Justin Timberlake

The Times Magazine, September 2006

The lobbies of even the smartest hotels have, on Sunday afternoons, a dispirited air. Time hangs heavy. Waiters yawn and wish the last lingering lunch guests gone. It is the case a few steps away from Marylebone Station, where not even the noisy passing-through of a Jewish wedding party charges the cold and costly atmosphere with gaiety. An odd place for the hottest young male property in music to have stationed himself during a promotional trip to London? No. Were he to step out onto the capital's pavements he would almost certainly be mobbed. But here, walking swiftly across polished floors towards the lifts, he is effectively invisible, just another wealthy, dressed-down tourist heading to his room.

Justin Timberlake is the boy from the backwoods who, by a succession of improbable leaps, has become an idol of the age. At 11 he was one of 20 chosen in a nationwide search to be part of a children's TV series, The Mickey Mouse Club. At 14, his resultant profile led to membership of what would be a vastly successful boy band, 'N Sync. Then, at the height of that group's fame, he launched a solo career which, unusually, combines mass market appeal and sales with street credibility and critical acclaim. His prowess as a performer is such that, in 2003, Rolling Stone deposed a devalued Michael Jackson to hail him 'The New King of Pop'.

Now 25, Timberlake has all the accoutrements of the modern-day megastar – a clothing line of his own (William Rast, said to fuse the spirit of Hollywood with that of his home state, Tennessee), a celebrity partner (once it was fellow Mickey Mouser Britney Spears, but latterly and equally tabloid-enticingly it has been the actress Cameron Diaz, eight years his senior), and a legal team which deals with the wider world (say those with first-hand experience) in a manner eschewing most of the usual courtesies. Of course, having such back-up frees the hirer to be the very personification of charm. When, after a six-hour wait, I am finally invited to meet the man, I tell him it's a pleasure. "Believe me," he replies with full eye contact and a warm handshake, "the pleasure is all mine."

Being in the same room as Timberlake instantly solves one previously mysterious (to me) element of his appeal. Yes, I think Cry Me A River and Rock Your Body, from his 2002 debut album Justified, to be among the best pop singles of recent years. And yes, he's perhaps the most confident, charismatic male stage and video performer since Jackson himself. Athlete-fit too, as shirtless photographs from the time of his solo launch were designed to prove. But that he should cause teenage and old-enough-to-know-better girls and also gay men whom I know to swoon? I didn't get it, but within 30 seconds in his company suddenly do. The intense gaze, the cheekbones, the soft Southern voice … Some public figures have exceptional presence, and he is one of them.

We're not alone. In the suite to which we've ascended are various representatives of Timberlake's US record label. Most will leave but one (a PR) stands directly behind him for a majority of our time together, leaning against a door frame (I take this as a reminder that the subjects of Spears and Diaz have been deemed interview-stoppingly off limits). Present too is Renee Earnest, his day-to-day management representative when travelling. A friend and now business partner of his mother in JustinTime Entertainment, she sits sifting through emails on a laptop, an auntie-like figure in comfortable clothes. But when I ask the now Los Angeles-based star to give me a sense of the community into which he was born, she stops and listens intently, almost as if homesick.

He spent his early years in Shelby Forest, "a small town outside of a slightly bigger town, Millington, which itself is outside of Memphis." Its primary attraction is a large State Park and anywhere you might want to get to (he cites WalMart and the FedEx Forum, home of basketball's Memphis Grizzlies) is a 30-minute drive away. "It's a place where everyone's known by name. Where you all go to church on Sunday. Where if you're driving and another vehicle passes, you automatically put your hand up and wave. It's rural and spread out. The roads are one-lane and there are no stop lights. There were just five TV channels when I lived there and no cable. Our getting a satellite dish when I was 14 was a very big deal."

His parents Randall, a choir director at a Baptist church, and Lynn separated when Timberlake was five and subsequently divorced. He remains close to his father, but was brought up by his mother and stepfather Paul Harless, a banker. Memphis's most famous son died four years before his birth but Timberlake grins when I ask if he were ever taken to Graceland as a child. "Yes, but I was so young that the only thing I remember is the room with animal skins all over the walls and the one that's lime green – hideous, like something out of a Kubrick film, yet awesome at the same time. But as a kid I never really appreciated the magnitude of Elvis or even Michael Jackson. I just loved certain songs, without ever really getting fixated on any one artist."

