CRUISE´S PEAK

From the sordid, alternate universe of David Lynch to the sordid, alternate universe of Top Of The Pops, JULEE CRUISE has escaped from Twin Peaks and plunged into pop mainstream. She reveals to JACK BARRON her secret obsessions and childhood tricks. See Cruise: AJ BARRAT

"Sometimes a wind blows/And the mysteries of love come clear" - 'Mysteries Of Love', Julee Cruise

In the photographer´s studio Julee Cruise winks at me and extends her hand in greeting. Understated in bodywear - black jeans, jumper and biker jacket - her face overcompensates by shouting with false eyelashes, mascara and a capped but kindly smile. "Oh it´s you, one of the people who knew about me before Twin Peaks" she laughs. There´s no elitism or camaraderie of snobbery in her statement. Just a simple matter-of-factness.

Last spring when Julee - whose first memory is of a carousel of Monarch butterflies playing music in her all-green bedroom some 33 years ago - was in London to promote her album 'Floating Into The Night' she was an archetypical 'cult figure', notching up interviews with the music press and specialist magazines. Now every prong of the media fork, from The Sunday Times through Smash Hits to Top Of The Pops, is queueing up to get a stab.

The reason for this is partly due to her symbiotic involvement in the TV soap of the season, David Lynch´s surreal whodunnit-to-Laura-Palmer, Twin Peaks. Three of the songs from 'Floating Into The Night' - itself a collaborative effort with music provided by Angelo Badalamenti and lyrics and creative direction by Lynch - crop up on the soundtrack for Twin Peaks. And one of them, 'Falling', is on an unexpected magic carpet ride up the pop charts.

On top of this, Julee has a role in the soap. She doesn´t have a character name as such in the series, rather she is known with bit-part aptness as Girl Singer. We´ve already had a glimpse of her as the vocalist in the bar during the brawl in the opening episode.

"Without revealing anything to you, which I don´t want to, I do have a bigger part in the series as it goes on," says Julee. "Not that I killed her or anything like that. Well I might have! No, that would be ridiculous! Hahahaha!"

Schtum´s the word. Certainly the success of Twin Peaks both here and in America has changed Julee´s profile. "I get recognised at truck stops, it´s unbelievable," she grins. "People come up and want my autograph. They are usually very bashful and tentative. They think that I´m this mysterious character, which you know I´m not. Has that changed me? No, not really, I guess I try to be nicer to people.

"The strange thing is it isn´t as if my face is so prevalent. What has happened I can´t quite grasp. Twin Peaks is very hot. David Lynch is very hot. I sing the theme song to Twin Peaks and is has been heard all over the place so people identify me as the Girl Singer, which isn´t necessarily true, you´ll just have to keep watching the series, hahaha."

Inevitably, as well, the soap´s popularity has led to work offers. Some of these have an ironic ring, in the US she is now "The Oldmobile girl", once singing jingles for TV ads was a major source of income for Julee. She has also just done a pilot for CBS called Passion and finished her first tout which she describes as "nice".

Additionally, in the near future the trio of Cruise, Badalamenti and Lynch are due to go into the studio to record a second album. Given that Julee is ostensibly a Voice, it would be easy but mistaken to think of this petite daughter of a dentist as no more than a puppet with Lynch pulling the strings.

"The way I see it is David is very talented and he´s formed a company of actors around him which he uses over and over again in the same way that Orson Wells did with Joseph Cotten and so on. I see myself as the musical wing of that company. When we go into the studio we don´t have anything planned, we don´t have scores or lyrics, we just make it up as we go along with David describing the sort of sound he wants in terms of images because that´s what he´s good at.

"I don´t know much about the music business, but I guess it´s more like Brian Eno works and Daniel Lanois works with tracks and tracks of stuff which is finally edited together..."

I don´t know much about the music business either, but I do believe that 'Floating Into The Night' is an extraordinary record and certainly one of the, ahem, peaks of 1990. The project itself spiralled out of the trio´s first collaboration on the song 'Mysteries Of Love', which featured in Lynch´s psycho-sexual grotesquerie, Blue Velvet.

