Paul Simper’s career in pop journalism began after a fortuitous encounter with Spandau Ballet in a Tiger Bay nightclub in 1980. Writing for Melody Maker, New Sounds New Styles and No.1, he spent the best part of the rest of the decade interviewing the new generation of pop stars who took over the world, before having his own crack at the charts as one half of the ill-fated disco duo Slippry Feet.
He has published one other book, the 1960s cult TV tribute The Saint: From Big Screen to Small Screen and Back Again. Paul Simper lives in north London.
Dedicated to:
The Crimpers, my dearest darling Crowther and Molly-Jean; here’s one I made earlier.
Geoffrey, for trusting your little brother with your precious record collection.
Jacqueline, for risking putting on those oh so slippry feet.
And Mrs Simper, aka Mother, who will disapprove of much of this, but without whom none of it would have been possible.
‘No, I don’t want to live in the past. But it’s a nice place to visit’
Nile Rodgers and Chic, ‘I’ll Be There’
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Prologue
1 Eve Graham’s Toast Rack
2 50p New Romantic
3 Bank Holiday Rondo
4 Spandau Valet
5 Not Mad About the Grill
6 Cup of Cold Sick to Go
7 Enjoy What You Do
8 Nana Hi Hi
9 If We Took a Holiday
10 Mother’s Pride
11 Shaking Your Eyes
12 The Well Stocked Pop
13 It’ll Be All Polite on the Night
14 Prince Says Keep It Coming
15 Down to Earth
16 Everybody Needs Good Nanas
17 We’ll Always Have Paris
18 Raise Your Rump Off That Seat
19 Put On Your Slippry Feet
Epilogue
Thank You
Supporters
Copyright
It is one of eighties pop music’s lesser known facts that Bananarama’s second album – the one with ‘Cruel Summer’ and ‘Robert De Niro’s Waiting’ – was at one time to be titled Tea at Mrs Simper’s.
This followed a weekend jaunt in January 1984 by two of the Nanas – Sarah Dallin and Keren Woodward – and their best pal (and honorary fourth member) Mel O’Brien, to The White House, my mum and dad’s home in the tiny, publess village of East Grafton in Wiltshire.
Bananarama vs. Mrs Simper was always likely to be a lively encounter. In the one corner: council-tenanted pop stars Keren and Sarah plus their gold-toothed mate from Bethnal Green, all three prone to piss-taking, eye-rolling and in-joking, lovers of Blind Date and Brookie and capable of drinking their own body weights in vodka.
In the other, the very just-so lady of the manor, Mrs S, an inveterate snob, falling somewhere between The Good Life’s Margot Leadbetter and Keeping Up Appearances’ Hyacinth Bucket, queen of her colonially decked-out domain, lover of the Antiques Roadshow and Last Night of the Proms, partial to a dry sherry and the occasional (fairly lethal) Wiltshire cocktail.
Bristolians Sarah and Keren were at least on nodding terms with the countryside and country ways. Mrs S, on the other hand, who approved of only two records I’d ever owned –‘Turning Japanese’ by The Vapors, to which she would dance dementedly round the dining room like one of the three little maids from The Mikado, and Bowie’s ‘The Jean Genie’, because it had her name in the title – had not the slightest idea who these rather unruly girls were, or of what they sang.
She had, though, been reliably informed by the teenage offspring of one of her mates that these new pals of mine had been on Top of the Pops, which at least granted them a BBC air of respectability. Hence they were feted with the best china and ushered into the big sitting room – normally reserved for landmark birthdays and Christmas.
If Mrs S took to any of Bananarama, it was Keren who, perhaps with a premonition of her future life shacked up in a Cornish country pile with Wham!’s Andrew Ridgeley, appeared the most at home in these surroundings. There’s a photo of the whole ensemble, including old family friends, St Mary’s convent girls Giulietta and Bella Edwards, and my brother Geoffrey, taking afternoon tea, and Keren, standing by the mantelpiece, is the only one with an air of ‘Sure this is my gaff, what of it?’ Meanwhile Sarah and Mel muck about with the family teapot and Mother plasters on a smile and waits for everyone to return to venerating her Victoria sponge.
Needless to say, Mrs S was not impressed by the girls’ general tomfoolery or the lack of a single skirt, nail varnish or lipstick between them. All of which only added to the air of barely suppressed hilarity as far as the Nanas were concerned.
Soon after arrival, Sarah and Mel struck gold when they discovered a small knitted frog in their bedroom, which they immediately christened Mrs Simper. This accompanied us to Savernake Forest after we’d been shooed out from under Mrs S’s feet because of our constant tittering. The rest of the afternoon was spent with the girls going through their repertoire of exotic bird calls as they waggled the knitted Mrs S about on a pointed stick and sang old Cher hits whilst running from (non-existent) gypsies, tramps and thieves.
