Don't stop believing

Paloma Faith has a huge tattoo of a dove on her back. It’s a gritty flourish that, the longer you consider it, actually goes with her vaudevillian persona. When I bring this up, the 24-year-old songstress-to-watch immediately volunteers an answer in her charming Cockney chirp. “I have three tattoos and they are all doves. I had the first one maybe six years ago? I can’t remember now.”

The winged creature is an appropriate choice since that’s what her name means. Born to a Spanish father and an English mother in the London borough of Hackney, Paloma Faith is idiosyncratic in the truest sense of the word. Her résumé would make any magpie froth at the mouth: ex-magician’s assistant, former lingerie saleswoman, sometime Central St. Martins art student. But it’s clearly her retro-soul sound — a smoky conflation of Dinah Washington, Erykah Badu and Duffy — that has everyone wondering who the hell this girl is.    

Musical Narrative

“Yeah, I’ve always listened to rhythm and blues. I didn’t take voice lessons as a child and I never thought I was good enough to sing professionally,” Paloma purrs on the phone. It wasn’t until she fronted a 1950s cover band called Paloma and the Penetrators a few years ago that people started suggesting she come up with her own material. And so she did.

Written in the UK, Sweden and America and recorded entirely in London, “Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful?” is her stunning debut album. Now two singles deep, it’s a musical narrative that’s inspired by literary references (“I admire writers like Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter and Milan Kundera. They all use a lot of metaphor”) and “the queens of tragedy: Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf and Judy Garland.”

Charts And Hearts

The lead-off single, Stone Cold Sober, cracked the UK Top 20 upon its release in June. New York, the stirring follow-up, confirms that Paloma Faith is set to hijack even more charts and hearts. An ode to a lover who ditches her for the Big Apple (“She had poisoned his sweet mind”), it’s a torch song that showboats sadness as if it were a pair of sex-kitten Louboutins. It’s easy to imagine this single making it to the Sex and the City sequel.

Paloma Faith is already known for the craziness of her live shows, perhaps a manifestation of her past as a performer with Carnesky’s Ghost Train, a touring company that combines magic, theater and performance art. “I think the reason why I started initially is because I’m bubbly and — yikes! — plain. I’m quite a character and I’m very hard to describe but I do consider myself a visual person.” Her onstage outfits and curtained backdrops telegraph her singular style, mixing giant origami birds, cabaret and Marie Antoinette. On one Channel [V] performance, she sported editorialized football-player shoulder pads; she looked like she had wings. Paloma Faith’s showstopping look has caught the eagle eyes of online gawkers, who have since dedicated a Fashion Spot thread to the fledgling icon.

And as if that isn’t enough, the twentysomething chanteuse also acts. Paloma Faith lends her old-time glamour to the new Terry Gilliam film, The Imagination of Dr. Parnassus, acting alongside the late, great Heath Ledger. “The film has got some incredible actors in it and obviously he was wonderful there.” As our conversation reaches its last bullet point, all I could think was yeah, Amy Winehouse better keep an eye out for this one.