The question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The only concert I’ve ever really been to was (to see) a prepubescent Justin Bieber many years ago. I remember looking into the crowd. It felt like every girl wanted to be on stage because they wanted to just touch Justin Bieber…. All the girls wanted to be with him, I feel, but I just wanted to be him in that moment.
David Friend, The Canadian Press, Winnipeg Free Press, 1 April 2016 source ↗
I told my mum I wanted to be a swan.
An actor – that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I went to stage school when I was 13.
An air traffic controller.
By the time I was 19, I was saying, “I’m going to be a writer. This is my path.”
Amy Winehouse. I love everything about her and her music. It was honest and so wise in a way. I hope to emulate the way she captivated people. Someone like Ed Sheeran, too, because he can also leave an audience in awe with no help. That’s something to admire.
It’s the world that's messed up, and it’s the world’s twisted view of what beauty should be. They need to change, it’s never you.
I had a bunch. When I was young, I really loved the Black-Eyed Peas and The Gorillas and bands like that. And then as I got older, I discovered Amy Winehouse and Lauryn Hill and older singers like Etta James. I gravitated towards a lot of young women who just played guitar and had great voices and wanted to emulate them in whatever I did, so they really inspired me.
I don't write as often as a lot of artists I know. I save [my songwriting] for a period of time, so I bank up a lot of ideas and a lot of feelings, and then, not even necessarily on purpose, it becomes an album.
That's always been a tough thing. I've always struggled with staying present and not worrying too much about the future or the past. I'm always either dwelling on the past, or missing the past, or worrying about the future. So that's been a big challenge, because this type of lifestyle goes extremely fast.
People think that to be a pop star you have to look a certain way. I want to show people that there’s an alternative.
Björn Ulvaeus, Charlotte Church, Martin Kemp, Sue Perkins, Shaun Ryder, Belinda Carlisle
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