UK Interview: Kelly Rowland Talks About Her Career & Independence From Beyonce Knowles & Her Family.
—Kelly Rowland was one third of Destiny’s Child until the world’s top girl group drifted apart. SHE’s relaxed about her solo career – as long as nobody mentions the b word
Interview: Kelly Rowland – Singer and actress
It’s the hottest day of the year so far in London. I’m waiting for Kelly Rowland in a hotel suite in Mayfair so big and bling and boiling it would make Lady Gaga wilt like a wallflower. The temperature is hotter than a Beyoncé photoshoot in the seventh ring of hell, with the pink and black soft furnishings to match. The air conditioning has been turned off. Windows have been closed. Curtains drawn to shut out the sun. “Can we turn up the AC?” someone asks faintly. “No,” replies Kelly Rowland’s PR. “Kelly likes the room to be warm.”
So Rowland is a hot-blooded diva. At least I hope so. What more could you expect from one third of the world’s most bootylicious girl group Destiny’s Child, the trio who made hands-in-the-air independent women of us all, at least for a few minutes?
Rowland later tells me she is now a “grown ass woman” in her own right (everything comes down to butts with this lot). Sure enough, when she shows up – only 15 minutes late – she looks every inch the part, towering above me. Rowland sweeps into the suite on a cloud of lip gloss and giant spray-scented hair. Feeling like a child, I reach up to shake her hand, bedecked in rings the size of golfballs. She flashes me a Miami-white smile. Then she shivers: “Is there a blanket in here?”
Rowland is brought a kingsize duvet, which she snuggles under, hiding her glamorous get-up: nose-bleed heels, skinny white jeans, slashed slate-grey top. I tell her she may as well be wearing pyjamas. She laughs. “I’m sorry,” she purrs. “You must be like what the heck kind of interview is this? Just pretend you can’t see the blanket, OK?”
She can’t seriously be cold. “I’m anaemic,” she drawls. “I feel the cold hard. I have to wear layers and layers of clothing during wintertime.” Performing must be a nightmare. Think of all the times she must have caught cold belting out Survivor in sequins into a wind machine back in the day. She shrugs. “Yeah, I get sick easily so I have to make sure I’m damn straight.”
Rowland is no prima donna, despite having lately been in the papers for changing outfits five times in a night at a New York gala. She’s confident rather than arrogant, has a warm and quirky sense of humour, and proper Deep Southern politeness. She apologises for the heat (“I’m melting my visitors!”), for interrupting me, which she only does once, and thanks me for taking time to talk to her. There is only one flinty moment. Halfway through our interview, having spoken at length about her new single, Commander, and forthcoming album, I ask Rowland about her friendship with Beyoncé Knowles, whom she met when she moved from Atlanta to Houston, Texas at the age of eight.
“When I met B her father was working with Xerox and her mother had a hair salon,” she says, going through the motions a little wearily. “Mathew wasn’t the manager yet. They were just the supportive parents. We were all just loving singing together.” I start to ask another question about her first impressions of Beyoncé but she cuts me short. “This isn’t going to turn into her interview, is it?” She says it without malice but the message is clear. Rowland has moved on. Or, as she puts it, “now I’m not in a team. The only person I can see is me.”
Destiny’s Child, made up of original members Rowland and Knowles and Michelle Williams, who joined in 1999, released their last album in 2004 and broke up a year later. At that point they were the world’s biggest girl group, successors to the Supremes, had sold more than 50 million records and had given female empowerment a bootie-shaking twist. But then they walked away. The usual rumours abounded. Beyoncé’s desire to go solo influenced the breakup. There was infighting. Rowland tended to be painted as the Mary Wilson to Beyoncé’s Diana Ross. Even more recently in the pilot of Glee, one character moans: “I’m Beyoncé, I ain’t no Kelly Rowland.” But Rowland maintains they all wanted to pursue their own music and that there was no acrimony. In fact she gets fed up of people assuming she is jealous of Knowles.
“That’s my sister,” she says. “One of my best friends, Serena Williams, told me she and Venus love each other. She said ‘we’re going to be sisters, period. When we have to play each other we are competing and we both want to win. But we still love each other at the end of the day.’ That’s simply the way it is. I think everyone wants us to hate each other. It’s not going to happen.”
All three have found success. Knowles has become the biggest female R’n’B artist in the world. Williams has released gospel albums and was the first African-American to play Roxy Hart in Chicago in the West End. And Rowland hasn’t done too badly either. She collaborated with Nelly, for which she won a Grammy, released two acclaimed solo albums, and is a judge on US reality TV series The Fashion Show, which has just hit UK screens. In September she releases a third album and the first two singles, When Love Takes Over and new track Commander are already global hits, big, sexed-up dance anthems. Producer David Guetta, the French DJ who has worked with everyone from Black Eyed Peas to Madonna, has given Rowland an electro-house treatment, and it works. She has gone a little bit Rihanna, a little bit Gaga, all robotic moves, killer shades and skyscraper shoulders. It’s the first time she’s felt she’s found her niche.