'Floating Into The Night' has been finely called a rose with a worm wingling in its heart. Love songs, romance, splitting like a whishbone, have long been bangers and mash and the menu of popular music. Never though, at least to my ears, has the "upsettingly blissful" emotional tug-of-war involved in falling in and out of love been captured in such an acute yet tender manner on vinyl.

Much of this is down to Julee´s voice, which is so chilled-out and unhysterical as to be almost Martian to the nominal subject matter. Apart from odd musical intrusions, a big well of dizzy noises on 'I Remember' for instance, the soundscapes of 'Floating Into The Night' are like being wrapped in a womb of mist. Occasionally rattling debris of past eras, especially the ´50s and early ´60s - a quivering tremolo of guitar here, a blowsy horn section there - makes an entrance giving each song an individual stylistic feel.

How such a quiet, economical record - it has a Cocteau Twins-ish ambience - can convey so much pleasure and pain is the real achievement of 'Floating'. In the drains of the groove, though, is a sinister aspect which hints that one´s purest love for another has a nihilistic undercurrent which eventually destroys it: the worm eating the rose.

It seems in retrospect providence that Julee Cruise and David Lynch should end up working together, both are downright odd fish fingers in the aquarium of life. In addition to TP, she performed in Lynch´s stage production of Badalamenti´s 'Industrial Symphony No1' in Brooklyn last year.

Both Lynch and Julee come from small American Midwest towns. He from Missoula, Montana, she from Creston, Iowa. Both were imprinted with the superficial yet tainted glamour of ´50s US suburban life. And both were precociously talented. He went on via practising interest in expressionist painting to make films such as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and the ill-fated Dune. She moved from studying classical French horn at Drake University to acting in Broadway plays and musicals such as Little Shop Of Horrors, A Little Night Music and House Of Blue Leaves.

I understand that as a child you had a raging fantasy life. Can you tell me more?

"Most kids do. I had an imaginary friend and lots of imaginary things around me. The friend was called Beanie. No, it wasn´t male or female, it was like neuter, just skin, not anything, which probably says a lot."

Julee looks at the park outside and goes so quiet you can almost hear her braincells firing.

"You know, just regular kids stuff. It´s just that I was alone a lot and I wasn´t around a lot of children; I´m the youngest out of a lot of older ones. So I was home alone, so you tend to make up things. We had a piano and stuff and I would play something resembling Scriabin, just like little kids do. It´s just that I never grew out of it."

So do you think there´s a firm relationship between children who have raging fantasy lives and creativity as an adult?

"Well, I think all kids have it and they probably lose it. I´ve probably kept it because I wanted attention, that was the only thing that gave me comfort. I had many, many hang-ups and fears when I was little.

"Like what? I was afraid I would get sucked down the drain of the bathtub, that was a real fear. I was afraid of fuzz that would come off the dryer. It would shatter me to tears. And I wasn´t one of those shy kids either, I was very aggressive. Cars as well. I was always afraid we were going to get lost in the car. I don´t know whether I thought we were going to get into another dimension or what.

"My dad was a pilot, we used to fly a lot. He was a dentist but had a plane, that´s why I´ve got my pilot´s license. A real ´50s thing in the States to do was to be a photographer and a pilot. Dad was the typical John Cheevor martinis in the pitcher, the whole thing.

"Anyway, lots of my feelings are based on fear. This is really frightening work that I do. I don´t mind talking to you, this is the fun bit. The performing part of it is my favourite but it´s also that fear thing again. It´s, urrrrrghhhhhh! I like scary movies, I like violence - I don´t like violence around me, maybe I do, I don´t know but I do like violent movies."

Aside from "spanking the dog" and "slamming doors and kicking the wall" Julee, who is married to a journalist she plays cards with in bed every night, says she has never really been violent herself.

"I´ve always had a kinda dark temper side to me but it goes away very quickly. It´s a bit like the dog that goes and runs behind the toilet. Nothing ever comes out of it really."

