Amanda Palmer: What dishes?

When Palmer was last in South Africa in January 2015, making good on a promise emanating from a record-breaking $1.2m campaign funded by her fans around the globe, she had just found out she was pregnant with the child of British literary genius Neil Gaiman. It’s Palmer's relatively recent motherhood that has made ‘Mother’ even more pertinent in the eyes of her devout followers.

Music In Africa jumped on the bandwagon to ask the theatrical musician about her political views, what to expect from her South African shows and what it’s like being involved in a marriage of perpetual creativity.

You were in South Africa in early 2015. What made you want to come back here? What do you remember most clearly about the country?

I came to Joburg to deliver the very last house party of my 2012 Kickstarter. My Kickstarter got a lot of attention at the time I launched it, but I think people forget that I then had to circumnavigate the globe twice to get to 35 households to deliver 35 parties to my top fans.

I’d made it to arctic Canada, Isreal, Australia, the backwaters of the German countryside, Southern California… I’d been everywhere. But there was one lingering party in Pretoria that I just hadn’t managed to squeeze into the itinerary because, you know, it’s damn far away from everywhere.

Then, right at the start of Janurary, I found out I was pregnant while I was in Australia, and I thought, ‘If I don’t go now, when?’ So on a week’s notice, I rerouted my flight from Australia to the States via Johannesburg. I spent an unexpected week in Soweto, feeling like this was my equivalent of a bridal shower/bachelor party, even though nobody knew I was pregnant except for two random South African filmmakers who I decided to confide in.

My main impressions of Joburg were harsh – like I was out of my depth. As a New Yorker and world traveller, I feel incredibly street smart, but all of a sudden I felt like a complete rookie in terms of protecting myself. I’d never had anybody tell me to take my sunglasses off my head when riding in a car lest they get stolen. It was humbling. On the other hand, Twitter came to my rescue and a huge handful of helpful Joburgers lifted me into a whirlwind week. I found a lift out to Nelson Mandela’s house, a friendly local helped me put together a huge, free gig in a warehouse.

I was impressed with the vitality of the place, and it made me excited to come back and 'do the thing I really do'. Neil Gaiman, my baby daddy, is in Cape Town right now shooting TV for the BBC, and so I decided to come along and make real shows happen. I have a few days booked in a recording studio in Cape Town while I’m at it. I want to write something while I’m here.

What will An Evening With Amanda Palmer entail this time around? What material will you perform and are there any collaborations with African artists/musicians on the cards?

I’ve been hiding away working on my new solo piano album, and I haven’t been very social since I landed here given that I spent a week laid up with a stomach flu, so it’ll probably just be me and a piano, telling stories and making people laugh and groan and cry. That’s my specialty lately. I also offended a couple of South Africans on Boulders Beach yesterday by changing my top without going to the changing room, so I’m considering playing totally naked just to make up for it. I kid. Or do I?

Some people call you a provocateur, most recently regarding you video for 'Mother'. It's incredible how those lyrics make sense 40 years later in the face of the Trump presidency. In an interview with Newsweek you said: ‘It’s rough with him. It is like trying to suck water from stone. Somewhere in there, there’s a different kind of human.’ Can a man wield the same kind of power if that ‘different’ human is unearthed for all to see?

We forget what incredible power there is in vulnerability. I believe in that moral arc that bends towards justice, and I believe that we, as a human race, will be stronger if we bend towards a strong, transparent vulnerability with one another.

Did you do Waters and Gilmour proud?

I did! David Gilmour watched it and said he liked it. That was a little tick off my bucket list that I wasn’t expiating. I still consider The Wall one of the most beautiful and compelling anti-war, anti-repression films of all time. I still, however, don’t feel like it has a feminine counterpart in Western culture. I keep figuring out how to make that project. It’s definitely a bed, not a wall.

Describe the atmosphere in the US a year down the line after the presidential inauguration. From here we hear about what a shithole Africa is and various analyses by talking heads coached to deliver their bits. It's quite important to get an honest analysis from an artist such as yourself. Should we fear the Trump presidency as people who live outside the US?

