Mica Paris: ‘Let’s not talk about oppression. White people gave me so many breaks’
“You don’t have to be religious for gospel music to lift you out of your pain,” says Mica Paris. “Although I was raised in the church, I’m not religious anymore myself. But when I sing Amazing Grace or Oh Happy Day? Honey, I’m gone. My worries, my ego are gone. The make-up starts running, the lashes come off because I start burning up with the power of it all… ”
At 54, the singer best known for 1980s pop-soul hits including My One Temptation has finally honoured a promise she made as a child. Struggling to fold her 5ft10 inch frame into a rather dinky chair at a posh London hotel she explains that her Jamaican grandparents were both ministers who “worried about me singing ‘devil music’. I said I’d do a gospel record one day. I didn’t feel moved to do that until lockdown, when I realised we all needed our spirits raised.”
Now she’s recorded a glorious live version of that album – Gospel (2020) – as a Christmas special for Sky TV. It enables fans to watch the music transform an earthy South London single mum into a beacon of hope, love and humility. She mixes Christian classics with secular hymns”. I tell her I cried all the way through her slow-burning version of Labi Siffre’s 1987 anti-apartheid anthem Something Inside So Strong and she rocks forward in her chair and hugs my knees. “Oh girl, that song! I don’t know how I sing it without bawling too. We all need that kind of strength and courage right now, don’t we?”
Paris’s matey demeanour – and the fact I listened to her Radio 2 show for two decades – make me feel like she’s a friend. I have to remind myself that, back in the late 1980s, she was a platinum-selling superstar, recording with Prince and hanging out with America’s A-list pop stars.
Born in London as Michelle Antoinette Wallen in 1969, Paris was raised by her maternal grandparents. “They were strict,” she laughs. “As a minister’s granddaughter, I was meant to Be The Light For Everybody to See.” Meaning? “It was my job, as a child, to look and act perfectly. It meant clean white socks, sit up straight, don’t complain.”
Forbidden from playing outside in the street, little Michelle sat before the turntable in the living room where she wasn’t allowed to touch anything and listened to every album by the Hawkins Singers. “I knew every detail from the album sleeves,” she tells me. “I could have told you who was on tambourine and who was on triangle. Lynette Hawkins, I learned to sing from her and by the age of 9 I had every lick of it down.”
By her mid-teens, she was recording with the Spirit of Watts gospel choir but pop was pulling her in a different direction. She wanted to be more like her mother – a woman so glamorous people mistook her for Diana Ross and more secular father – who visited on weekends “in his flashy E-type Jag, I won’t tell you how he got that!” – played her jazz, took her to galleries and Chinese restaurants. “He was incredibly cultured and has had three books published,” she says. “There weren’t many black men in south London who shared his interests at that time.”
At 17 Paris became a backing singer with UK band Hollywood Beyond. “My grandparents were horrified,” she says. She assumes a strong Jamaican accent and wags her finger at me as she summarises their views: “Meee-chelle! You kwaaaaan go in dee music business or you gon end up a drug addick or a prostitute!”
She changed her name from Michelle to Mica because of school bullies who compared her to the character of Michelle Fowler in EastEnders. “Mica sounded more exotic,” she says. “Like Sade, it was a name you could imagine on a posh perfume bottle. I added Paris after I went to Carnaby Street to spend my first paycheck on some diamanté brooches and found one that said ‘Paris’. ‘Mica Paris’ sounded luxurious… I’m a working-class girl and I still strive for luxury.”
In the event, she owes her solo career more to the church. “I was signed by Island after Whitney Houston and Anita Baker blew up. They’d come from gospel and people in the industry were looking for that kind of voice, that sound.” She recalls her initial meeting with “the suits”. “I was the only black person in the room. The only woman. But I was precocious, bold. I get that way when I’m nervous. So I told them which songs I wanted to do and they were supportive.”
Stretching her long legs, she tells me that when the Black Lives Matter movement got moving a few years ago “Journalists suddenly started calling up, asking for my experiences of racism in the music industry.” She shakes her head, firmly. “In all the years, nobody had asked these questions. And I thought: why would I do this, when so many white people in my career have given me so many amazing opportunities? I don’t think you get over oppression if you keep talking about your oppressor. Let it go. Head up. Walk on.”
But she admits the sudden rush of massive fame that hit when she was just 18 “scared the bejeezus out of me. Fame is not a natural state. It definitely gives you some psychosis and American fans were crazy. They were mobbing me in the street and stealing my clothes. I was so stressed I came out in hives all over my hands which we had to cover with make-up when I went on shows like Letterman.”
