‘Life is comedy and tragedy’: Daphne Guinness on her remarkable journey from muse to musician

People have some wild ideas about Daphne Guinness, but the oddest one she’s ever seen, on Wikipedia, stated that she was in league with the devil. The evidence? The strange, hoof shapes of her favoured platform shoes that she wears everywhere. “But they’d also managed to find a picture of me drinking tomato juice, so they claimed that it was the blood of children and that I was in QAnon and had two secret QAnon children,” she says, amused but baffled by the lengths people will go to. She’s speaking over Zoom from the Caribbean where she’s brighter and smilier than I had expected from the frosty fashion photos that exist of her. “I mean, seriously, Americans are pretty weird,” she adds.

Still, it’s not as if anyone needs to invent stories about her. Part of the Guinness brewing dynasty, but also the Mitfords, a family of English aristocrats, Daphne grew up not realising her beloved granny, Diana Mosley, had been married to this country’s leading fascist, and once got into trouble at school after happily identifying him as a relative on TV. (She has since decried his politics entirely.) Her father, Jonathan Guinness, a British peer, had sets of children by three different women. One lot was a surprise to Daphne, though they’re all friends now, she says. When he was married to Daphne’s mother, Suzanne, Jonathan bought a former monastery up a dirt track on a Spanish mountain, near to the home of Salvador Dalí, who kept lobsters in his swimming pool. The Guinnesses spent several months a year there, with no electricity and no car. Daphne’s bed was beside the monastery’s altar. She spent a lot of time in caves, playing with hornets, or getting advice from Dalí, her mother’s great friend, on how to be naughty.

That was until she was “married off,” as she has put it, in 1987 at 19, to the Greek shipping magnate Spyros Niarchos. She gave birth to the first of their three children in 1989, and divorced in 1999. Released from the role of society wife, she became a fixture in the world of London fashion, becoming great friends with Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow, modelling for them both, later designing clothes and jewellery herself. Both McQueen and Blow died of suicide, Blow in 2007, McQueen three years later. Her brother, Jasper, died of cancer in 2011. Their deaths affected Guinness deeply. She doesn’t believe in psychiatry and suspects medication often made things worse, “particularly with Isabella,” and says she herself is “gratefully post-suicide, I think. I mean, you know, fingers crossed, because there were moments post-McQueen, when I just… I felt I had a target on my back, as it were. Just a sort of expectation. Someone actually came up to me and said, ‘What are you still doing here?’ or words to that effect.”

If this sounds odd, death has hung over Guinness since she was five years old, when a family friend tried to murder her. Yet it is only now she is really starting to make sense of the experience, doing so through music. “I have expelled a ghost,” she says, about the process of writing a song called Solitaire, which she performs on her latest and sixth album.

Solitaire contains the lyrics: “She cried to the heavens / She wept to the sky / She wept for every psychopath / Who had come into her life.” Guinness explains: “How that song came about is that I was with my aunt, about four years ago, and she said, ‘Did anyone ever talk to you about that time?’ I was like, ‘Phew, someone has spoken up, at last, haha. Finally!’ That sort of gave me permission to… Well, not permission… You know, shit happens when you’re little. But I do know I have had a very, very strange life. I mean, it was a kind of – it was just survival, all the time. There was no break, no time for being a girl or anything. You just had to fight for your survival every single day. But I mean, it’s the same for everybody. I’ve never felt like I was a victim or anything like that.”

In 1972, a family friend called Tony Baekeland turned up at the Guinness house in Kensington looking for his mother, who was out having lunch with Guinness’s mother. He was let into the house by the staff and found Daphne in her nursery, where shesays she was pleased to see a familiar face, thinking he had perhaps come to read her a story. “And because there was no one ever looking after me,” she says, “it just took a very big turn for the worse.”