One should always take stupidity and fear seriously, and that’s what we’ve got. As the American over here, all I can try to communicate to y’all is how unprecedentedly unpopular Donal Trump is among the people I know – but remember, my social circles are mostly East and West Coast intellectuals, academics and artists. He’s loathed. We still cannot believe this man is the president of our country. It’s such an unfathomable insult to what America stands for, what it means. It’s like some impossible nightmare. And the resistance is strong. Look at the #MeToo movement, look at the Women’s March. I’ve never spent a month of my life just working on a video to make a statement about the emotional state of the president.

We are taking time and energy to express our horror; we aren’t taking this lying down. Mostly, it’s so embarrassing. Trump is like the relative a person has to tolerate but would rather just eject from the entire narrative. But we really should be listening to the root causes of why this guy wound up in a seat of power. He isn’t the problem, he’s the symptom, a pimple on the iceberg, of what’s gone wrong with systematic racism, capitalism and misogyny in America.

It's impossible for journalists or those who appreciate the written word not to ask you about your husband. But the question will be more about your intellectual connection to Mr Gaiman and how it has changed you. There are millions of people around the world who would give an arm and a leg to have a five-minute conversation with him, yet you have unlimited access to his creativity and mind.

[Laughs] I may have unlimited access to his imagination but I also have to table with that imagination when it comes to scheduling our weekend with the kid. We’ve been together almost 10 years now and it really is the biggest challenge of this marriage to stay connected with the appreciation we both need to have for each other’s imaginations, because our tendency towards ‘imagining’ is also our undoing in the mundane dishes-and-groceries department.

I can just as easily imagine that there are no dishes and no flights to book as Neil Gaiman, and believe me, it happens. What dishes? My formidable imagination will simply make them go away. The only way through it and the only way to continue to love each other is to have a massive amount of humour about it. Put it this way, Neil and I are both formidable artists, but we can’t eat tear-jerking piano ballads or horrific magical realism for dinner, if you know what I mean. Just because you can imagine other worlds, stories or songs into being doesn’t mean you can just as easily imagine yourself empathetically into someone else’s shoes. It’s a different muscle, and we both have to be very careful that we exercise the mundane imagination, lest we hurt each other.

Many have said that you've grown from strength to strength as a lyricist. Does your husband's thoughts, utterances, and presence create a different vocabulary in your mind, as it were, that helps you describe things in a different, more original way?

In a weird way, standing next to Neil has been a lesson in the costume department. He hides his source material deep, deep within his work, whereas I tend to wear my emotional sources on my sleeve. I’ve never considered fiction very useful in my life but Neil is a reminder that you don’t have to tell the truth, that, in fact, lying and costuming the truth in the service of art can take you to pretty wonderful places. So I watch him and I remind myself that my palate is much wider than I sometimes think.

By the same token, are his stories and writing style sometimes influenced by your intellectualism? Do you sometimes go, ‘Hey, I said that’?

You’d have to ask Neil. He’d probably tell you something about The Ocean at the End of The Lane, which he wrote during a very rocky period of our marriage because ‘I wanted a book with feelings in it’.

With reference to your Ted Talk on ‘the art of asking’, it's probably quite important to talk to our readership about that concept through an African prism. Musicians in Africa are always looking for revenue streams to fund their projects – and they don't always exist. You've crowdfunded millions of dollars. What are the basic tenets to being able to do so?

Staying away from the idea of blockbuster, mainstream ‘success’ is the main key. It’s enough to be able to pass the hat to your community, watch them fill it, and pay your rent and get food to eat. Not everybody should be trying to achieve superstar status, which kills you anyway.

Is punk dead?

Fuck no.

What’s next for Amanda Palmer in 2018?

I’m heading towards a solo album and working on a new musical, and who knows what else... I’m really enjoying being a mother of a two year old, and feeling how fast it flies. I’m trying not to go too fast. I want to enjoy the shit out of motherhood.

Buy tickets to Amanda Palmer's Stellenbosch and Johannesburg shows here and here.