Due to the dearth of pubs in the village, we spent the Saturday evening in the public bar of the Royal Oak, Wootton Rivers, where the locals proved about as welcoming as An American Werewolf in London’s Brian Glover and Rik Mayall when their game of darts is interrupted at the Slaughtered Lamb. Being the days before camera phones, and clearly unaware of the maxim ‘take a picture, it’ll last longer’, various welly-clad, twine-belted characters ambled over to inspect the girls at extremely close range, as you might a new breed of heifer. The girls were not impressed.
Sunday was again spent taking to the great outdoors, walking up Martinsell Hill to do a few Beatles’ ‘Help’-style poses (possibly the inspiration for their 1989 Comic Relief Lananeeneenoonoo collaboration with French and Saunders?) and visiting my dad’s herd of cows up Dursden Lane, which proved to be a poor substitute for the horses Sarah and Keren assumed we’d have knocking about somewhere out back.
I’d say the weekend was over all too quickly but as we bade our farewells and headed back to The Smoke there was (for me at least) a sense of relief that we’d all got through it in one piece. The glower from Mrs S when Sarah gleefully declared that her London living abode was ‘council’ has stayed with me to this day.
And yet, mortifying though much of it had been, there was also something thrilling about seeing these two worlds unfeasibly collide. Like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, where various on-screen characters magically burst free from the celluloid to enjoy a Madcap Manhattan Weekend in 1930s New York, here were shiny Top of the Pops stars I’d watched devotedly on our telly suddenly spilling out into the Simper household, supping cups of tea in our kitchen, popping upstairs for a quick wee or being tutted at by my mum for coming down late for breakfast.
Bringing a pop star back to the country – the place that as a teenager I’d been so desperate to leave – was, strangely, in some way the ultimate confirmation of how lucky I’d got with this wholly improbable career of mine. Not only was I being paid to interview and party with these sexy, funny pop people in the big city, they were even taking the time to hop on a train and meet the folks.
Not that it was always such a smooth ride. No pop journo memoir would be complete without a few stories of outraged stars wanting to string you up for one reason or another. We’ll return to those. For the most part, though, the early eighties was a pretty glorious time to embark on writing about all things pop, especially living and working in London.
Nightclubs were young, thrilling and fun; packed to the gills with a new generation of pop stars set to take over the world and more than happy to be written about whilst they did it. New technology heralded the dawn of MTV and colour-printing presses – big-budget, glossy pop videos (and lifestyles) and big-budget, glossy pop mags. At its peak, fortnightly song words magazine Smash Hits sold half a million, a 7-inch single like Adam Ant’s ‘Goody Two Shoes’ a million.
But for all the fancy trappings of this brave new world there was much at the start of the eighties that was reassuringly analogue. Records were played and reviewed (then frequently sold on for a tidy sum) on vinyl. Pop stars were not on conference call, electronic press kit or buffered by an army of publicists. They were there in person. You might not get to know them well enough to pop round their houses, but chances are they’d be up for a pint. With the bounteous array of home-grown talent emerging from the new clubland scene, we were often sharing the same dance floors and anything else that made for a good night out.
For those of a delicate disposition, be warned: it does get messy.
Let’s not jump the gun, though. For now, it’s back to the all-important task of naming that second Bananarama LP. To their credit, the girls pushed hard for Tea at Mrs Simper’s to become its title. In the end, though, London Records plumped for something they considered more impactful.
They called it: Bananarama.
It’s 1972. A seminal year for pop on the telly. For many it will be that arm drape on Top of the Pops, one heady July evening, as Starmen Bowie and Ronson set off their cultural comet. But for me, 1972’s most palpitating night of telly pop had already passed some five months previous, when all my hopes and dreams were focused on another BBC musical event – and one with a global audience.
Coming live from Edinburgh’s Usher Hall and presented by Moira Shearer, this was the big one. The UK was hosting the Eurovision Song Contest and my absolute favourite pop group of that moment, The New Seekers, were red-hot favourites to win with their rollicking piece of bubble-gum pop ‘Beg, Steal or Borrow’.
I’d been glued to my TV set since the thrilling process of picking our song for Europe had begun. Every Saturday night for six weeks, on It’s Cliff Richard!, The New Seekers had offered up a different ditty for the great British public’s careful consideration. My personal choice to get the job done was ‘One by One’, a tale of the Creation sweetly sung by Lyn Paul, but ‘Beg, Steal or Borrow’ ran away with it and, to be fair, it was a stonker.
All the signs were good. The New Seekers were already on something of a roll thanks to their chart-topping adaptation of the CocaCola theme tune (artfully changing ‘We’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ to ‘We’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’) the previous year. Allied with the UK’s then rock solid Eurovision track record – Sandie Shaw winning in 1967 with ‘Puppet on a String’, Lulu tying in 1969 with ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ and Cliff’s ‘Congratulations’ only being pipped at the post in 1968 by one vote – who could possibly deny them?
