by Marc Shapiro
‘Tennis Court’ would debut at No. 1 on the New Zealand Singles Charts and would become the second cog in the Lorde chart explosion to make June ‘The Month of Lorde’.
On June 10, the already well-entrenched ‘Royals’ cracked the US market on the Billboard Alternative Rock Radio Spins Chart. The song continued its monster status on Spotify, cracking the Top 100 List. Into July, Lorde’s music continued to make chart noise, debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 List.
With less than ten songs to her credit, Lorde’s immediate, worldwide success was evident. In a short period of time, her songs had charted on no less than fifteen foreign charts. Even the non-singles were getting play. It remained for only one country to bow down to Lorde.
Despite the instant success Lorde had in Europe, America was considered the final frontier for any budding pop star looking to break into the big time. And so Lorde had seemingly arrived early in July when the Australian and countless other outlets reported that the singe ‘Royals’ had sold 85,000 copies in the US a mere three weeks after its release.
With ‘Royals’ having done so well and ‘Tennis Court’ seemingly primed to be as successful, Lorde’s label and management felt it was time for the youngster to fly to the States and do a full-blown promotion blitz that, as the itinerary came together, would include television appearances, a handful of concerts and more interviews than she could shake a stick at.
Lorde was excited and a bit nervous at the tour, which would commence in August. With so much to do in the next few weeks, she pretty much decided to take it easy and be Ella for a bit before she would go back to playing pop star.
On one of those nights off, Ella was in Auckland, partying with some friends and having no particular plans for the rest of the weekend . . . When her phone suddenly buzzed. It was a frantic text from her manager. Maclachlan hastily explained that he had just received an equally frantic phone call from the promoter of the Splendour in the Grass music festival, an annual three day outdoor music festival which, that year, was being held at Yelgun near Byron Bay in New South Wales. Lorde was aware that the festival had been going on and would conclude in two days.
What she was about to find out was that one of her true musical idols, Frank Ocean, who was set to perform on the final day, had damaged his vocal chords and would be unable to perform. The promoters wanted to know if she would step in at the last minute to perform on that final day. With her friends screaming and hollering in the background, Lorde contemplated this out-of-nowhere request.
‘I got the text on Friday at about 11.30,’ she recalled in a feature in The Vine. ‘I read the text and then just sort of left it. I wasn’t thinking straight or something.’
Finally, after a round of phone calls and texts to Lorde’s parents, her bandmates and another call to Lorde, the singer finally got the picture. To jump in and replace one of her idols sounded too good to be true. There could be only one answer.
‘I said okay,’ she recalled to the Australian.
But the craziness was far from over. Jimmy, a very hung-over Ben and Lorde got together for a quick rehearsal the next day. The set list had already been worked to death in preparation for the trip to the States, so that was not a problem. And Jimmy and Ben had recently purchased some new equipment that they were anxious to try out. Everything seemed in place for this impromptu gig as they hopped on a plane in Auckland and headed for New South Wales.
On the flight, Lorde reflected on the last minute gig. It would be the perfect busman’s holiday. She was able to fine-tune her performing chops in front of 10,000 fans. That it would be her most high-profile performance to date and only her third live show as Lorde was not lost on her. By the time the plane landed and the group were in their hotel, the nerves were beginning to settle. Lorde was confident.
But she also had a sudden case of the jitters.
Lorde and the band arrived at the festival site three and a half hours before they were due to go on. First they were awed by the size of the place and the literally thousands of people who were packed close to the front of the stage. When they finally arrived backstage and Lorde saw the calibre of performers wandering around, her confidence turned to mush.
‘James Blake is wondering around backstage,’ she recounted in The Vine. ‘Alt J is in the dressing room next to me. And I was like, “Oh my God! What am I doing here?”’
Maclachlan could see that his charge was bordering on stage fright and, with a bit more than two hours before she was scheduled to perform, he suggested that Lorde wander about the festival grounds and just relax. Maclachlan explained to The Vine how quickly that plan backfired.
