Natalia Kills’ biggest obstacle in life is herself. The 27-year-old English-born singer-songwriter certainly didn’t take the easy route.
“I am quite a challenge, just because how my life was,” she says.
“I have been in a lot of trouble with police when I was younger.
“For, like, stealing stuff and wicked fights with my friend and running around town with nothing good to do, and I guess if you had asked me when I was 18 years old what I would be when I grew up, I probably would have said that I would be dead by now.”
But to her surprise she’s doing well. The first single of her second album Trouble, Saturday Night, got plenty acclaim and she was invited as an international artist to present an award at last night’s New Zealand music award.
Kills, born Noemi Keery-Fisher in Bradford, Yorkshire, started out as a child actress and had a role in BBC sitcom All About Me.
“When I was a kid, my mother used to film all of our holidays and all of the good times, and I kind of associated the camera with everything being OK and everything being happy,” she says.
“So I thought I wanted to be an actress and play a character more cool, or prettier or more fun with a nicer life than me.
“But the minute I moved out when I was 15 and I ran away from home, I decided I could be whoever I wanted to be, and that I could be myself and I didn’t wanted to be an actress anymore.”
But things didn’t immediately go to plan.
“When I quit all of my acting and signed into a terrible record deal and then quit that and suddenly had no job, and no money, no life and no boyfriend and nothing . . . I still never went home,” she says looking back.
Her first break came in 2007 when she loaded one of her songs on the still-busting online platform MySpace.
The self-produced and written demo, Wommanequin, received two million plays on the website and Kills reached the top of the unsigned artists.
But even when her music was going well for a time, Kills stuck to her trouble-making antics.
“After I ruined my life yet again and blew almost every penny I had, I stepped on a plane to Hollywood and lived in these cheap $20 per night motels for almost a year and a half,” she says.
But all the dark moments make her music and the lyrics stand out from other artists’ work.
“My song-writing has always been just about my life – usually my worst moments,” she says.
“I am not sorry about who I was, even when I was an a***hole and I don’t feel I don’t deserve to be here.
“There are still the same feelings looking back now, and I don’t erase the bad bits or miss out those moments that would make me unlikable.
“Like, how can you be 22-years-old and have ruined your life so many times”
These memories are now the fabric her songs are made of, “because they’re my trouble and I am fine with that”.
Looking back of her upbringing in the north of England, she says it has a lot in common with her chosen home New York.
“I was born in Bradford, it’s kind of the town that God forgot about, and I really like that, I like the feeling of helplessness – places where there’s nothing to do, but riding cars with boys, and decorate your mess with more mess.”
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Although she travelled a lot with her parents when she was young, the one feeling she would always remember about Yorkshire was wanting to make a “desire out of despair”.
“I think New York has sort of the same thing, and that never leaves you – everything being bigger than you, everything being better than you and it being this close . . . just one more step and you could go through that step and it could be yours.”
But for now the singer is in a good place.
“I make the music my ears want to hear, I wear the clothes my body wants to wear and the ones boys call be back for, and I generally make the songs that my feet dance to,” she says.
“And I don’t really pay attention what people say, but I feel flattered that I have a fan base.”
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