In the flesh, most famous people are different from what you’d expect — smaller and duller, usually.
But Alison Mosshart presents like a facsimile of a rock star, in skinny jeans, stompy boots, leopard-print jacket, battered guitar case in tow and a tousle of blonde hair. ‘Sparkling water, please,’ I say primly to the bartender. ‘Margarita, please,’ she says. ‘No salt, not too sweet.’
Mosshart might not be the most famous half of The Kills — that accolade would go to Jamie Hince, thanks to his five-year marriage to Kate Moss (they divorced in 2016) — but she has always been the most mesmerising, owning the stage with a prowling, snarling ferocity, and a fearlessness she was probably born with. Now 40, she started her first band, Discount, in Vero Beach, Florida, at 13 and was touring the world at 14. In the early 2000s she formed The Kills with Hince (the date of their first gig, ‘14-2-02’, is tattooed on her left hand) and quickly gained a reputation as half of one of London’s most dynamic alt-rock bands. Almost a decade later, she added another string to her bow by forming The Dead Weather with Jack White, releasing Horehound, an album born out of a series of jam sessions in their native Nashville.
You might also be familiar with Mosshart from her brief moment as a tabloid fixture during Hince’s marriage with Moss. Mosshart and Hince’s chemistry on stage alone might hint at something more than friendship, but she’s adamant they’ve never been lovers. Besides, The Kills have been together for almost 20 years, a longevity that puts most marriages to shame. ‘I haven’t seen her in years,’ Mosshart says of Moss today, but stresses she’d still invite her and ‘all that old gang’ to parties at her place in Islington, where she stays whenever she is in London.
More recently, Mosshart has turned her hand to fashion design, with a 16-piece collection for R13, stocked at Browns, the New York-based brand that designs her (very expensive) black skinny jeans of choice. Inspired by her own clothes, it’s the perfect capsule wardrobe for the wannabe rock star. ‘I’ve been wearing R13 on stage forever,’ she says. ‘It was a natural collaboration. I’d like people to feel super-powerful in it, because that’s what clothes should do.’ Does she ever wear anything other than black skinnies? ‘I feel like I’m not dressed right unless I’m wearing my skinny jeans. I don’t know why. I feel like I’m more in my gym outfit when something’s baggy.’ Dresses are a total no-no. ‘I think the last time I wore one, I was three. I didn’t like them. I had the same sort of violent physical reaction to them as I did to chewing meat at 11.’
She has been vegan ever since, with the same uwavering conviction she seems to apply to everything, be it forming a band aged 13 or deciding that she was going to work with Hince. She heard him before she saw him; on tour in London with Discount in 1999, he was playing guitar in the flat upstairs from hers. ‘I’d never heard anyone play like him. I would be going to sleep at night, hearing it through the floor, thinking, “That must be the coolest person in the world up there.” And then we met. I was very shy. But we had this kind of understanding. He really encouraged me to write my own songs. It was life-changing. I knew right away that we were going to do music together. He was totally a soulmate. Even though I’d had hardly a conversation with him, I was so overwhelmed by that feeling. I was like, “How am I going to break this to him?”’
They started recording together (‘we didn’t really have a plan’), going dumpster diving for equipment. ‘We were so serious about it. We believed it so much that we made it true.’ They released their first album, Keep on Your Mean Side, in 2003, and are soon to start work on their sixth. ‘We’re both ready to roll, so I think it’s going to be fun.’
Whether in the studio or on the road, you get the feeling that The Kills have fun wherever they go. Mosshart’s stamina is legendary; all the more so for not being drug-fuelled. ‘I don’t really have anything to say about drugs. It’s just not my thing.’ Instead, she favours tequila, ‘because it keeps you awake’. She also likes to indulge in tequila Pilates. ‘I started teaching exercise classes at a party. It just gives me so much energy, it’s crazy. I need somewhere to put it.’ She works till 4am most nights. ‘I do like sleeping, but I’m very bad at going to bed. If you’re in my job, you’re in a different time zone every day, so you just have to go to sleep when it’s time to go to sleep — and you wake up when it’s time to wake up.’
The best party she’s ever been to was hosted by Nobu Kitamura, owner of cult Japanese label Hysteric Glamour, in Tokyo. ‘He does the greatest parties of all time. It was in this multilevel building that was huge. You walk in and there are art installations, millions of people there, and a swimming pool, but it doesn’t have any water in — it’s full to the top with stuffed animals. And then you go into this other room and it’s like a strange pub with strippers on tables and poles everywhere. Then you walk into this other room and it’s like Primal Scream are playing. You couldn’t make it up. It was paradise for Jamie and me. We were like, “We are never leaving.”’
And the best party she’s ever thrown? Her 33rd birthday, just after she’d bought a house in Nashville. ‘It looks identical to Graceland, so we called it Disgraceland. It was really nuts. I built a huge shooting range in the backyard, because we were in Tennessee and you can do whatever you want. My brother is a chef and he made this cake that was the size of a card table. We lit the whole thing on fire; it was called the pyrocake. We had everyone shooting BB guns and setting things on fire and there was a whole room full of black balloons. Everything was kind of weird.’
I wonder whether someone as fiercely unapologetic as Mosshart, who has both survived and thrived as one of the leading women of rock’n’roll, has ever been pressured into doing anything she doesn’t want to. ‘I’ve never been pressured to dress a certain way by anyone in the music industry,’ she says. ‘People in the fashion industry try to get me in all sorts of things and I’m like, “F*** you.”
‘I’m not a model, never wanted to be, but when I was younger, magazines were like, “You have to wear this.” No, I don’t. I’m here representing my band, which is me representing myself. You just have to fight for yourself. But it’s a weird fight to have. It [the pressure on women to look or dress a certain way] should be changing in every industry. Everybody should get with the programme.’
Staying true to yourself, as Mosshart has, is only possible if you have the confidence to be assertive. So how do we teach women to be more assertive? ‘I don’t know. It’s a good thing to learn how to do, but people have to take you seriously. Practice makes perfect. You know your whole life, you’re going to be fighting for something. There’s always a fight. You’re always going to come across somebody who on a deep cellular level just cannot see you in the same way that they see the men in the same position.’
After three years on tour, she is keen to get into the studio again. ‘You never mean it to be that long, but when you keep getting offered shows, it’s hard to say no,’ she smiles. ‘If it sounds exciting, you do it, even if you’re absolutely worn thin. You literally have to be too ill to live or you just put your foot down and say, “Don’t tell me about anything good that comes in. Don’t tell me.”’
She drains the last of her Margarita. ‘But this is our job, this is what we do and we love it.’ Truly, she makes it seem like the best job in the world.