‘So we went out and took about thirty steps and then she looked at me. I was like “Are you okay?” And she said, “I think I’d better go back.” There were people recognising her, nudging, staring, double-taking, pointing. It was, like, “Woah! Let’s go back and chill out and then do the show.”’
Shortly after 5.30 p.m., Lorde hit the stage. She still appeared uneasy. But then the band started pumping out her trademark haunting rhythms. The singer felt the stage fright slowly melting away.
‘I don’t really know how to explain what was going on in my head,’ she said, recounting that moment to The Vine. ‘I’ve got this blank part of my memory because I don’t think I’ve ever been more terrified. I was like “This is it. I’ve got to do it. I can do it now.”’
The crowd began to chant her name. The vibe was definitely supportive. Tension was replaced by calmness.
Lorde was now in complete control.
She came across as poised and polished, roaming the stage in an oh-so subtle fashion, projecting an image of contemplative exploration and excitement amid moments in which she played to the audience with a young girl’s passion.
The only downside to this surprise performance was that Lorde had wanted to do a Frank Ocean song in tribute to the performer she replaced. Unfortunately, the call to perform was so last minute that she did not have time to rehearse a tune.
But that blemish was more than compensated for by the fact that, according to Maclachlan in The Vine, her third show as a performer had proved an important point. ‘I think what the Splendour performance did was confirm that Ella can do it live in front of a crowd of ten to fifteen thousand. That’s a big call.’
Lorde’s coming out live on a large scale also appealed to the fan in her as she was in a line-up that included a personal favourite, James Blake, and such hip acts as Of Monsters and Men and Gurrumul.
When she came off the stage, Lorde was smiling. It was a moment of triumph captured in time.
It would have been the perfect send off to her trip to the United States . . .
. . . IF IT WASN’T FOR THE PAIN.
‘I CAME DOWN WITH
A KIDNEY INFECTION JUST
AS I WAS ABOUT TO GET
ON THE PLANE,’ SHE TOLD
THE TELEGRAPH.
‘They took me to the hospital and put me on a drip and now I’m on heavy antibiotics.’
The kidney infection would clear itself up but the result of the antibiotics was that, for a number of days, Lorde would have trouble sitting upright. Consequently she was not in the greatest of spirits as she prepared to board the plane for America. Her physical discomfort was meshing uneasily with her erratic emotional state. She was not sure how well she would sleep on the transatlantic flight and so she brought along a bottle of Nyquil to help her doze during the flight.
Lorde had never flown on a plane in her life until the puddle jump to the festival. And so as she went up the gangway and into the plane, there was most likely a little bit of nerves, because America was many hours and 9000 miles away. But with her older sister Jerry along on the trip to chaperone, her bandmates and her manager, the nerves were most likely replaced by the excitement of this next and all-important phase of her career.
Spreading the gospel of Lorde in America.
This trip was set up as a preliminary first strike: an August 6 show at N
ew York’s hip Le Poisson Rouge and a quick cross-country hop to Los Angeles and a much anticipated show at the Echoplex. This would be a fairly heavy industry trip, a meet and greet with record company executives and industry heavyweights. Lots of press and lots of happy talk loomed on the horizon. If anybody Lorde’s age managed to get into the show that night in New York, it would be more by chance than design. In a sense, Lorde had a lot to prove with this first trip across the pond.
Yes ‘Royals’ and The Love Club EP had been selling like the proverbial hot cakes and Lorde had recently captured the honour of being the first female performer in seventeen years to top the Billboard Alternative Rock Charts. Lorde’s reaction to the news was typical of how a normal teenager would take things. Her initial reaction was to be ‘cool’ about it. But, as witness her reaction in Billboard, ‘cool’ quickly dissolved into glee. ‘It feels like a combination of my birthday, Christmas and washing my hair after a month of not doing so.’
But to the US, record sales and chart listings did not mean a lot at that point. Lorde was still largely a mystery. Her music was an original force of nature. But how would Lorde go down in a live setting? It remained to be seen.
