INTERVIEW: Clara Fable talks her inspirations, career and new single 'Jennifer's Body'

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Sydney based singer-songwriter-entertainer Clara Fable has been performing across the world for a number of years now. Always having a love of pop music and inspired by artists such as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, in 2020 she decided to launch her own music career. Her debut single ‘Nosferatu’ is a chilled, brooding electro pop track with the follow up ‘Cherry Ripe’ being a addictive synth-pop track whose bright and perky beats contrast with the serious and sexy lyrics that explore Fable’s awakening as a queer woman.

Earlier this month she released the powerful single ‘Jennifer’s Body’ inspired by the film of the same name. Mixing the carefree joy of pop with the dark thrill of horror movies it is a sensational track which has an equally wonderful music video portraying the most glamorous - and campest - exorcism you will ever see.

Just three singles into her pop music career, Clara Fable is proving she is one of the most exciting new talents to emerge onto the Australian music scene. Endlessly versatile, ignoring genres and bringing unique new sounds and influences into her soundscapes, Fable’s upcoming releases are going to be super exciting to behold. We recently caught up with Clara to find out more.

Hello Clara it is a delight to chat with you today. You of course have a delicious new single out, ‘Jennifer's Body’ inspired by the cult classic horror comedy. Talk me through this bad boy.
I'm very inspired by Lady Gaga, and classic pop, Katy Perry and heavy catchy choruses. And I felt that with ‘Cherry Ripe’, I found that and I wanted to continue it but give it a little bit of a different spin. Something really, really catchy but that was going to be in a different realm. I was really inspired by ‘Do What You Want’ by Gaga, she’s saying ‘do what you want, do what you want with my body’. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I really like that’. But I want to put a spin on it, my kind of demonic, vampire vibes. And it was ‘take control of my body’. And then adding all the visuals and production to make it that more spooky kind of sound. That's where it came from.

The video for ‘Jennifer's Body’ is just over the top production and incredible you give an incredible acting performance. Talk me through it, what was it like to create?
I collaborated with the incredible Felicity Jane Heath who directed ‘Cherry Ripe’. She's an incredible Australian director and producer who has been living in LA for about 10 years. Surprisingly, we didn't meet in LA, we just had a lot of mutual friends. And when COVID happened, she was back to Australia and messaged me and was like, ‘I would love to work with you’. And I was like, ‘I would love to work with you!’ And then we became friends. We just connected a lot on the same themes, and I was like I can't even believe people understand where I'm coming from with my visuals. I would come at her with the most crazy ideas and she would just say ‘oh yeah, I love that. Let's do it’. It was a really beautiful friendship and work relationship that connected very quickly. And then with ‘Jennifer's Body’, I definitely knew that this was the next one to come after 'Cherry Ripe', because I wanted something upbeat, catchy, super poppy. But I was like, ‘hear me out - I want to be a demon, I want to be possessed.’ I'm obsessed with the movie Jennifer's Body, let's take a nod to that cult classic, and put some little easter eggs throughout it. And then make it the Clara Fable universe.

You're talking about, like, do what you want to my body. And there's this very burlesque nature that goes with your performance. It's so beautiful. With burlesque, it's like it's comedy through dance and being able to put a playful spin on that performance of the tease. Within the music industry, of course, women always are one thing or the other, they have to be sexy, but not too sexy that they’re sluts. There's all these layers. What I love about your style is you make it burlesque and you make it playful, and you can be as sexy as fuck, but it's done in a way that's there's still ownership, because all the control comes from you.
I grew up loving cabaret, burlesque, you know, the art of tease and dance and performance. But also being inspired by performers that were comedic, but in such a strategic way that people just love them for being that way. And it was almost like a adoration of making fun of myself, but also in a way that people other people want. I'm making fun of myself in a way that makes me happy and makes me feel good. In a way that people go, ‘oh, she's so campy’, but I'm just being ridiculous. I want to do this because it makes me laugh. It makes me have a great time while I'm on stage. And I think that comedy portrays as something so happy for people that you can't not love it. For me watching stage shows and going to concerts and seeing my favourite performers and how they portray their music live, I want all of those elements but I want to make people laugh. And a big person that does that is Katy Perry. In every single video clip she is inherently making fun of herself, but she does it in a way that super sassy and sexy and portrays as camp and I was like ‘I need to do that.’

Absolutely. And you dance like a beast. Have you always danced?
I'm gonna totally throw myself under the bus and say I'm not a professional dancer and I have literally winged it my entire life! I'm good at talking, you know, I can talk my way through any audition. It seems to have paid off!

You recently performed at the Sydney Mardi Gras show and it looked incredible. What was that experience like?
It was fun! I love being onstage and during COVID it's been really tough to disconnect from that and go, ‘okay, what else can I do in my mediums of music and my artistry that still portrays that I'm an entertainer.’ So it's been really, really cool to get back on stage again. Having an audience in front of you, you bounce off their energy. Dancing or singing in front of a camera gets to a point where you're like, ‘Okay, alright, I need my audience, I need you guys to see what I've been doing’. And creating and the energy is the best part of performing.

Anyone that's seen your videos will know that incredible performance is what you strive for. Last year’s release ‘Cherry Ripe’ is just poptastic. Again there's that beautiful macabre, drag empress quality to it, really gorgeous. But then there's quite a story there with the lyrics. Can you talk me through its origins?
Cherry Ripe is a cheeky little nod to being a queer woman. I’m being really naughty, but using words that are really pretty and beautiful to kind of explain what it's like to be with another woman for the first time. But I'm doing it in a way that people are like, ‘Oh, I love this song’ and I'm like ‘oooh I'm being real naughty here!’ It’s about discovering sexuality and discovering how you feel about it and how you navigate that as a person and as a woman. If you read the lyrics, you're like, ‘Oh I know exactly what she's talking about!’ But I'm doing it in a way that is super respectful, but really sweet and cheeky at the same time.

