The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs Karen O on her favourite things

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer on rock chicks, punk dives and NYC

“At school I was an outsider, excluded from everything,” says Karen O. “This half-Korean, half-Polish goof. So I always did my own thing. But I’m not complaining; it helped me to become who I am today.” Karen Lee Orzolek, 31, is today the idiosyncratic yet charismatic frontwoman for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, arguably the world’s hippest band. She formed the group in 2000 with guitarist/keyboard-player Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase and they made their debut in 2003 with Fever to Tell, included last week in The Times’ best 100 albums of the decade (timesonline.co.uk/music). They embark on a British tour this week, having delighted critics and public with their third album, It’s Blitz, in which O transmogrified from the darling of the arty NYC post-punk scene into an Eighties-styled electro-disco diva, with an accompanying wardrobe of barking-mad stage outfits. This, it seems, is her year. “I’ve also just written the soundtrack for Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are,” she says proudly. “It was a dream project for me, exactly what I wanted to do.”

...frontwomen

Betty Davis Not the actress — the funk rock singer. I love everything about her: her persona; this raunchy antagonist nasty gal, the way she mashed up the genres; her lyrics (like in Anti Love Song), her vocals punctuated with those sort of guttural noises, and then there’s her style. Huge afro, platforms and micro-short all-in-ones — she was as sexy as hell. I feel as if she is my long-lost sister.

Poison Ivy of the Cramps Her stoic, mysterious stance, hardly moving or showing emotion, completely won me over. As a companion to my other favourite, Lux Interior [the Cramps’ late singer], you can’t beat them.

Mary Weiss, of the Shangri-Las There is something really great about this suburban white gal singing about leather jackets and biker gangs in the Sixties. I just love the hypocrisy.

...style icons

Divine A great, big, outrageous drag queen, he appeared in all the classic John Waters films such as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Hairspray. He was a good 250lb, wore floor-length Fifties ball gowns, those crazy wigs, while his make-up was sorta punk futurist Bride of Frankenstein. Genius.

Edith Massey Another John Waters star; she had a punk band in the late Seventies called Edie and the Eggs, when she was 60 years of age. She is a major fashion influence on me. She takes it way past the edge and crosses the line so far that it is totally out of sight.

Petra von Kant In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, she wakes and transforms herself into these completely different personas every day wearing these couture outfits and then just lazes about her house. I love that she does all that just to please herself. To me, that’s what it’s all about.

Anna Karina She was this actress, writer, director and muse of the film director Jean-Luc Godard who had this real quirky French style that is cooler than the coolest.

...NY haunts

The Mars Bar An original punk rock bar full of old alcoholics and young punks. This is where I met Nick [Zinner, the YYY co-founder]. They put artworks on the walls that are created by the regulars and haven’t changed the decor since it began.

The roller disco in Central Park The place to go in the afternoon on the weekend. They play Parliament and Funkadelic and rare funk and disco. It could only happen in New York. It’s like a time warp full of people that were doing it in the Seventies.

Katz’s Deli A proper New York institution that started in 1888 [and the setting for that Meg Ryan scene in When Harry Met Sally]. I get the crispy hot dogs, the pickles and the knish.

...NY films

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) This is the nostalgia of the Eighties that I hang on to. It is my vision of how it was then and, according to reliable sources, it is 100 per cent accurate. Anything went — which sounds pretty damn good to me.

Minnie and Moskowitz (John Cassavetes, 1971) This is one of my favourite films. It stars Gena Rowlands, and is set half in New York and half in LA, which is a bit like me.

Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964) I love the way that Anger mixes up the Jesus imagery with the Coney Island biker gang thing. I feed on all of these things. They fuel this dark fantasy image that I have of New York, which I use to build up my own myth and persona.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs are on tour from Sun; Where The Wild Things Are is out Dec 11

Chris Sullivan, Times Online 28-11-2009

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