A complex childhood and a difficult first marriage were mere stumbling blocks on the road to success for the singer-songwriter and global superstar. She talks to Frances Hedges about overcoming adversity, embracing her diva reputation and why she’s proud to be producing music that comes from the heart
an we get those curtains closed?” asks Mariah Carey, gesturing towards the window in the Corinthia’s penthouse suite, which, on the evening when we meet in the midst of a London heatwave, is awash with glorious sunlight. It is well known that Carey, a night owl, is most comfortable under the cover of darkness, so I hastily oblige before we settle down for our chat. Who am I to argue with a music icon?
And a bona fide icon she still is. Last night, I watched her stride onto the stage at Wembley Stadium for the Capital Summertime Ball, where she performed classics including We Belong Together and Heartbreaker with a pitch-perfect vocal that had lost none of its power over the decades. As the 80,000-strong audience – many of them pre-teen girls – belted out the lyrics to Hero, swaying from side to side with lit-up mobile phones aloft, it felt to me as if no time had passed since the era when Friday nights were for watching Top of the Pops and Sunday afternoons were for tuning into the radio chart show. “It’s funny – someone just showed me a clip of me doing that song back in the early Nineties, and there was a little girl in the audience I hugged,” Carey tells me now. “And then last night, I gave a stuffed toy to another child who was watching. It’s amazing, really, to think of these two girls from different times, both about five years old and both hearing my music.”
Read the rest of this entry »