#paul rees

She looks demonic standing here in her white slip dress and prom queen crown, blood running down her forehead, staring into the camera. Her expression switches by the frame from looking either like she’s mourning someone or about to knife them. She photographs like a model, which is to say the camera accentuates the big deep pools of her eyes and the epic pout of her lips.

During a break in the Q cover shoot in this West London photo studio, Lana Del Rey walks over to a computer screen that is projecting back each picture of her taken. The one on the screen now is an extreme close-up of her face: on it her mascara is streaked and her crown askew. She appears bruised and broken.

“That,” she says, pointing an extravagantly nailed finger at the screen, “that’s my life.”

Until she posted her self-made clip for a haunting torch song called Video Games onto YouTube last May, Lana Del Rey was almost entirely unknown. She’d recorded her first album, Lana Del Rey aka Lizzy Grant, in 2008 but it didn’t surface on iTunes until January 2010, and then only briefly.

The Video Games clip, with its found footage and sunburst images of her, made a sensation of Del Rey. At the time of writing, it has had more than 50 million views on YouTube. There are many homemade reinterpretations of the song on the site and it’s been covered by acts as diverse as Kasabian, Bombay Bicycle Club and Jamie Cullum.

Influential blogging sites such as Pitchfork were quick to embrace Del Rey, suggesting she “hit the sweet spot Cat Power has vacated” and positioning her as indie rock’s new queen apparent. But the tide turned. In September a blog was posted on Hipster RunOff entitled Lana Del Rey: Exposed. It huffed that Del Rey had been backed by major label Interscope all along. Soon doubts were cast about whether she’d really made the Video Games clip herself or even written the song. Since she came from a well-heeled family, bloggers asked why she’d spoken of living in a trailer park if not to burnish her own myth. Then there are the claims of her having had plastic surgery. In photos of her performing as Lizzy Grant, her lips seem not so fun, evidence enough for some that she’d since enhanced her appearance.

Such is the nature of modern fame: in a flash Lana Del Rey went from being hailed as a bolt of lightning to battling accusations she was an elaborate construct.

Notwithstanding that the arts of reinvention and myth-making are ingrained in the fabric of popular music (cf. Lady Gaga), one suspects Del Rey upset tastemakers simply because of the way she looks and the fact that she wasn’t Cat Power after all.

Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, President of Polydor Records in the UK, dismisses the notion that Del Rey is a puppet. He insists that he didn’t sign her until last September, having first mer her a year previously.

“Lana knows what she wants like few artists I’ve ever met,” he says. “She like to control every aspect of her career. Often we come across someone who is really good at writing songs or singing them, or has a great visual sense, but Lana is that rare thing – someone who can do it all.”

A week after the Q photo shoot, the end of November, and I’m having coffee with Lana Del Rey in her hotel bedroom. She is wearing a white crop top and jeans; her feet are bare there’s little evidence of make-up on her face, which is hypnotically beautiful.

She is bright, engaging and unfailingly sweet. While her mannerisms are prim like those of a ’20s high-society belle from the pages of an Edith Wharton novel, she has a laugh that escalates from girlish giggle to filthy cackle. This morning she cleaned her own room. It is spotless and clear of any kind of clutter of personal effect.

Lana Del Rey, née Elizabeth Grant, was born 25 years ago and grew up in Lake Placid, a village of less than 3000 inhabitants in rural New York State. Her father Rob is a real estate investor, her mother pat a former account executive at an advertising agency. She has two younger siblings, sister Caroline and brother Charlie. She had a typical small-town upbringing, singing in the church choir and attending the local high school, until she was 15, when she took off to boarding school in Connecticut.

Have you any notion of what made people respond to Video Games?

I know that i’s a beautiful song and I sing it really low, which might set it apart. I played it for a lot of people [in the industry] when I first wrote it and no one responded. It’s like a lot of things that have happened in my life during the last seven years, another personal milestone. It’s myself in song form.

You said at the photo shoot, the more intense it got, that it was like your life…

Because Simon [Emmett] kept taking pictures and saying, “Look like you’re not sure what’s happening”. My face would fall and he’d say, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for!” Well, it’s not that difficult…

What is your natural disposition?

Happy… and at peace with myself. It’s something I wanted for a long time when I was younger. I had a lot of inner conflict.

