Grace Jones unmasked: A pop diva reveals all

The apparition at the restaurant window is genuinely frightening. A huge, hairy monster with shiny eyes the size of coffee saucers, is gibbering and dancing in a deranged fashion beyond the glass, out in the chilly night beside the Thames, and waggling its fingers like a horrible insect. Sitting inside at the bar, I can feel my heart pound in my chest. It's like being set upon by the Snow Queen's crackpot African cousin. But it is not. It is merely Grace Jones, having a little joke.

Ms Jones is trying to be placatory because she is 65 minutes late for our interview, and I am on my third Sauvignon. She embraces me in a flurry of fur and limbs, removes her strange tricorn hat ("It's a Miyake. It's made of straw. They got people in the mountains who do this kinda thing. I call it my Napoleon look"), takes off her long, black, voluminous fur coat (on the hem of which some hapless man allegedly stepped during the Quantum of Solace launch party, and got a three-minute blast of steam-hammer Grace Jones abuse), shakes hands with the maître d', kisses the barman, orders a Bellini and some calamari Romana, flops down on a beige banquette and sighs theatrically.

It's been a busy time lately for the Jamaica-born über-model, actress and disco queen. Last month she brought out Hurricane, her first new album in decades, to wildly positive reviews. The first single, "Williams' Blood", is in the shops this week. Next month she embarks on a UK tour, beginning in Birmingham and ending at London's Roundhouse. And a TV documentary is being made of her life by Sophie Fiennes. Not bad for a woman who's reached 60. Not bad for a singer who quit making records in 1989, filed for bankruptcy in 1992 and all but disappeared from public view, except for odd tabloid stories about violent misbehaviour in Chelsea flats.

In her heyday of the late Seventies and early Eighties, she was the undisputed queen of gay discos, the cynosure of Manhattan nightlife. She hung out with Andy Warhol, and with Steve Rubell of the druggy nightclub, Studio 54. She was best mates with Arnold Schwarzenegger and girlfriend to the muscle-bound Dolph Lundgren. She strode the narrow world like a colossus. With Chris Blackwell, of Island Records, she brought out one throbbing disco/funk/reggae album after another from 1977 to 1982: Portfolio, Fame, Muse, Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, Living My Life.

There's always been more to Ms Jones than singing, of course. (Or modelling. Or acting.) Since the late Seventies, her muscular, athletic body and sculpted features have achieved a kind of celebrity status mainly thanks to her French photographer boyfriend, Jean-Paul Goude, who delighted in portraying his squeeze as an "exotic" jungle creature. Other designers and snappers glossed her massive lips, burnished her coal-black skin, topiarised her luxurious hair like a garden hedge, zipped her into a thousand S&M and dominatrix costumes. Long before Melanie Brown turned up in the Spice Girls, Grace Jones was Scary: lanky, androgynous, feral, sensuous, leather-clad and amazingly cruel around the eyes, she held the promise of cold blood, hot sex and extreme peril.

The lady in person at this glossy Putney restaurant isn't the least bit scary – at least, not after her initial flurry at the window. She is friendly and confiding. She is warm and rather emotional. She likes jokes. She likes hugs, and has been known to snog interviewers (of both sexes) but not, sadly, your humble scribe. She moves in a force-field of energy, loquacity, egoism, name dropping, husky cries of "Darling" and throaty laughter. This is typical diva behaviour, of course, but La Jones exudes a charisma that's beyond logic, and an assumption of universal adoration that marks a real star.

She's been staying in a flat near the restaurant for a month or two. Putney is not the London suburb of choice for many singing legends, but Fulham and Chelsea are just over the bridge (she lived in a £1.5m Chelsea Harbour apartment from 2002 to 2006, and was sued by its owners for allegedly causing £16,000 worth of damage).

What would visitors to the Putney flat see when they walked in? "A lot of boxes," she laughs. "I haven't had time to do much with it. They'd see some Philip Treacy hats, some Issey Miyake stuff, lots of flowers and musical instruments: guitar, ukulele, drums. The keyboard is still wrapped up, still to come out of its bondage."

Did she ever throw out her vast, ever-changing wardrobe of clothes? The Putney Oxfam Shop must be a veritable treasure trove of designer tat... "No, I keep everything. I have a museum of clothes in New York. I keep all the costumes from the movies I've done because, most of the time, I design them myself. It's just something I do."

