unsuccessful. The first was Use Me:

Feel Up was even less successful. The last single off the album, the Vanda-Young composition Walking in the Rain had some success in Germany, Australia, and New Zealand:

This is the album's title track, a David Bowie - Iggy Pop composition:

NME included the album in its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, with its entry stating: "A glimpse into the sordid disco depravities behind the velvet rope at Studio 54, Nightclubbing and its standout smash Pull Up to the Bumper shunted new wave, reggae, and disco firmly into the seductive neon '80s with a single arse/car metaphor." The Guardian listed Nightclubbing as one of the "1000 albums to hear before you die". It is also included in Out's "The 100 Greatest, Gayest Albums of All Time", and Attitude's "Top 50 Gay Albums of All Time".

At the peak of that fame, Jones appeared on Russell Harty's chat show. Taking umbrage when he turned his back on her to interview another guest, she slapped him, creating an infamous and oft-repeated TV moment. She rejects any suggestion that it was staged: "No, I wasn’t acting. Absolutely not." Jones's reputation for being scary and crazy was cemented - yet, for all her public posturing, she had a softer side to which close friends were privy. "Her name equals danger," says milliner and collaborator Philip Treacy, "but she's really very sweet."

Jones described Goude as the only man who ever "made me buckle at the knees." But their relationship was doomed even before she fell pregnant by him. "I had no intention of staying with her," he later admitted. "I wasn't happy with it." Their son, Paulo, was born in November 1979, but Goude and Jones eventually split. "I did my best work with her," he observed decades later, "and we're still very friendly. She is great." Reluctant to be separated from her baby, Jones took Paulo on tour. "I went jungle," she said. "I took him everywhere. Like elephants or lionesses."

Her next album, Living My Life, was released in 1982. It was less enthusiastically received, both by the critics and by the public, although it eventually managed to sell in excess of 400,000 copies worldwide. Nipple to the Bottle was a #2 US Dance hit, a top 10 hit in New Zealand and Belgium, and a top 20 hit in the Netherlands and the US R&B chart:

The singles that followed were smaller hits. First, there was The Apple Stretching:

... Then came My Jamaican Guy:

... And then, Cry Now, Laugh Later:

Following the release of Living My Life, Jones switched gears and took her distinctive look to the screen, appearing with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan The Destroyer (1984) and opposite Roger Moore and Christopher Walken in the 1985 James Bond film A View To A Kill. She was one of the most impressive Bond "bad women" ever:

Also in 1985, she released her last album on Island Records. It was called Slave to the Rhythm. The album's title track was chosen as the first single. Buoyed by her increased visibility, it was a big hit in most of the world:

The follow-up single, Jones The Rhythm, didn't do so well:

The following year she appeared in the film Vamp and released the album Inside Story, for Manhattan Records. The album spawned the hit single I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect for You):

Party Girl was a lesser hit:

Crush was also a minor hit:

... And so was Victor Should Have Been a Jazz Musician:

By then she was in a relationship with Dolph Lundgren, a 6ft 5ins Swede she met at a show in Sydney and initially employed as a bodyguard. Nine years her junior, he was her physical ideal and an intellectual match: he earned degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, reportedly has an IQ of 160 and speaks seven languages. After Jones wangled him a bit part in A View To A Kill, they joined the ranks of New York's in-demand celebrities. Warhol described them as "fabulous" and Helmut Newton shot them naked as a modern Adam and Eve for Playboy.

"My time with her was nuts," Lundgren reflected. "Four years of mayhem." Jones observed that "Yelling between people in love is normal." As Lundgren's fame grew, the relationship waned. "As soon as I got cast in Rocky IV and moved to LA and got my own place, we started drifting apart," he noted. "We were on more equal footing after Rocky and it was unexpected and hard to deal with for both of us. Our relationship lasted for four years but, as soon as I got even a modicum of fame, we were doomed."

"I have terrible relationships because of my temper," Jones later admitted. "Some men actually want to kill me because they think I have more balls than they do. To most men, it's intolerable. For years, I've had to consciously try to balance, even repress, that side of me in order to make a relationship work."

In 1989 she released Bulletproof Heart, an album that was largely ignored. It would be her last studio album for 19 years. Love On Top Of Love was chosen as the lead single. It met with limited success and only reached modest positions in Italy and the Netherlands. However, the 12" remix of the song, subtitled Killer Kiss, was a significant club hit in the US.

