Feature: Meet Tiffany Twisted

• California, December 1976. A new album by the Eagles satirises the shallow
  materialism of mid-70s Los Angeles, portraying it with dry humour as Hotel California. In
  the title song, a traveller on a dark desert highway stops at a hotel that looks inviting, but
  soon finds himself trapped in a nightmare as inescapable as it is seductive. An unnamed
  woman stands in the doorway, welcoming guests. ‘Her mind is Tiffany-twisted’, sings Don
  Henley. In other words, warped by an insatiable desire for luxury goods such as Tiffany
  jewellery.
  
• London, 2019. Hetti Harper, aged 23, moves from Yorkshire to London. She forms a
  band and adopts a stage persona for herself: Tiffany Twisted.
  
• London, September 2026. Tiffany Twisted is the rising star of UK Christian rock, and
  making waves in hard music circles Stateside. On a rainy afternoon in south London, we
  sit in her home studio as she recounts the rollercoaster ride of the past seven years. It’s a
  tale of spiritualism, the occult, deliverance, crying on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m., and loud
  music. Buckle up – it’s a wild ride.

Ascent
At the age of 11 Hetti Harper, from rural North Yorkshire, won a choral scholarship to the
prestigious Barnard Castle school. Her classical training would later prove helpful with
vocal technique, but her growing love was for rock music. Her father’s uncle was an
aspiring musician, and hearing him sing “Hotel California” was one of her earliest memories.
The mysterious woman with the Tiffany-twisted mind took up residence in her brain, and
became a musical alter-ego.

In her late teens she moved to London and formed an alt-rock band. Tiffany Twisted
built a reputation on the London scene for energetic live shows. Officially they were a four-
piece band, but fans knew Tiffany Twisted really meant the big vocals and charismatic
stage presence of their lead singer. In March 2020 they recorded an EP, This is the End, at
London’s famous Abbey Road Studios.

‘We were very much a live band’, recalls Hetti. ‘We recorded the EP as live – we
were old-school and felt we didn’t need slick production. We only had a month’s notice
before the recording, and I wrote all the material in that month. It was a wonderful
experience, and that was the point I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life.’
The Abbey Road recordings included some apparently spiritual song titles: “Save
Yourself,” “Sold My Soul,” and “Speaking in Tongues.” Was Christian faith an influence? No,
says Hetti, she was just playing with words: ‘I was unaware of the meanings at the time,
but it turns out to have been prophetic for what was to come.’

Descent
Just days after the release of the EP, Britain was plunged into Covid lockdown and Hetti
found herself spending extended time alone. Unable to perform, she began to explore
spirituality. A friend introduced her to a Spiritualist medium, who recognized signs of
mediumship in her. By that stage she was hearing voices and sensing mysterious physical
presences. Hetti, according to the medium, was a natural ‘seer.’ She started attending a
Spiritualist church and trained as a medium.

Daily life now involved out-of-body experiences, as well as conversing with the
dead, spirit guides and angelic beings. That, at least, is what she believed was doing. On
one occasion, while walking through the streets of London’s Soho, she felt somebody grab
her. Looking round, there was nobody there.

She was consumed by her new passion, and considered abandoning her musical
ambitions. The anxieties and turbulent emotions she had experienced down the years
seemed to be calmed only during her sessions of meditation and mediumship.

Spiritualism became a gateway drug for something harder, the occult: ‘It presented
itself as good, but I started to spiral downwards quickly. I realized I’d got myself into
something dark. Now when I was meditating, I saw only demonic presences. I saw demons
every time I closed my eyes and while I was asleep. This went on for over a year and I
began to panic. I felt I was under a curse, being pulled towards death. Down the years I’d
experienced suicidal ideation, but this was different. I wanted to live, but I was
overwhelmed with feelings that something else wanted me dead.’

She would find herself lying broken on the floor of her bathroom, at 3 a.m., the room
spinning around her, crying out in desperation. The only physical position that seemed to
lessen the agony was kneeling. Finally, kneeling on the bathroom floor in the early hours,
she cried out to God. Her first ever prayer.

When an answer arrived, it came from an unexpected and ironic source. A close
friend who was a fellow occultist was sounding off about deliverance ministry, the crazy
Christian idea that Jesus could free individuals from spiritual oppression and demonic
influence. He was dismissive of it all, but Hetti was intrigued.

She began to search out information about deliverance ministry, and discovered
online videos of pastors warning of the dangers of mediumship and the occult. She found
their descriptions of Jesus casting out demonic presences from people strangely
compelling. She had known little about Jesus, and cared even less. But every time she
heard Jesus’s name, she felt a surge of hope. Listening to a particular talk on deliverance,
every word spoken by the minister seemed addressed to her personally: ‘I knew he was
right.’ She had an experience she later described as being ‘hit by the Spirit.’

