A few weeks back, Sky Ferreira played a show at The Basement in London, a venue so exclusive that it’s members only – you need a referral to even apply. The 100 Club, where Ferreira-favourite the Sex Pistols cut their teeth, is just a few doors away.
A hip crowd in the city where punk exploded should have been the perfect opportunity for Ferreira – young, wild, impossibly cool – to deliver a performance to match her fantastic debut album, Night Time, My Time.
Footage from the night shows just how wrong it went. After less than 90 seconds the bratty anthem I Will
lurches to a halt, with Ferreira mumbling, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear anything.”
The pattern was repeated over and again, with The Guardian reporting: “Ferreira does more apologising than singing, and her band barely gets to finish a song. It’s frustratingly shambolic.”
This is nothing new for Ferreira. She’s only 21, but her career could already be viewed as an endless series of false dawns. Indeed, if Lorde has become the poster child for just how spectacularly well it can work out for a young woman in the music industry, then Sky Ferreira might be her antithesis – chewed up and spat out before she turned 20, by which time she was well on her way to becoming a cautionary tale.
And yet, the last couple of years have seen her roar back to the verge of stardom, thanks to her music finally matching her troubled, darkly glamorous narrative. In Night Time, My Time, Ferreira has conjured a debut of rare quality. Fizzy, ebullient and impassioned, it’s a critic’s favourite while also possessing enough mainstream appeal to land her a gig opening for Miley Cyrus across the US.
For all her recent success, though, there still seems something self-sabotaging about Ferreira – a will to chaos as strong as that to create.
At the time of going to print, she’d just been rushed to hospital after falling during a performance and needing 60 stitches in her leg. Her support slot with Miley Cyrus was temporarily pulled.
Troublesome live shows aren’t the only cause of chaos.
When I speak with Ferreira she’s just awoken from “a heavy, intense sleep” after her European tour, and is at the doctor’s, waiting for her boyfriend Zachary Cole Smith, of indie band DIIV.
The pair gained a kind of neo-Kurt and Courtney notoriety in September of last year when they were arrested at a traffic stop in upstate New York. Their pickup had stolen plates, and each was carrying drugs – his heroin, hers ecstasy.
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The timing was awful. Just the day before she had announced the release of her debut album, six long years after she first signed a record deal. Even if you subscribe to the idea that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, this was pretty unfortunate.
Alone, it mightn’t have mattered – she’s hardly the only one taking drugs for fun. But soon there was more controversy.
When her album cover was released, it
