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When she hit the music scene in 1983, Cyndi Lauper was immediately something strikingly different – colourful, outspoken and completely her own person. She became a star with songs like Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time and True Colours.

She’s sold over 50 million records, won two Grammys, an Emmy and a Tony award. On Desert Island Discs, she talks to Lauren Laverne about her extraordinary life and the music that means the most to her.

Here are eight things we learned…

Cyndi Lauper was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953. For her first music choice, she selects Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy, because it holds special memories for her. “The first music I remember was the music my mother played us,” she says. “She loved classical music.”

Cyndi thinks the first time she heard Debussy may have been when she began to understand the power of music. “I remember hearing it and the melody was so stunning. I even said to my mom, ‘Sometimes, when you hear this stuff, is it so beautiful that it just makes you cry?’ She said, ‘Yes, that’s what music can do.’ She always shared with us like that, and this is one of the first things I remember.”

2. She was encouraged to be creative and expressive from a young age

“I was a really, really odd kid,” says Cyndi. “In every way. My idea of play was listening to [my mother’s] records. She had musicals, and because there were so many different voices… I would listen and imitate them. Then I would listen and imitate them again. This was how I spent my time.”

Her eccentricity was encouraged. She says she got her love for creativity from both her parents. “My father also loved books and he would always have instruments all over the place. He wanted to play xylophone, so there’d be a xylophone in the porch.” Even doing household tasks would be a time for self-expression. “We had to do chores, so we’d separate all the clothes. But we were all together and [my mother] would play music and we would dance wildly. I remember how wildly I would dance.”

3. But her early family life came with challenges

Cyndi’s childhood was not always happy. Her parents had a very tempestuous marriage. “They fought a lot,” she says. One night, it got particularly bad. “[My mother] would throw dishes against the wall. I was watching and I think a shard went in my head when they were fighting. They rushed me to hospital. I had a little scar. They felt it was not good for them to be together. It wasn’t safe.”

Her mother remarried, but that was another hard relationship. “We wanted her to be happy, but unfortunately… [her new husband] had a great sense of humour, but he was also very disturbed. It was kind of like living with Don Rickles and Freddy Krueger all together.” Cyndi was sent away to school for her protection and eventually went to live with her older sister.

4. She once lost her voice for a year

Cyndi began writing songs when she was 10 and started her first band, with her sister, around the same age. In her early twenties, Cyndi started taking music more seriously and joined a band called Blue Angel. Her professional career was almost over before it started when she lost her voice for a year.

“I would be singing and they’d have these 200-watt Marshall amps right by me,” she says. “And the cymbal guy will be hitting it right by your head.” She would have to try to sing above all that noise, which led to injuring her vocal cords. “I remember at one point I asked one of the guitar players… to please turn it down. He just ignored me and I had to sing over him. I was playing cowbell with a broken drumstick, so I jabbed him and he got really upset. He stopped playing and I said, ‘Thank you.’”

5. Her mother and grandmother’s work as tailors inspired one of her biggest hits

Cyndi’s debut single, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, is still her defining song, but it originally sounded quite different. Written by Robert Hazard, the song as written was about a son talking to his father about women. “Daddy dear – nudge nudge – we are the fortunate ones, because girls wanna have fun with us,” she says. “It didn’t make sense for a woman to sing that.”

She changed the lyrics and approached it as she did her unique outfits. “My grandmother and my mother, they were tailors,” she says. “They could take clothes that were hand-me-downs, pull them apart, put them back together on you and it looked perfect, like it was made for you. I started to feel like that kind of mentality is the same for songs… You take it apart and put it back together.” Her version became a giant hit.

“They wanted me to make a female anthem. They just didn’t realise they were talking to somebody who burned her training bra at the first demonstration at the Alice in Wonderland statue in the 60s.”

6. She missed seeing The Beatles, but later met Paul McCartney at the dentist

Cyndi is a huge Beatles fan and one of her disc choices is I Want to Hold Your Hand. She recalls the time she ruined her one encounter with the Fab Four. When she was aged 11, her sister’s friend took Cyndi to a spot near the airport, which she knew The Beatles would pass on their way into New York.

Cyndi Lauper and Lauren Laverne in the Desert Island Discs studio.

I was singing True Colours and some guy came up to me from the crowd with a… rainbow flag... He said, ‘I designed this because I was inspired by your song.’

Cydni on the impact of True Colours

“Here comes the car. I start screaming. I had my eyes closed and all of a sudden I opened my eyes and I saw the back of their heads. What a jerk. What did I do? I missed them!” However, she made up for it decades later.

“I was at my dentist recently and I turned around and there’s Paul McCartney, right behind me. I didn’t know what to say. I was at the dentist, so I said, ‘Nice teeth.'"

7. One of her biggest songs is dedicated to a friend who died

Another of Cyndi’s greatest hits is 1986’s True Colours, which she calls a “healing song”. It’s gained huge meaning to the LGBTQ+ community. Cyndi says she sings it for her friend, Gregory Natal, who died from an AIDS-related illness in the 1980s (she also wrote the song Boy Blue for him).

“I sang True Colours for us who survived him, because he was really a good kid,” she says. “He never felt good about himself, because you’re made to feel horrible about yourself, and that’s what makes these youths more vulnerable.” He was 24 when he died.

Lauper says that at one of her gigs, “I was singing True Colours and some guy came up to me from the crowd with a… rainbow flag... He said, ‘I designed this because I was inspired by your song.’” It was what’s now known as the Pride flag. “After that moment, I knew Gregory got his wish.”

8. She feels really proud of the new generation of female singers

Asked how things are different for women in music now, compared to the 1970s, Cyndi says, “They change and they don’t. The fact that Taylor Swift has to justify herself, I’m like, ‘Are you kidding?’ I’m freaking so proud of that young woman. What a good example. I’m so happy watching all these young women. I know there will always be struggle, but you’ve just got to take a step back. There will always be gatekeepers. You’ve just got to figure out how to get around them… We stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us, and the people that come after us will be standing on ours.”