A tweet from Alexa Chung. It is 7am in New York City. “Gross. Keep being sick. It’s the worst,” she says. “Food poisoning?”
It’s plausible – though I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to consider her final tweet the previous evening. “Seasick drunk. Bad vibes.”
So our interview is postponed. We meet a day later, when naturally my first job is to determine the cause of this illness. Was food or booze to blame? Both, it turns out. “I got up at 6.30am, did the show, then I had to wait around and go to a screening of this awful film,” she says. “Then everyone wanted to go for a drink. And I hadn’t eaten all day, and I was so hungry by the time I got to the bar I just ate my weight in olives. Then I had whisky. I think something happened with the two and they turned to poison. I didn’t stop puking until 2pm yesterday. Disgusting. Olives stuck in my nose,” she announces, brightly. “I was, like, ‘Wow! I was really swallowing those things down whole?’”
It’s not the sort of thing you get from Fern Britton. But it is why MTV has whisked Chung – 25, TV presenter, model, style hero to a generation, girlfriend to Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner and one half of Britain’s coolest couple – off to America. Noted for her cheerfully irreverent interview technique, first seen on Channel 4’s Popworld (where she’d ask Gwen Stefani if her new scent stank of bacon, and get Paul McCartney to sing a song about shoes), Chung now has her own show. Mixing celebrity interviews, live music and comedy sketches, It’s On with Alexa Chung launched on June 15.
Broadcast live from Times Square each day at noon, it’s a big deal for MTV. Replacing hoary old flagship show Total Request Live, it signals a channel-wide overhaul that, the network says, “marks a directional shift geared toward the millennium generation”. Chung is hardly the first TV Brit to cross the Atlantic, but this one won’t be coming home with her tail between her legs. Audience figures have tripled in the first month, It’s On… is moving to an early evening time slot and guests are now of the Cameron Diaz/Adam Sandler calibre. Rolling Stone has noted approvingly her role “as a madcap inquisitor” with “an attitude”, and Chung herself has been a guest on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon – big news. She’s even got her own office overlooking Times Square. That’s pretty serious, I say. “It’s really serious. It’s kind of surreal. Um, they gave it to me, but I don’t actually go in there.”
Last seen here not being recommissioned as the roving reporter on Gok’s Fashion Fix, and probably wishing Vanity Lair, The Wall and Frock Me, all doomed comedy/lifestyle vehicles, hadn’t been commissioned at all, no one is more surprised than Chung. “I thought I’d get to go home in November,” she says. “Usually I have one season of everything. Now they’re talking about 2011.”
We meet in a restaurant in Williamsburg, the hipster enclave across the East River from Manhattan where, Chung notes, “Everyone walks around looking rad all day, drinking coffee and working on a script.” Her apartment – “which is huge, but has nothing in it” – is here; she moved with Turner and “80 per cent of my clothes” (four wardrobes-worth flown over in crates marked, semi-cryptically, A. Chung, “in case someone liked clothes and wanted to nick them”). Turner’s lyrics for Fire and the Thud, on the imminent Arctic Monkeys album, refer to their relocation – “If it’s true you’re gonna run away/ Tell me where, I’ll meet you there” – and New York is very much the couple’s home now.
Chung is immediately likeable. Smart (two A’s and a B at A level, and “still p***** off about the B in history”), more serious than a career spent asking McFly, “Where’s the strangest place you’ve put your finger?” would have you expect, she’s decked out in her idiosyncratic take on high-end meets high street – floaty Topshop frock, Chanel patent heels, plus quilted shoulder bag and necklaces everywhere. It’s a look that, as Vogue puts it, has seen her take “prime position in most best-dressed lists”.
She unpacks her 34in legs, and double-crosses them. She’s such a permanent fixture of “Get the Look” articles even this simple act of human comfort has been deemed worthy of deconstruction. “The Alexa Chung exaggerated leg cross,” raved one journalist, “it’s all in the twist. Always accompany with acres of tanned and toned bare leg.” “Who wrote that?” she hoots. “What a boring thing to have written about you. I trod on your shoe earlier – here, I’ll try to stick them under the table.”
She attacks the menu. That Alexa Chung brunch order in full: “Some baked eggs, no meat; leek on the side.” The waitress asks if she’d like sugar in her cappuccino. “Oh yeah!” she enthuses. “Lovely.”
The art of conversation
Why did MTV want her? It is, after all, hugely American. And she’s very British.
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