The ultimate guide to Grace Jones

This summer the legendary Grace Jones will headline the Brighton and Hove LoveBN1Fest.

Grace will take to the stage on Sunday August 4 and to celebrate Grace, we have compiled a guide to everything Grace Jones, courtesy of Sink the Pink’s ‘Glynfamous’ …

The first time I ever saw Grace was in View to a Kill and I was transfixed. She has this otherworldly grandeur to her and to be honest, I just wanted to be her!

This has not changed, she just keeps on fucking up everyones idea of what it is to be sexy, a woman, a lady of a certain age…She is a QUEEN! For fifty years Grace Jones has dominated culture, music, and fashion.

With every interview, every appearance, every outfit decision, and every gig, she finds a new, engaging, glorious, and utterly unchallenged way of doing things.

She pushes boundaries, turns heads, and drives culture forward. And she’s showing no signs of slowing down. All Hail Grace!

Grace’s Top 5 Tracks

1. Slave To The Rhythm

This track has never dated! You literally can’t get more eighties than this song – it’s indulgent, entirely over the top, and beyond fabulous.

It was originally written for Frankie Goes To Hollywood, but I can’t imagine anyone else singing it. Everything about this song from its swagger to how it allows her to work her entire range, is just perfect Grace!

2. I Need A Man

The amount of times I have stomped around dirty basements screaming this track loudly! Often forgotten but not by us gays, this is such a banger

3. La Vie En Rose

THE breakthrough from her debut record. It’s a reworking of Édith Piaf’s signature song that Grace made her own, Double camp whammy alert! Flooding it with all the creative sass, flair, and style she’s been heralded for ever since. It’s a sprawling seven and a half minutes of pure seduction. I love an extended record….well I love an extended anything really!

4. My Jamaican Guy

This is from my favourite and Graces most popular record! You can feel the Caribbean in this and I LOVE it.

I have seen Grace a few times and I love watching her perform this, It’s The Oooos and shreeks she makes whilst fixing hr stare on someone terrified in the front row!

YES small man she will eat you!. Every line is dropped with such confident charisma, even thirty odd years later it’s still packed with allure.

5. Pull Up To The Bumper

Okay so who has not got dirty to this? It just reeks of filth! There is no song in the history of man that has an intro as wild as the start of Pull Up To The Bumper. It’s like she’s melded everything great from the 80s into one song!

5 Iconic Grace Jones Moments

1. Bubble bath

The Grace Jones moments that really stick out for me are the stories she tells in her fabulous autobiography.

There’s one story about her conducting interviews from a bubble bath while sipping wine, slowly revealing herself to the interviewer. I love that, it feels as though she achieved infamy just by doing whatever the fuck she wanted.

2. Her rider

Have you read Grace Jones’ rider? It’s incredible! Cristal in the dressing rooms, unopened oysters because ‘Grace does her own shucking”, and transportation only by stretch limousine. What a diva. I love it, and I want it.

3. “Lived on red wine, oysters and cocaine”

In her autobiography, Grace talks about how in the 80s she just lived on wine, oysters, and cocaine. What a diet. Not that I’m condoning the drug use. I think it’s just the glamour of it, even if it’s completely untrue (which I doubt), it just makes her seem so much more otherworldly and untouchable – she would never just eat a sandwich like the rest of us.

4. Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall houseshare

When Grace Jones was a young model she lived in Paris and – just to prove this woman can never, ever be normal – her housemates were Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall. The three of them would go out to gay clubs, party together, take drugs, drink, and all shag the same men. It also really shits on any notion that your early years pre-drinking on the night bus to G-A-Y were in any way raucous.

5. Lovebox Sunday hula hoop OK, here’s one not from the autobiography. 2010 and the Sunday of Lovebox in Victoria Park (that used to be the best day of Lovebox, of course). Grace headlined and during Slave To The Rhythm she hula-hooped for eight minutes straight. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever witnessed on a stage. She is a queen and after I tried to do the same … 8 seconds was my record. I am SHIT!