Eighties legend Cyndi Lauper reveals what she really thinks about Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and why she still just wants to have fun

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It’s a warm spring afternoon in New York City and Cyndi Lauper wants to ask me a question. ‘I don’t look like me with these glasses, do I?’ she asks. ‘You can’t tell it’s me, can you?’ 

Lauper has on dark shades, a black hat that covers her short platinum-blonde hair and a bright red top. I have barely had a chance to reply when we hear ‘Ms Lauper! Ms Lauper!’, as an overexcited middle-aged man approaches and asks for a selfie. 

Question answered: this isn’t just another glamorous older New Yorker – this is a trailblazing Grammy, Tony and Emmy award-winning pop star who has sold more than 50 million albums and recorded some of the biggest hits of the 1980s: ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, ‘Time After Time’ and ‘True Colors’. Impossible to miss, even incognito.

Lauper has lived in New York all her life. She and her husband, actor David Thornton, have since 1992 leased the same rent-stabilised apartment on the Upper West Side – residents have included Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Conan O’Brien and the late Sidney Poitier. Now 71, she is busier than ever, with the upcoming stage-musical adaptation of Working Girl, her follow-up to the multiple Tony award-winning musical Kinky Boots, and a new documentary, Let the Canary Sing, about her life. 

There are constant citations of her as an inspiration from a new generation of female artists; there’s this weekend’s Glastonbury performance; a show last week at the Royal Albert Hall; and her global Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, kicking off on 18 October in Canada.

On the day we meet, another famous New Yorker, Donald Trump, is on trial a few miles away. Accused of trying to cover up payments made by his lawyer to former Playboy model Stormy Daniels (who claims she had sex with the former president in 2006), he has since been found guilty. Lauper knows the guy: she appeared with him on the US version of The Celebrity Apprentice in 2010.

Cyndi onstage at the 12th annual American Music Awards, New York, 1985

What does she remember? ‘He was OK,’ she recalls, uneasily. ‘His kids were on the show – I thought he couldn’t be that bad, but I didn’t know they were going to put him in the f***ing White House.’ Lauper only appeared on the show to promote her work for LGBTQ+ rights, for which she has long been an advocate.

More recently, in 2022 she launched an abortion fund called ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights’: ‘If you don’t have autonomy over your own freaking body, what are you?’ she says. ‘You think a man is gonna be told whether he can or cannot have a vasectomy or can or cannot have kids?’

There is so much to talk about. Problem is, her publicist has set aside only 30 minutes for us, and we’ve hardly begun when I see Lauper’s PR signalling to start winding up. Lauper brushes them off, saying, ‘I’m the boss, I can do what I want. Let’s go for a walk.’

We enter Central Park. I ask about Glastonbury and she looks a little stressed. ‘I’m going to be OK,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘I just got to kick ass. That’s all.’ To maintain her voice, which used to have a four-octave range, and her health for performing, Lauper does three hours of vocal lessons a week along with weights, yoga and aerobics. ‘I’m not going to sing like I’m 30,’ she says. ‘But I’m not going to be a wallflower.’

We keep walking. ‘My parents used to take me here to see Shakespeare in the Park when I was a kid,’ Lauper tells me. She grew up in a Sicilian Catholic family in the borough of Queens. ‘The women were raised to do a certain thing,’ she says. ‘They said I was to learn how to cook and clean because that was what I was going to do the rest of my life.’

1983, In London, on the cusp of stardom; 1984, With her mother, Catrine, at a post-concert party, New York

But Lauper was always going to march to a different beat. When she was nine years old she dyed her hair green to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, and she used to haunt thrift shops, seeking vintage clothes. Later, that look would become iconic, but back then it only brought trouble. 

What was she like as a kid? ‘Weird. The other kids used to throw rocks at me for the way I dressed, and I was voted most likely to die when I was in high school.’

She grew up listening to Billie Holiday, Mario Lanza and, later, The Beatles, and as a girl was singing around the neighbourhood. ‘Music was a gift,’ she says. ‘When I sang I felt free, and that is why I sang – to feel free.’

1985, posing with her trophies at the 12th annual American Music Awards; 1993 ,live at Irving Plaza

Lauper left home at 17 after catching her stepfather spying on her in the bath, naked. ‘The whole thing was creepy and, in those days, nobody said anything,’ she says.

‘I learned to walk with my shoulders down and look as unattractive as I possibly could.’ She drifted from one job to the next – stable girl, judo instructor, ear piercer – and even ended up for a while in a tent in the woods.

