What’s it like watching such a deeply personal film with audiences?
I didn’t think I would like it. I don’t want people watching me watch my own film. It’s awkward enough. And what I discovered instead was . . . Getting older is funny. I find that I’m very sentimental, and I will cry at the drop of a hat. If I see someone else becoming emotional, I fall to pieces, and that is what I’m discovering with the screenings.
If I find that any part of my story is making anybody share themselves or become vulnerable, I absolutely lose it. I stop what I’m doing and we have to hug. All of us are losing our parents as we get older, many of us have gone through divorces, the kids are in university and beyond. A lot of these old skateboarders are empty nesters! So, people are having to redefine their lives, and sometimes all we still have is this weird little generational sense of community where we can chuckle at our old skinned knees from the half-pipe and our old snowboarding injuries.
On that note, what’s it like performing songs today that you wrote in your 20s, when you were a different person?
I’ve learned that you can put out as much new music as you want . . . [fans] don’t wanna hear the “new record.” That’s something that I had to come to terms with. They just want to hear “I Love Myself Today” and “Spaceman.” And then you wind up falling in love with those songs again because it’s just joyful to perform them. You have to look at people like Tina Turner and go, “She was in a miniskirt and high heels at 70, and she loved it.”
Even though you change and you grow, if it’s a sad enough song, it’s still sad. It’s still a song about yearning and even though you’re a different person, you’re still a person that yearns and you can still be transported back to that moment. Also, many of our wounds go unhealed throughout our lives, and you can still feel them.
You penned a memoir not that long ago, I, Bificus. What fresh territory do you and your director tackle in the doc?
One thing I never spoke about in my book was the joy of all the stalkers and criminal harassment that we dealt with over the years. We were not allowed to talk about it at all in our HarperCollins publication — and at the time that book came out, it was a real problem in my world. And I’m sure it happens in equal amounts to Safeway cashiers; if you are in an occupation where you are dealing with the public, you’re running the risk of some unwanted behaviour from people. I’ve had lots of different experiences with law enforcement and Crown councils. That’s something that I am happy we were finally able to talk about . . . My book was very polite, which is great because I like being polite, but I felt I was a little bit handcuffed in some of my ability to be honest.
As someone who’s been in the spotlight so long, do the insecurities of that intense scrutiny ever go away?
My guitar player, Doug [Fury], we’ve been playing together since ’96 or whenever it was. His new motto is: “It doesn’t matter.” When we used to get so worked up about gig posters or the rental or gas . . . now he just laughs, because it doesn’t matter. That’s something that comes with age. The insecurities and the imposter syndromes and all that worry, it really does just kind of fall off your back.
Bif Naked airs Wednesday, November 26, on Super Channel Fuse; Super Channel+
MEMORABLE ROLES:
An indelible icon of Canadian music, Bif Naked was born in India to teenaged boarding school students, adopted by American missionaries and raised in Winnipeg before blazing a trail on the male-dominated punk scene of the ’90s and 2000s with a chart-topping, platinum-selling career. Along the way, she spent a few decades calling our fair province of B.C. her home.
CURRENT GIG:
Bif takes an unflinching look back at her beautiful, tumultuous, groundbreaking life with this new documentary, directed by Pollyanna Hardwicke-Brown. Just hours before a special screening of the film at Vancouver’s own Rio Theatre, the rock star got raw with TV Week.