Lorde Your Heroine

by Marc Shapiro

  ‘I still remember her voice,’ Lorde recalled years later in a Rolling Stone interview. ‘And I remember looking up at her and being like “I’m in my own world. I know what I’m doing.”’

  That Ella could be so confrontational and defiant with somebody much older than herself had been the natural by-product of the youngster being encouraged to interact, not as a precocious child but as a very small equal, with older family members, neighbours and people she would be around on fleeting occasions. Ella was reportedly very convincing when around adults, contributing to conversations in a childlike but adamant and serious way. In such conversations, she would amaze adults in her ability to grasp the nuance, if not the big picture, of an exchange and, yes, contribute.

  It was not that the very young child was being deliberately channelled toward older company. She had her siblings and the neighbourhood children who she got on well with. But, in later years, she would acknowledge that she always found conversations with those who were older much more stimulating.

  Ella turned five in 2001 and commenced her formal education as a student in Vauxhall Primary School. This period coincided with her mother’s early steps on the road to becoming an award-winning poet and, not surprisingly, the combination of drive and creativity that had been instilled in Ella from an early age made the youngster the talk of the school. It was not uncommon in Vauxhall for a student to display higher academic instincts even at this early age.

  But there was something about the way that Ella approached even the more mundane assignments, a mixture of focus and studiousness, that appeared to her teachers to be above the norm. So much so that, by the end of her first year at Vauxhall, she was the topic of much conversation among the faculty. And all of it seemed to centre around the fact that the by now going on six little girl with the curly hair and the secretive smile and demeanour might just be something special.

  Years later, Lorde would laughingly dance around the question of how smart and confident she was during an interview on Skavlan. ‘I think I was always kind of faking confidence. Actually I was quite shy. Starting when I was young, I always had this way of plotting, figuring and understanding things. So I guess I was smart that way.’

  During a meeting with Sonja, one instructor went so far as to state that Ella was truly gifted and that she should be tested. Again that word ‘gifted’. For Sonja it continued to be a word she wanted her child to avoid. But finally she agreed to have Ella take a battery of tests to determine whether or not she was the very word she did not want her daughter to be associated with.

  The results of those tests were truly amazing.

  The tests indicated that, on many levels, Ella had the mental age of twenty-one. She had high artistic, creative, reading and writing skills and, at the ripe old age of six, she was very much a driven perfectionist. This pronouncement would be the cause of much conversation between Ella’s parents.

  Victor and Sonja were not so much surprised as dumbfounded. That Ella was showcasing both intellect and drive at such a young age was a true discovery for them. Having those traits could only be a positive. The big question remained as to how to cultivate them?

  Against their better judgement, Victor and Sonja enrolled Ella in the prestigious George Parkyn Center for Gifted Education. The school had an excellent reputation as an institution that could help youngsters with seemingly advanced IQs make the most of their talents.

  Ella reportedly had no problem adjusting to the new environment. But after only a few weeks, Sonja definitely did and immediately went to the school, picked up her daughter and drove away, reportedly telling Ella, as related in Faster/Louder, that ‘You’ve got to be in this world with everybody else.’

  Ella went back to Vauxhall Primary and continued to be at the top of her class academically. But Sonja, perhaps still suffering unease from the brush with gifted education, took it upon herself to add to Ella’s learning process in her own way. Sonja began to take her daughter out of formal classes on a regular basis to spend creatively nourishing afternoons in art galleries and bookstores and encouraged her to become active in extracurricular outlets as well as her formal subjects.

  These were special times for mother and daughter. They would spend time discussing the great artists and authors of the day. That Ella was getting special days off from formal education was part of the allure of being with her mum. That she was absorbing concepts, ideas and notions that interested her was the subtle guide to an intellectually rewarding life.

  ELLA TOOK THE HINT . . .

  . . . BUT NOT WITHOUT

  THE EXPECTED BUTTING

  OF HEADS BETWEEN MOTHER

  AND DAUGHTER.

  Sonja made no excuses for steering her young child toward poetry. And Ella had to admit that, as her mother’s growing recognition as a published poet of note played out, there was some inclination to like poetry as well. Sonja had a light touch when it came to her daughter cultivating similar literary tastes and wanted her daughter to love the poetic form as much as she did. Ella was quick to turn down her mother’s poetic advances.

  ‘Mum tried to get me into poetry,’ Ella recalled in a Daily Telegraph interview. ‘But I wasn’t into it. I did read a lot of short fiction.’

  But while Sonja lost that battle, she ultimately won the war to mould her young daughter’s creative mind. An early edict in the O’Connor household was that there were always books in the house. And as Ella related in The Daily Telegraph, the influence of television was ladled out in small doses.

  ‘For a long time, we had a television but no DVD player. Then Mum got a DVD player but only allowed us to watch the old stuff like Wonder Woman, The Partridge Family and Little House on the Prairie.’

  Sonja need not have worried about her daughter’s mind being corrupted by the tube. Because shortly after her dalliance with gifted school, she had returned to public primary school with a mind open to any and all opportunities.