What is your most enduring memory of growing up?

It’s of going away on vacation to Florida and of lying in the ocean with my Dad. I don’t remember much from when I was younger… Lake Placid was really quiet. Were were in the middle of a national park, six hours from the city. It was tangibly far removed.

I lived very much in my own mind. I was confused about where we came from and why. I was a very cerebral child. My mom says I thought I was a grown-up when I was little – and that her friends were mine.

Isn’t “precocious” the word?

Well, I didn’t want to say it but that’s the word she uses. Very good!

Were you the prom queen?

No, I wasn’t. I went to one prom when I was a freshman, at 14, and then I never went to another.

Why not?

[Fifteen-second pause] I don’t know… [Two-second pause] No one ever asked me.

And then you went to boarding school…

I didn’t go willingly, uh-huh. My parents sent me. I was a bit wild when I was younger. I enjoyed living life after hours. It was a long time ago.

Lana Del Rey says she’s always hoped to sing but didn’t begin writing music until the moved to New York, aged 18. In Lake Placid, outside of seeing Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box video at a friend’s house (“I thought about Kurt Cobain all the time – just from watching him for three minutes”), she says she knew nothing of pop music.

In New York she studied metaphysics at college, began teaching herself guitar and discovered hip hop. The latter, she says, inspired her: “People talking about their real lives – it gave me the freedom to write about whatever I felt over whatever strange melody I wanted.”

The first song she wrote was called Pawn Shop Blues. A melancholy acoustic track, she sings it in that now instantly recognisable sad, deep pitch.

She first performed it at an open-mic night in Brooklyn and at a local talent show she entered. She didn’t win the competition but one of the judges was an A&R man for a small indie label. This led to a $10,000 recording advance and her collaborating with producer David Kahne, who’d recorded The Strokes and Paul McCartney. She spent her advance renting a trailer in a park in New Jersey. The record she made with Kahne was almost instantly deleted.

Metaphysics sounds complicated…

Not as much as it sounds. I felt comforted by finding other thinkers who wondered why we were here. The origins of the universe…

Have you arrived at any answers?

Mmm… They call philosophy the science of questions with no answers. I’ve found my own personal reason to be here, which is just to be of service to the people around me in any way I can.

How was coming to New York?

The way I always pictured it is exactly the way it is: the most beautiful thing I’ve seen. Since I got there it’s been split between music and service work, those are my two worlds. I like to go out and see what’s going on, but I don’t “go out” at night.

What kind of service work?

Part of it is homelessness outreach – helping people get their social security numbers back, so they can apply for jobs again. There are other divisions of it, like imparting knowledge I have about how to make things easier in your life. It’s something I do with a small group of people I’ve known since I was 18.

How did it first feel playing to an audience?

The same as now – scary. I was 18 and I took along my guitar to this place in Brooklyn on Bedford Avenue. I played the one song I’d written, got offstage and two boys followed me out of the club. They said, “You’re good, come and open our show.” Quickly I realised that I was going to have a nice simple career in Brooklyn. I could open for anyone I wanted to… and that’s what I did for a few years.

Those early songs are recognisably you – but they lack the darkness of Video Games or Blue Jeans.

Maybe I’ll send you my first record. My inspirations have remained the same, which ism life and… everything that’s beautiful, whether it be certain film scores or looking at the old architecture on Wall Street. This is just the next phase. Whether it’s got darker… I don’t know, not sure.

The trailer park part does bring a gothic feel to your story…

[Sighs] That wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. For the very reason that, on top of what I look like, I knew it would be what other people wanted to talk about. But a journalist found an interview with me that was done in the park in 2008.

When my first label gave me that $10,000 I didn’t have anywhere to live – it’s not something that I glamorise. For $500 a month I could actually have my own place. For me it was something nice that happened – you don’t plan on people later on talking about it as part of “The Story”.

The 16 November and Lana Del Rey is about to play the third show of her first UK tour at the Scala in London’s King’s Cross, which is packed tight to its 3000-capacity. Prior to this, Del Rey had not played live for well over two years.

When she walks on, in white trousers and looking nervous, she is greeted by whoops of encouragement. Her set runs just to eight songs, but the whoops return after each. In between she sings to hushed silence – her voice seeming to stop air in the room. At one point a woman next to me tells her friend: “I’m not gay but I’d sleep with her.”

