Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Disks podcast.
Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My cast away this week is the singer, songwriter and activist Cindy Loper.
She burst onto the scene in 1983 with her album She's So Unusual and she really was an explosion of colour and joy with a look and sound that were equal parts spirit and skill.
Her dressing up box aesthetic inspired a million lookalikes.
Her own inspirations were more esoteric.
She draped herself in thrift store petticoats, pasted Van Gogh's starry night to the soles of her high-heeled shoes,
recruited Annie Lieberwitz to shoot the album cover and insisted that the instrumentation on the record centrepiece,
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, should evoke the Coney Island fairground she'd grown up visiting.
The exuberant catchiness of that track and the soaring success of those that followed belied the years she'd spent struggling to become an overnight success.
She sold over 50 million records,
won two Grammys and her debut album was the first by a female artist to spawn four consecutive US top five singles.
She also won an Emmy as an actress and then took on Broadway composing the music and lyrics for the internationally successful and Tony award-winning musical Kinky Boots.
Her activism, inspired by her own experiences of homelessness and misogyny,
has seen her testify before Congress and been honoured by the UN.
She was unusual.
She still is.