Whisky, Wine & 杜松子酒 | Inked Australia 

Inked would like to stress that no children or animals were hurt during this interview, and everyone in the room was most definitely sober. We think…

To do justice to Gin Wigmore’s character, we should really just give you the transcripts of the interview word for word, but reading 20 pages of us laughing so hard that we fall off our seats may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Plus, you’d be left with the false impression that she is guided by the devil (two of them, actually), and is insane. That last one may be true – the tests were inconclusive.

What’s apparent about Wigmore is that she isn’t worried about what other people take from meeting her. She is straight up, and while she is now in the position to take on new opportunities in life, this New Zealand gypsy gives the impression that she is still the same girl who was struck by the music bug at 12 years old. Marching to her own beat – possibly with her own band, physically or just in her head – Wigmore is charismatic, open, and bloody hilarious.

Wigmore is mostly known in Australia and New Zealand for the unique sound her vocal chords can produce. Labelled everything from forceful to fragile, her raspy, soulful singing is quirky, not unlike her video clips. There is always something just a little different going on – perfect for a girl who is never in one place for too long. Having become a force below the equator, she is now spending her time in the US and Europe, breaking into new markets that have started to open up to her, with her music appearing everywhere from a Lowe’s commercial in the US to the latest Heineken beer commercial with Daniel Craig, and in TV shows like

Wigmore admits that long ago she gave up on relying on routine to guide her days, and she realises how it makes her sometimes appear. “People think you’re a fucking weirdo,” Wigmore says, between bouts of laughter. “I remember being at a hotel about a week ago and I said ‘what day is it?’, and the guy said the it was 17th or something, and I was like ‘No, what day is it?’. And I was thinking, I’m actually a crazy person. He can’t understand, I’m asking for the day and he’s probably thinking surely she must know what day it is, she can’t be that mental. But I didn’t know because flying in and out confuses everything”.

Working on completing two tasks a day – waking up and going to sleep – she embraces the confusion of her chosen career. “I think that the thingabout this job is you’ve got to have a lot of gypsy blood. You really need to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants person and be prepared to miss everything. That’s normal, and if you’re cool with that it’s rosy”.

Things eventuate quickly, too. One Wednesday she was told she didn’t get a part on a huge campaign for Neiman Marcus and Target, who had booked out the entire set of ad slots for the final of TV episode of Revenge. Thursday, still no news. Friday she goes to bed, due to fly to London the next day. At 6am the call comes through: “Okay, in 90 minutes you need to be at the airport; you’re flying to LA where we’re doing this Revenge thing”.

Far from just being a commercial, it was a campaign like no other, with each ad break telling another chapter of a devious story, and with all of the clothes available to be bought straight from the television. It made worldwide press.

Alongside the ratings for Revenge, which are phenomenal, millions watched Wigmore shake her thing. “Trying my sexy moves” in a scene where the protagonist throws a party and Wigmore is on stage – a role she’s comfortable with – she even got a line to say with her thick Kiwi accent. Wigmore says that she’s “mixing in a lot of different circles these days”.

It’s not surprising then that people that have met Wigmore want to work with her. Halfway through the interview we’ve thrown out the questions, we’ve dragged one of her good friends to the conversation and she probably knows as much about me as I’ve learned about her. Somehow, she’s convinced me that the craziness should be broken into a three-part series on the craziness of Wigmore’s life, along with three covers, and we’re planning on cover lines such as “Andy will you marry me? For real!”

But we are planning on searching the building for whisky, and predicting tattoos at 2am. Alas, we decide we should probably opt for lunch instead.

Wigmore’s life is filled with: “Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m doing this” moments and we’re not just talking drunken times on Sunset Strip (though we’ll get to that later), nor her “super babe” boyfriend, who the magazine is apparently proposing to (on behalf of Wigmore), or any moment where not remembering the next morning is a good thing.

Still a fresh voice overseas, she has found herself touching Jay Leno’s 1930 Bentley (and Jay Leno himself). Along with shooting with ‘007’ Daniel Craig – a sexpot she describes as looking like he’s been in a “good few fights, with less of a chiselled jaw and more like a ‘where is my jaw’”, but admits that luckily she “quite likes a man like that”.