  When a classmate of hers decided to join the local Devonport Drama Club, Ella went along and was instantly enamoured of the opportunity to exercise acting as well as singing talents she had not thought about before. In a conversation with The Daily Telegraph, Ella acknowledged the experience of performance as being magic and sacred. ‘I had to switch on a different side of myself and become a different me.’

  Drama Club tutor Geoff Allen would acknowledge in a Faster/Louder feature that he had a front row seat to just how much of an impact the several years in the club had helped Ella creatively and socially. He beamed as he recalled how Ella further learned how to interact with adults and the importance of poise both on stage and in everyday social situations.

  Ella proved down to earth on the school ground and made friends easily. But when alone, she would easily revert to a somewhat introverted intellectual, always with a book in her hand and, by the time she matriculated to Belmont Intermediate School at age ten, she was, in the best possible way, known around town as the smart girl who was reading grown-up books.

  And the names of the authors Ella was reading and, yes, understanding, were quite astonishing: Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Sylvia Plath, J.D. Salinger and others. And it was apparent that Ella was not just mentally lifting the heavy tomes for show. At the ripe old age of ten, she was not only reading adult classics but, more importantly, understanding their structure, character and nuance. To her parents and teachers, Ella’s reading habits were a source of many conversations. All of them positive.

  Years later, Lorde would be quoted in The Wall Street Journal paying homage to those and other authors and how they would ultimately influence her once she began to test the songwriting waters. ‘I began to read a lot of short fiction and I had such a reaction to it. The words were where they should be. I’d read Tobias Wolff stories out loud to figure out what he was doing to make things rise or crash the way they did.’

  But having tastes well beyond her years often made Ella the butt of teasing as she made her way through the last days of primary school a
nd into intermediate education. Ella recalled how her esoteric tastes made her the prime target for schoolmates less intellectually inclined in an interview with Rookie.

  ‘Throughout my intermediate school experience, everyone would tease me for wearing weird clothes, reading weird books and for liking things that other people didn’t like. That was hard for me but I developed the attitude of “I’m above these people”.’

  The same year, Ella matriculated to Belmont Intermediate School, slowly but surely she began, more as a hobby than anything else, writing short stories and developing her own voice. By her own estimation, much of her early literary attempts were either not very good or not memorable.

  Lorde chronicled her earliest literary steps in conversation with Billboard. ‘I was eleven or twelve when I was writing short stories. They were probably pretty awful. I wrote a lot of autobiographical stuff and I just wrote total fiction.’

  And, by way of comparison to what she currently does for a living, Lorde conceded in a New Zealand Listener that the idea of writing appealed to her sense of self and solitude. ‘Before I started to do this, I was really interested in writing short fiction. The reality is that you don’t really hear about the stars of short fiction. You’re faceless.’

  Lorde used those early efforts as a mind exercise. They reinforced the fact that she did, indeed, have a fertile imagination and that she could get her thoughts down on paper in a coherent and, hopefully, entertaining manner. But it was anything but serious business.

  ‘Before then I didn’t write songs or anything,’ she related to The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘It was definitely a hobby for me at that point because I had no idea what I wanted to do.’

  But her ‘writing as hobby’ approach did not stop her from persisting and, as reported by the local outlets The Devonport Flagstaff and The North Shore Times, putting her creative writing out in public for the first time.

  In 2007 Ella captured top honours in the North Shore Primary School Speech Competition. And a near miss that same year in the Belmont Intermediate School Kid Lit Quiz, which cost the team a trip to Oxford, England, for the finals, did not dampen Ella’s and her classmates’ spirit. ‘We’re really glad but we’re really annoyed that we couldn’t go to Oxford,’ Ella told The North Shore Times. ‘But we’ll be back next year.’

  The following year Ella and her team placed second in the world in the competition in South Africa. The trip was an eye opener for the young child. Coming from Devonport, travelling to South Africa, seeing its people and another part of the world, Ella absorbed the sights and sounds like a sponge and that trip lit the fuse on the young child’s desire to see more of the world.

  None of Ella’s early accomplishments came as a surprise to the faculty of Belmont Intermediate. From the day she entered the school they had fallen in line with the notion that she was something special.

  Ella’s former music teacher Jenny Bezuidenhout recalled in a New Zealand Herald article that ‘Ella was extremely talented and that the school gave her a safe environment for her to explore her talents.’ In the same story another former teacher, Jenny Armitage, said of Ella, ‘She was an exceptional child who always understood more than other children.’

  But while exceptional, Ella was still a normal pre-teenager. Classmate Madeline Christy, who would later play in a school rock band with Ella, told CNN International that ‘She was always getting in trouble for her uniform because she would always wear bracelets and necklaces.’

  Christy and Ella were pretty much inseparable during their pre-teen years. They would regularly get together to talk music, go shopping and, she laughingly recalled in an interview with 3 News, spend endless hours trying to figure out what to do with Ella’s mound of curly hair. ‘I remember one time I tried to straighten it and brush it for a disco we were going to and it took me two and a half hours trying to straighten it with her mum helping. It was so funny.’

  Christy was privy to her friend’s hopes and dreams and, when it came to what Ella would do with her life, she recalled that Ella would tell her that she wanted to be a lawyer.