He says that the Beach Boys and The Eagles were his favourite bands back then, largely because normal orthodoxies of what was cool or uncool didn't reach his ears. "Stuff like that isn't important in Shelby Forest. You just get the music or whatever, without all of the hoop-la. Mind you, I do remember when I was 10 that Tom Cruise was in Tennessee to film The Firm and stayed nearby in this mansion a dentist had built. The whole town was like, 'Tom Cruise is here! Tom Cruise is here!' So funny." A precocious performer at home and in church, his own first taste of celebrityhood came very shortly afterwards, on being chosen from among 20,000 wannabes to be one of Mickey's Mouseketeers. Selection meant moving to Orlando, Florida. "The easiest thing I've done in my life," he says now of the entire experience.

With him in the 20-strong line-up and in addition to Spears was Christina Aguilera and JC Chasez, also to become a member of 'N Sync. "That was a crop, wasn't it? You look at it today and think the casting director was really onto something." His academic education continuing via one-to-one tuition, the 11-year-old Timberlake seized the opportunity now afforded him. "I'd always sung back home but suddenly there were vocal classes, acting classes … You were shown how to perform to camera and learned by direct experience about entertaining a live studio audience. I was a sponge, soaking it all up. And we were so very well taken care of. I can't imagine what it musthave been like to look after us all though, these competitive little kids thinking they were adults and getting to play with adult toys."

Was he a naturally outgoing boy, even before this two-year hothouse experience? "I was taught to be confident but at the same time humble," he says, making me wish his mum were on hand to ask about a comment attributed to her in that Rolling Stone article, 'the child would argue with God.' "When I step on stage is when I become the most confident version of myself, but that's offset by everyday insecurities. It's interesting I'm now looked at as this person who's rolling through life like everything's always peachy keen. I'm just a man." One who, it must be said and in his next incarnation, sold 42 million albums as a member of 'N Sync, a US equivalent of Take That. And it is in discussion of that period (and of what was by any standard a remarkable commercial achievement) that he reveals a key motivating force – the desire for peer respect.

"Yes, we were part of a product movement, but the thing I'll defend about the band until the end is that we were pushing those buttons as well," he says, and though no defence has been asked for. "We understood that those 12-year-olds were our core audience and knew exactly how to write songs and put together our shows to sell 10 million a time. That's why, towards the latter part of our time together and when JC and I had started being responsible for a lot of the material, the evolution towards a solo career suddenly came to seem feasible. Before then it hadn't felt like something I could pull off. I didn't have the confidence to do it or know exactly where I'd fit in." And his vision for himself was one that would neatly curdle the image of the fresh-faced teenage pop puppet. He would become an r'n'b star.

Timberlake emphasises his Memphis roots in explaining why he should attempt such an audacious, potentially disastrous transition. "Historically the city's been a melting pot for all kinds of music. It's the home of Elvis but also of B. B. King. You've got rock and blues but Nashville's right down the road. In the '60s Motown was this beautiful, polished sound but if you travelled a little further south you'd get a soul music that was altogether slower and rawer, grittier and dirtier." R'n'b is the modern, more commercial equivalent and had become, he says, his favourite music. And by drafting in hip-hop producers Timbaland and The Neptunes to create libidinous settings for his pure, high voice and to collaborate on decidedly grown-up new songs like Cry Me A River (said to be about his break-up with Spears), he set about his comprehensive reinvention.

With worldwide sales of seven million to date, 1.8 million of them in the UK, Justified was not a success on the scale of 'N Sync's biggest hitters, but still it dominated the airwaves in 2003 and was triumphant in transforming Timberlake's public image into that of an edgy young love god (the red tops celebrated the fact by dubbing him 'Trousersnake'). A sexually charged performance of Rock With You with Kylie Minogue at the following year's Brit Awards made headlines, but nothing like those inspired by Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction" (Timberlake's words in apologising for the incident) while duetting on the same song a few weeks later at the 2004 Super Bowl final. Any other former boy band member would have been thrilled with himself. Not Timberlake.

"That new-king-of-pop coverline in Rolling Stone bothered me so bad. When I saw it I was like, 'My God, my career is over!' I felt it meant I still wasn't being taken seriously, that I was being stereotyped just like I had been before." The end-of-year Best Of … lists didn't help either. "'Pop Album of the Year' here. 'Pop Album of the Year' there." Timberlake mimics receiving a wound to the heart. "I couldn't understand why people couldn't hear that I was doing r'n'b." The experience of promoting Justified around the world for 18 months also took its toll. When he talks about 'N Sync, the singer makes much of the brotherly aspect of being one of five against the world: "Everybody took care of each other. Those were some of the best times of my life." Now he was out on his own.