There are loads of things that Ms Jones "just" does. As well as modelling, singing, acting and, er, sewing, she also plays musical instruments at a moment's notice. ("I'm very good at percussion, and I can do bits of piano and accordion. If I have a crash course for a couple of days, I can play them in concert".) When starring with Schwarzenegger in Eighties movie Conan the Destroyer, "I learnt to ride bareback, fighting, turning the horse on a dime." She's also written a screenplay about her Jamaica childhood, Jamaica Jones, which she hopes to direct, possibly with David Lynch. It wouldn't surprise me if she revealed a talent for juggling, or macramé, or a desire to be a UN ambassador.

For the past two years, her life has been transformed by Ivor Guest, a musician and producer, who asked her to supply some vocals for a track he was working on. A spiritual (and sexual) chemistry bubbled up between them, and he inspired her to climb back on the musical saddle. They became an item, co-wrote three songs, and co-produced the new album, on which Guest played keyboards and rehearsed the band for the forthcoming tour. He is, incidentally, the 4th Viscount Wimbourne, who inherited £30m in 1993.

I ask if her exposure to the British aristocracy led her, like Madonna, to embrace English ways. Barbour? Cloth cap? Tea-time? Desert Island Discs? "No, no, thank God I was never like that," she says. There was none of that tea-time business. We were all about creating music." She muses: "The English are intriguing. They dance around things. You have to be a mind reader to understand them. I never came here as a model, when lots of friends got big modelling jobs. There were bombs going off, which was a deterrent. But I love the English sky, how quickly it changes. It's not like Paris where the sky just stays there and hovers. Here the sky is very dramatic, and the clouds are changing. I've become a sky stalker."

The album, Hurricane, is an extraordinary amalgam of styles – strident drum'n'bass from the Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare rhythm section, swooshy keyboard "treatments" from Brian Eno, ambient bleeping, jungle sounds and Grace's declamatory vocals, sometimes as severe and bloodless as a prison Tannoy: her first words, "This is my voice – my weapon of choice", chill the bones. But it's also an album filled with family stuff, wobbling with nostalgia, trembling with sentiment.

The songs "Williams' Blood" and "I'm Crying (Mother's Tears)" are meditations on family. Her mother, a lyric soprano, sings "Amazing Grace" in the background. Grace's son Paul Goude gets a writing credit on "Sunset Sunrise". The album sleeve notes thank her brother Noel. The album is dedicated to her late father. Was it a way of patching three generations of her family life together?

"The funny thing is, I didn't realise it until my dad died," says Grace, "that I was gathering everyone together. He and my mum had a 60th wedding anniversary in December. And there's a song that talks about when my grandmum died, and my mother didn't cry, but my dad cried for her. This is all in the album. When I listen to the record now, it's as if someone was showing me my dad was going to die five months later."

Listen to "Williams' Blood" and you find yourself right in the branches of the Jones family tree. Grace sings about a girl of 17 who marries a preacher and settles down to a nice orderly life. "My mum always wanted me to do that, like she'd done. But music was in her family blood. Her dad used to play with Nat King Cole. The only photograph of him I ever saw is with Nat and his touring band in Miami. He died young, and mum always said to me, 'My God, you're living the life of dad.' And she'd say, 'You're gonna die young, like your dad.'" Gee, thanks mum. ("And he womanised, and I suppose I'm considered the female Casanova," says Grace, matter-of-factly.)

So the song is about being pulled between two sides of a family, forced to choose. One side is the devout, preacher-haunted Jones clan, the other the bohemian, keyboard-tickling Williams bunch. "When you going to be a Jones?" cry backing voices. "But I got the Williams blood in me," replies Grace.

Her mother sang and played the piano, but was dissuaded from pursuing a music career for a simple reason: her mother's brother – Grace's great-uncle – was bishop of Jamaica. As a result, the family were fated to live like paragons of virtue. "When you're a bishop in the Church in Jamaica, you got a lot," says Grace emphatically. "You don't have to lift a finger. People come in and live in the back of the house and do everything. I was never allowed in the kitchen. I never learnt how to cook."

The family had servants? "They were from the church and served the hierarchy of the church. It was a trip. We were always being scrutinised. Our house always had to be perfect, and we had to behave perfectly." Her mother, she points out, managed to find a husband only because he was a Pentecostal preacher with churches in Jamaica and America. "There was no way she could marry anyone else. They wouldn't let her out of the house, unless it was to go to church."

