Back in the the days of her youth, Belinda Carlisle, lead singer for The Go-Go’s, was apparently that kid in school whom parents warned about.
The all-female pioneers of pop-punk are finally getting their long-awaited induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, and Belinda is opening up about the impact of the band, her own experiences with popularity and fame, and the life-changing decision she eventually made regarding her excessive drug use.
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Carlisle, now 62-years-old, grew up as a wanderlust in Thousand Oaks, a city just outside of Los Angeles. The oldest of seven children, Belinda saw music as an escape from an abusive father who she says left her with feelings of having something to prove. “I wasn’t stupid, I wasn’t a loser, I wasn’t what they said I was,” she explains in a new, extensive interview with The Guardian. "Hitchhiking, running away, dropping acid,” she says was her outlet… “But at the same time, I was a cheerleader, so I managed to be both people. I was born a little bit of a rebel, and that was one of the reasons punk music appealed to me.”
Once she made it to L.A. at just eighteen, she met similar-minded people with whom she would eventually form strong bonds. “We’d have parties, we’d show up at the same clubs. I lived in a punk rock commune for a couple of years with Jane [Wiedlin, Go-Go’s co-founder] – this derelict building in the bad part of Hollywood, and it was all bands and music. And drugs, of course. There were about 50 of us who were the original, I guess, Hollywood punks.”
Carlisle says she feels lucky to have had that experience. “We just had a blast, it was a girls’ club,” she says. “No guys allowed, no boyfriends. We had girl roadies, female management.” The band went “from zero to 100 in three years,” not just because of the support from their tight-knit community. Drugs were also heavily involved.
Belinda says she was always aware of the pitfalls of substance abuse, telling The Guardian she always had a little voice inside her asking, "'What are you doing?'" Admitting she was "an acid head," originally, Belinda says it all changed for her when she was introduced to cocaine: “I thought: ‘Oh my God, when I get money, I’m going to buy lots of this.’ And I did.” Three years later, most of her money had been spent on drugs, clothes, and a racehorse of course.
“I had a complete blast, but it does become a problem normally at some point. It was fun until it stopped being fun,” says Carlisle, ”and then it just became a real f***ing nightmare... I mean, everybody was just off their trolley.” Drugs, money, and in-fighting eventually broke up the band, with Belinda admitting now that she was “incapable of being creative” at the time. “I couldn’t really find it in me to ask for what I thought was fair because I was such a mess.”
Belinda kicked her bad habits once she began her solo career after The Go-Go’s disbanded, but found a new set of challenges being forced upon her based on her weight. “It was horrible. I look back now, and I was normal – I would fluctuate in weight and that was never an issue. I think one of the things that people loved about the Go-Go’s was we were normal girls. But when you’re that young, and weight was always mentioned when I was in the paper, that really messes with your head. That was one of the reasons I got into drugs, because I could keep my weight down.”
Following up the success of her debut proved difficult and by her fourth album, Belinda found herself back on cocaine, taking a break while she was pregnant with her son. "I was in a really bad place from age 40 to 47," she says. While recording a French-language album in 2005 which she bailed on choosing a cocaine bender instead, she had a sudden realization: “I just knew that it was only a matter of time before I died.” After multiple attempts to get sober, which never truly stuck, Carlisle was "just sick of the lies and the drama,” she admits. So, after one final bottle of wine, "I just stopped and got myself some help."
"I woke up and that was it. I was over cigarettes, over pills, over everything," she says. Joining AA and finishing the record, "got me through the early days of sobriety. I was able to be creative," she says, "and I didn’t really care if anybody ever heard it."
Aside from The Go-Go's Rock Hall induction this year, Carlisle is currently working on new material, as well as U.K. tour plans for the Fall. "I would never, ever have thought that I would still be working at this age, but I still love to do it,” says Carlisle.
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