Though it hadn’t been made clear, Baekeland, then 25, was schizophrenic and violent. He arrived with a knife, and announced he wanted to kill all women, starting with this child. He took Guinness hostage. “I remember being marched through this house with a knife at my neck, bleeding and cut,” she says. “I mean, the things I was told that day are probably not fit for print. I ended up outside the house in Kensington Square, still being held at knifepoint. I was saved by my parents’ housekeeper, who was trying to stop him from killing me. He had me next to the railings with the knife, saying, ‘Death to all women, death to…’” She tails off. The two mothers arrived in a taxi and Baekeland escaped through the house, out the back. He killed his mother the next day, after she had assured everyone everything would be fine. After serving time in Broadmoor he travelled to the US, where he stabbed his grandmother, who survived.

Guinness was taken back into the house, “but no one ever actually debriefed me, as it were.” She adds, sounding perhaps slightly ashamed, that “when I eventually heard that he had killed himself, in Rikers Island prison, years later, I was extremely relieved.” I think, how could she have been anything else? Baekeland had made good on his other death threats; for a long time she felt he was still coming for her. (In 2007, Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne made a film about his case, Savage Grace. His family were heirs to the Bakelite fortune.) “Life is comedy and tragedy in equal parts,” Guinness goes on. “And the main thing is to try to pick yourself up and to create something that’s worthwhile out of it.”

The more we talk, the more I wonder if Guinness uses her eccentricity as a device, as a place where a woman in her position can safely retreat from violence and power systems. Though she comes from great wealth and material privilege, and though her surname is a ticket to freedom on many levels, her childhood was also violent and cold, and something she is finally trying to make sense of now, at 55. Guinness has been many things, but while we talk I’m not sure she has ever felt safe.

“I have lived a backwards sort of life,” she says. “It’s been a very strange experience, this life of mine.”

According to some reports, Guinness was rescued from her marriage to Niarchos, it having become something of a gilded prison. She has said the divorce settlement involved her having limited contact with her own children, who went to live with their father, after which Guinness would spend Christmases alone. During the marriage, she was only given “a couple of days off” after each birth, she says, before being expected to be “back in the routine” of being a magnate’s wife. Press interest focused on the $39m settlement she received, in addition to other Guinness money she might have, but I wonder about the cruelty.

When I ask her about her ex-husband, she is keen to present a united front. “Oh, I’m really, really, really good friends now with…” she starts, when asked about her ex-husband. “I mean, the whole of my life has been sort of trying to kind of make… What I want is happiness for my family. But, you know, that was all a long time ago. We are tremendously good friends at this point.”

It seems generous not to be consumed by bitterness. “There’s always a bigger picture,” she says. “It’s really not all about me. It isn’t. There are wider ramifications to everything.” Her face glows when she mentions her grown-up children, two sons and a daughter, all of whom have had the education she missed out on when she married young. “They’re so brilliant, my children,” she says. “Oh my God, they’re so wonderful! And they’re such lovely people as well. Which, I mean, that’s all you could wish for.”

Guinness and I are meeting to discuss her music, which she has been making, quietly and fruitfully, since 2016. Her music-making routine is fascinating. On every album, she says she overworks herself to the point of serious illness, but she only gets ill when she stops working, so it’s better if she doesn’t stop. “With each album, from album two onwards, I’ve ended up in hospital. I always almost die with these!”

When she completed her latest album, she contracted pneumonia, and has only recently recovered, “though I had a sort of relapse”. She was ordered to the Caribbean, she says, for rest. Next she is off to Los Angeles “to take care of some medical things.” Her working days begin with fresh mint in hot water (“I don’t drink coffee,” she says, “and I don’t even drink normal tea. I know, it’s really pathetic”) and “some vitamin” – this is how she says it: “some vitamin” – before going “straight to the gym” and then working intensely on her music.

“Don’t you eat anything?” I ask.

Guinness bursts out laughing.

“No!” she roars. “Not at all. I actually can’t work if I’ve eaten.”

“Nothing?” I say. “I sort of sometimes eat a tiny banana or something,” she says. “And then at 5pm I am like a child, I have fish fingers and some mashed potatoes.”