I still find it hard to revisit the events of that night. Back then it had all unfolded in slightly foggy black and white (our first colour telly didn’t appear till the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and Boycott’s 1977 Ashes) but watching it now on YouTube in eye-popping (save for the beige stage) colour makes it all the tougher to bear.
The New Seekers had it in the bag. Spurred on by the BBC orchestra and cheered heartily by a partisan crowd (Eve Graham was from Perth) they gave it their all. Singing so sunnily, so winningly (that moment where Lyn Paul crinkles her nose adorably) and ending with a look so triumphant that even though there were thirteen more acts still to be heard, I was already anticipating their glorious air-punching moment of victory.
There are times, though, when pop goes wrong. That disastrous Smash Hits Poll Winners Party of 1993 when Take That’s perfect trio of ‘Pray’, ‘Relight My Fire’ and ‘Why Can’t I Wake Up with You’ tragically split the vote and the Fresh Prince snatched the Best Single award from their deserving grasp with ‘Boom! Shake the Room’ is one that’s never truly healed.
Tears were shed by a fully grown (fairly pissed) man that fateful Sunday afternoon round my mate Sue Tilley’s. And so it was for the nine-year-old me, some two decades earlier. Wide-eyed and over-brimming with optimism – yet in truth still hopelessly unprepared for the injustices of the entertainment world.
Vicky Leandros, representing Luxembourg, was the penultimate act to take to the stage with her ballad ‘Après Toi’. It was good, solid Eurovision fare. Plenty of emotion and a stirring chorus and Vicky looked very nice in her floor-length black dress. But come on! Winner?! Where was the pizazz? Where was the likeability that Mr Cowell would later teach us was an essential of any singing contest winner? Where indeed was the X factor?
In the end fourteen points separated the two. It was neck and neck all the way and because our bodies tend to protect us from life’s more traumatic moments, my mind has erased the memory of which fucker cast those final, decisive votes.
The recovery process was a long one. In my Letts School-boys Diary for that year, four weeks pass and then on the Wednesday of an otherwise unrecorded week I have scratched the words EVE Grahame [sic] in a handwriting that I can’t even recognise as my own. There is not another entry for the next twenty-two weeks until I finally break my mourning by playing with my Action Man.
It is possible that that one curiously misspelled entry was the day on which I decided to make Eve a toast rack. I can’t entirely fathom the reasons for this. Was I using basic arts and craft to repair my broken heart? Was it intended as some sort of consolation prize for Eve for not getting to lift that Euro trophy? Or was it a gift with which to woo her?
Cards on the table, between the two of them, I actually fancied Lyn Paul more. But many a fruitless game of playground kiss chase had taught me not to play the favourite.
On reflection, this is a fairly harsh call on the Graham. With her almond eyes twinkling with allure from beneath her dark fringe on the back sleeve of my album We’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, Eve is undoubtedly a hottie and deserving of far more lavish gifts than my D-minus effort.
All the same I parcelled it up and posted it off to Polydor Records. After which, big surprise, it was never seen or heard of again.
Many years later, I phoned into Danny Baker’s weekend Radio London show to share this story and he was much taken with the idea of me imagining Eve sitting at her breakfast banquette, nibbling on a slice of toasted Nimble from my little rack and thinking fondly of Young Paul from Burbage.
If only she could have trusted herself to date a nine-year-old.
Still, though my young heart had taken its first battering at the hands of pop, there was much to be thankful for. I had discovered the buzz that went with it. Soon I would be gobbling up all manner of predominantly 7-inch vinyl from Glam to Disco to New Wave (I was too much of a wuss for Punk). My only trip to London in the 1976 summer of Anarchy involved me visiting the National History and Science museums and buying a copy of Mayfair and Oui.
With each new phase would come fresh agonies and ecstasy. The thrill of owning ‘Metal Guru’ in its beautifully branded red-and-blue sleeve with Marc and his corkscrew hair staring up at me as he chased himself around the turntable. Counterbalanced by the misery of discovering that the copy of T-Rex’s Tanx – that I got off my cousin Gerald for the price of a conker – had warped when I casually left it exposed to the heat of the midday sun in the back of the family Renault 12.
Later, when I took to the dance floor of Tunisia’s Sahara Beach Hotel, there was the giddy combination of my first holiday romance and my first earful of Chic’s ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah)’. Only to be followed by the crashing disappointment, on returning home, of realising that there really had been no romance and that the object of my fanciful desires (who lived down the road from my dentist) couldn’t even be arsed to come to the phone let alone cut a rug again to Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards.
At first the records themselves were more than enough to be getting on with, but as I moved up through my teens, a thirst for information about all my latest chart obsessions led me to the music press.
