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Paloma Faith can always be relied on to say it how it is, and the singer/songwriter's hard-hitting, honest and LOLs debut book MILF: Motherhood, Identity, Love and F*ckery charts her motherhood journey, love, dating, selfishness, messiness and all. To celebrate the Sunday Times bestseller becoming available in paperback, Paloma has added her thoughts on women and power. In this exclusive extract she shares her experiences in the male-dominated music industry and the moments she felt most in her power.
I have never desired to make men feel small, I have wanted to look across at a man and work together. My power should never be the source of someone’s disempowerment. I recall a meeting I had in the United States at a record label where I refused the male exec’s requests because I felt by adhering to them they would render me inauthentic. His response was to look towards my male manager and say, ‘Please control your artist.’ I was shocked by this and promptly left the meeting (hence I have never broken the US market). But it said a lot more about his insecurity and inability to accept female agency than it said about me. I explained my reasoning to him as being morally led, as opposed to his financially led expectations of me.
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If I were to think more deeply about when I’ve felt real power, I’d instead think of myself during a conflict I had with another music exec who was appalled about the fact that I had told the truth in an interview about my label’s mishandling of a release. The label had re-released a single of mine, adding an American rapper to it without consulting me first. When I heard the lyrics, I felt that he hadn’t understood the song he was rapping on, and I told a journalist my feelings about it in an interview. The exec was fuming. I was summoned to his office where he shouted at me and tried to exert his masculine power, to which I calmly replied, ‘I am not going to respond well to being spoken to like this, it reminds me of my father.’ He replied, ‘What would it take to make you do this properly? We could buy you a car.’ I was shocked. I don’t care about cars and I never have so I laughed and explained that this was a ridiculous and completely uninformed way to speak to me. In the end, they pulled the single campaign and the release.
I got what I wanted, I was in my power and at the time I remember feeling that it was shocking and difficult for him to understand my ability to be a woman and powerful. However, from that day forward I earned his respect long-term. It’s tangible, and the respect goes both ways. My defiance saved me, as it always does in the end.
MILF: Motherhood, Identity, Love and F***ery by Paloma Faith is out now in paperback. Catch her new podcast, ‘Mad, Sad & Bad,’ with episodes every Tuesday.
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