Annie Clark re-imagines St Vincent alter ego on new album

Annie Clark has re-imagined her St Vincent alter ego on her new album, says Ed Power.

WHAT’s happened to Annie Clark, aka St Vincent? She used to be earnestly unprepossessing, a picture of girl-next-door innocuousness, with frizzy, loose-hanging ringlets. Three years later, she’s the indie Lady Gaga — a pasty mannequin with a platinum-bleach fright wig, a retro-future wardrobe worthy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and plastic mirror-shades concealing half her face.

How can she have changed so much?. “I start from the premise that everything is performance,” Clark says, in the austere function room of a fashionable Dublin hotel. “Whether you are on stage with an acoustic guitar or doing a choreographed dance, you are still communicating something. I just wanted to heighten that. It’s better than going out and strumming along. That doesn’t interest me at all.”