Every Wednesday the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Record Mirror and Sounds would bring me that little bit closer and make me that little bit more fascinated with these unreachable idols. Dropping in on them whilst they recorded their latest album, being invited backstage at their gigs, even flying to faraway lands with them for a bit of a chin wag. Imagine – just imagine – having a job like that?
Seeing your name in print for the first time is a thrill. Not as cool, I’d imagine, as hearing your record on the radio or looking up at yourself on a movie screen, but a thrill nonetheless. There it is on the newsstand, an inky version of you, jumping up and down with a little loudhailer, shouting: ‘Here’s what I think of this mob!’
When I made it into the hallowed pages of the Maker in March 1981, I must have read my Stray Cats review pretty much all the way from Cardiff to London. Fellow NCTJ student Jane Moore – now illustrious Sun columnist and broadcaster, then fellow course mate living in a dodgy bedsit on the Newport Road opposite a funeral home – reckons she was more impressed by it than I was. ‘It was like a big, proper grown-up thing to do.’
Still, my diary entry for the following Monday, when we were both back in college, belies any cool I might have been affecting.
‘Just felt like a great day,’ it breezes. ‘Generally bounced around the place receiving congrats for the article.’ You’d have thought it was me who’d played the gig.
There had been one false dawn before my ticker-tape parade. My first commission by MM’s features ed, Colin Irwin, for Bad Manners had arrived at my digs in Cyncoed by telegram (yes, really; that old) two weeks previous. After waving it around like Lord Chamberlain under the noses of my fellow course mates, I strode off to the city’s Top Rank that evening to cast a critical eye over Buster Bloodvessel giving it a bit of ‘Lip Up Fatty’.
All went well, complimentary press tickets (my first!) were waiting, notes were taken (steady at 80 wpm Teeline shorthand) and there was even a bit of drama when the Manners’ set was brought to an abrupt end by some local skinheads and their impromptu stage invasion – pretty standard for ska revival gigs circa 1980/81.
Unfortunately, copy written, what this wet-behind-the-ears cub reporter neglected to do was file it down the phone to the subs the very next day. Instead, I entrusted it to the Royal Mail and it eventually arrived on Colin’s desk at much the same time as the weekly edition of the paper it was meant to be in.
Anyway, second time lucky. There I was in black and white, 350 words of ‘more assured’ this and ‘vastly improved’ that, covering half a page thanks to a live smudge of lead bequiffed Cat, Brian Setzer, leaning into his mike and sweating up a storm.
It had arrived on a propitious day. After much gabbing about it, fellow course mate and pop fanatic Gary Hurr and I were bound for London. We’d talked about little else since a chance encounter with Spandau Ballet the previous November that had set all manner of thoughts and dreams in motion.
I’d arrived in Cardiff in the autumn of 1980; a New-Wave-loving, just-turned-eighteen, nightclubbing novice. I had not the slightest inkling that a new game-changing youth movement was growing and that it was happening not only up the M4 in London, but right under my very nose. I’d not even heard of the band (just about to release their first single) that was at the vanguard of it.
I’d only made it to Cardiff by the skin of my teeth. My mother had presented me with a cutting from the Daily Telegraph advertising five courses across the UK run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. I’d replied with the required essay on ‘Why I Want to Become a Journalist’ (apparently funny) then made the day trip to London for my half-hour interview with a three-member panel of editors and senior journalists, and sat the General Knowledge exam (apparently the worst they’d ever seen).
So here I was with Jane, Gary and twenty others at the South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education on Colchester Avenue, studying libel and slander, public admin, practical journalism (how to structure a story) and 110 wpm shorthand with the supposed intention of doing indentures on a local newspaper for a subsequent two and a half years, before working one’s way towards Fleet Street.
Except there was this clothes shop. A very trendy-looking clothes shop in the centre of town called Paradise Garage on Queen’s Street. So fearfully trendy, in fact, that I’m not quite sure how myself and Gary convinced ourselves we were cool enough to step inside. Actually, I don’t think we did. Jane Moore and course mate Ann Ashford were with us, and they just walked straight in.
The guy who ran the place, Mark Taylor, was tall, dark, immaculately dressed in some sort of leather long-coat and sporting 1940s Clark Gable shades. I didn’t know it but he was part of the Welsh Taffia who, in the shape of Chris Sullivan, Steve Mahoney and Steve Strange, had already relocated to London and begun to revolutionise the way the capital went about its nightclubbing with their Soho and Covent Garden one-nighters (run by the kids for the kids): Billy’s, Blitz, St Moritz and Hell.
I’m sure Mark didn’t even notice us boys as we tried our best to look nonchalant in front of a rail of clothes that we palpably couldn’t afford (thirty-five quid for a pair of trousers was a whole term’s grant!). But he took a shine to Ann and that was when he pointed to the tiny poster on the wall.
