queen of diamonds

Madeleine Marx: Edwin and I always knew it would be better to raise a child in England. Wales was so many dead-end streets. In England there was work for us, and our children could be exposed to much more culture. I think, coming from a small town as does Edwin, we always found that Londoners were more open-minded. We felt that the girls and Charlie would grow up much more well-rounded than we did. They teach us things every day.

Edwin Hall (executive, Hall Publishing): Emma was our second child, and our second daughter. She was born in '89, and I wish I could say that's the most trouble she ever gave us.

Madeleine Marx: Now, be nice, Edwin!

Edwin Hall: It's the truth, though. Emma was always very precocious, probably more than we could ever handle. Do you remember when she tried to build her own computer by taking apart the broken tele and the stereo?

Madeleine Marx: ...when she frightened us all to death by running away to the train station and ending up in North London...

Edwin Hall: ...when she and her sisters all styled their own hair with sewing scissors and felt tips, of course it was Emma's idea—at first I demanded they go to the barber's and have it all cut off, but then Madeleine and I realized it was much more wicked to send them to school looking that way.

Madeleine Marx: I suppose we're truly lucky the girls have always got on so well. Emma and her big sister Katie in particular have always been the closest of friends. I think perhaps that was why she did so well with being in a band, making compromises about the art and all that.

Katie Marx-Hall (interior designer): I think if any of us was going to be in a properly famous band one day, it was going to be Emma. She was always a bit of a show-off.

Emma Marx-Hall: I was destined for fame since day one. I absolutely knew it. I prepared every day. Used to practice being interviewed, and do my red carpet walk in the mirror...

Oh my God, you think I'm serious! Oi, turn that off!

Katie Marx-Hall: Emma started playing guitar in her school, so she had lessons and was actually already quite good when she was ten or eleven. At which point she discovered rock music and begged for an electric guitar for Christmas. I think Mam and Dad just wanted her to shut up at that point. (laugh) One day it was Bach and Scarlatti, the next it was the Rolling Stones and Guns 'N' Roses. She was also making up a lot of songs around then...

Emma Marx-Hall: ...a lot of crap, really, utter crap, about how I hated exams, about plots on Coupling...

Renée Marx-Hall (student): A lot of Emma's school friends were surprised when she sort of came out of her shell I suppose. Like, she'd always been sort of a teacher's pet (laugh), a straight-A student, but like at the weekend, she would always put sparkles in her hair and sneak into dance clubs with her friends, not because she wanted to drink or anything, but because she wanted to go listen to music.

Emma Marx-Hall: It was really because I'd figured out I was bisexual. I knew there was always some reason I didn't quite seem to fit in and part of it was because I was always really dedicated to schoolwork and people looked down on that, but part of it, in the end, was because I didn't fit in in a straight world.

Alice Hughes (student): One of the things we always really wanted to make clear was that there are a lot of people who don't really understand what it means to be gay, or they wanted to impress a boy in school so they'd, y'know, "lez off" with someone, or whatever. But the fact is that throughout history it's always been really difficult to fit in in normal society if you don't conform to people's ideas of what a normal person is. If you're gay, or if you're not white, or if you have a mental illness, or if you're really unlucky and you're a mentally ill lesbian, then you don't have a lot of the privileges that people have in the rest of society.

Brian St. Helens: That idea of being bisexual, even only nominally, is also something that has appealed to kids many times throughout the years. If your parents are really conservative sorts, what better way to bother them than to be 'a bit gay', you know? You never saw Alan or Emma sitting down to dinner with a partner of the same sex, but no one cared about that, it was when Alan would call up a boy from the audience and snog him on stage, or when Emma would come out for an encore in nothing but a rainbow flag—that's what bisexuality meant to them.

Parents really shouldn't be worried that their kids are going to be 'turned gay' by those naughty rock bands with their evil deeds, because no real homosexuals would consider them gay themselves.

Charlie Marx-Hall (student): People say a lot of really silly things about the fact that Emma loves girls as well as boys. I think love is actually quite simple and people are making it much more confusing than it ought to be.

Emma Marx-Hall: After that it was quite obvious who my real friends were, and everyone else at school would just have to live with the fact that I was there and in their faces.

Madeleine Marx-Hall: She was very rebellious at that time. She would cut her school uniform up and wear bright colored socks. I can't remember how many times her school phoned to say that she hadn't worn proper uniform, and I had to either drive up to the school and bring her new clothes, or come pick her up and take her home.

Renée Marx-Hall: Emma still made A's, even though she was having her 'rebellious phase', and she did three A-Levels, an A and two B's.

Theodore Adams (student): Back then Emma and I used to have these grand adventures through London. We'd get hopelessly lost and find our way back. She always had so many amazing ideas. I suppose I always knew she was really bright, and that she was going to go to a good uni and I'd probably never see her again.

Can I give you a mental picture? She would always stand above all the other girls, because she'd wear platform shoes, and she had all that hair—and she dressed sort of like she did in all of the band's photoshoots, but maybe not quite as stylish just yet: everything was either from charity shops or she made it herself. Bright colors, flowers, animal prints. I was always a kid who didn't really fit in, but I tried hard. When Emma came along, she was so different, and in such a vibrant way, that everyone was distracted from kids like me. She didn't care what people thought, and she would always stick up for you when people were putting you down.

It was really fantastic. I miss that.

Edwin Hall: Emma is a really lovely girl; kind to her friends, close to her family. It's not the public persona she put on when she was in the band, and so I think it's quite important that everyone understand that.

Emma Marx-Hall: In a way, everything is a pretense. I'm not really that fashionable and glamorous and mad; I'm not really a rock star. The best thing in my life is my family. I've always said that Katie and Renée and baby Charlie are my absolute best friends in the world. Every time I need advice, I phone Katie. Even when things were really weird, really just confusing and alien, Katie always seemed to have the right thing to say.

Charlie Marx-Hall: We have a very nice family, my mum and my dad, and Katie and Renée and Emma and me. We've got a dog called Lady, and Renée has a hamster called Donald. I have my own room, it's painted like outer space.

Madeleine Marx: This is a bit of a secret, but Emma is actually planning to be a schoolteacher as well. She's doing a degree in Media Studies and after university she's going into a program to train her to be a teacher for primary school children.

Emma Marx-Hall: I had a brief period of time where I wanted to be an actress, but otherwise I've always wanted to be in a band.

Renée Marx-Hall: It didn't surprise me at all that Emma would be in a famous band. In fact, one of my mates said that if any of us were to be in a band, it would either be Emma or Charlie, Charlie because no one expects the quiet ones.

Emma Marx-Hall: That's actually true, you know, that bit about practicing being interviewed.

Katie Marx-Hall: Emma is a bit of a chameleon. She adapts to fit every situation. She's always changing, but there is something inside of her that will always be my little sister.