Lorde’s fourth album – Virgin – is released tomorrow and the singer has been doing the promotional rounds, which has included a rather revealing interview with Stephen Colbert in which she talked about how she overcome stage fright.
The secret, she rather nervously disclosed to the talk show host, was guided MDMA therapy. “It truly, like, changed the game on my stage fright,” she said.
This conjures up images of Lorde boshing a load of pills, going to a club and getting right on one matey, as ravers used to say back in the day. Not so, it seems. Colbert asked whether “you talk it out or just have an experience,” to which Lorde replied: “I am a very quiet journeyer, I have been told.
"You just lay on a bed, you’ve got an eye mask on for six hours.” The therapist is there for the whole duration, though “there’s some talking.”
Anyway, it seems to have done the trick, in terms of curing her stage fight: “What I’ve heard, some of these (fears) live very deep in the body, and you hold on to it,” she told Colbert.
“You hold on to a response like stage fright for reasons that no amount of talk therapy or brain use could get at. But when you bypass that and get to the body, something shifts.
"And that totally happened for me. I tried everything for my stage fright. I did this therapy, and then literally, I woke up the next day and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s over. I know it’s over.'”
Which is just as well as she has a three-month tour lined up for this autumn which covers North America and Europe. There are November dates in Manchester, London, Glasgow and Birmingham on what she’s calling the Ultrasound tour, a title possibly linked to Virgin’s startling cover art which features an X ray of Lorde’s own pelvis with her belt buckle, jeans zipper and IUD (coil) all visible.
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