Guinness started making music on the advice of David Bowie, whom she misses dearly. (He brought his producer, Tony Visconti, on board to produce her.) “Bowie was my great champion,” she says. “He essentially shadow produced my first album. I remember Tony called me up just before we started and asked, ‘Do you mind if David gets a cut of every day?’ And I was, like: ‘Absolutely!’ He was so nice. I mean, we were into the same things. You know, it would be by chance, we’d both have been reading the same books, the same scores.”

They loved Wagner’s Ring Cycle: “We’d sit there reading Götterdämmerung together. You know, in my other sort of life, I’m Brunhilde. You almost have to be pickled in Wagner. You go to sleep, under the covers, wake up, it seeps into your skin.”

Compared to everything I have read about and seen of Daphne Guinness, which suggests this other-worldly, fantasy circus master, the person on Zoom in front of me seems tender and giggly, a good conversationalist, well informed. She is often seen at parties, but insists she struggles to make small talk: she’s better at the big. She somehow knows all about how much money Elon Musk spent buying Twitter, and plans for the King’s upcoming coronation. She is angry about the state of classical music, given how badly she sees the jobbing musicians she works with being treated. “Frankly, the coronation should be silent,” she says. “I mean, you know, I don’t really understand how they can expect the culture to exist if it’s not funded in some way.” As for Musk, she doesn’t know him, but says, “You do have to give people a chance. And a chance to fuck up as well.” She wonders about that world. “Power is a very strange thing,” she says. “People want it and then they don’t know what to do with it. It’s actually terrifying, especially in America, especially in the internet age.” She has recently been drawn towards becoming “a neo-Luddite” and thinks smartphones have probably ruined everything, though she uses social media and has always been deeply interested in tech.

Guinness has always moved around the world a lot. She recently rented a house in London, despite saying she’d never move back, though she has “mainly been living in hotels”. She sold a Manhattan apartment for $10m after the downstairs neighbours complained that her baths kept overflowing and ruining their ceiling. She brings up a period she spent living in New York in the 1990s, “when I was having children, but in my spare time I was doing things like figuring out the internet. And going to computing classes with all these Wall Street stockbrokers, me sitting there, doing the function keys.” All she remembers the internet having on it “was AP and Reuters and a Santa Claus in Lapland, for some reason, which was very funny”. The first time she tried to save a picture “it took about a day and a half to download it. And that sound! Like a sort of spluttering coffee machine.”

I say she must have learned to run commands in DOS mode, (pronounced doss), the old-school computing interface that predated Windows. “Yes!” she says, with some delight, “I was in DOS mode on 6th Avenue,” which is the sort of quote you want printed on a T-shirt.

“I remember sitting at this dinner party, saying, ‘Well, I’ve been sort of logging on via Cern with my computer and there’s a thing called the internet, which is going to change everything’ …and, of course, there was an evergreen thought that I was completely bananas. I said, ‘Listen, just you know, forget telexes, forget faxes, this is the future.’”

Because of her status as a longtime fashion fixture and her high-profile divorce, Guinness’s relationships are often covered in the media. In the noughties she briefly dated the actor Tom Hollander. More recently she had a long on-and-off relationship with Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual, who remained married to his wife throughout. Guinness has described herself as a hopeless romantic, that Lévy was the love of her life, and that you get over being called a scarlet woman after a while. Though things have seemingly gone sour between them.

I ask if she will ever get married again.

“Goodness gracious!” she says, genuinely surprised. She thinks about it. “I don’t think anybody would ask me,” she muses. “I believe in art. And that’s really the only thing that hasn’t ever let me down.”

Daphne Guinness’s new single, Hip Neck Spine, from her forthcoming fourth studio album, Sleep, will be released in May via Agent Anonyme Recordings (daphneguinness.com)

All clothing Daphne Guinness’s own; hair by Larry McDaniel using Oribe; makeup by Anthony H Nguyen for KVD Beauty; set design by Jeremy Reimnitz; styling assistant Michy Foster; photo assistants Bryan Lynn and Bono Melendrez; digital tech by Ramond Alva; production by Kylie Govinchuck; shot at Hype Studios