INTERVIEW: The singer is winning her fight with cancer as well as conquering the charts, writes Brian Boyd.
'If the cancer returns, I'm going to remove my breasts, both of them," says singer Anastacia matter-of-factly. "It's a big decision to come to, but I've got there now. I just don't want to go through what I've been through again. Hell, I'll just get fake ones. If that's what I have to do to live a healthy life, then I'll do it. I'm not going to be a slave to this disease."
As one of the world's top-selling singers, 30-year-old New Yorker Anastacia had already battled chronic Crohn's disease on her way to the top of the charts, but just as she was to go into the studio to record her third album last year, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
"It was all so quick. I went in to the hospital for something else and they did a biopsy and found a malignancy. I think at the time I was more freaked out by the fact some son-of-a-bitch picked up a phone and leaked the story to the press. I was devastated because I had friends calling me up saying that they had heard these stupid reports on TV and it was hard to tell them it was true. I was always going to go public about it but I wanted it to be in my own time," she says.
The ensuing treatment - an operation and a debilitating course of radiation treatment - was, she says, "a huge, huge fight - I had the hardest time putting the word cancer and my name in the same sentence. I just felt like, and this might sound funny, I was being dangled out there like a piece of meat on a fishing rod to the cancer. I'm a very literal person and all this "might" talk from the doctors was driving me crazy. So I just continued with the album."
She hadn't allowed for the effects of the radiation therapy. "I thought, well this is going to be tough, but after a month of the therapy, I had nothing left. I couldn't form a sentence. My voice was so weak I couldn't sing. So I just surrendered to the treatment, and once I did that, I learnt to live with all the side-effects."
Radiation therapy was not going to stop her making her third album. Anastacia's previous two albums, Not That Kind and Freak Of Nature had sold 10 million copies, propelling her into Britney/Kylie territory, but without the attendant media overkill. Her big, brash urban pop voice has been favourably compared to that of Tina Turner.
As evidence of her single-mindedness and independence of thought, she got involved in an early spat with her record company over her refusal to take off her glasses in photo shoots and on-stage. "I need glasses to see, so I wasn't going to take them off because a stylist thought I should," she says. "I really didn't understand why they were trying to sell me a certain way back then. I'd be like 'Give me a microphone and an audience and that's all I need', I don't need the 17 stylists and hairdressers just so I can sing. I do wear contacts sometimes now - but that's because it's my choice - and I sold all those records while wearing glasses."
The current album, Anastacia, holds mixed emotions for her: "I feel like the cancer is here and the album is over there, if you know what I mean. I'm still, to this day, going through things and seeing a doctor, and once the cancer's a little bit further away so I can't shake hands with it, then I feel I can look at this album and see it as it is without remembering the difficulties of how it was to write it when I wasn't feeling good. There's a lot of confusion and determination on this one, given the state I was in when I wrote it. I am not embarrassed about what I've gone through. I'm not getting vulgarly honest about it on the album, but it was a very hard time for me and that's going to reflect a little in the songs."
Her experience of cancer prompted her to read, research and investigate. "I was never really 'why me?' about the whole thing," she says, "but that's the way I am. If there's ever been a difficult thing in my life I just try and climb over it. But with this, I was so determined to find out whether it was hereditary or environmental. There was certainly no breast cancer in my genetic make-up, so I got to thinking about why a woman in her 20s would get this. I do think more research has to be done into the environmental stressors out there which are unique to women. And that is ongoing research.
"In the short-term, what I'm campaigning for now is a lowering of the age of women getting mammograms. Traditionally it has always been 40-plus when women get checked, but I really think that bar should be lowered, down to at least 30 and even into the 20s. The big obstacle I'm finding here is the position adopted by the insurance companies in lowering the age."
She has just set up the Anastacia Fund at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, a fund that will help raise awareness and increase funding for breast cancer research in younger women. She is particularly interested in younger women with the cancer who, like her, have no family history of the disease.
"The family history aspect is important because younger women with the disease in their family are very quick to go for screening or even carry out self-examinations. It's those people who think they're safe that we have to hit. It was only my doctor's insistence that I have a mammogram that saved me."
Meanwhile, her urban pop career continues unabated. "How else I am going to fund the research?" she says. "I don't know what people will think of this or where it will take me, but at least I know I'm doing something."
Further information on the Anastacia Fund is available at www.anastaciafanclub.com. The album, Anastacia, is out now on Epic Records. Anastacia appears at the Point Depot, Dublin on November 11th.