Ida Maria

Profile: Ida Maria
Words: Johnny K

A Problem Like Maria

She may be wearing a top hat instead of a bowler but Ida (pronounced ‘eeda’) Maria is a dead ringer for A Clockwork Orange’s Alex De Large. The Norwegian singer is sitting at a table in the garden of a Kensington pub. On one side of her a Japanese girl talks loudly and rapidly to friends, and on the opposite side, three boys celebrate the end of their A-Levels by drinking cocktails. Ida stands out a mile. Her bright red lipstick is smudged at the edges, investing her with a slightly maniacal look, and her eyes loom large between the symmetrical fringe which pokes out from beneath that hat. The Fly takes a seat opposite, quickly causing her to shift positions when our feet accidentally touch under the table. The message seems clear. Don’t sit too close – this storm needs room to move.
One thing’s for sure, you need to work hard to hold the twenty-four year-old’s attention. She talks brightly for the first minute of meeting, enthusing that “things are fucking amazing”, and laughing that she’s “a bit sick of the bacon and sausage fry-ups you have over here. We have to bring rye bread with us from home.” But as she swivels on the bench and looks around her, she’s quickly diverted away from what she’s talking about. To keep Ida interested, conversation needs to progress at a hundred miles an hour. Throw up a subject, drill into the heart of it as soon as possible, and then move onto the next one.
We hurtle back towards her teenage years. “I never thought I would find any guys that wanted to play with me because I’m a girl,” she says, touching upon an issue that still makes her furious now (“I am a woman, and there’s a huuuuge stigma around females in the music industry”). “In college, when I tried to get into the guys’ bands, everyone was like ‘you can’t be in a band, you’re a girl.’ So I was like ‘fuck, I’ll go in my room and make songs and then I’ll strike back with furious anger, and that’s what I’ve done!” And she’s managed it with a group of her own: “My band unofficially goes under the name of The Strap-Ons,” Ida confirms.
The music she makes with them is raw and melodic. It sounds like The Strokes minus all the time spent looking in the mirror. “I’m not trying to invent the wheel, that’s not my agenda,” Ida Maria insists, her accent turning the word ‘agenda’ into ‘againda’. “Maybe in the future I’ll want to push boundaries but at the moment I’m just trying to discover what the fuck I’m doing here. I try to go down to the absolute basic and my lyrics are very straight-forward. That’s the whole challenge and that’s the fun of it ‘cause if I speak to people I never feel that I get my point across. And if people are speaking to me I get distracted by all their different layers, by how their body language is.”
Those human ticks, like body language, are characteristics Ida (who is currently following up Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘On The Suffering Of The World’ with an equally uplifting read about suicide) gives her own songs. She talks about ‘making’ music rather than ‘writing’ it, a habit which somewhat anthropomorphises her debut album ‘Fortress Round My Heart’. Being buried in the middle of that record with Ida can feel like living in the Bradbury Building with J.F. Sebastian. “I don’t understand my songs,” the singer admits, “they don’t belong to me really. I made them but they also made themselves.” And she says she is happy every time she finishes a song, but that her focus is almost immediately stolen away by the next unborn piece of music. “You’re proud of a song in that second and then you kick it out of the house and hate it. Then maybe it comes crawling back and begs for mercy, and then maybe you can take it along! I made a lot of songs and the ones on the album, they’re the ones I can hang out with.”
It’s a vivid point of view and it makes complete sense of the Ida Maria experience to suddenly hear about her synaesthesia. “My senses are all mixed up,” she explains. “When somebody just hears a note, I hear a note and a colour and a pattern. When I was younger, I found it really hard to understand why nobody else wanted to eat every green tree. And I could be stressful ‘cause I could go really deeply into a shirt someone had on instead of what they were saying. But it hasn’t been a big handicap, more the opposite, because I notice things that nobody else really notices. If you’ve taken LSD you would know how it’s like,” she guesses. “Although I’ve never done that – I wonder if everything would just turn silent? One day I’ll try it!”
‘Fortress Around My Heart’ is out now on RCA