And," she concludes, finally pausing for breath, "I think my defences just crashed down. And sometimes I think I can be without sleep. So by the time I get to the stage I'm like, 'Oh, this is home.' So far on tour it's been great, and I leave every night so energised. "It makes a huge difference to come out through the audience as opposed to coming out from the stage. "The people really lifted my spirits and my energy," she continues. I hope it didn't show on stage!" It didn't – she was a pocket dynamo, flitting between her own high-energy singles, a surprisingly effective cover of Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters", and an awful lot of dancing, mostly based on the crowd-wowing deployment of hips, belly and hair. I've been rehearsing this tour for 30 days, and I didn't have one day off. I was awake all night after Madison Square Garden, writing the speech!" "I was actually writing my speech till 8.30 in the morning. "I was sick," she says, as bright and perky and smiley as can be. When I finally do catch up with her, just before she has to leave to catch a flight to Florida (she has a rare night off, and is going to Miami, where her parents live), I ask her what happened. Part of me isn't surprised: over the course of three days in New York, the time and location of our interview will change six times. She stands up the Bushes, the mayor and, by extension, the Clintons. I wanted something feminine and sensual."Įxcept, at the last minute, Shakira doesn't show for the speech. "Then I met the right people, the people from Puig I really liked them, the way they deal with the business, and how we connected." After throwing herself into research, she found scent notes that spoke to her: "Jasmine, sandalwood and vanilla. To really submerge myself in it," she says, adding that as well as designing the scent, she designed the bottle. "The perfume world was flirting with me for a while, and I wasn't ready, I didn't have the time. "It was about time, you know?" she says by way of explaining her push into the lucrative world of scents. But Shakira has interests that lie beyond the global superstar's normal frame of reference – brand-extending forays into perfume and the like (though Shakira has a perfume, too: S by Shakira). She may be the sexually provocative singer of the global hits "Hips Don't Lie", "Whenever, Wherever" (including the lines "Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/ So you don't confuse them with mountains"), "She Wolf" (complete with groin-centric video, more on which later), and this month's dizzy, fizzy single collaboration with Dizzee Rascal, "Loca" ("That girl is a nuttah!" yelps Rascal). Small but perfectly sinuously formed, Shakira had approached the stage from the back of the arena, singing as she worked her way through the crowd, shaking hands with delirious fans and waving gaily to the evening's celebrity guests: Hollywood actor Jim Carrey, the recently elected Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, a former president of Chile and Queen Rania of Jordan.
I always felt there had to be a way to make things better." So, in 1995, Shakira founded the Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) Foundation, named after her third album and which provides schools for the poor across Colombia.Ī confidante of both Colombian and American presidents (she has held meetings – proper meetings, not celebby meet'n'greets – with both), Shakira is as comfortable mingling with political heavyweights as she was last night, when she performed a sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden. A part of me is very intolerant of this brutal contrast, to so much injustice," she will tell me in her fluid (in every sense), Spanish-accented English.
"I was born and raised in a developing country, and I grew up seeing so much inequality. This is the kind of environment in which the Colombian pop star, activist, philanthropist and Unicef goodwill ambassador feels at home. And big enough to encompass Shakira, who is scheduled to speechify on the panel alongside Mayor Bloomberg and the Bush First Ladies.