I’m surprised to hear this, considering she’s sold 10 million records since leaving the group. “Well, you know Destiny’s Child hasn’t done anything in a very long time,” she says. “But I think subconsciously I was still in that space. This is the first time I’m saying this – but I really didn’t think about it in that way (of splitting up]. You know it was like ‘well, we might do something together soon’. I didn’t know what would happen.
“My waking moment was when I said to myself, ‘What are you going to do?’ Suddenly I was like, I’m almost freakin’ 30! It’s important to be happy by myself and there’s nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with selfishness, with wanting happiness for yourself.” She sounds like she’s trying to convince herself.
“It’s important to have people around who want that for you as well,” she goes on. “So when I made the decision to leave my management and disconnect from my old label everything was destined to happen.” In 2008 Rowland, who had continued to be managed by Beyoncé’s father Mathew Knowles after Destiny’s Child split, decided to go it alone. Suddenly she had no label, no manager, and no idea what would happen next.
Why so much change? “I’ve been doing this since I was 12 years old,” she says, with all the world-weariness of a pop star in her late twenties. “When everything slowed down for me I was so humbled. I love being busy and I love having hit records. It’s not like it’s ever been taken away from me but there were a lack of records that I wanted to be number one and that was a jab. It hurt, but above everything God put me in a place to be humbled.”
Religion is hugely important to Rowland. She talks about her faith in the way that only American pop stars do, with great zest and earnestness, bringing God into every other answer. “I can’t live without it,” she says of her faith. “As kids we were so on fire for God. And then you grow up, travel and experience things and stop reading the bible every day. You don’t realise that you’re taking important things away from yourself. If all this were taken away from me right now I would still have my faith. If you don’t have faith the world will eat you alive.”
For Rowland, singing and faith always went hand in hand. “Music was infectious just from being in church,” she says. “It was there that I had my first solo. I was five years old with the worst dress on. I don’t know how my mum had the nerve to make me look like a darn cupcake. So much frosting on a kid. Layers and layers on my dress, even layers of socks!” Rowland would sing and her brother would play drums. It was when she was seven that her mother left her father and took the family to Houston. Rowland auditioned for a group, then called Girl’s Tyme, which would eventually become Destiny’s Child. “I sang Whitney Houston’s I’m Your Baby Tonight,” she says. “Thank you Whitney!” She sings a few lines for me.
Rowland and Beyoncé would go to her mother’s salon and sing for the women having their hair done. On a good day they got tips. “B said I had an X factor about me, too,” she says. “It’s really cool when you find people you click with when you’re young. We loved to sing together.”
At times Rowland still sounds wistful about Destiny’s Child but she tells me she’s got too much of a big mouth these days to be in a group. “B was the creative mind, Michelle was the faith and the heart, and I was the mouth. And I have more of a mouth now than ever. I’d be afraid to see myself in a group. People would have no behind – all their ass would be chewed.”
Not long after, at a club in France, Rowland met Guetta. “He was DJing in the place I was performing,” she recalls. “He played the instrumental of When Love Takes Over and I heard it and lost my mind so much I cried. I had to sing on that track. He was still DJing and I was like I need to talk to you. I need that track. I couldn’t wait.”
After working on the track with writers in London, Rowland returned to Miami where she has lived for four years. Rehearsing in a studio, she caught the attention of Sylvia Rhone, president of Universal Motown Records, who was next door working with Nelly. “She came in and asked me if this was the direction of my new record,” Rowland says. “God puts us in the right place at the right time. That’s definitely what he did that day.” When Rhone discovered she didn’t have a label she signed her on the spot. “And we’ve made a fantastic record.”
Her confidence about the album, which doesn’t yet have a title, is unshakeable. “I feel the same way about every song as I do about When Love Takes Over,” she says. “I don’t care who says what. I’m like screw you, this record is great.” Next she says she would love to collaborate with Fergie of Black Eyed Peas. “I’ve always been a great fan of her voice. She’s got really great stank.” I tell her I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Well the word swag is over right now. Anyway, I’ve asked her about it and she said she wants to sing with me. Between her stank and my vocals? Mmmm.”
Her willingness to show her ambition is unusual. But Rowland, who says the only thing she wants is a dog, which she can’t have because she’s away too much, has been living like this all her life. “You go out there to make a statement, to make a name,” she says with a shrug. “All of this is normal to me.” And does she think, now that she’s broken out of the mould of Destiny’s Child, that she would ever go back? “It isn’t about saying Destiny’s Child is no more,” Rowland insists, sticking a leg out of the duvet. “I never want to say that. But what I did eventually want to say was where does Kelly fit in? Now I feel ready. I’m not afraid anymore.”
Commander is available now on iTunes and is released on 28 June (Universal Motown). Rowland presents The Fashion Show on Really, weekdays until Friday, 8pm.
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