It seems wholly appropriate that my first contact with Spandau Ballet should have been via a clothes shop and a nightclub. Their debut Top of the Pops appearance for ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ two weeks before was the first I’d really heard of them. Now Mark told us they were playing that Sunday afternoon at Casablanca’s, a disused church in Tiger Bay. Why not come along?
In fact Clark Gable could do even better than that. Not only would we see this hot new group, playing only their second ever show outside of London, but we could also interview them the night before at Mel’s – Cardiff’s most painfully trendy club – for our college rag, Fuse.
Mel’s was an adventure in itself. Up to this point most of our course socialising had been conducted in traditional large boozers like the Philharmonic near the station or the more modest Poet’s Corner which was closer to college. Mel’s, on the other hand, was in Tiger Bay – these days a bustling docklands redevelopment, but back in 1980 a dangerous, dark, faraway place that appeared to be only reachable by foot and which escaping from depended on one very unreliable night bus, allegedly bound for Ely.
We had never ventured that far but on this Saturday night – spurred on by a second Spandau TOTP appearance as ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ surged to Number 5 – we made it.
What happened next, I can now appreciate, was a classic Spandau hit-and-run. The notion that there really were other New Romantic scenes (that dreaded term, but it had stuck) sprouting up outside London was one that the band had only really road tested earlier that week when they’d presented their first out-of-town show in Birmingham.
On the Thursday, a coach-load of pissed-up, tripping Blitz Kids (another term bandied about) had descended on the Midlands, danced to Spandau at the Botanical Gardens – the city’s most pre-posterous live venue – run up a massive bar bill at the one trendy club – The Rum Runner – compared notes (and competitive sideways glances) with the scene’s own aspiring band (a bunch of no-hopers called Duran Duran who they’d refused as their support act) and a few style-conscious fellow-travellers, before piling back to London.
By the weekend, it was Cardiff’s turn for similar treatment. Except this time, it was myself, Gary and Jane having our ears bent as Spandau’s affable but astute manager, Steve Dagger, laid out both the scene’s and the band’s manifesto accompanied by his classic Young Americans wedge haircut. We were about to be a part of something very now – this new decade’s update of the mid-sixties Swinging London club scene with contemporary designers, DJs, models, artists and photographers – and this band that was now standing in front of us – ‘the applause for our audience’, as they referred to themselves – representing it.
Within minutes of entering Mel’s, we’d all three been paired off with the efficiency of a speed-dating service. I was given a comprehensive dissertation on the history of London club culture, courtesy of Gary Kemp. Gary Hurr got the low-down on contemporary wardrobe from Steve Norman and Jane Moore had half an hour of Tony Hadley on his Mastermind specialist subject, The Life and Works of Frank Sinatra, with a Bowie and Roxy bonus round.
By the time Spandau actually got around to playing the following afternoon, in the sweaty arches of a disused church called Casablanca’s, it was a done deal: this was a party I didn’t want to leave. There were terrifyingly gorgeous girls painted like dolls, extremely drunk lads who could really dance and a top table musical feast from DJ Rusty Egan of Roxy, Bowie, Kraftwerk, the B-52s and Gina X that made my New Wave diet of Boomtown Rats, UB40 and The Police suddenly seem sorely undernourished.
There was even drama. Slipping backstage after the show, I was just in time to see a well-oiled and garrulous Robert Elms berating Melody Maker’s Steve ‘Sticks’ Sutherland as Steve tried to interview the band in their dressing room.
‘Where were you when this all started?’ scoffed Elms.
I couldn’t have cared less. Marching up the road with Jane brandishing one of John Keeble’s drumsticks, I was busting to tell everyone on the course what we’d just seen. Not only had the curtain been pulled back on a whole new way of life, there was even the possibility I’d been afforded a shortcut round the hard slog of local newspaper journalism.
From that weekend on it was nightclubbing all the way. Our New Romantic radar on high alert, we discovered all sorts in the city. Along with Mel’s there was The Floorshow every Wednesday at Lloyd’s by the railway station, Nero’s – with new live acts like Shock and Depeche Mode – on Saturdays and Xanadoos – with its precipitous raised dance floor of flashing disco squares – on Tuesdays.
Lloyds was mine and Gary’s favourite haunt. Mel’s was a little too up itself and, truth be told, still a little too intimidating to enjoy week in week out. But for 50p, Lloyds had the lot.
Our compère and DJ was Anthony, a friendly David Sylvian lookalike who leaned towards the electro pop end of the spectrum – Visage’s ‘Fade to Grey’ and ‘Mind of a Toy’, Landscape’s ‘Einstein A Go-Go’, Simple Minds’ Moroderesque ‘I Travel’, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘Enola Gay’ and ‘Electricity’, Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ and ‘All Stood Still’, and, naturally, as he pouted with rouged cheeks from beneath his bleached, flicked fringe, Japan’s ‘Quiet Life’ and ‘Life in Tokyo’.