‘I would sleep with an axe in my sleeping bag because I was so terrified,’ she recalls. We sit on a bench. There is music playing in the distance and the park is filled with people – most unaware of the pop icon among them.

‘I got a job as a gal Friday [a secretary],’ Lauper continues. ‘I really tried but it wasn’t for me. I would fall asleep reading the mail and was always daydreaming.’

It was music that saved her. Lauper had started off as a backing singer for assorted acts on the New York music scene before joining a band called Blue Angel. They split up but eventually Lauper got signed to make a solo record. 

She started looking around for songs to record. Among them was a track by an American songwriter, Robert Hazard, about a man who didn’t want to commit to a relationship because ‘These girls just wanna have fun’. Lauper rewrote the lyrics in 1983 and turned the song into one of the biggest hits of the 80s: a classic feminist anthem.

2010 at the Celebrity Apprentice live finale, New York, with programme host Donald  Trump and producer Mark Burnett

Among the little girls who grew up loving ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ were Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga; only days after we meet, Lauper will join Minaj on stage in Brooklyn. Gaga has described Lauper as ‘a lot of my inspiration’. For her part, Lauper says she worries about the pressure young stars are under: ‘I admire Taylor Swift so much. I don’t know how she deals with it [fame and attention]. I know it broke poor Britney Spears in half, it really did.’

Lauper seems to feel a duty of care to younger women. The intention behind ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ was something heavier than a frothy pop song. ‘I’d read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. It just confirmed everything that I ever felt,’ she says. 

Moreover, ‘I knew that people were going to watch the music video, and if all the little girls watching it could see themselves and connect with it, we would have our own little army of girls who wanted to have fun and be free.’ So, she says, ‘I sang it in the key of a trumpet because I wanted to trumpet it as an idea.’

The next hit, ‘Time After Time’, followed in 1984. In the video a tearful Lauper leaves home with only a duffel bag. Were the tears genuine? She nods. ‘I cried because I realised I had lived that in college. I would hitchhike and in the duffel bag was everything I owned. I cried because here I was, a famous person – but who the f**k would have thunk that?’

The legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis ended up covering the track, which merely caused her still more sleepless nights: 'I thought he wouldn’t like me – because I was weird and a feminist,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want him not to like me and not play it any more.’

In the end, being liked wasn’t a problem. Her debut album She’s So Unusual shifted 16 million copies. Suddenly Lauper was one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. ‘It felt like it was now popular to be odd,’ she recalls. ‘All of a sudden it was cool to be different.’

2018, with husband David for the fifth anniversary of Kinky Boots on Broadway; 2012,with Nicki Minaj and Taylor swift at the 40th American Music Awards, New York

The publicists start hovering again. Somehow we have been talking for more than an hour. I tell Lauper that I recently watched the Netflix documentary about the recording of ‘We are the World’, the 1985 charity single by the supergroup USA for Africa, in which she appeared.‘Oh my god!’ she recalls. ‘There was Michael Jackson and there was Diana Ross, these are the legends, and I just happened to be there because I had a hit record that year.’ Lauper wasso starstruck that she stuck close to fellow New Yorker Billy Joel. ‘I knew him,’ she says. ‘And he was kind of my buddy.’ 

That must have been a night, I say.

‘It was a good cause and the right thing to do,’ she replies. ‘In your life there’s a decision you have to make to either help or back away, and my tendency is if I can help, f***ing do it.’

Lauper and Thornton have been married since 1991. ‘He makes me laugh,’ she says. ‘He’s very opinionated and wildly creative. I love my husband.’ They have a son, Dex, 26, a rapper, who was arrested in February for criminal possession of a weapon after police allegedly caught him with a gun. (As he is on bail I’ve been asked that we don’t speak about him.)

By now, Lauper’s publicists look like they are about to have synchronised cardiac arrests. We have been talking for more than two hours and Lauper is running late for her next appointment. She has a reputation for being a little kooky and, to use her word, weird. But by the time I say goodbye I am convinced that this is not the full story. She reminds me a little of Dolly Parton because Lauper, too, has long been underestimated as an artist and activist.

‘I’m Sicilian and I was born with boxing gloves,’ she says. ‘The women who raised me taught me endurance, so I said what I thought, didn’t put up with any bullshit and fought to do my own thing.’ Then she’s off, disappearing into the streets, a born New Yorker, still doing her own thing, in her natural habitat.

The Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour reaches the UK next February; cyndilauper.com