DATE OF INTERVIEW:

EMILIE AUTUMN

9th March 2010

(Emilie Autumn on the primary purpose of her show)

"Burlesque means a Victorian and turn of the century, and even earlier, entertainment; a show that was mainly using humour and sexuality to make a mockery of things that were going on socially and politically. That’s what burlesque means, and that’s what we’re actually doing."

Emilie Autumn onstage at the Leadmill, Sheffield, UK, 9th March 2010

Photograph copyright © 2010 Mark Holmes - www.metal-discovery.com

Interview and Photography by Mark Holmes

METAL DISCOVERY: You seem to excel in every artistic outlet that you’ve turned your hand to, but have you ever discovered any limits to your creativity where you’ve tried something that maybe you’ve not been so good at?

EMILIE AUTUMN: No! The reason why is that, if I try something, I will not…I’m a determined motherfucker and if I try something it will not be put down until I master it! That’s just the way it goes. So, I can confidently, arrogantly say I will never not succeed at something because I just won’t stop until I do. I refuse to fail or not be good at something. That’s not gonna happen.

PART 2

PART 2

MD: Okay, that’s a good answer.

EA: Thank you. It’s honest, anyway! [laughs]

MD: You use sexuality and humour in your shows to spread your message…

EA: Yeahhh!

MD: Is that supposed to also be…kind of how I read it…also satirical of Victorian culture?

EA: Yeah.

MD: Obviously in Victorian times sex was kind of taboo and death was talked about openly; now it’s the converse of that.

EA: That’s the thing…it’s like, or is it? You know, there’s a lot of things we can do; we can sexualise things - and this is a feministic view of things - but it’s like, yeah, you can use sex or you can sexualise these things, that’s okay, we can accept that, but not necessarily from a woman’s point of view selling it herself. I’m okay for a guy to be like “that’s hot”, there’s no problem with that but I’m even more okay with me taking control of my own sexuality if I’m gonna sell it. I mean, yeah, we use it onstage because it’s an awesome, powerful tool to use as an art form and to spread a message that you want to, and that is true that the things I think are most important…there’s the music in the show. The record, obviously, is all about the music. The show is not all about the music; I don’t want it to be all about the music; I want it to be about the show. That has several different elements and, for the entertainment value, you’ve got the visuals, the music, the action, the acting, all of that stuff but, I think as far as my insidious goals of changing the world in this way - which I’m gonna assume we all have even if we don’t admit it - is that the way to do that is not by preaching at people, it’s through entertaining, and it’s through humour and comedy more than anything. And then, any other tool you have like physical beauty, sexuality, all of that because…and it goes back also to what I do think of the show as, if I were going to label it, is a true burlesque in the real sense of it because it isn’t Bettie Page. That’s awesome but that’s not what burlesque means. Burlesque means a Victorian and turn of the century, and even earlier, entertainment; a show that was mainly using humour and sexuality to make a mockery of things that were going on socially and politically. That’s what burlesque means, and that’s what we’re actually doing. Not everybody in the audience may realise the depth to which that goes and that’s totally okay, they don’t need to, but some people are and that’s all that matters. Those people who want to be reached will be and will take away with them a sense of we’re creating a sanctuary, this place to go to be safe, this place that wants you to be as different as possible that takes everything that you’re supposed to apologise for and says you absolutely, under no circumstances, will apologise for this today. And then maybe you walk out and you take that with you. The show for us, and the music for me, and the book that I wrote, is exactly what that is about. It’s that I refuse to apologise; I will not be afraid of this anymore, and I’ll have my fucking insane asylum cell number tattooed on my arm, which I did, because I’m just gonna own it and not be ashamed of being crazy, of being called whatever, of being on whatever psychiatric drugs I’ll be on for the rest of my life. I will own it, and I’ll not only do that, I’ll make it into something beautiful, and something that can not only help me but hopefully, if I’m good enough at it, other people. And something that can also pay my rent. And that’s the ultimate revenge.

MD: That’s a very philanthropic outlook.

EA: We try!

MD: I’ve started reading the book, actually, since we last met and it’s really incredible on so many levels…it’s incredibly well written…

EA: Thank you so much.