Gary had a penchant for The Skids so was always lobbying for ‘Into the Valley’ and ‘Working for the Yankee Dollar’, whilst, card-carrying party member that I’d already become, I was always on at Anthony for the Spandau 12-inch of ‘To Cut a Long Story’ and ‘The Freeze’.
There was naturally plenty of Bowie and Roxy. The obligatory ‘Heroes’, ‘Sound and Vision’ and the three Scary Monsters singles: ‘Ashes to Ashes’, ‘Fashion’ and ‘Up the Hill Backwards’ for the former; and thrilling back catalogue ‘Pyjamarama’, ‘Editions of You’ and ‘Do the Strand’ telling us of fabulous creations and danceable solutions for the latter.
Highlight of the night would be the moment when Anthony would slow things down with Roxy Music’s ‘Mother of Pearl’. Two Ferry lookalikes – the Two Bryans, as we called them – would take to the floor in dinner suits and play out the whole number: lighting each other’s cigarettes, striking the poses, double clapping after ‘even Zarathustra’ and sticking it out through the torch song’s numerous false endings (four of them) before enigmatically departing the now fairly empty dance floor on the final finger click. Once, one of the Bryans exited one round of finger clicks too soon, leaving Gary and me in fits for the rest of the night.
My wardrobe had also had a suitable makeover. Gone were the baggy Geldof jumpers and jeans and Sting-style stripy T-shirts and raincoats.
‘Shone in my clown outfit,’ reads one fashion-conscious entry from my February 1981 diary. ‘Gary had his great mercenary outfit on.’
‘Stunned and outshone all at Mel’s in my plus fours,’ reads another. I was doing a lot of shining.
My father was less impressed with my sartorial choices. When he came to pick me up from the M4 turn-off for Marlborough and saw the daring bleached motif in my hair – courtesy of Jayne, one of the trainee hairdressers also at Colchester Avenue, and a fellow Lloyds frequenter – his first instinct was to keep on driving.
You’d have thought the plus fours might have gone down a storm in Wiltshire but headbands and tablecloth-sized neck scarves with pixie boots were about as New Romantic as it ever got (and even that was a year or so off yet).
Back at college, Gary and I were not over-enamoured with the opportunities being presented to us. Jane, being far more sensible, already had her sights set on Fleet Street and was playing the long game. But with mine and Gary’s coursework reading matter consisting as much of NME, Melody Maker and Record Mirror as NCTJ text books, we were keen to see what the music press had to offer.
In the summer of 1980, I’d entered a Melody Maker competition to review five favourite albums with the prize being that your work would be published in the paper. Ziggy Stardust, My Generation, the first Beatles album, Regatta de Blanc and AN Other were my five. I hadn’t heard a peep.
But since our fortuitous Spandau encounter, I now had a better in. The tiny detail that I hadn’t actually realised I was conducting my first exclusive interview with a bona fide pop star when I was propping up the bar at Mel’s with Gary Kemp (and subsequently hadn’t made a single note) luckily didn’t deter me from writing 800 hastily remembered words about it.
With this and a couple of gig reviews of The Skids (‘Exuberant highland whoops’) and The Blues Band (‘Layin’ it down with good humour, energy and skill’) at the local Top Rank as my calling card, I printed off and posted two copies to the NME and Melody Maker, offering my services as a thrusting young thing with access to the hot new bands that they had only just become aware of.
Three months later and there laid out in front of me, next to our bars of chocolate and mid-morning British Rail crappy coffees, was my first reward. ‘The Cats Who Licked the Cream’ was the headline. I was practically purring myself. Here we were bound for this new eighties version of Swinging London and me a published music journo.
Everything was in place. I had a foxy friend, Darling from Ludgershall, who had a swanky pad in South Ken, and Gary had a mate who worked at the BBC in Ladbroke Grove (wherever that was). All we needed to do was hook up, dump our bags, then hot-tail it to the West End – the epicentre of all that was hip and happening on a Thursday night – and let the japes begin.
At least that was the plan. Unfortunately, bearing in mind my recent Bad Manners Melody Maker fiasco, I was beginning to learn that letters – particularly the posting of and now the correct addressing of – were not my forte. When we eventually made it to Darling at her (West) Ken residence we discovered my letter had unsurprisingly never reached its destination and there was no room in her inn for two smelly, galumphing blokes.
The day wasn’t a total washout. Earlier we’d happened across Robert Fripp engaged in some sort of record promotion at the Virgin Megastore on Tottenham Court Road for the launch of his Let the Power Fall: Frippertronics album. Then, with the sound of his ‘challenging’ guitar art still jangling discordantly in our ears, who should we spy strolling down the other side of Oxford Street but Steve Dagger?
