17 August 2004
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND
Most people’s teenage years in the late 90s/early 2000s consisted of the Spice Girls, sparkly lip gloss, bedazzled jeans, 9/11, and of course, Britney Spears, but the story goes a different way for Sapphire Taylor. Sure, her twin sister Julianna fit in with that stereotype, but everyone knew Sapphire and Juli were polar opposites.
See, Sapphire has a huge fanbase. Since the release of her debut album Melancholic Blues back in September 2003 (in the United Kingdom only), you can’t walk a mile without seeing the eighteen year old’s face splattered on a poster somewhere. At seventeen, Sapphire signed a deal with Virgin Records. She spent the end of 2003 making up lost time with her friends Joanna and Jade, and her troubling boyfriend, Jack, whom she nicknamed ‘Jacko’. She’s currently doing her first UK world tour, most of which already sold out.
Zap yourself back to sixteen. Imagine you’re normal girl one second then a major household name the next, and it just comes out of nowhere. Could you handle it? That’s a question I want you to think long and hard about.
“My CD is called Melancholic Blues because it’s just shit load of sad, melancholic blues, I guess.” She corrects herself. “Well, most of them. Doll is more poppy, not really sad at all. Well, it’s one of those songs with sad lyrics but it’s really upbeat. I’m never going to write about anything other than what is, because I can never change what’s going on in my life, so why not turn a bad situation into a greater good, y’know?”
When the interview sits next to her on the couch in Sapphire’s flat in Manchester, however, she seems restless.
“Look, something happened with my man this morning, it rubbed me the wrong way,” Sapphire says. “I’m sorry if I say something out of line, i’ve gained a lot more respect for people since i’ve recorded the album.”
But she didn’t. The interviewer assures her she hasn’t.
Sapphire blushes and looks at the ground awkwardly. You look in her eyes and you can see a whole story. Being a teenage celebrity in the UK was tough, especially for someone as droopy and sappy as Sapphire. The British press was as tough as nails. They never let anyone off the hook. The interviewer proceeds to explain that when she was a teenager, the trends were fishnet stockings, neon clothing and hooped earrings. The only people girls like Sapphire had to look up to were Nancy Spungen, Queen and Siouxsie Sioux. Girls who hadn’t had their lips injected with Juvederm, and a chest so big it looked like two bowling balls. Sapphire, however, seems quite content with herself. She seems to be very happy with her royal blue hair, nose and tongue piercing, and the several tattoos on each of her arms.
“I never - and never will - understand all the hype about blending in. Why haven’t people got any originality these days? Would you want to be in a sea full of fish that are exactly the same?” She scoffs in disappointment. “My sister is like that, and that’s the reason we don’t get along, and all the attention is getting to her head. I’ve always known exactly who I wanted to be, and that was just because i’ve always been a tearaway. I don’t respect authority, and that won’t change. I have manners-” she pauses and smiles. “At times I have manners. But aside from that, i’m all like ‘fuck you, you don’t know shit about me!’” She shrugs.
At a photoshoot a couple hours earlier, she was playing like a child with her boyfriend in front of the wallpaper, and told them to just take photos of them playing around. They turned out beautifully.
According their Mum, Hana, her talent never showed until she played at the gig that got her noticed. “She never, ever sang. Juli was always singing, but she never had the voice Sapphire did. I would’ve never known if I didn’t go to that gig.” She recalls in a past interview.
Perhaps her talent comes from her father Geo’s (who left when the girls were six) side? Her official middle name is Giovanna and her sister’s middle name is Genevieve, as her father comes from a French and Swedish descent. Sapphire remembers a childhood filled with fights and makeups with her “inbuilt best friend” who also happens to be her sister. The girls were born in Essex but moved to Manchester after Hana and Geo divorced. They went to high school at Newall Green until March 2002.
“When I see movies where people are always in trouble, that’s what my life was - and kind of still is - like. But it wasn’t like I was going to keep doing school anyways, Lord knows I would’ve left at some point, even if it is after college,” she laughs. “I was actually known in my school for doing stupid things, like sneaking food colouring in the teacher’s coffee and her teeth would be blue the rest of the day! And my sister was in the school’s clique. That shit messed her up mentally.”
What do teenagers do these days anyways? Sapphire seems to know quite well.
She blows a raspberry. “Drugs. Alcohol. Smoke. Sleep around,” she smiles. “I mean, I smoke and sometimes I drink. But I don’t do drugs, and I barely have sex with Jack, which is strange because everyone in the fucking world does that stuff except me because they think it’s cool and it makes them popular, but don’t fuck up your life for some shitty recognition that won’t even matter ten years down the road, if even a year.”
But perhaps she’s considered trying it? With all the access?
“It’s fucking mad how easily accessible drugs are these days, and people do it, and they do it once and they don’t realise it could be that first or last time that could literally rob you of your life,” she shakes her head. “Crazy man. Drugs ruin your life, it causes pain!”
Pain is what drives Sapphire’s career. Songwriting was never new to her, as her life always had something going on it that was worth writing about. She had been writing poems from the age of six, but began writing songs at thirteen, when she fell in love for the first time. This experience was most of the inspiration for Melancholic Blues.
“I had just started dating Jack, and i’d never felt that way about anyone in my life,” she looked as if she was remembering a special moment they had. “And we’re still together! Five years. That’s insane!”
Since then, Sapphire has been on a metaphorical, if not emotional, tear. In contrast to the poppy love song Doll, a song about being young and naive, A Series of Unfortunate Events opens with the popular line “we all chug lies when our minds are thirsty.”
“I wrote that at the beginning of all this..” she makes a movement that shows craziness with her hands. “Madness, or whatever. I was so oblivious to everything, because all this cool, insane stuff was happening.”
Back in the nineties, Jane Pratt’s Sassy and Jane magazines made room for girls who didn’t feel that they fit it with society's standards. Sassy writers were blunt, straightforward and all around dope, and Sapphire was exactly the type of person they’d crush on. She’s the type of musician young, insecure girls - actually, all girls, for that matter - need in their lives, because she doesn’t hide that she goes through the exact same things any other teenager in 2004 would go through. She makes it okay to be unapologetically yourself.
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Fame Monster Act l
General Fiction"Because the tragedy of Sapphire Taylor was like something out of a movie. It was surreal. Her life was surreal. It was lived out in public, in front millions of people, since the age of eighteen. She was twenty six when she passed, but still acted...