There's nothing like a contrast! And you do that a lot with your work. You have this gorgeous, gentle melody, but then the words are just savage or vice versa. Is that something you lean towards always when you're writing, is that the kind of stuff you enjoy listening to?
I enjoy listening to music like that. If you are brought up on music that has a certain undertone or a certain message, as a musician, you're always going to be drawn to it and want to write in that way. So I definitely think that for me listening to someone like Melanie Martinez, who has very similar very sweet, beautiful childlike melodies and the synths are really beautiful…just everything is almost like a ballerina is how I describe her music. But she's singing about some really serious and heavy issues. So I wanted to take that as an inspiration, and the fierceness of all the people I love in music and turn it around and make it like a bad bitch anthem. Everything I sing about. I'm like, ‘I might hate you, but this song is so pretty so you have no idea.’

You are a massive pop fan, and are clearly on the hunt to create the perfect pop songs, which is incredibly hard to do. Where did your love of pop come from, and who were your sheroes growing up? Oh my goodness, Madonna is hands down the absolute top of my shero list. She is everything I like to embody. She is just so effortlessly herself. She exudes sex, but in a way that is, as you said before ownership. She takes control of every situation. And she uses her powers for good in music and that's what, growing up with her, I really loved that about her. And she broke boundaries. She was the first to do a lot of stuff in music that we do nowadays. Portraying certain imagery in music videos and on stage, she was the first to do that. She paved the way for pop music and pop artists and entertainers that wanted to be a little bit more edgy and risqué, and she paved that way for us. So I feel really, really amazing to be able to grow up in the era of her music, because it was super inspirational for me. And then as I got older, obviously Lady Gaga was a huge one, absolutely huge one. She took her version of Madonna and her favourite parts of Madonna, and then made them her own. I love that you can really see that clearly in a lot of performers where they take their inspiration, and then they make it their own.

And when did you start to create your own?
I actually started very late in life, I was always a musical theatre performer, I was always singing covers at pubs with a band or at weddings and stuff like that. I never really discovered my own sound until maybe 2018, 2019 when I was living in Japan, and I was just exposed to so many different types of artistry, not only within the country and the culture itself, but working for Universal Studios and being surrounded by 150 other incredible musicians, dancers, songwriters, producers all in one place. I really, really soaked up everybody's energies and everybody's abilities over there and learnt as much as I could, in a very short amount of time, came back to Australia and was like, ‘I want to be a pop singer, and I want to sing my own music and I'm ready’ and it kind of just happened like that.

Your music has taken you around the world, as you mentioned Japan & Universal Studios, and then Las Vegas as part of the Bad Wolves/Five Finger Death Punch tour, equally glamorous and otherworldly stratospheres of performance stages. And yet Australia has always been home to ‘dude rock’ with pop artists only recently being able to carve out a career on home soil. What are your thoughts on the pop industry in Australia, particularly with regards to women like yourself trying to be heard in this ‘dude rock’ environment?
For me, it's definitely a place where I am surrounded by wonderful women in music. But I feel compared to places like America, we're not a music hub like they are. And I think that really does portray differently through our music. If you're in America and performing onstage, everyone over there is so interested in knowing who you are, what you're doing, why you're here, this and that. And it's a really inspiring and energetic place. And I feel like in Australia, sometimes people are scared to feel that way. They're scared to reach out and find new things and discover new music and people. Here we're very set in our ways. So I loved travelling over to America to learn so much more about their culture and their energy. And the music hub over there is just thriving. In Australia we're slowly branching out and discovering other things and being more open to discovering people and new music. I'm really excited that a lot of people are discovering more Australian music, especially over in America. I have a heap of friends that tell me ‘Oh, I love that Australian singer’ and I'm like, ‘Oh, yay, this is awesome’, because I've always just been conditioned to think that America and Australia are very separate. I feel TikTok and the use of Instagram and the internet is becoming more and more prevalent in the mixing cultural and music. But I still am feeling we need to band together as women and just show the world that Australian music is so important and it should be heard.

Absolutely. You've touched on genre and people being set in their ways. Your music absolutely mixes up all kinds of not even genres, but styles you wouldn't put with a genre and vice versa. It's very just you playing with what you love. Do you feel that particularly today, those lines between style and music and genre are almost a thing of the past?
Yes, absolutely. I absolutely do. And I think with the use of and the accessibility of the internet, you're finding out that there's a lot of people in the world who also love blurring the lines between genres and creating new genres. More and more, especially female, producers are coming out of the woodwork and saying ‘this is what I love to do. This is how I make music. I blend this I do that’. And it's really awesome. Again, the use of TikTok has really, really elevated that. I've discovered people all over the world, especially women, who are incredible bedroom, pop producers, meshing these worlds together, and me thinking that could never happen. I get to access that now and I love that. It's very inspiring.

And finally Clara, we've got ‘Jennifer's Body’ out, what else is in store for you this year?
This year, I'm really looking forward to going on tour with Draculas. Very on brand for me. We're taking the original show and it's called Resurrection. So we're resurrecting he classic pieces from the original shows, taking it on tour going around to all the major cities of Australia. And it's going to be awesome. So I'm hoping to look at setting up some sideshows and some really, really cool small intimate gigs and stuff in every city. That would be really amazing. And then I'm also looking forward to working on my EP, which I would love to develop into a full visual, short film. So they are my goals!

‘Jennifer’s Body’ is out now. You can download and stream here.

To keep up with all things Clara Fable you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.