Of course, we were bound to see him. This was Dagger’s and Spandau’s London. These guys owned this city. No doubt before the day was out we’d see the Kemp brothers quaffing a cocktail in some suitably trendy establishment and perhaps Tony Hadley buying a Russian peasant’s tabard in Soho.
Frustratingly, like many new to the city before and since, we couldn’t make head nor tail of which side of Oxford Street was south and which north and although Gary knew Spandau’s Reformation offices were on Mortimer Street (not a clue), Dagger had disappeared back down his hole like the White Rabbit before we could hail him.
The rest of our two-night London invasion was spent cadging sleeping berths, catching new movies (Raging Bull, Alien, The Long Good Friday) and singularly failing to get involved with the throbbing new clubland scene in any shape or form. Clearly there was more legwork to be done.
Naturally Gary and I bigged up our London trip as soon as we made it back to Cardiff, but we both knew it hadn’t lived up to expectations. Apart from the three movies, Dagger spot and burst of Fripp, our most exciting encounter had been with the doorman of Leicester Square’s Empire cinema who was built like Joe Bugner but with the voice of Larry Grayson.
My final four months in Cardiff rolled by pleasantly enough with more nights at Lloyds and plenty of gigs. Echo and the Bunnymen (or to be more exact their philanthropic manager, Bill Drummond, later a chart-topper in his own right as money-burning founder of The KLF) treated me and fellow course mate Sam to a post-show curry. At Nero’s, I spent a few mortifying (but sort of thrilling) minutes sitting in the dark with a very young ‘Dreaming of Me’/ ‘New Life’-era Depeche Mode after I wangled my way backstage, only for Gary Hurr to turn the dressing room light off for a lark.
There were two more reviews published. New Romantic dance troupe Shock, led by wild man Robert Pereno and girlfriend Lowri-Ann Richards, who I declared to be ‘not just a diverting sideshow, but the main event’ (they folded within the year) and Toyah, who had made the leap from Sheep Farming in Barnet punk fringe attraction to pop star, thanks to the squeaky, belligerent ear worm that was ‘I Wanna Be Free’. ‘The most beautifully crass pop lyrics since Gary Glitter’s “Leader of the Gang”,’ I reckoned. Oh dear.
All too soon my year in Cardiff was over and I was confronted with the sticky problem of converting three £17 live reviews into enough funds to get me to the big city. Pressure from home suggested now was the time to knock this music press nonsense on the head and either go to university or get a job on a proper newspaper, like the Reading Evening Post.
To show willing, I had already gone for an interview at the Post but it hadn’t gone well. When they asked me how I felt about doorstepping, I lied through my teeth that I would have no problem rapping on someone’s front door after they’d just lost their only child in a house fire. The truth is, I couldn’t think of anything worse. My journalistic reading matter up till that point had consisted of the music papers, Film Review and Photoplay (the mainstream movie mags of the day), Continental (European arty films with a sprinkling of tits and a bit of bush) and The Cricketer. I had not a single news-reporting bone in my body.
The only other alternative was to go to work for my Uncle Peter at his fruit-machine depot in Bath, save some money and then hope to somehow find my way to the capital. That summer, McEnroe bagged his first Wimbledon, Botham won the Ashes on the Beeb and Roger Moore’s Bond went back to basics in For Your Eyes Only, save for a comedy coda involving Margaret Thatcher impersonator Janet Brown and a parrot.
And then the 1981 August bank holiday happened.
It started with a phone call from Gary Hurr. Did I want to go and see Blue Rondo A La Turk playing one of their top-secret, one-off gigs in Bournemouth?
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure who or what Gary was on about. Since Cardiff, the closest I’d got to the constantly evolving London club scene had been purchasing the thrilling 12-inch of Spandau’s ‘Chant No. 1 (I Don’t Need This Pressure On)’ as the summer of 1981 saw everyone binning the arty poses and diving feet first into a riot of funk.
I was getting most of this second-hand from my weekly NME where staff writer Adrian Thrills, formerly of punk fanzine 48 Thrills, was enthusiastically reporting back from the sweaty frontline of the scene’s latest place to be – Le Beat Route, as immortalised by Gary Kemp’s ‘Down down pass the Talk of the Town’ rap. It was Thrills’ singles column, busting with exotic sounding 12-inch imports purchased from Greek Street’s Groove Records – Was Not Was, Bits and Pieces, Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band – that was keeping me at least marginally in the loop. But Blue Rondo A La What? Gary had to fill me in on this one.