An amusing aside to the trip was the alterations that had to be made to accommodate the age and legality of Lorde in a time honoured music lifestyle that was traditionally geared toward adults. One concession that she jokingly explained in an NPR interview was the exclusion of any alcoholic beverages in the singer’s backstage refreshment rider. ‘Another was the fact that the hotel staff would go into my room and clean out the mini bar before I got there.’
Lorde made the most of her short time in New York to do a bit of touring and take in the sights and, in a Huffington Post interview, related that it was definitely her kind of place.
‘New York is crazy. It’s pretty overwhelming and it’s so busy. But everything just seems to fit there.’
Lorde would recall in a conversation with Spin that there was a sense of déjà vu, experiencing a New York that she had long seen in movies and television shows... But she thrived on the fact that the city was so alien to anything she had experienced in New Zealand.
‘I had such a good time,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have time to do anything really amazing because I had to work. But I did a photo shoot on the top of the Empire State Building that was both tourism and promotion.’
And it was in New York that the singer discovered how well ‘Royals’ had travelled in advance of her first US appearance. Fans she did not know she had turned out to meet her at the airport and were camping out outside her hotel. For a relative unknown, it was like Biebermania
‘Which was weird,’ she chuckled at the memory in conversation with The Guardian. ‘People at the airport. You’re like, really cool.’
It was also a moment when Lorde found out that she had suddenly become the darling of the celebrity set. Selena Gomez and R. Kelly were among the A list celebrities who courted her with quick hellos and tweet congratulations on her good fortune. And in a gesture that left her totally amazed and amused, she received a not-too-veiled offer from the already nostalgic Backstreet Boys to collaborate with her on a song.
After only three shows together, Lorde and her bandmates were still getting to know each other personally and professionally. From the beginning, Jimmy and Ben’s ease in working behind somebody much younger than them who was basically calling all the shots was a plus. Their chemistry was further strengthened by the fact that they had the same musical tastes and sense of humour. That they were all up for eating often and, occasionally, exotically didn’t hurt either. Jimmy and Ben quickly became her older and highly protective brothers. They had been around music long enough to always be aware of what Ella was up to at all times, aided and abetted by her manager and sister.
Their pre-performance ritual came quite naturally as Lorde explained in a Rookie Magazine interview.
‘Usually I need a couple of minutes by myself,’ she declared. ‘I warm up and I stride around the room in different, weird ways. Then I do body warm-ups because there’s nothing worse than getting on stage and being all non-limber. Then we just listen to a couple of songs, me and my band, and I just sing and move around. I’m quite a hand-mover onstage, so I let that side of me come out pre-show.’
But there was something else Lorde had to contend with the night of her appearance at Le Poisson Rouge. Sitting backstage in her dressing room, surrounded by her family, band members, sister and manager, Lorde was feeling decidedly out of sorts. Part of it continued to be the effects of the antibiotics, part of it was jet lag that refused to catch up with the fact that she was more than 9,000 miles away from home. She was putting up a good front but it was easy to spot that the young singer was a little rough around the edges. But, much like she had pulled it together in the Splendour in the Grass festival, Lorde pulled it together when the house lights went down.
Lorde took the New York stage that first night amid an air of excitement and anticipation. There was the sense of high drama that only the singer could project. During the midpoint in her rendition of ‘Tennis Court’, her too cool, other worldly demeanor was suddenly punctuated by a smile and a dip of her head in acknowledgement of the audience. Perhaps sensing that she had strayed too far from her persona, she suddenly whipped her hair around and returned to a nonchalant if sometimes spooky-looking stance. Songs like ‘Royals’ and ‘Bravado’ resonated with lyrical and musical light and shadows.
At one point in the show, as chronicled by a Billboard review, she addressed the audience, saying, ‘I’m so humbled to be here.’ It was a symbolic moment to say the least. Figuratively Lorde had taken her first plane ride . . .
AND SHE HAD ARRIVED SAFELY.