Back to that drunken night on the Strip. Three friends, blind drunk on whisky (don’t try this at home, kids), stumbled along Sunset Strip into a tattoo studio. “The tattooists were like ‘we can’t tattoo you, you’re so ripped’ but the guy was like ‘if you really want a tattoo then our rookie dude that we’re training can tattoo you’.” Needless to say this wasn’t the best idea to begin with. But Wigmore, in her wisdom, took up the offer and then instructed the apprentice exactly how he was doing it wrong, even uttering the words “you don’t even know how to draw a heart shaped eye”. Needless to say, she woke up with a wonky piece on her hand, one she later had covered by her hand flower tattoo. Her friend’s tattoo, however, was perfectly cute. “Oh no”, gasps Wigmore, “I’m never going to get tattooed again [after telling that story]; they’ll be like ‘get out Gin Wigmore!’”

Wigmore admits her tattoos are often the result of a spur of the moment decision, starting with her first one at the age of 14. Like many girls, she started with a tramp stamp – more because it was a way of hiding it from her parents, than any fondness for the position itself. “My parents went away for the weekend. I had $370 in my bank account. I was staying at my friend’s place and thought “fuck it, it’s tattoo time”. My brother was in the fake ID business so it was perfect. I took $365 out of my account and did it. I went to school the next day and was like ‘yeah check this shit out! Hoochie!’ My parents came back the following Monday and I bent over to help them with their bags and heard, ‘What the fuck is on your back?’ I tried the ‘nothing, just some sharpie line’.”

Even her favourite piece – a bear on her lower right arm – was picked from the inside spread of a magazine. Why did she pick it? “Because he’s always angry, always pissed off! So there, that way I can balance it out by being reasonably calm.”

Luckily, this time she’s booking in with better artists, such as Johnny 2/3 in LA. “I feel pretty good generally when it comes to getting tattooed. I freaked out on my lower arm because it was my first really big one. And I freaked out on my underarm one because I kinda got peer pressured, by myself. I peer pressure myself a lot. ‘Do it Gin, Do it’. I swear, I have two little evil people on my shoulders. They’re just evil. No good angel – she left years ago.”

As unplanned as they might be, Wigmore’s tattoos, like many of us, are just little parts of her personality coming through on the skin, almost rising to the surface as the years go on. She is one of the few heavily tattooed females, along side the likes of Christina Perri and Lights, that is making music waves worldwide. “That’s what I find annoying about chicks sometimes,” says Wigmore. “Chicks and music; most girls take this whimsical, pretty flower, virgin thing. It’s like ‘fuck that, we’ve all had sex, get a tattoo to prove it’. Mark that cherry-popping and just do it!”

While the laughing continues for five minutes, what’s apparent (aside from how loud we’ve become) is that Wigmore is always thinking about new possibilities and opportunities. Suggesting a possible collaboration for her next album, Wigmore doesn’t need much prompting before she circles Pat Benatar as her dream duet, something we discuss more seriously at length. Thinking a little harder, she also circles Elvis. “I’d want him to be the fat Elvis though. So that I could possibly upstage him. If he was the skinny Elvis he would trump you 100 per cent.”

A “high expectations psycho”, Wigmore isn’t happy to rest on her laurels or remain purely ‘New Zealand’s crazy sweetheart’. What’s pushing Gin is Gin, and while she’ll never stop peer pressuring herself into outlandish or career-changing risks, she does admit that if she was able to tour the world to sell out crowds of over 20,000 people, she would allow herself to sit back in a nice big oversized chair for a month or two, to reflect on how far she’s come. For now, however, she lists the things I’ll need to bring for part two of our conversation (to happen some time in an unplanned, undefined future) and, after a long time, the conversation deteriorates to what must sound, to most people, like cats mating in an alleyway. One of her reps steps forward to end the chaos, perhaps looking to save one, or both, of us. I think I need a drink!

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