So when was the first time you really fell in love?

Julee lets soar another long silence.

"That´s really kinda hard to say isn´t it? The time I got the pips in my stomach, that kind of thing? Actually this is what happened and it´s very much like Julee Cruise music: We were at this dance, and I remember I was a little fat, kinda chubby, and I had on this orange dress and my girlfriends were there and stuff. We were dancing to records at this kind of gym and I saw this boy across the room and I knew he was going to ask me to dance.

"So I ran into the bathroom because I got scared and freaked out. I was thinking 'Why does he want to dance with me, I´m fat? Uhhggg!' You´re always squirrely and creepy at that age. I couldn´t stand it. I had the squirms in me. Then I came out and he found me and asked me to dance. I was absolutely quivering with fright. From that moment on I was just catapulted up on this rollercoaster thing.

"The whole thing was so upsettingly blissful... Then I found out the next day through someone´s sister, who was real mean, that the boys had all bet him a dollar that he wouldn´t ask me to dance. That devastated me. From being up there in this cosy little pink atmosphere I plunged down so deep into such a dark hole, hahaha, that I don´t think I got out of it for a couple of years. It was such a hard, cold slap in the face. And yet it was such an innocent thing: it was just a dance at such a fragile age in a Methodist church which I had no business being at.

"Later on, funnily enough, the guy turned out to be my first boyfriend, but that was like seven years later. I was a kinda late bloomer, I didn´t go out with boys at high school. I was the most popular girl in school, but I was one of those girls that wasn´t easy, so nobody would go out with me."

So did that incident make you lose your trust in people?

"I´d lost my trust a long time before. If you have older brothers and sisters you get real savvy quick when they say things to you like, 'Look, wise up you little f---er there is no Santa Claus, so grow up.' So you tend to not trust."

Do you identify closely with David´s lyrics and Angelo´s music?

"Well, I guess I do. I´d like to say at first that I don´t because it embarrassed me, it was a place where I was quite frightened to be. I´d rather show someone the loud side, the funny side, the brassy side, but that´s embarrassing as well. That´s why I wear make-up. I´m not sitting here without mascara on my eyelashes in front of you. I don´t want you to see my real face, which is weird but it would embarrass me."

Do you think that the whole project, lyrics, sounds, voice and the way it´s put together illustrate how pure love is ultimately nihilistic? In other words, when you fall deeply in love your individuality disappears as you merge with your partner to the point of suffocation?

"Yeah. And you get paranoid. I think the music is very paranoid and disturbing and dementing. Yeah I like that, that´s pretty good. I didn´t think of all this stuff before. I just did it. I think if I had thought about the music beforehand it wouldn´t have come out very nice if at all."

Has that condition - nihilistic love - happened to you?

"I think that it´s happened to everyone. Sometimes you want it to happen to you, or you pick this person who is going to do it to you, whatever. And then you lose yourself, things become heightened, bigger than life and then obsession takes over.

"An obsession is a frightening thing in its own right. But to be obsessed with another human being and needing to feed off that person, well that´s pretty heavy duty stuff. That kind of situation is not very pretty."

No, it´s ugly and destructive. "But I think what David sees as good and right in the world is the ´50s. Things that looked trite on the outside, like pretty ´50s party dresses and lake picnics - you know there´s a picture of David with his girlfriend on a tandem bike waving at the camera, I´d give a lot of money for that photo - anyway that says it all for me. David must have a very repressed side, he would have to if he sees things as he does.

"He doesn´t plan out things ad go 'That´d be really weird'. He thinks that normal things are weird. But he´s so normal it´s weird. Every day he has the same thing for lunch. I mean, that´s how he sees things. And I think that he sees that as how I grew up. I grew up in a small town, popular girl in high school, you know, real kinda wholesome but I wasn´t at all."

So what was so unwholesome about you?

"Well, I was a virgin, hahaha."

