When Grace Jones held a corporate show to ransom: “Well, give us all your jewellery and watches”
“You have to be a high-flying bitch sometimes,” Grace Jones once poignantly relayed, and honestly? There’s no better way to sum up the woman who sings to her own tune, who peers out at the world, raises her chin, and fiercely dares it to look her in the eye.
Ever since she entered the scene, Jones’ presence has felt like an explosion of sorts, the kind with fragments that fall meticulously into place and ruffle the feathers of the archaism that reside there. But these aren’t movements from someone whose only goal is to wreak havoc; these are all moments lost to the contexts from which they arrived, sitting somewhere between perfectionism and chaos.
Understandably, though, this sometimes came across as her being unreliable or unnecessarily defiant, but it just spoke to an artist who always wanted things to be a certain way, even if it made things feel infinitely more difficult for those around her, even herself. But it’s also something most of us can all get behind: if you’re an author, for example, things have to be written just right, and you can get so stuck in the weeds of figuring out the perfect way to execute a storyline or piece of dialogue that it ends up feeling like an uphill battle.
For Jones, this perfectionism has always been a blessing and a curse (“I’m a prisoner of vanity”) and something that often makes her appear standoffish or argumentative in interviews. Really, though, it’s just someone who knows who they are and doesn’t care much for disrespect or worse, bigotry. Much of this attitude comes across in her art, particularly Nightclubbing, which presented Jones at her most musically innovative, like a stranger lurking in the dark late at night, peering like a conniving figure, only to emerge adorned in leather, inhuman like a robotic force lacking sentience.
No compromises, no apologies
But these criteria for being a complete and utter baddie were always, once again, manifested from the soul of someone who knows exactly what she wants and isn’t afraid to do whatever is needed to get it. Unfortunately for the company LG, this was learnt the hard way when they booked Jones to play at one of their corporate events, only to find that she never ever performs unless she’s paid upfront first. Now, most artists have some leeway when it comes to scheduling, booking, and whatnot, but Jones—she has requirements and no room for requests.
Jones recalled this event in her aptly titled book, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, recalling how the LG team begged, promising her money the following week, but she remained steadfast. “I am not moving until I am paid,” she wrote, “I won’t even leave the hotel and go to the venue, because there is too much pressure once you arrive. We say, ‘Well, give us all your jewellery and watches, your Rolexes, as a deposit. We’ll keep them in the safe until I get paid’. They do not want to do that.”
In their desperation, they suggested something entirely absurd: “Finally, after a couple of hours with me not budging and everyone trying to come up with a solution, they call with an idea for a deposit for the weekend until they can get the cash on Monday,” she wrote.
Continuing: “They say, ‘We have an employee who has a baby she is prepared to offer as security. We have a baby! You can keep the baby until we bring you the money’. The baby is the most outrageous story of them all. I didn’t take the baby. They couldn’t get the money. I didn’t do the show.”
While the team at LG probably had some choice words, as most who have worked with people who don’t budge when push comes to shove will understand, Jones’ choice can only be commended, especially when looking at it from the perspective of her art being the one thing she maintains full control over. And if that’s threatened, it only pushes her further into stubbornness, a right she’s more than earned, considering the resistance she’s faced her entire life and career.