"I performed those songs over and over for a year and a half and with everyone screaming at me. It should have felt amazing and did at first, but it came to a point where I had no energy left and so I decided to back off from music for a while." Being Justin Timberlake meant he wasn't short of offers of things to do. In addition to launching that clothing line (today he has teamed his own brand jeans with Lacoste trainers and a faded black t-shirt), he launched a parallel acting career, appearing in the straight-to-DVD thriller Edison Force, committing to three other films and voicing the character of young King Arthur in Shrek the Third, due for 2007 release.

So many Hollywood actors, seeking the perfect role, option a favourite book and develop it as a potential starring vehicle. Is he much of a reader himself? Timberlake smiles. "A narcoleptic one, I'm afraid. I think I need to get my eyes checked. I don't have a problem reading scripts 'cos all the text is in the middle of the page and you just scan down. But there's something about going left to right, left to right that makes me dizzy. Sport is what I love most and any chance I get I surf, snowboard, play basketball or golf. I'm an athlete (here he flexes first one bicep, then the other) and I think that's why I'm able to dance. I never took any formal training in it, hip hop apart."

But it all comes back to the music, and at some point Timberlake gave himself a talking-to. "That King of Pop thing? Finally I looked in the mirror and said, 'Check your ego! This is a great thing they're saying. Get off your high horse and go make whatever album you want to make, one that defies categorisation.'" The result is FutureSex/LoveSounds. A supervised hearing of six tracks suggests he's succeeded in making another step change. So while the media longs to check the current temperature of his relationship with Diaz (she is here with him in the hotel), all Timberlake wants to talk about is his new release.

It's certainly state of the art, I thought intially, yet there's nothing here that in terms of musicality rival the track Loose Ends, his vocal contribution to the recent Sergio Mendes album Timeless (it is an examination of the effect of the war on terror on the families of US servicemen and women).Then through the speakers came Another Man, produced by Rick Rubin, hot from recent successes with the Dixie Chicks and Neil Diamond but with artists asdiverse as Slipknot and the Beastie Boys already on his CV. "You liked that?" the singer grins. "That's music to my ears. I think people are going to be surprised."

While elsewhere he competes with technology and hip hop beats, here is just a song and a voice. And thus exposed, Timerlake is almost as impressive as the man he says is a muse, the late soul singer Donny Hathaway. "That's the one song on which I gave myself over completely to the producer," he says. "And amid my own compulsive obsessive disorder about the songs I write, I'm so glad I did 'cos it came out better than I ever could have imagined." Scheduled to close FutureSex/LoveSounds and the only Rubin-produced inclusion on the CD, it is also the harbinger of things to come. They have already recorded a further handful of songs together, and the next album will be a total collaboration between the two.

Finally then, Timberlake looks like being rewarded with what he appears to have wanted all along - peer and critical approval. Yet still his mass appeal and famous partner keeps him in the territory he enjoys least, Tabloidville. On the day we meet, an interview has been published in a UK title in which he's reported as having said heroin was a safer drug than tobacco. "Interesting you should mention that," he says wearily. "That's a great example of the trouble I find myself in and why I choose no longer to comment on my personal relationships.

"I've tried always to be truthful and honest but a lot of times people take advantage. What I'm purported to have said was taken from the replies to different questions and put into the same quotation, so that suddenly I appear to be saying the most ludicrous thing anyone could ever think of saying. OK, it's just the nature of the beast, someone trying to write something more interesting than what I actually said, but can you understand why it makes me …" He stops, sighs, exasperated.

"Fame has always been this incredible thing for people, but now seemingly more than ever it's a focus," he then continues. "But d'you know what? It doesn't really exist. It comes as a by-product of what you do but it means nothing. You are one but you're not. I know I'm no more special than anyone else, and I continue to live my life like I can learn something valuable from everyone that I meet. I'm neurotic at times, and narcissistic, but mainly I try to be self-deprecating about it all. If you can't laugh about what's happening to you …" At which point the PR tells him that this interview has to terminate and that his next one must begin, meaning that Timberlake's policy will once more be put to the test.

Copyright © 2020 Alan Jackson

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