Once you’ve had a feature-length documentary made about you, it’s surely time to accept you’ve reached legendary status? Cyndi Lauper laughs. “My dogs don’t think so,” she says, to the sound of barking. Then, to her dogs: “You gotta stop, guys!”
Lauper is the subject of Let the Canary Sing, a new film by Alison Ellwood. It follows Lauper from her difficult childhood with an abusive stepfather, through the New York music scene and early bands, to the release of feminist anthem Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and beyond. There are clashes with music execs who don’t understand Lauper’s art school sensibility and want her to compete with Madonna, and she survives a career downturn. More recently, Lauper has become a campaigner, and the writer of award-winning musicals.
What was it like to make the movie? “The good news is it’s not a thriller, and she lives at the end,” says Lauper with a laugh. At 71, this is a pivotal time for her. In the UK this week, she has a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall, is playing Glastonbury, and recently announced her farewell tour, which kicks off later this year. She may do some shows after that, she says, but there will be no more arena tours.
We speak over Zoom. Before we talk I’m warned not to keep her long because Lauper needs to protect her voice, but she talks and talks, jumping from one inspiration to another. One moment she’s likening herself to a snake – “when they hit a wall, they go around and they feel their way. And they regenerate. You shed your skin” – the next she mentions the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. “If I’d known about Kusama in the 80s … but you get caught in the hamster wheel and you forget why you came to the planet in the first place.”
Lauper says she couldn’t see the point of making the film at first. Then she thought about the women’s consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s. “They would all learn from each other. Women of all ages would get together and speak and tell their story … For a young artist, the one thing I would want them to know is you don’t give up, right?” This has always been her mantra. “You gotta wait for your day? Big deal. It’ll come if you don’t give up. You dig your heels in, you look, you see how to prepare. Another gatekeeper? I’m just going to sidestep and go around, because there’s always a way.”
She sounds scrappy and single-minded – and she is – but in her 2012 self-titled memoir, Lauper also writes that she never felt good enough and was plagued by self-doubt. “I’ve come to understand,” she writes, “that I may never feel that my work is good enough.” Does she still feel like that? “Yeah, are you kidding? I have panic attacks because I think I won’t be good enough, but you just keep moving forward, you keep trying and you stay determined. I only know that when I sang and I lost myself in the moment, it was like heaven, like being free. You sing to fly, to be something else, to go anywhere your imagination can take you.”
Lauper grew up in Queens, New York, in the apartment below her grandfather and Sicilian grandmother. Her father was a shipping company clerk and her mother was a waitress. When Lauper was about five, her parents split up, and her mother then married a man who was physically abusive. In his rages, he would threaten to rape Lauper and her older sister. Once, as a teenager, Lauper caught him looking through the keyhole as she had a bath, and shortly afterwards left home, carrying only essentials – a toothbrush, spare underwear, an apple and a copy of Yoko Ono’s book of instructions and drawings, Grapefruit. This book, she writes, “had become my window for viewing life through art”. (Sample instruction from Ono: “Listen to the sound of the Earth turning.”)
Lauper lived with her sister in Long Island, surviving on spaghetti and short-lived jobs, and spent a few years drifting – busking in New York, art college in Vermont – before joining the first of a number of bands and singing in Long Island clubs. She supported herself and raised money for gig equipment by working as a topless dancer, but grew sick of the degrading things men would do, throwing coins and insults at her. She quit. At about the same time, she says she suffered a serious sexual assault by one of her band members, and two women who were at his apartment. It left her stunned, and resurfaced years later when she was in therapy.
By the time Lauper secured a record deal with the band Blue Angel, she wasn’t far off 30. The band didn’t do well and Lauper was urged by the record company to become a solo artist, which at first she resisted. When she eventually agreed, she had to fight her former manager in court and went bankrupt – but as an impoverished artist, Lauper didn’t have much to lose. The judge in the case ruled in Lauper’s favour with the words, “Let the canary sing”, which became the documentary’s title.
Lauper’s record company initially wanted her to be another Barbra Streisand. “Look, you already had a Streisand,” she says now. Then they pitted her against Madonna, whose 1983 debut album had come out a few months before and done well. “As if you could only have one woman who is successful. What the hell is that about?” says Lauper. “That woman’s been entertaining us for years. She’s made great pop songs. I want to be competitive, but not pitted against another woman. I’m not into that.”
Lauper often clashed with music industry executives. Would she have had a different career if she had been more malleable? “Yes, I probably would have, but I wouldn’t be who I am. I don’t know what that path would have been. It might have been easier for a while, but I wanted to learn. And, honestly, I just always wanted to be a great artist.”
In her memoir, the music industry of the 1980s sounds horrendously sexist. She laughs. “You think it’s not sexist now?” At the start of her career it wasn’t so bad, she says, because the head of her label, Lennie Petze, “wasn’t like that. Once he left it was, like, oh my God.” She was told to try wearing jeans and a T-shirt (in true Lauper style, she deconstructed a T-shirt, ripping it up, and adding chains). “I remember going in one time and the guy is eyeing me up and down, looking at my tits and looking at my face and smiling. It was really gross.” She felt belittled by male producers who tried to keep her out of the studio, but she stood her ground.