MD: I’m only up to around page 100 as I get very little time to read these days! It’s very horrific reading what you had to endure on the psych ward and so forth, and I remember you saying before that the book represents a lifetime of waiting and wanting to be understood, but do you also hope the book serves to educate people as to the whole…it seems like a big paradox with the mental abuse people suffer on the psych wards?

EA: Exactly. That’s the whole thing of…one of the main messages is just let’s look at this closely enough to see who’s actually crazy here because ninety nine per cent of the time it’s not the people behind the bars. It’s not. And it’s not just me talking about me, it’s me seeing the other people in the modern day psych ward who, looking at them, saying - “wow, you were put here because you were inconvenient to somebody, or they didn’t wanna take care of you anymore, or it’s a cheaper retirement home, or for any number of other reasons, but it doesn’t mean you’re crazy”. In my case, as you know at least a little bit about me, obviously attempting suicide doesn’t mean you’re crazy; it means you really wanna get out of here, and there’s a lot of good solid, logical reasons that are stark raving sane why someone would do that. I believed in them completely at the time, and I believe in them now. I don’t think I did a wrong thing and I don’t even regret doing that. I still, in some cases, regret being found but, now that I am, I’ve made a decision to…I don’t know how long I’m gonna stay on this planet, but that’s not the point; while I’m gonna be here, I’m not gonna waste my time or anyone else’s. I’m gonna make something good out of this…whatever day it just hurts too much to breathe and I say “I would prefer to go somewhere else”, then I will, and I won’t feel bad about that either. But, yeah, it’s the whole being able to see…in order to do this, in order to be here and smile occasionally and all this stuff because things are pretty good right now. Like I’m not gonna lie and pretend to be all Gothic and miserable so that I can make a fashion statement or something, it’s not about that; it’s about taking these things and saying if I’m going to live with them, I’m going to make them into art, or try, and definitely make them into beauty. The thing in order to do any of that, you’ve first got to find what’s funny in the situation, and trying to find what’s funny in some of the most horrific situations a person could be in…that’s not funny, but you’ve gotta find something or you’re gonna die. One of my favourite jokes from the book - I don’t know if you’ve got to it yet - but when it’s the chapter where it’s my diary entry on what they feed us in there, in the modern day…well, not the Victorian alter-ego thing…because we eat some pretty crazy stuff in there too…[laughs]…but in the modern one in Los Angeles where they brought me…you know, I’m under suicide watch; I’ve no appetite whatever; they’re pumping me full of drugs that I don’t even know what they are and they’re just zoning me out completely; they’ve got a guard posted by my open door; I’m not allowed to even get out of my bed to walk around and go to the bathroom by myself…so they bring me dinner which I have to eat or else they’re gonna put a feeding tube down my throat. So it is a soggy paper plate full of cold, not well cooked spaghetti and a plastic spoon to eat it with. Why? Because you can’t have a fork or a knife because you’re gonna kill yourself. So, you get a plastic spoon.

MD: Dangerous weapons those plastic knives and forks!

EA: Definitely! I’ll comment about that in a minute because there’s a funny parallel. But, with that, the joke in the book, of which there are many, is have you ever been asked to eat spaghetti with a plastic spoon because, if you weren’t crazy before that, you will be afterwards. So that’s the thing of who’s crazy? The person who’s forced to eat that or the person who’s back saying “that’s what we’re gonna give that patient today”?…that’s fucking nuts; that’s crazy!

MD: That’s why the whole thing seems like one big paradox.

EA: Exactly, it’s this big fucking joke. It’s an absolute joke, and the real problem is simply that we talk about a lot of things which is good, in our society, which is we can talk about child abuse, and rape, and all that stuff to some degree, but there’s still so much we don’t talk about, largely because we don’t know. One of these things is…well, on the subject of mental illness, we’ve no fucking…I mean, calling someone bipolar is now almost equivalent to calling someone retarded.

MD: Exactly.

