Belinda Carlisle: 'I never felt like I was good enough or that I was worthy'

Belinda Carlisle was born in Los Angeles, California, in August 1958, the oldest of seven siblings. In 1977 she became the drummer for a punk band, the Germs, then formed The Go-Go’s with friends a year later. Carlisle was lead singer for the all-female new wave band, and they sold more than seven million records, topping the charts with their album Beauty and the Beat, which featured the songs “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat”, before splitting in 1985.

Carlisle went on to have a hugely successful solo career over the next decade, with global hits including “Heaven is a Place on Earth”, “Circle in the Sand” and “Leave a Light On”, and scoring double platinum albums and Grammy nominations. In 1991, The Go-Go’s reunited with a greatest hits album and tour, the first of many reunions. In early 2009, Carlisle appeared on Dancing with the Stars, and took the role of Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. In May 2021, The Go-Go’s were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Carlisle will release her ninth studio album, Once Upon a Time in California on 29 August.

In 2014, Carlisle co-founded Animal People Alliance in India, which trains and employs impoverished women to care for street animals. In May 2024, she was received the Harvey Milk Award at the Diversity Honours for her advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights. She is married to Morgan Mason and they have one son. They live in Mexico City.

For her Letter to My Younger Self, she looks back on going from rowdy class clown to forming a punk band with her friends to then going one step beyond.

At the age of 16 I was mostly thinking about boys, of course, and basketball. I was a Lakers freak way before it was trendy. I was the oldest of seven. My real father left when I was five. And then my mother remarried when I was seven. We had no money. They did a great job for us even though we didn’t have much. So I grew up in a pretty normal, dysfunctional family. Barbecues, baseball, camping… my parents made a little bit go a long way. My stepfather had his problems, but he took care of us.

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I used to buy 7″ singles with my babysitting money. And I listened to the radio. That’s how I got most of my music. And California radio at the time when I was growing up was amazing. So when I got money I would immediately go and buy whatever the latest single was. 

I was a born contrarian. I was sort of a rowdy teenage girl, you know, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer at school and running away from home. But I was also sort of known as being the class clown. I think I had a good sense of humour. If you met the younger me today you’d think she was sweet, but troubled. I would say sweet and troubled is a perfect combo, though I was never depressed, I always had humour about things. 

I think the teenage Belinda wouldn’t recognise her older self. I’m a totally different person now. Maybe because I grew up with no money. I’ve been working since I was 15 years old. I think I was a little manifester but I didn’t even know I was manifesting. I always imagined myself being a singer and I do believe you can manifest anything you want. So I think I was doing that as a teenager.

My first experience of being in a band was when I was in the Germs [a Californian punk band in the late 70s]. I was the drummer that never played. I was also in a band called Black Randy and the Metrosquad, which is a genius band. I was a backup singer for them. And then The Go-Go’s were formed in 1978. We were just sitting on the kerb one night at a party, and everybody else was in a band in the LA scene. And we said, OK, let’s make a band too, even though we didn’t know how to play anything. So we were self-taught, and we learned as we went along, and within three years, we were the biggest band in America. So go figure.

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I think our breakthrough came when we went to the UK and opened for Madness and The Specials. We had a single out on Stiff Records, Madness’s label, and that was a minor hit. This was before the internet, so we were writing letters back home and telling everybody how we were this big success when we really weren’t. And I think that just got around, and when we came back from the UK, all of a sudden everything changed. I remember playing the Starwood, and there were lines of kids wrapped around the blocks, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what?!’ I felt like we were skyrocketing. 

Not too much later we were nominated for best new artists at the Grammys. There were lots of big moments – we opened for The Rolling Stones. But I think that the biggest moment for the band was just a few years ago when we were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

I don’t think the young Belinda would be too fazed about being famous and recognised. I think she probably would have expected that to be honest, because I had fantasised about being a singer, and that was something that was definitely going to happen to me. But the teenage me might be surprised at what can go wrong. How can you handle success when you’re in your early 20s? There’s no handbook, so we handled it in different ways. My drug problem? [Carlisle developed an addiction to cocaine and alcohol when she was in The Go-Go’s]. I don’t like to talk about that.

If I could give my younger self any advice I would say you are perfect the way you are. I always felt ‘less than’ and I always felt like an imposter. Partly because of where and how I grew up and how I looked. There was a lot of focus on my appearance. And I look back at these pictures of me at 20 years old, when I felt really insecure. And now I’m like, oh, my god, you were so cute! I never felt like I was good enough or that I was worthy. So I would say to her, you’re worthy and you’re perfect, and you were always meant to be doing this. 

I always knew that I had an opportunity to have a solo career after The Go-Go’s broke up. I didn’t know how to do anything else. So, yeah, I thought, OK, why not? I’d like to think I handled it better when I was a little older. I mean, I kind of knew what to expect. And I know it’s extraordinary to have that kind of success twice, but in actuality, the success of my solo career was even more intense than The Go-Go’s. In a band you could split the responsibility five ways. Suddenly I was on my own. But I think I took a lot of what I’d learned with me. 

If I could have one more conversation with anyone I think I’d like to have it with my mom. Because there are a lot of questions that I had about my younger years that were never answered, round about when my father left. I have very vague memories of being sort of carted around with her as a baby, and around four and five years old, with my two younger brothers and sisters. So there are a lot of things about that I would love to talk to her about.

I’ve lived in about eight different countries, I lived in France, I lived in Thailand. I’ve lived in India, I’ve lived in Austria, I’ve lived in London. And now I live in Mexico City. There was a book that really influenced us years ago about the way we wanted to live our life, about this family from New York that went to the south of France in the 1920s and they had this amazing life. They were very bohemian. It was just a fantasy. And that book inspired us to want to live our dreams. We went to France. We gave it six months and thought well, if it doesn’t work, we can always go home. Everybody thought we were crazy, and then we ended up staying for 24 years.

I was the oldest of seven, so being a mother wasn’t the top of my list of ambitions for years. But then a couple of years into the marriage, my husband and I decided that we wanted to have a child. So now we have my son. He’s 33 years old. He’s gay, he’s a big activist, he’s super smart, and yeah, I was blessed with a gay son. 

We’ve been re-watching the home movies my husband has been taking for years. I have very mixed feelings when I watch it, because he documented everything. But the days living in France were so magical. And I think I’d love to go back just to have another year of that. I think that was probably some of the best years of my life and my husband’s life. But we left because we had done it to death. All the dogs died. And growing up as a gay teenager in the south of France was tough for our son because it’s very parochial there. So as soon as he left school he was literally on the next plane to fly to LA. And my husband and I felt we’d done France, there was no mystery any more. So we said, OK, let’s go to Thailand. So that’s what we did.

Belinda Carlisle’s new album Once Upon a Time in California is released on 29 August. She will be touring the UK with her Heavenly Hits tour on 5-13 September.

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