Jones' cover of Amado Mio, a song from the classic 1946 film Gilda, was released as the final single in 1990. It also made little impact, still reaching the top 40 in Italy, but placing at the lowest reaches of the German and UK charts.

In 1989 she married Chris Stanley, producer of that year's Bulletproof Heart, but they divorced within two years. In the mid-90s she fell for another bodyguard, this time a Belgian called Atila Altaunbay. They married in Rio in 1996 when she was 48 and he was 21. The New York Times reported that, after the ceremony, they went straight to the gym. The marriage lasted eight years but, despite her openness in all other areas of her life, Jones has remained quiet on the subject.

Jones continued working in films, playing a parody of herself in the 1992 comedy Boomerang alongside Halle Berry and Eddie Murphy. Grace's contribution to the film's soundtrack was 7 Day Weekend:

Thereafter, the bigger roles dried up and her acting career ground to a halt in 2008. That was the year that she finally released her last studio album so far, the acclaimed Hurricane. It was produced by her then-fiancé Ivor Guest, the 4th Viscount Wimborne and a relation of the late Princess Diana. They split amicably a year later and Jones has said she remains single these days.

"I'm a man-eating machine," intones Grace in the arresting video for Corporate Cannibal, her first new solo single in nearly two decades. Her mouth divides, cell-like, into two mouths. Her eyes roll back into a skull that's distorting upwards into a skyscraper silhouette. As an industrial guitar grinds away in the background, this relentless cyborg of a woman promises to "Consume my consumers with no sense of humor."

Grace explains: "People hear that line 'I'm a man-eating machine' and they think it's about sex but it's not. It's about a monster, a multinational skyscraper munching people in off the street. It's about the way these corporations chew us all up. And now they're all eating each other. There's a meltdown and we have this economic crisis. But I watch the news and I just think: 'Let the dying die'. None of it was ever real, it was all fantasy money… but then they end up taking the real money from the ordinary people and that makes me angry." Here's the song:

Her next single, Williams' Blood, is an autobiographical song, written by Jones and music duo Wendy & Lisa, explaining how Jones takes after her mother's, Marjorie Jones née Williams, musical side of the family rather than that of her disciplinarian father Reverend Robert Jones. According to the lyrics, Jones' mother reveals that her grandfather was a musician who traveled with Nat King Cole, womanizing and drinking from town to town. The song describes her family's lament that she isn't more of a Jones like her sister or brother Noel while she expresses her desire to be free. In the song's introduction, Jones adapts a line from the first stanza of Amazing Grace declaring, "You can't save a wretch like me". At the end of the track when Jones sings the first two lines of Amazing Grace, her mother Marjorie, a lyric soprano, can be heard singing the same hymn in church.

This is a great live version of the song:

Her last solo single so far, Love You to Life, showcases strong reggae influences and includes spoken verses (the only sung part of the track is the chorus). Its lyrics are based on a true story of one of Grace's lovers, who was in a coma for several weeks, only to come around in front of her. His first word was Grace's name. "When their eyes first open and you just magically happen to be there, there's a look in the eye that you'll never forget. Like a birth," said the singer.

Her comeback was confirmed in 2012 when she was asked to perform the classic Slave to the Rhythm for the Queen at the Diamond Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace. The performance returned her to the public eye – she's currently recording new songs – and stars including Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Lorde have cited her as an inspiration.

In October 2014, Jones was announced as having contributed a song, Original Beast, to the soundtrack of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1:

In 2017, Jones collaborated with British virtual band Gorillaz, appearing on the song Charger, from their fifth studio album, Humanz. Here it is:

Now in her late 60s and living in southwest London, Jones has another role to add to her CV: grandmother to Athena, the four-year-old daughter of Paolo, a musician, and his dancer wife Azella. "I'm a grandmother," she declared. "So grand." What the grandparents and parents make of Jones when she rocks up at Athena's school gates, one can only imagine. But it's doubtful she cares. "She has something inside that sucks you in," says designer Azzedine Alaïa, who Jones met in her Paris days and who, five decades later, remains a close friend. "She has so much energy."

Jones herself seems to concur: "It's much more exciting to be the villain and much more me," she says, "I think the male side is a bit stronger in me and I have to tone it down sometimes. I'm not like a normal woman, that's for sure."