EA: It’s just like a blank, almost insult for someone who’s acting fucking crazy, which essentially is doing something stupid. Nobody knows what that actually means and, also, what nobody really knows is unless they’ve been locked up in one of these places, they don’t get what goes on in there. Why? Let’s think about it: because you have no voice and anything you say from the time you’re put away to basically the end of your life, even if you get out, any job you ever have, any relationship you ever have, you are completely discredited, because why? Because you’re a crazy girl and they’re a doctor with a million dollar education. So when the lawsuit happens because of whatever abuse is committed, who are you gonna believe? It’s not gonna be the crazy girl.

MD: I think one of the most disturbing things for me in reading the book is…when I was at university I read ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and obviously saw the movie, and I think the book was originally written in the sixties, but nothing seems to have moved on in terms of how they treat people. Some of that was disturbing to read then, but now it seems to still be quite archaic in their attitudes towards patients and how they treat them.

EA: I know, and there’s a reason why this whole parallel of this reality…I mean, there’s a reason why it’s like this Victorian reality, and Elizabethan reality, and all of that stuff because all the things that modern medicine, modern psychiatry, modern psychology, modern drugs, modern attitudes towards mental illness, modern psych wards - all of that has its basis in the late 1800s. That’s when the first lobotomies, that’s when photography, that’s when all of these things started to happen that created what we think we know about the brain, about people, about gender, about all of these things. I mean, yeah, we had medicine since the beginning of time but, as we know it, like the real popularisation of the psych ward, the lunatic asylum, was then because before that people were mostly cared for at home or in these hospitals and things where they were put away. But, this whole thing of let’s treat these people…let’s treat them; let’s treat a depressed girl who doesn’t wanna get married to some guy she doesn’t even know or like by removing her fucking uterus, because that’s not crazy, is it? And that’s the whole thing - who’s crazy and what has changed from then ‘til now? Because that was insanely common. That was an all the time, every fucking day occurrence. Let’s just take things out because removing that will just wipe the problem out immediately. Yeah, you have constant headaches, let’s drill a hole in your head. This is real. I didn’t have to make up anything. This is all historically, absolutely accurate. That’s why it’s terrifying. And the whole idea of the book, as you’ve probably figured out, is like you get the diary entries from here, and you get the diary entries from here, all of which are very real and they get closer and closer until, around the middle, you can’t…unless you read the date and where they came from, you can’t tell anymore whose is whose because they are exactly the same. That’s the point.

MD: It’s a real fucking good Gothic horror read as well.

EA: Thank you so much.

MD: I’ve always loved all the old Gothic literature from Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, to Ann Radcliffe, to Edgar Allan Poe, to even Dickens and Wilkie Collins…

EA: Yeah, that’s the thing of what Gothic actually means.

MD: Are you into Gothic literature at all?

EA: Oh yeah, totally, absolutely. To me, that’s real Gothic art. Gothic is not a black trench coat…which I love too but that’s not the point…and Gothic isn’t a style of music with people wailing; that’s not what it is, although that can all be very entertaining and Gothic dancers…very entertaining, which I actually love, I mean, this is awesome. I know I don’t really have to say it because you know what I mean by this…our Gothic fans are amazing…but what Gothic actually means, and they should know this more than anyone, there are actual fucking authors, and painters, and Goya, and all these things, and that’s Gothic.

MD: Definitely, the original conception of Gothic.

EA: And if you want to go back to farther than that then Goths are what? Goths are a tribe of fucking rapers and pillagers who came over and started slaughtering people, you know, over a thousand years ago. That’s what Goth is so, if you’re gonna own that title, know what it is you’re doing to where then when I’m like - “Is this Goth music? I’m a Goth. I’m the Goth queen!”…it’s like, really?! Because let’s think about what that really means. There are some really awesome things that Goth is. There’s fucking Gothic architecture. I wish I could be as badass as that! I’m gonna work on it, and then I should deserve to be titled that, but I’m not there yet.

MD: The whole subplot of the book, though, it’s brilliant and captures the whole Gothic vibe…

EA: Thank you so much. Aww, that makes me happy. Because even just on the level as a writer, I want that to be enjoyed by the people who just want to read a book; they don’t need to know anything about me.

MD: Ah, it’s incredible. All the interior monologues are very Poe-esque, I thought. Yeah, brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

EA: Yeah, so I think they shouldn’t even need to know if it’s true or not, it should just be a novel.

MD: Exactly.

EA: Thank you. You’ve made my day!