Lorde winged her way across country to Los Angeles where she found a different kind of vibe. To her way of thinking, the tone of the city was different from New York and just a little bit weird. ‘There was this huge picture of giant breasts above my bed,’ she told The Huffington Post. ‘I got there and it was like, “Man! I have definitely arrived in LA.”’
And she took what little time she had to be the prototypical tourist as only somebody new to Hollywood could be. In a 97.1 AMP conversation, she gushed that she was ‘staying in the coolest hotel’ and that she had a constant giggle as she walked down Hollywood Boulevard and saw the more infamous ‘adults only’ establishments. One in particular, Looks of Love, would be pasted in her permanent mental memory book.
The hip music crowd in Los Angeles had been waiting with open arms. The Echoplex was a small standing-room-only club. Consequently the show easily sold out with ticket prices climbing to as much as US$120.
That was the upside to the trip to Los Angeles. But the down side remained the crippling stage fright that was her constant companion right up to the moment where she hit the stage. In a candid conversation with The Australian, Lorde explained the real horrors of touring.
‘Before I go onstage, I lock into this period of the most crippling fear. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on somebody I hated. It’s the worst half-hour of my life, every night. But then it gets replaced by something magic.’
And true to her prediction, the moment the lights went down, the fear melted away.
With a more youthful, less music industry audience, Lorde felt an immediate connection and was in complete control during a brief forty-five-minute set in which she trotted out just about everything on The Love Club EP, as well as some new material.
Lorde took the occasion of the Los Angeles stopover to announce that her first full album, entitled Pure Heroine, would have its official unveiling on September 27 and would contain ‘Royals’, ‘Tennis Court’ and eight brand new songs.
During her brief stay in Los Angeles, Lorde also experienced her first real life encounter with a rabid pack of paparazzi that snapped pictures of the young singer as she was standing outside a restaurant. In the aftermath of the encounter, she speculated that being stalked by paparazzi was part of the price
she would have to pay now that she was somebody famous.
Lorde also found time to make an almost prerequisite appearance on The Kevin and Bean Show on trend-setting radio station KROQ where she performed ‘Royals’ live in the studio and patiently, and with much good humour, answered the expected questions that were now on the verge of getting old, but were not quite there yet.
While in Los Angeles, Lorde began what would be regular appearances on the daytime and nighttime talk show circuit, singing ‘Royals’ on The Ellen Show. For Lorde this was pretty simple stuff. Ellen introduced Lorde. Lorde sang ‘Royals’ and then Ellen hugs Lorde and the show fades to commercial. Quick and dirty but it got the point across. Lorde was now a viable act in front of Middle America.
And what she was finding along the way was a line of questioning that, by this time, was evolving well beyond the ‘What’s your favourite colour’ teen magazine clichés. People seemed interested in her in a much more serious way. Of course there were the expected questions of how she got to be Lorde, which she typically answered with patience and no small sense of humour.
But the more serious music press was willing to ask her about the more serious aspects of her music. Feminism remained high on the list of media questions. So did the sorry state of pop music and the perceived notion of Lorde as the anti–Katy Perry and Justin Bieber who was out to singlehandedly save pop from itself.
‘For so long, pop music has been a super shameful thing,’ she told MTV with no small amount of candour. ‘But the way I see it, pop music doesn’t have to be stupid and alternative music doesn’t have to be boring. People have a brain and I think you can combine saying something clever with saying something in a highly accessible way.’
LORDE RETURNED HOME
ON THE WINGS OF TRIUMPH.
The day of her New York debut had also signalled an announcement that ‘Royals’ had become the most shared track by a new artist in 2013. She would also discover that the song she had once considered an afterthought had quickly crossed over into ‘classic’ status, which meant that it was suddenly one of the most covered songs on the planet with literally hundreds of takes on the song, by artists with varying degrees of notoriety, appearing in online and the occasional live version. Among the more well-known artists to take their turn at ‘Royals’ were Selena Gomez, Saints of Victory, The Weekend and Gap 5.