She moved to New York but life in her glamorous flat overlooking the Hudson “just didn’t seem real.” Margaux Hemingway – the model who killed herself – lived upstairs and she would see Irene Cara in the street. “I was just pretending to be a grown-up and I had to fly my mum out to live with me, to ground myself.”
In fact, she says: “It was the big American stars who became my mentors, Chaka Khan was lovely. Natalie Cole was amazing – she told me which people to avoid. She told me to stay away from drugs. Although I was never in danger of getting into that – I don’t like mess. I like to know where I am. I’m punctual. My grandmother always told me: No matter what happens, make sure you find your own bed at the end of the night. Good advice.”
Whitney Houston became a friend. “I first met her in Germany… She was so good-looking she genuinely floored you.” Paris sighs. “Forget the pictures, in real life she was even more gorgeous because of this aura, this spirit around her.”
Houston invited Paris to dinner and shocked her “by starting to play footsie under the table. I think she liked me a little bit… y’know?” she laughs. “Bless her. But at that time I was,” – she pulls a horrified face – “just out of the church. I was like: we don’t do that girl-on-girl thing in my church. My stylist was cracking up because he couldn’t believe how scared and awkward I was about it all!”
Later Paris met Houston’s first girlfriend, Robyn Crawford, who struck her as “a really fabulous person. I really believe that if Whitney had stayed with Robyn and not married Bobby Brown then she would still be here today. But the world wasn’t ready for her to come out and Whitney was very, very good at pretending she was OK. That’s maybe a church culture thing we had in common.”
Prince invited Paris to sing on stage with him as soon as her first album was released and later wrote a song – If I Love U 2Nite – for her second album Contribution. Although Paris is aware of the “awful, shocking” encounter Sinead O’Connor had with Prince around this time, she says he was nothing but kind and supportive to her. “I felt he really loved women. He was a real feminist – ahead of his time – in supporting female drummers, saxophonists, guitarists at a time when nobody else was giving them space on stage. He encouraged me to produce If I Love U 2 Nite when I was used to having to fight male musicians to accept my arrangements in the studio.”
She says Prince would often call her up when he came to London. “Often he’d call at 4am and just say “I’m at the Cafe de Paris.” And I’d go down there and we’d sit and listen to music when the place was empty. He didn’t speak much.” She last saw him after one of his London shows six months before his death. “He looked so thin. I knew he wasn’t himself. I asked his manager if he was OK. She said he’s just a bit tired. But he was obviously not well…”
Paris credits moving home from America aged 20 and raising her two daughters (mostly alone) with “keeping me sane”. She tells me that “some people in the industry still tell me I could have been more successful if I’d stayed in the US. But that depends on your idea of success. Is it selling loads of records, or raising two beautiful children in a happy, stable home?”
Although she felt briefly “saved” from celebrity when she married and gave birth to a daughter – Monet, now 32 and a practising psychotherapist – she has said her fame proved too much for such a young couple and they split after two years. Fifteen years later she had a second daughter – Russia – with a German filmmaker but that relationship was also short-lived.
Since then she tells me she’s been on a long journey of “self-discovery and self-acceptance”. When Russia was two she began presenting What Not To Wear and talking to so many women who’d lost sight of their self-worth helped her to see “I had been just as guilty of waiting for the love to come to me. Waiting for some guy, some award, some external validation. I realised it had to come from inside, that the only person who needs to approve of me is me. Now I run and power walk on a treadmill for 40 minutes 4 times a week. I do pilates and I steam three times a week. I take my vitamins. Nobody can believe I’m 54 and it’s because I take care of myself. Women are conditioned to give give give and we need to take a little back. That’s why I have my grandchildren (aged one and four) at my house once a week so that Monet and her husband have a weekly date night.”
Paris’ stresses that her new empowered philosophy has enabled her to be honest about her failures too. “I tell my kids when I mess up. Russia’s 18 now – she’s started modelling while working hard on her A Levels – so she understands. I tell her: Baby, I will make mistakes, but I will always have your back.”
One of those mistakes, Paris howls to admit, was her decision to appear on Strictly in 2008.
“I hated that! I couldn’t stand all that training. All those steps! I come from the 80s, babe. We had wind machines and other people dancing for us.”
Although Paris enjoys her forays into TV (including a recent stint on EastEnders) and theatre (she’s done Fame, Chicago and The Vagina Monologues) she tells me she’s “always a singer first. A musician’s singer. I think you can hear the struggles, the sadness I’ve been through in my voice now and I think that helps people to connect.” She gives me one last, big hearty hug as I leave. “I don’t care who is listening or what they believe in. I just want to give people strength. Like Sylvester Stallone says in Rocky: It’s not about how many hits you can take. It’s how many times you can get up.”
Mica Paris: a Gospel Christmas is on Sky Arts and NOW on Saturday December 23 at 8pm