Like Spandau, Blue Rondo had risen from the original Billy’s/Blitz scene, fronted by fellow club runner Chris Sullivan (Hell, St Moritz, Le Kilt) and key face Christos Tolera. They boasted some bona fide Latin and African heavy artillery in the form of a rhythm section that included Kito Poncioni – bass, Geraldo D’Arbilly and Mick Bynoe – percussion, and a dazzling dancing trio of Sullivan, rhythm guitarist Mark Reilly (later of Matt Bianco) and saxophonist Moses Mount Bassie (real name Tony Gordon), whose steps had been honed on the country’s Northern soul dance floors.
To date, they’d played four gigs, including a South American music festival, coincidentally just down the road from me in Salisbury, where chief town crier Bob Elms had been refused a round of lager, cider and blackcurrant on the grounds that he would fiendishly combine them to make a snakebite.
Now Blue Rondo were to play at the Exeter Bowl Hotel in Bournemouth, just up the hill from the Winter Gardens, and we needed to be there. Gary had been speaking to the band’s manager, Graham Ball (like Dagger and Elms, another LSE graduate) who had already made himself known to us backstage in Cardiff. We were on the door.
The only snag was I’d already bought tickets to see Siouxsie and the Banshees that same weekend in Oxford. Banshees or Blue Rondo? A quick call to Colin Irwin at the Maker sealed the deal. This was the first Rondo show that the music press had got wind of and miracle of miracles I had the only in.
The key question – and one that, not for the last time, I should have probably given more thought to – was what to wear? I had gathered from Martin and Gary Kemp’s immaculate posing on the NME’s ‘Soul Boys of the Western World’ cover earlier that summer (from the movie of the same name, coming your way in thirty-three years’ time, folks) that zoot suits were the order of the day. But Prohibition-era bespoke tailors were few and far between in Burbage so what I actually wore was a tweed jacket and some sort of khaki baggy trouser.
If Spandau at Casablanca’s had unveiled a whole new world, Blue Rondo in Bournemouth was the clarion call to hang all consequences and get properly stuck in. As Gary and I stepped down into the heaving subterranean ballroom, the strangest thing was the feeling we were walking back into a party that we’d only nipped out from for a breath of fresh air. Yet in that short space of time anything and everything had changed. The whole scene had gone from monochrome to Technicolor in the blink of an eye – or to put it in calendar terms, about eight months.
The one thing we did immediately understand – possibly at the behest of an attentive Graham Ball – was the need to get down the front. On a steamy bank holiday Sunday night, without any other prior knowledge of what these Bournemouth soul weekends were all about (funk, Pils, sex, stimulants), it was evident that everyone was more than ready to lose their shit.
Like Spandau, Blue Rondo knew a bit about creating a sense of drama. The club crowd were already familiar with Elms and his infamous poem that used to usher Spandau on – ‘The dance of perfection – The Spandau Ballet!’ – to stark, Fritz-Lang-inspired lighting. But if Spandau were Hollywood-matinee-idols-meets-German-Expressionism, Blue Rondo were more of a rumble.
There was a bit of Brando’s On the Waterfront with a dash of Raging Bull about them. Moses in particular (he’d been a boxer) cradling his instrument like he was ready to go twelve rounds. It’s possible that some of the slow, menacing build may have been more down to the haphazard nature of this notoriously unmanageable bunch of mavericks (as Graham Ball earned his keep propelling them stagewards) than any grand plan; but either way it was mighty effective.
Starting slow, building fast, at the sound of a high trumpet, the whole thing erupted into a mass of delirious, flailing limbs. Blue Rondo barely drew breath again till they departed an hour later leaving us punch-drunk and drenched.
Soon after, I’d get all fired up by the projected passion and conviction of Kevin Rowland and his Dexys Midnight Runners, but the unbridled mayhem that Blue Rondo created live was equally something to behold. Sure, their biggest UK hit (‘Me and Mr Sanchez’) would only get to Number 40, plus, they never came remotely close to filling Radio City Music Hall or six nights at Wembley Arena – unlike some of their contemporaries. But of that era, along with Madness, Blue Rondo were about the most fun you could possibly stick on a stage.
Gary and I weren’t the only ones to be bowled over that weekend. After a chilly night spent in Gaz’s Mini Mazda in the top car park opposite the venue, we returned the following lunchtime to the scene of the crime for a second show laid on specifically for the benefit of Virgin supremo Richard Branson (with an audience of substantially more hungover soul boys and girls) who had arrived too late for the Sunday festivities.
It’s not every day that the head of a record company schleps across the country to see an unsigned act, but with Spandau still riding high, the labels that had missed out on them were desperate not to let the next act from London clubland slip through their fingers. As with Spandau, Phonogram, in the shape of Roger Ames and Tracy Bennett, were pressing hard but Branson even more so.
‘There were a couple of other companies that were interested,’ says Graham Ball, ‘but strangely enough Richard had kind of made his mind up that he wanted this. He was desperately trying to expand Virgin. They had The Human League but Dare was yet to be released. Blue Rondo was a hot group.