Julee cringes inside an imaginary shell. "No, the secret thing is I liked to make phone calls as a kid. Phone calls to people who didn´t know who you were. I´d call people if I was angry at someone and wanted to scare them. Or I´d call and not say anything at all. There´s something very aggressive and intrusive and not very healthy about making those kind of phone calls. Now you can´t do it in the States because the bills show the number you have dialled. Hahaha. There´s something kinda voyeuristic about doing something like that."

The album is quite disturbing, almost psychotic in that it´s so eerily controlled. There is no effervescence and shouting from rooftops, or conversely self-pity and depression and moroseness associated with falling in and out of love. It all floats with the disjointed distance of madness.

"Yeah, there´s an underlying thread that weaves constantly through it. One person called the record a rose with a worm in it. People are kind of addicted to that feeling too and I don´t know why. It´s not very pleasant and yet you always try to get back into it, maybe for the danger. The ´50s were like that as well. Everything seemed glossy and happy on the outside but there is such a dark undercurrent present. But this music was not approached consciously as something like that. I think it was a sincere attempt to be romantic, it just turned out strange.

"You see when you´re in love or obsessed with someone and they are with you it´s so odd. Often you just can´t believe they love you because it´s just too good to have and you know that it´s going to go away. There´s always that voice that says 'It´s going to go away'. Everybody has that, I don´t care how secure you are. It just happens, that voice is there. If it´s not there then you´re brain dead. But that voice can be very disturbing and destructive and that voice is talking all through that album."

So do you identify with that voice in everyday life?

"The insecurity and the paranoid feeling and the fear? Sure, sure. I´d much rather identify with that than the blissfully, feminine, happy part, that I can´t deal with. Being frightened though, yeah. Everybody has that but I don´t think this music gives you the ickies, I don´t think it´s depressing, I think it´s very tender and nice. I just think that´s the part of it I can see. I understand that floating feeling of love but I haven´t had that as much as the depressing side."

"WHEN YOU told your secret name/I burst in flame and burned" - 'Floating'.

Julee recognises those individual peculiarities - secret names, sings - that when shared achieve intimacy between strangers.

"You go through different stages, sure. I don´t really remember my sings or peculiarities from the past, it´s a kinda grey area. It isn´t that my life has been grey, dark and depressing, it´s just I´m trying to answer this question for you the best I can, and honest-to-God it´s pretty grey. You know there´s a certain guard that one keeps up that you don´t want anyone to see until maybe ..."

Another pause, this one pregnant with triplets - elephant triplets. Julee has already been more candid than could be reasonably expected.

"I dunno, I was a lot older when I finally met someone that I really trusted. So it´s hard to say."

Marvin Gaye in Divided Soul says something to the effect that sex is most fulfilling when you´re in love with the person you´re making love to. Think that´s true?

Seconds crawl by on splints. "I dunno, I don´t have sex, hahahaha! What´s that? I just have the phone and the album, hahahaha. I´m trying to tell you things that I´ve never told anybody else for this. Usually I have a straight speech, so if I seem like I´m drawing blanks bear with me. My husband says when he listens to the music - and this has come up elsewhere - he thinks it´s like a salesman, in a creepy motel room, watching a 14-year-old stripper. There´s a part in 'I remember' that really lends itself to that.

"As for sex in general - and this isn´t preconceived - I think it´s more fulfilling with a stranger. I´ll give you an example. Maybe a girl had sex with someone ten years ago once, never saw him again but she is still thinking about that person. Not in a 'I hope he will call' sense.

"It´s more like she´s in a grocery store doing the shopping and all of a sudden she will have a little vision of them together in bed and it never goes away. It was intense at first and then it just drifted off into nothing. She thought it was something and it wasn´t. And it didn´t really break her heart because she wasn´t in love - you can´t be in love that fast, or maybe you can - but the obsessive aspect still clings."

Julee pours another coffee. "I dunno, when you´re in love with someone ... " She lapses into reverie again. "It´s ... well ... I DON`T KNOW." Julee Cruise erupts with exasperated laughter. 'Floating Into The Night' is the finest legal romantic narcotic of 1990 so far.