Nicky Love

THE HISTORY
People have been underestimating Nicky Love her entire life – limiting her, dismissing her, stereotyping her: pretty woman, chick singer, party girl. She knows the labels and she knows how they obscure the person behind them. She knows how they prevent people from understanding the very real struggles she’s gone through, the depression she’s fought but which she feared would completely envelop her. Nicky has had enough. As she sings in “Box,” from her debut album, Honeyvision: “If you put me in a box, you might lose your Goldilocks.”
As Honeyvision makes clear, Nicky Love is nobody’s Goldilocks; on the contrary, she’s a strong, resourceful woman who’s emerged triumphantly from a particularly dark period in her life. The album is her statement of purpose. “It’s about trying to be yourself after years of pretending to be someone else,” she says. “I was lost for quite a few years, in one way or another. And the album is about coming out of it. There are songs from the deepest depths of hell on there, but I’ve tried to mix in some lighter things, too. I don’t want you to want to slash your wrists at the end of it because I don’t want to slash my wrists.”
Certainly Honeyvision (released April 24, 2001, on DreamWorks Records) has its moments of anger and pain, whether it’s the brutally frank “Judas,” the on-the-brink dispatch “Choke” or the attention-demanding “Hush”: “Ten more minutes ’til my head blows.” But Nicky has survived her tough times, so the record is, in fact, a richly varied tapestry. Songs range from the seductive pop of “Slow Motion” to the atmospherics of “Daylight Tripping.” Nicky reveals: “This album was a way of saying, ‘Look, this is me; this is who I’ve been all this time.’ It took me a long time to have enough confidence to pursue my dream, which was to make an album that was truly me and that I was truly proud of.”
Nicole Love – yes, that’s her real name – was born and raised in Australia, mostly in the suburbs of Sydney, though her family moved so often that she changed schools frequently. From the time she was a child, she loved to dance and perform, but her performances were strictly for herself, at home in front of the mirror. “I wasn’t one of those kids who stands on tables and performs for everyone,” she says. “I was way, way too shy for any of that.”
Nicky left school early. She longed to pursue her nascent interest in acting but wasn’t quite old enough to gain admittance to acting school. Instead, she tried hairdressing, got into modeling for a while and appeared on television commercials and music video programs.
She gradually began to overcome her shyness and acknowledge her desire to be onstage. She got her chance as a member of The Freaked-Out Flower Children, who enjoyed local success in Australia before falling apart. In the aftermath of the dissolution, Nicky realized it was no longer enough to just go onstage and sing; she wanted to do something serious, to write and make her own music.
Her opportunities to do that in Australia were few as her professional associates still wanted her to play the role of the pretty, malleable backup singer. While visiting a friend in England, Nicky made a decision. She went back to Australia just long enough to put some of her belongings in storage and sell the rest. She then got on the next plane back to London. “It was like starting from scratch,” she confides. “And that’s when this whole hideous soul-searching thing began.”
The searching lasted for years. Nicky knew she didn’t want to sing cheesy pop songs or be “a bit of fluff in a short skirt,” but British record execs took one look at her and decided that’s exactly what she was. Needing to make a living, she played along. “I’d try to do it, singing in my little girlie voice, but it never worked out,” she says. “Every time it would be crap.”
So she put her pop dreams on hold, took 18 months off and traveled the world with friends, “partying and living an outrageous kind of lifestyle.” These high times did not, however, prevent her from seeing that her ambitions remained unfulfilled. It wasn’t long before her out-all-night existence began to feel empty. Meanwhile, her father, grandfather and grandmother all died within months of each other, the man she loved “went mad” and one of her best friends committed suicide. “At that point, I knew I had to stop the way I was living,” she relates. “Because my friend and I were very similar, and when he died I could see how it might happen to me.”
The resulting change of milieu created a period of decompression: “First you have to feel like shit for a while as all the impurities come out of your system,” Nicky explains. “That’s when your friends realize you’re not the life of the party anymore. Once you let go of that, the real you starts to come out.” As she regrouped, she returned to her music career, refusing this time to be the pop princess. She worked as a waitress, worked at casinos, worked the door at clubs – “anything,” she says, “to fund my singing lessons and pay for tape.”
She slowly came to understand what she needed to accomplish: “I finally started to accept who I was. I realized how badly I wanted to get something across.” She began writing songs with a friend, guitarist Emile Lobo. She found to her surprise that the crucible of the previous few years contributed to her progress. “The difficulties of having no money and being in a foreign country with no family and few friends – all that stuff made me a better writer,” she posits.
One of the songs she and Lobo recorded in demo form was “High,” which had made its way to tape with some of their other compositions. Around this time, Nicky heard through a mutual friend that DreamWorks Records’ Robbie Robertson (the renowned artist maintains a variety of creative and executive duties at the label) was in town to scout talent. She managed to get a meeting with him, about which she recalls: “I played my really raw demos and sat there explaining my vision to him. I was used to everyone not getting what I was trying to do. It was refreshing – and a little amazing – to find somebody who totally understood what I wanted to achieve, something unique, my own little niche.”
Robertson (who served as executive producer of Honeyvision) signed Nicky to DreamWorks and teamed her with producer Marius de Vries, whose credits include Björk, P.J. Harvey, Annie Lennox, Massive Attack and Madonna. De Vries produced most of the album’s songs at his home studio in Cambridge, England; producer Tim Gordine (a member of the band Tinstar) oversaw his contributions in London, and former Scritti Politti member David Gamson produced his in Los Angeles. (Gamson’s are the only songs Nicky did not co-write.) That she was surrounded by top-flight talent was not lost on her. Nicky suffered an anxiety attack early in the recording sessions, just before she laid down vocals for “Choke.”
“I was sitting on the floor, and I looked up and saw all these people waiting for me,” she recalls. “The room just started to spin. It suddenly dawned on me that from now on, every time I get onstage, it’s going to be up to me alone. No matter how many people are around saying, ‘Okay, we’re ready,’ at the end of the day it’s on my shoulders.”
Nicky concedes this was a “be careful of what you wish for” moment. “I’ve been in nightmare situations with record companies where they wanted me to do something just awful,” she says. “I remember saying, ‘You fucking wait! One of these days I’m going to do an album, I’m going to write all my own songs and I’m going to be taken seriously. I’m not going to compromise and I’m going to be fucking successful!’ And now it’s, ‘Oops – looks like I got my chance!’”
Elaborating on this theme, she ventures: “First, people are going to get to know what goes on in my head, which is a frightening thought. The other thing is that now I’ve got to live up to my big talk.” Still, for all her concerns about the challenges that lay ahead, Nicky has plainly – and finally – reached the place she illuminates on Honeyvision’s “Daylight Tripping,” where she sings, “I’m exposed, but I’m not afraid.”