  Current acting principal and former teacher Bryan Wynn added to Ella’s rebellious reputation when he acknowledged to CNN International that she would always bend the rules by wearing fashionable Doc Martin shoes. Wynn laughingly recalled that he would give her a ‘gentle reminder’ that her shoes were not school shoes and she would always respond with a smile.

  As she approached her teen years, many observers felt that the onset of interest in boys and all the normal coming of age challenges would dissuade Ella from her creative and academic pursuits. But if anything, the opposite was true.

  Books continued to be her constant companions and her mother would often boast that by the time Ella reached twelve years of age she had already read a thousand books. Adding to her already growing list of adult literary favourites were the likes of Wells Tower and Junot Diaz. In later years, Lorde would laughingly recall that she would read everything and that the quality of what she was reading was never the criterion.

  ‘I read everything. Good books and bad books. I have to admit that I did read a lot of shit.’

  But good or bad, books continued to be her go-to place when she contemplated, albeit cautiously, turning her attention to songwriting.

  ‘I’ve always been a huge reader,’ she told New Zealand Listener. ‘I was more into books than I was into music.’

  BUT FATE AND THE ONSET OF

  HER TWELFTH BIRTHDAY WOULD

  CONSPIRE TO CHANGE ALL THAT.

  ELLA WAS STILL IN THE

  WOODSHEDDING STAGE

  WHEN IT CAME TO HER

  MUSICAL ATTITUDES. LIKE

  NORMAL PRE-TEENS SHE HAD

  HER FAVOURITES AND WAS

  VERY ATTUNED TO THE POP

  FLAVOURS OF THE MOMENT.

  The group Blue was an early favourite. While she would eventually outgrow the pre-fab nature of the boy band, she told The Observer that she found much that was attractive in that kind of pop music and particularly Blue’s big hit ‘One Love’. She said of that song, ‘That song was a gem. I was always drawn to songs with that innate catchiness.’

  And Ella was nothing if not a true teen expert of the pop music that blared out of the family radio. Ella knew the songs by heart and could rattle off lyrics with ease. She knew where the bands came from, how they got together and, yes, what they had for breakfast. On that level she proved to be a fountain of musical knowledge.

  Musically she was also going through an awkward phase where she was listening to bands like Talking Heads, not because she liked the group but because somebody had told her it was a cool group. The irony was that, years later, when her interests had matured she would admit to going back and revisiting groups and finding they had a lot to offer.

  However her musical interests went much deeper than the songs that top 40 radio seemed hell-bent on playing over and over again. She was also drawn to the raw lyricism and emotion of the reigning stars of rap and hip-hop. But her secret pleasure remained the fringe stuff, alternative and progressive pop, the music that only the truly hip and, to her way of thinking, the truly intellectual, could appreciate and understand.

  Until she turned twelve, Ella had spent a lot of time alone in her room and in front of mirrors, developing a childish singing style that began with the mimicking of her favourites but was ultimately rounding into shape as something vocally tougher, original and, yes, contrary to the prevailing teen pop world.

  Ella’s interest in music was well known and she would quite naturally be drawn to friends who had similar interests. They would often sit around talking about the latest pop bands and songs. It was inevitable that at one point, Ella would join a band.

  One of Ella’s first public performances was as the singer for the rock band Extreme, made up of her schoolmates. Extreme never ventured out beyond school battle of the band’s contests at Belmont Intermediate School but, according to Stereogum, could always be counted on to
present an eclectic mix of covers that would include songs by Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow and The Cult.

  And even at that stage of musical development, Ella was thorough. When Extreme played the song ‘Man on the Silver Mountain’ at a show, she made sure her audience of other twelve-year-olds knew it was by Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio. When they played ‘Edie (Ciao Baby)’ those kids were educated as to everything Ella knew about The Cult.

  As grainy videos of Extreme’s performances would indicate, Ella, as lead singer of Extreme, had the early makings of a rock star. Her screaming rock vocals were serviceable, her enthusiasm as she roamed the stage and interacted with the audience was amusing but spot on. Extreme was often dismissed as cute during their short time together. But that Ella had some spark of potential could not be denied.

  While at Belmont, Ella had made the acquaintance of classmate Louis McDonald, an only fair guitar player but somebody who shared her budding desire to test their musical skills in front of an audience. The pair formed an informal alliance called Louis and Ella, and embarked on a brief career as a cover duo playing regularly in what passed for the Devonport music scene.

  The pair were regulars at cafes around town and were a big part of the entertainment when the town’s Vic Theatre put on shows and were guests on the top-rated Radio New Zealand show Afternoons with Jim Mora. By twelve-year-old standards, Louis and Ella were considered quite good. Louis was reasonably fit as a guitar player but it was Ella who was primarily responsible for their small-town notoriety.

  At that early age, Ella was already projecting a stage presence that was light years beyond her age. Granted, there was not much to her performing style. Basically she just sat and/or stood and sang. But, according to those who saw those very early performances, her singing style was surprisingly mature in an oh-so-controlled and soulful way. Her demeanour was, by contrast, very informal as if she had just popped in to sing and would soon be gone to the rest of her day.