Interview: Claire Boucher, musician

Boucher holed herself up in her Montreal apartment and blacked out the windows. For three weeks she barely ate or slept while she made music around the clock, mostly fuelled by amphetamines and cigarettes.

“I went to hell and back,” she says with a satisfied smile. “I was either in the throes of ecstasy or hitting rock bottom. I lost track of time. There was always this horrible moment when the sun would rise and start seeping through the cracks, and I’d be like, ‘I’m never going to sleep’. I was so deep in the hole. I was hallucinating and sometimes I would be so nauseated…” She sighs, takes stock, and continues. “But, you know, it was amazing. It was good to go there. Suffering is important.”

In the midst of this “purging,” Boucher made one of the most exciting records of the year. Visions is an album bewitchingly at odds with itself. The past and the future, shimmering pop and menacing techno, the agony and the ecstasy, the mainstream and the downright weird: it’s all here with Boucher’s childlike voice warbling over, under and through it like a one-woman symphony. This is suffering elevated to the sublime. Plus, there aren’t many albums that reference 12th-century choral music and TLC. “I’ve always wondered why Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin can’t make a record together,” is how Boucher puts it.

Grimes is poised on the brink of stardom, and she knows it. “Making art is what it’s about,” she says airily when I ask whether she’s worried about her life changing. “Most of this stuff is just a distraction. And I’ve got a pretty solid head on my shoulders.” She grins, then her glittered face clouds over. “I think…” She sighs and looks stern. “No, I’m up for it.”

We meet the morning after a packed-out secret show in north London where Boucher performed a brilliantly scrappy set, looping her voice while leaping between machines in a hairy jacket and hi-tops. She looked a bit like a possessed yeti. Today, round the corner from her label 4AD (she slept on the manager’s sofa the night before), she seems fresh-faced and surprisingly innocent.

“What are poached eggs?” she asks me and then to the waiter: “What’s a flat white?” She orders and demolishes both. She comes across as vulnerable and fierce at the same time, a paradox that runs through Visions. This has the odd effect of making you veer between wanting to protect her then wanting to applaud her.

On pop music, she is hilariously candid. Lady Gaga “is ripping off Marilyn Manson a lot. Her image and songwriting are really good but there is something about it all that I can’t fall in love with.” As for Lana del Rey, she says: “I love that she’s become this hated figure. You want people to hate you. If you’re just making people happy you’re like Mumford & Sons.”

Boucher is also well on her way to becoming a style icon. Last month, a Dazed & Confused cover; today, a photoshoot for Love magazine. She looks the part in leopard-print wedges and a coat like a deconstructed tent. She has hair the colour of algae, tattoos up her wrist, numbers on her hands, and a ring with an eye on her finger. I tell her I’m disappointed not to see her wearing a vagina ring, designed by a fellow Montreal artist, which she is selling as official Grimes merchandise. She whips one out of her bag, neon pink and surprisingly realistic. “I hate merch,” she says drolly. “If people are going to pay money we should at least give them something good.

“I hate doing anything I don’t want to do,” she goes on. “I would rather starve and be freezing than have to spend eight hours a day doing something that meant nothing to me. I mean, I could die at any moment. The world is f***ed, right? By the time I’m 50 there is probably going to be a nuclear holocaust. I should just enjoy myself.” Dramatic, yes, but somehow you know she means it.

Grimes is completely her own creation. Boucher makes the music, writes, produces, draws the album art and makes the videos. “I have forced myself to confront my worst fears,” she explains. Which are? “Being in front of people. People seeing who I am. Playing a show. Getting my picture taken. I’m just totally turned over as a person now. I used to have panic attacks if I was around too many people. I had serious problems before I made this record.” Why does she like terrifying herself? “Well, the rate at which you can achieve things is amazing,” she shrugs. “If you are constantly confronting your worst fears you zoom through life.”

Boucher grew up in Vancouver, one of four siblings and the only girl. Her father was a banker, her mother worked in public relations, and it was a strict upbringing. “I had a movement disorder called restless leg syndrome,” she explains. “And I have the weirdest time trying to sleep. I can’t stop moving.” This is true. Boucher’s conversation is accompanied by table slaps, wiggles and cat stretches. Her music never sits still either. “I get this tic when I try not to move,” she says. “I would get kicked out of class all the time. That’s why I got into dance.”

Boucher did ballet for years, and attended a Catholic school. “I’m really nostalgic about my previous ability to believe in God,” she tells me. “I’m not a religious person, but apart from now, that was the best time of my life. The world was this fantastic place and God existed. I would go to church and there was Jesus nailed to the cross, people crying, Mary holding her dead baby, and this choir singing. It was such a messed up, powerful thing. I’ve always been attached to that feeling. I really liked Catholic school until I hit puberty and we were told being gay is unnatural, don’t use contraception, and sex is bad. It was awful.”

So she had a lot to react against. “Yeah, I was not good with rules,” she says. “I was always in so much trouble.” Was she a rebel or a geek? “I was the bad one,” she says without a pause. “I’ve never not been in trouble. I’m still in trouble. My parents are super pissed with me right now.” Why? “My dad thinks I swear too much on Twitter and that my image is too sexy,” she sighs. “My parents are really conservative and they’re reading all this stuff that they didn’t know about.”

Like what? Boucher tells me that a few years ago she was the victim of a violent assault, which is the subject of Oblivion, the darkest (and most dancey) single on the album.

“I definitely did not tell them about that. And there’s the stuff about drug use, and some pictures online of me kissing my friend, who is a girl. They were horrified, which is dumb.” She tells me they aren’t really speaking at the moment. “I can’t talk to them until they’re cool with stuff,” she says. “Because I’m going to do this anyway. And I’m way too old to still be getting in trouble.”

After graduating, Boucher escaped Vancouver for Montreal to study neuroscience and philosophy at McGill, one of Canada’s best universities. But the DIY arts scene, centred around the Lab Synthèse warehouse, beckoned. She started meeting people, making music, and eventually dropped out.

“I was at the end of the line emotionally,” she admits. “One of our best friends at Lab Synthèse committed suicide, then the space shut down. And I got frostbite on my feet. It was really cold and we didn’t have any heating. I took off my socks and my feet were all white and purple. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. It went on for months.” It was around this time that she locked herself away and made Visions.

It’s an incredible story, sad in places, uplifting in others. Making Visions and becoming Grimes has transformed Boucher’s life in every possible way. “It’s like I had to do this to let it all go,” she says. “I feel there is a before and after this record. I’m happy now.”

What did she do to celebrate when she emerged from her apartment? “I was so shell-shocked, so skinny and pale.” Boucher says, clapping her hands to her legs to quieten them. “I went upstairs to my friends’ place and we watched this really dark, psychedelic film called Enter The Void. It was one of the best movies I’d ever seen, I’d just made the best art I’ve ever made, I did the album art, right there and then, and it was the best painting I’ve ever made. The sense of achievement was incredible. I had been a ghost knocking around space, totally lost, knowing I needed to do something real.” She smiles, and the glitter on her cheekbones sparkles. “And you know what? I did.” «

Grimes plays the Berkeley Suite, Glasgow, tomorrow night; the Liquid Room, Edinburgh, 28 August; and the Arches, Glasgow, 29 August. Visions is out now on 4AD. www.grimesmusic.com