Later, when she started getting parts in films, usually comedies, she overheard one producer wonder aloud how “fuckable” she was. Another time, someone in the business put a scarf around her waist and pulled her into him. “I was like, don’t do that to me. You have to keep going on your path because eventually those people, if they’re that superficial, are going to fall away because they’re not in it for the same reason. They weren’t born to do this.”
Lauper’s first album, She’s So Unusual, contained hit after hit, many of which she co-wrote, including Time After Time and She Bop. The song Girls Just Want to Have Fun wasn’t written by Lauper, but she changed the lyrics and the feel of the song and it became a huge hit. Suddenly she was famous, but isolated. On tour, she was often put in rooms by herself and reassured that nobody would bother her.
“So you sit alone, and you hear the band and everybody outside laughing and having a great time.” At concerts, she was greeted with hysteria. She felt shy around other famous people, but also longed for the company of other artists. Not one to self-censor, Lauper spoke out when she could. On tour in Italy to promote the album, and influenced by her Italian family background, she told the press the biggest oppressors of women were the church, the family and the government.
Her second album, True Colors, took longer to make, and was released in 1986. Lauper was feeling burnt out – by the hype and the gruelling promotional tour, but also the grief of losing close friends to the Aids epidemic. She was recovering from surgery for endometriosis and would be in and out of hospital for a couple of years. She wanted to write more political songs, but was told she couldn’t, even though she pointed out that her rewrite of Girls Just Want to Have Fun was political. (Lauper had been heavily influenced by second-wave feminism and wanted to make an uplifting song that championed female joy, with an intentionally diverse video.)
Executives couldn’t see past the fun video and upbeat sound; one told her she was making “disposable” pop. Did she feel people were not taking her seriously as an artist? “I knew my audiences were,” she says. “It didn’t matter about the suits. So long as you can get by the gatekeepers, you’re OK.”
The song has become a rallying cry in the US since June 2022, when Roe v Wade was overturned – the ruling that had guaranteed women the right to an abortion. Lauper set up the Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights Fund that year, donating money to organisations that support women’s healthcare and access to abortion. “We do not have autonomy,” she says. “We pay the same taxes as any man, yet that guy got autonomy and we don’t. How does that sit with you? How’s it feel to have the government in charge of your body? It does not feel good for me. I want to be free and have the same civil liberties as any other person in my country, and then we have equality. If we’re not all equal, then none of us really are, because it can always turn on you.”
She sighs. “When they shut down clinics, they shut down postnatal care, prenatal care, there is a high mortality rate of African American women who die in pregnancy, or afterwards, or the baby does. I don’t understand what’s happening in this country.”
When she appeared on Celebrity Apprentice in 2010, Donald Trump was still just a brash TV character; Lauper even wrote nice things about him in her book. And now? “We have a strange policy,” she says, “that if you’re a felon, you can’t vote, but apparently you can run for president.” Division worries her. “I still feel in my heart people are fair minded, and when they are not, it’s because they are fearful and they don’t know.”
Lauper’s second album didn’t do as well as her debut, though its title track, True Colors, was a hit – it also became an LGBTQ+ anthem, and two decades later Lauper co-founded the organisation True Colors United to support homeless LGBTQ+ youth. Her third album, A Night to Remember, came out in 1989, but stalled her career. It received minimal promotion from her record company, which seemed to have lost interest in her.
What kept her going? “I thought to myself, if you want to be a real artist, you take it and you keep going.” She has been writing the songs for the musical Working Girl, based on the 1988 film, and there’s a line in it she likes. “‘Where I come from, you take the hit, you zhuzh the hair, you’re back in,’” she repeats. “It’s kind of how I lived. You get knocked down, you get back up, with every failure you learn something important because life is for learning. You don’t come into it knowing everything, and if you did, what’s the fun of that? What’s the purpose?”
Lauper has reinvented herself repeatedly. She won an Emmy in 1995 for her role in the TV sitcom Mad About You. She made a dance album, then a blues one, then a country one, and supported Tina Turner and Cher on tour. She moved into writing for the theatre, and the musical Kinky Boots, for which she wrote the music and lyrics, opened in 2012, then transferred to Broadway the following year; Lauper won a Tony award for best score. Working Girl should be out next year and she might write another album.
But for now there is her farewell tour, which will be a celebration. “I want to say thank you to all the people that followed me from one album to the next. I just want to say goodbye in a fun way that will make them feel like they are at a party.”
Lauper has survived it all – a tough childhood, traumatic experiences, an unforgiving business. “I just think you keep going and you find the little things that are joyful. Things that you think are the absolute end of the world, they are not really, they are just the end of that chapter and there are many chapters in your life. I had a friend tell me that once and I didn’t understand, but I understand now.”