The Intelligence on Sariah Bishop
by Alex S. Johnson
“Anything you want, you know I’ll give you
I know what I want, I will deceive you.”
--Sariah Bishop, “Anything”
Sariah Bishop’s sofa, her “beautiful sofa,” is Victorian and blood red. At her Whiskey a Go Go debut on July 8th of this year, Sariah imported the sofa onstage. (Along with her granny drawers, stockings, candelabra, Holy Bible, showers of platinum blonde curls, intelligence, direct stare and focus before the spotlight.) It’s a beautiful thing to see a young Diva claim her power. With only half an hour in which to perform, Sariah shimmyed, sashayed, glided, pounced, and innovated--a move new even to her, the slide. She had conviction. She represented. And her zone begins here, with the beautiful, blood red Victorian sofa. The centerpiece of a hard-rocking, haunted bordello. The first clue in a mystery, perhaps.
What you need to know about her: Sariah Bishop is French Creole, the third of four children, cherishes the fiction of Anne Rice and Clive Barker, calls Los Angeles home now and manifests a pure, dark power from the throat. Mute Malevolence, the first album from this ‘up and coming’ goth-industrial artist, announces her program up front. It is available currently from Sariah’s own Sin Icon label. But the allure she weaves on that album, and onstage, only accounts for part of the picture.
“Mute Malevolence is me, but I’m all grown up now. I’m actually kind of impressed that I can still pull off that girl.” By “that girl,” Sariah means the vulnerable face that animates the songs on her debut; in her own, synthetically purred words, “naïve, so sweet” (from the song “Rebel.”) “But I think when I do her live now, the angst and aggression is there too. I’m not vulnerable. I know who I am. And yeah I’m sexy. I don’t ever want to go back there. But if I can help someone now who’s the way I was back then, maybe all that stuff is worth it.”
Until she had to walk down Sunset Boulevard wearing them, Sariah did not anticipate the dangers implicit in luridly stacked, black vinyl platform heels. “I pick up things, they’re like odds and ends; I figure okay, those are cute. Not thinking that I actually have to walk and perform in those shoes. I was pretty shocked actually that I did not fall onstage.”
But that did not happen. Sariah flounced down the stairs to the stage with perfect confidence. “I’m half and half. I’m very feminine, but I’m very strong, and both sides came out in my performance, as they do even in my writing. You saw the performance live, and there it was. One moment it’s this girl, she’s the victim, and the next moment--no she’s not.
“I’m just Sariah Bishop, you know. To the world, I’m projecting who Sariah Bishop is in my purest form. Whether it’s wrong or right, whether they get it or not, this me. I don’t want to play the tough girl because I’m not completely tough. But I don’t want to play the victim either, because I’m not really a victim. We all have that thing that, if you can control it, it can be very nice.”
The night of Sariah Bishop’s Hollywood debut was weird and full of obstacles to overcome?for one,, a series of bomb threats that made the police close off part of the Strip. “It was insane!” Sariah says, laughing. “You had to go down five blocks up on a different street to even come back around again. The traffic was crazy. Everybody was trying to make it to the show, and even Ginger Fish [from Marilyn Manson, who performed that night with his own band Martyr Plot] was standing there going, ‘Where is everybody at?’ You’re going three, four, five blocks up, you’re in traffic, you’re trying to find parking, and then you miss your band set. You can’t miss your own set?it really sucks!”
The photo on the back of Mute Malevolence shows Sariah peering at herself in a mirror. Exactly one week later she recalls her debut. Backstage at the Whiskey, Sariah’s “in the dressing room, I’m looking in the mirror, because I had on a skirt before, and I took it off. I don’t really wear skirts. They irritate me for some reason. So I’m in the mirror and I’m getting dressed, and then I start ripping my hose. ‘Cause I’m like, well everything about me is not perfect, and so far, I’m walking out looking like Barbie Doll perfect, which isn’t me. So I went onstage in my granny drawers?at least they were black! My Bible and my stockkings. Oh my God. That was insane. But it was a great night. I had a lot of fun. And I felt good about my performance. The response that I’ve gotten back so far has been good. Let’s just hope that it only escalates from here and gets bigger.”
Pushing through the cheek-by-jowl see-and-be-seen crowd at the Rainbow after Sariah’s set, perfect strangers make goo goo eyes at her. Sariah is strikingly beautiful with her dark, passionate eyes, high cheekbones and Cupid’s bow lips. Her Creole accent comes out stronger in the smoky heat, for some reason. People, men and women, stop and stare. She is treated like a celebrity, although this is only her first show. Recording moguls take notice. She is both polite and bold, an experiment in whiplash ambivalence. “You’re not really Creole,” says one happily looped customer. “Do you speak French?” Sariah’s eyes grow stony for a second. “No, I’m not French, I’m an American.”
Recalling the incident, Sariah says, “I’ve never really mentioned or talked about my ethnicity or my background or whatever you call it until recently. Because for some reason, we cannot move around in this country! If someone finds out that you’re Creole, that you have any French, you must be from Louisiana or New Orleans, you must be from down South. I’m like okay, but we do move around too. We’re in California, we’re in Florida. We’re in New York also. I get that a lot. I was raised quite American, obviously.”
Interest in Sariah Bishop is arriving from unexpected quarters. A BBC documentary team have chosen her as an ‘up and coming’ star in a film they’re shooting about the Whiskey. Sariah will take her place alongside Sunset vets like Lemmy. “I am an ‘up and coming,’ says Sariah, quote marks intact. “Here in Hollywood you have the has beens, you have the victims, you have the ones who are still trying to be, and then you have those who are. And then you have the up and coming. So it’s like everybody’s in the same bowl.”
Sariah is currently working on the follow-up album to Mute Malevolence. “I’ve been in the studio a lot, even right before the show. You know, I didn’t even sleep, literally. At what, two o’ clock literally, I was trying to get some rest, and then I had to do sound check at 2:30, then run back home. It was hysterical, but that’s the part of being an artist: You have to be in the studio at all times and just keep working.”
This fall, Sariah will be “doing at least two to three shows a week. And they also want me to do a show in Japan, and in China they’re really into me now, I just did FHM China. So we’ll just see what happens. I’m in preparation, but sometimes things alter. At this point, this is where I’m at.
“At this point I’m just living my life day by day. I do have expectations of good things and great things, but I spend too much time in my past, and looking at my future, without living in my now, or my today. And somehow that has sort of passed me by. I can still prepare for my future, but it’s still, it’ll be Sariah now, which is a young girl, having fun. To not be too hard on myself, because I have been very hard on myself considering my multiple background, where I’ve come from. One part is gravitating toward the light, perhaps seeing what’s going in this direction, and the other one’s more or less like, okay well that’s good, but it’s portrayed in a dark light, if you will. Both of those are a part of me.
“In my show, I looked over and said, ‘how in the hell did the Bible get on my couch?’ I’m onstage at the Whiskey, and then I’m singing and I look over, and I’m looking at my Bible. It was insane. So I did what Sariah Bishop would do?she would pick it up! The only thingg I know is, after I said whatever I said, like, ‘who was that clapping,’ I was like ‘okay, that wasn’t a wrong move.’ Even if it was, I wouldn’t have cared, because that was me in that moment, you know.”