It was a tough, repressive time, made worse by the fact that her parents left Jamaica for Syracuse, New York, when Grace was only six, and the children were brought up, in Spanish Town, by their grandmother and step-grandfather. He was known by the patois name of Mas'Part, was 20 years his wife's junior and a nasty piece of work. "He scared us every day. He would say, 'Whatever bad thing you're going to do today, you will be beaten when you get home, even if you haven't done it.' So you'd be scared all day. Everything you did was wrong. If you were five minutes late home. If I had perspiration on my back when I got home, it meant I'd stayed and played after school, instead of coming home to church." Her eyes light with a sudden fury. "My lips were yanked because I always talked back. I was the rebel. I wouldn't listen. I can't remember what I said, but I said a lot of stuff. And he'd pull my fat lower lip hard. He was a shit. I didn't go to his fuckin' funeral. I'm sorry – God might forgive him but I won't."

Jeez, Grace, I say, this childhood stuff really stayed with you. "Yeah, apparently. I'm told by my acting coach that the reason I'm so scary is because I'm acting out my step-grandfather on stage." You're being him? "Yeah. All his movements."

Well, well – so the diva's stage persona, all that stalking and menacing, all the glaring and growling, can be attributed to her childhood bogeyman. Just as her career-long tussle with identities may have its roots in deciding whether she was a Jones or a Williams.

You seem, I say, to have a virtual obsession with sin and the devil. What was your youthful notion of the devil? "Rastas," she says without a beat. "You had to run and hide under the bed if you saw them coming. And if there was a pub next door, and music playing, you couldn't even look there. Anyone who wasn't in our church was going to hell." She was brainwashed, she says, from a very early age. "I was baptised and speaking in tongues at eight."

What did it sound like? And Grace Jones turns upon me a look of mad, staring eyes that is scary as hell, while her huge mouth opens and something inside that isn't quite a voice intones, "Hellameesherrack...meeshellackallah...".

She laughs. "It's not a made-up language. It relates to everyone." But it can't be understood by anyone, surely? "Only the people who are in it."

When she was 17, she and her siblings decamped to Syracuse to join their parents. She used to listen to her father, who also became a bishop, speaking in tongues when at his morning prayers. "He was a mysterious man. He was always up at 4am, which was terrible for us because we'd have sneaked out for the evening, and were sneaking back in through the basement windows at 4am."

She is evidently conflicted by her feelings for her father, whom she loved and bonded with over sport ("He did amateur boxing and he'd say, 'I'll take you out to breakfast if I win'") but whose religiosity annoyed her. The Jones house in Syracuse, was always full of people coming and going, looking for advice. "Dad was very wise, in a modest way," says Grace. "I think I was the only one who really understood him." But when he tried to throw her older brother Christian out of the house for being "swishy" (ie. gay), his wife said, "If he goes, I go," and Grace tasted rebellion.

She joined the Hell's Angels at 15 and rode a hog to Washington to be a part of Martin Luther King's famous March in 1963. Did she discover sex and drugs and rock'n'roll then? "Not then – but I wrote a song called 'Feel Up' about being on a bike with a gentleman, where they do everything except have sex. I was still blocked by religion. And I left them after I had a bad experience with THC [the active component in marijuana]." She moved on to drama school in Philadelphia and found herself in a musical version of Oedipus Rex. More importantly, she found a drama teacher who told her, "You know, you can really sing," and a legend was launched.

Though she was inspired by Dionne Warwick, James Brown and Tina Turner (who pipped Grace to the part of the Acid Queen in the rock opera Tommy) she never became radicalised by black power politics. She dealt with racism by ignoring it or interpreting it as something else. "Jamaicans are mixed-race – Indian, Chinese, red hair, green eyes – but consider themselves just Jamaicans; it's the tourists who're the minority." The year before her friend Naomi Campbell accused the fashion industry of discrimination for not putting enough black faces on magazine covers, Grace was having discussions with model friends, "and it was the mixed-race ones who were the angriest, because they didn't fit in either colour. I just flowed around it all like water." But did she never object to having her body used and manhandled by designers and imagists, stretched, spatchcocked, oiled, lubed up, painted with stripes and turned into a jungle fantasy?

"They turned me into a walking piece of art," she purrs. "It's the Ibo tribeswoman in me. Why should I mind?"

Grace Jones' new album 'Hurricane' is out now on Wall of Sound records. The single 'Williams' Blood' is released on Monday – and her UK tour starts on 19 January. For information and tickets call 0871 230 5576