There’s an obvious reaction from men to the way you look, but also comments online from women about how you make them question their sexuality…

Ha-ha! That’s not where I thought you were going with that, my dear! I haven’t seen that, no.

You’re aware of the general fascination with you, though: this sense of you being an enigma?

That has nothing to do with me. I’m not that mysterious and I’ve never said anything was a certain way when it wasn’t: everything I’ve said is true. I did write my songs and make my videos… I wasn’t going for an enigmatic presence.

According to Wikipedia your stage name references the Hollywood actress Lana Turner and the Ford Del Rey car…

Fucking Wikipedia! I don’t even know what movies Lana Turner has been in. “Lana” was just because it’s beautiful, “Del Rey” the same thing. It’s not like it’s a different person. I considered what I was doing an art project – I was making my own videos and setting them to classical music. I just had a name for the musical world I was building.

The Strokes have said they were lucky arriving at the time they did, because no one then could post footage of all the terrible bands they’d been in and fashion disasters they’d had…

That’s interesting. Well, you know, record labels don’t have money to spend meticulously on one person any more. The reason they signed me was because I already had a growing fanbase. I Was personally fully formed long before people knew me.

All the scrutiny about your face…

It is uncomfortable but it doesn’t have much to do with the life that I live. The only thing I can say i, the people and friends that I’m involved with in New York don’t know much about my singing and stuff. When I tell them what people write it doesn’t resonate with them.

Here are some other facts about Lana Del Rey. She doesn’t like flying. She says she never remembers her dreams. She smells nice but not perfumed. Off the cuff she sings a husky, coquettish version of Why Don’t You Do Right?, the torch song voiced by Kathleen Turner as cartoon femme fatale Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

There’s a nice visual line in Kind Of Out Luck: “Femme fatale, always on the run, diamonds on my wrist, whiskey on my tongue”…

Do you actually like that? I mean, I think other lines sum up who I am better. I’m not actually a femme fatale and I don’t drink any more.

Are you on the run with diamonds on your wrist?

Yes, that much I have going on.

You said you don’t drink any more. Assuming you once did – what sort of drunk were you?

Just drunk a lot. I haven’t drunk since I was 18.

Who first broke your heart?

There was someone in high school. He was very beautiful. Every time I saw him I’d go bright red.

Who’s great?

Elvis. Any period. The first thing I love is his face and then it’s is voice. Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain…

It didn’t end well for any of them…

It’s not the tragedy I’m drawn to – I genuinely like their music. I don’t like much, but that’s what I listen to at home because It makes me feel good.

A week prior to her Q cover shoot, Lana Del Rey sent me an email, with images of Sissy Spacek in Brain De Palma’s Carrie and stills from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides attached.

She wrote: “Having looked at the recent shoots I’ve done I think they look beautiful but they have a rather empty energy to them.” She went on to suggest the tone and mood of the pictures she wanted to have taken and how they could be more reflective of who she felt herself to be.

She will reveal more of herself on Born To Die, the album she releases this month. It was 16 months in the making and features input from several producers, including Kanye West collaborator Jeff Bhasker. She says she writes in two ways – “Walking around New York, singing words and melodies into my phone…” and with a producer “helping put my words to music.”

At the shoot while her two managers, PR and stylist look silently on, she is vocal about what she does and doesn’t like, dismissing an early set-up as “too Playboy”.

Over lunch she shows me the final cut of the video – tigers, sex, death and all – for the album’s irresistible title track on her laptop. She says making it meant a lot to her but she doesn’t know why that is.

One the live version of Born To Die you sing, “Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain…”

It got edited to “kiss you”…

“Fuck you hard” is better.

I’m singing it to my boyfriend and it’s not about fucking. It’s more about… When I found someone that made me feel really happy, that was so different to the way I’d felt before in my life.

Metaphysically speaking, what do you think happens when you die?

I’ve been told not to think about that because it worries me. I don’t do that good when I’m in fear – it’s hard for me to function.

Write your next chapter…

I like the record. The rest of it I’m not sure about. I’d like to go back to New York and continue the things I’ve been doing there, outside of music.

How do you want us to see you, Lana Del Rey?

I’ve a clearer idea of how I don’t want to be seen – as someone who does what everyone wants them to.