She made contact with a local church that took her accounts of spiritual warfare
seriously. There she found a warm welcome and pastoral support. On her first Sunday she
took a public step of faith in Jesus, and was later baptized. This led to a couple of years
rebuilding her entire life from the ground up: ‘I realized I’d have to rethink every area of my
life. I began to get rid of lots of stuff, and I split up the band. I stopped smoking overnight.
It’s been the most beautiful few years of my life. It’s hard to comprehend what life was like
before I met Jesus.’

It was the people closest to Hetti who most noticed the changes. Her father David
Harper, a presenter of antiques shows on BBC TV, became a Christian too. His journey
towards faith, says Hetti, was kick-started by the astonishing difference he saw in his
daughter: ‘He was shocked by the change in me. He was like, I don’t know this person,
and I need to find out why.’

Restoration
Before her conversion Hetti had never heard of Christian rock: ‘I didn’t even know it was a
thing!’ Discovering a world of edgy Christian music, particularly in the States, was quite the
revelation. Her favorite artists in today’s Christian music scene are Tommy Green’s
HolyName project fusing metalcore with Eastern Orthodox iconography, Texas progressive
metalcore band Bloodlines, and the nu-metal/shoegaze of CHANGETHEWXRLD.

But, she says, nobody else is playing what she wants to play. She calls her style
Christian Grungecore: a mix of ’90s grunge, early 2000s emo, metalcore and alt rock, all
done with a homespun indie sensibility. To date she has released a handful of singles, and
a spine-tingling heavy version of the UPPERROOM worship song “Unto the Lamb.” Her
debut EP, An Urn Out of Ashes, has just dropped. She describes it as ‘a collection of
things I’ve said to God: prayers and conversations.’ She has also done a few collaborations. These include an epic version of Psalm 4 in partnership with Out of the Depths, a project by two US producers to record metal versions of all the Psalms.

Her tracks are on a number of Christian metal and hard music playlists on
streaming sites. My own discovery of Tiffany Twisted came as I was listening to a Christian
metal playlist on Spotify to relieve the tedium of ironing shirts. A track started that was so
refreshingly different from the rest that I abandoned a crumpled shirt to find out more. I
assumed the singer must be a major artist from LA or Nashville, with a top production
team. Nope. Turns out she lives 16 miles down the road from me, writes and produces her
own material from a small home studio, and leads worship in her London church.

She says her music is mainly for two groups of people: Christians with an
unconventional past who find it hard to fit in, and people without faith who struggle with
hurts and traumas: ‘My music speaks into those wounds. It tells people they can come out
on the other side. If he can heal me, he can heal anybody. That’s the testimony.’

The next step for Hetti is live shows. So far the rebirth of Tiffany Twisted has
focused on the recording studio and producing arty, lo-fi videos to accompany each track.
Hetti is desperate to get back into live venues and showcase her new music. She recently
assembled a band of London-based musicians. First they will play some British gigs, then
she has plans for shows in the States in 2027.

Tiffany Rediscovered
When Hetti came to faith, she cleared out almost everything from her earlier life. So much
of it felt like tainted goods, memories of a life she wanted to forget. But for a time the one
thing she couldn’t bring herself to bin was her earlier music. The big achievement of her
younger self, it was bound up with her sense of identity. As she became more secure in
her new faith she felt God calling her to surrender that too, and to create new music. The
old Tiffany Twisted tracks were the last burnt offering on the altar, a final act of surrender.

Despite feeling compelled to delete her old music, Hetti never sensed that she
should also sacrifice the stage name. From a rational and marketing perspective, that
seemed weird. Seriously, what kind of name is Tiffany Twisted for a Christian singer?
Before I interviewed Hetti, I knew from watching an online interview that she was
still puzzling over why God might want her to hang on to the name Tiffany Twisted. I have
a fascination with language, so the night before our interview I decided to dig deeper into
some word derivations, to see if anything might come to light. Oh my goodness. When we
meet in her studio, with the London rain falling outside, I tell her what I’ve found.

Since Hetti’s conversion, she has spoken of her fondness for the Hebrew word
qavah (pronounced ka-VAH). It means waiting with hope: ‘Those who wait (qavah) upon
the LORD will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles.’ (Isaiah
40:31). The root of qavah means binding or twisting strands together to make a rope. In
other words, true strength and hope comes from being entwined with God’s power. Qavah
means Twisted.

But here’s the jaw-dropper: the name Tiffany means ‘revealing God.’ It’s a variation
of Theophany, from the Greek theophania. In medieval England and France, girls born on
6 January were named Tiffany, because that was the Feast of the Epiphany – when
Christians remember the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus. In other words, Tiffany is
about revealing Christ’s glory to people with a background in astrology and magic. And it’s
about people who’ve travelled far, on a dark desert highway, seeing a shimmering light.
The young Hetti Harper became Tiffany Twisted, a name evoking decadent excess.
Her life journey has taken her through fire and she has emerged on the other side with a
new identity and calling. And the coolest part of the story: her new name is Tiffany Twisted,
a name that means revelation and hope.

Mike Starkey is a London-based writer and ordained Anglican minister. A former
radio journalist, he often presents Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2, Britain’s
biggest national music station. He writes on culture, music and faith at
FlaneurNotes.com.

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