I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight In an everlasting kiss...
You know that girl your mother always warned you about? Well, my mother never warned me about her. I think the reason is that my mum recognised I was hopeless around girls, so why bother wasting her breath? The bad girls weren't going to be interested in me. Neither were the nice girls.Not even the hopeless girls...
The thing is, I wasn't really interested in the bad girls either. Certainly not at school. I found them rather obvious and annoying. So why I ended up fancying Wendy James, I really couldn't tell you. Yet whenever she appeared on Top of the Pops... well, invariably I ended up buying the single.
Just for the music, you understand. Transvision Vamp had some rattling good tunes and were a very underrated band and... and...
OK, mostly it was Wendy.
Which is unusual, because she wasn't my type at all.
I even bought her Elvis Costello-written solo album a couple of years later and thought it an excellent, mature piece of art. No, really I did.
3. Transvision Vamp - Landslide Of Love
My favourite Transvision Vamp single was this one. The guitars in the chorus always reminded me of the theme tune to Red Dwarf.
I had no idea until writing this feature that Wendy James was still releasing records, or that her latest, released just last year featured 50 year old Wendy... erm... sans clothes on the front cover. Disgraceful behaviour from someone of her age of course and I will not be endorsing that sort of filth here. Perhaps when I was a teenager, but I long since gave up any interest in the trappings of smut, thank you very much...
I don't think this one's too embarrassing. I was 15 when I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) was released and I still think it's a great pop song, thirty years later. Yes, it does suffer from tinny 80s production, but it bounces along joyfully and gives voice to the unspoken truth of every 15 year old, boy or girl, in its title (brackets all important). You listen to lyrics like those, sung by a pretty girl just a few years older than you... and she might as well be singing to you. It's a fun pop song made heartbreaking when you're stood up against the wall at the school disco, trying your best to look cool and not bothered.
2. Whitney Houston - I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)
This was 1987 too, of course, the zenith of the music video, and the succession of short, figure-hugging dresses Whitney wears throughout doubtless sold quite a few copies to boys my age who might not otherwise have liked this kind of music. I think it's fair to say though that I loved this unashamedly at the time, by then I'd quickly worked out that my taste in music was all over the place and couldn't really be kept in a nice, neat, carefully labelled box. Yes, Whitney, for a very brief moment in time I fancied the pants off you. Then I guess you cut you hair and I stopped loving you, as Billy Bragg famously sang.
Apparently Whitney was never comfortable with being a pop star, and as this was her biggest "pop" hit, you have to wonder if she grew to hate it. I hope not, because there's an innocence to it you rarely see in pop music these days, and the fact she looked like she was having such great fun in the video made her even sexier. If she was putting that on, she was a far better actress than The Bodyguard ever allowed her to show.
I bought the album too, in case you were wondering. I must have had it bad.
OK, I've been threatening this one for a while. Plumbing new depths of embarrassment and shame, I will reveal ten records I bought purely on the basis of fancying the singer. Most of these will sound terrible to modern day ears; some of them even sounded terrible at the time.
We all know there is an inextricable link between pop music and s-e-x. Especially as the main target audience for pop music is teenagers and arguably nobody is more interested in s-e-x than teenagers. (You may choose to dispute that. Who am I to judge?) There is a dark and serious side to this of course: the music industry has been exploiting young female singers for years (watch Charlotte Church's John Peel lecture for her opinion on that), but there's also a case that many female pop stars knowingly choose to exploit their own sexuality to increase their fame. Madonna is the most famous example of this, although curiously, Madonna chose to sex herself up after she'd established herself as a musical force: she was a right scruff-pot when she became famous. Which only goes to prove that it was musical talent which made her... and then her own choice to start flashing her bits to the world. Perhaps the same could be said for the more contemporary example of Rhianna. But when you watch a Rhianna video these days... or pretty much any video featuring a female chart act... they make the sexy videos of my own teenage years seem tame in the extreme. Even Madonna's more raunchy stuff looks quaint now.
Of course, male artists aren't immune to all this. Some have even come out and complained that they feel exploited for their sex appeal. Poor dears. Take a look at a picture of Justin Bieber from 8 years ago and one from today. You think maybe his record company realised his fanbase had grown up a bit and weren't interested in My Little Pony any more? This is a drop in the ocean compared to the way the music industry has exploited young women over the years, but it's one step towards a weird kind of equality...
All that said, I dread to think what pop stars will be doing in videos by the time my boy's a teenager. "It weren't like that back when I were a lad..."
1. T'Pau - Sex Talk
Carol Decker. Of all my teenage pop star crushes, you were the most devastating. The fiery red hair. The aggressive performances. The short skirts... oh yes, those skirts. But while there will be music I now shudder at the very thought of later in this list, I actually think I liked T'Pau for their songs almost as much as for Carol. I bought the Bridge of Spies album on the strength of the first two hits, Heart & Soul and China In Your Hand. I wouldn't call either of them classics, but there was much worse going on in the charts in 1987: the year the 80s went bad. At least T'Pau weren't pumping up the volume or jacking their bodies. At least they had some guitars!
And let's not forget T'Pau were named after an obscure Vulcan from the original Star Trek TV show, and although I was never a Trekkie, at 15 I was watching the Shatner/Nimoy teatime repeats with glee.
However, much as I might make a case for their music, or their sci fi roots, it was Carol who really sold me on T'Pau. In my memory, every TOTP performance featuring the band involved Carol in a micro-skirt with the cameraman lying on the floor and shooting up. Purely in the name of research, I have rewatched a lot of old T'Pau TOTP appearances while writing this post... and in none of them did Carol actually wear a skirt as short as I remember, and in none of them did the cameraman strain his back. This appears to be a false memory from the feverish imagination of a depraved 15 year-old. In fact, if you are so bored as to want to check out Carol's TOTP performances on youtube, you will find her trouser suits and big-lapelled, shoulder-padded jackets to be egregious fashion crimes, even for 1987. The only time she wears anything remotely like I remember...
...is in the video for the single Sex Talk. Which I bought, even though it was 6th single from the album. (It had, apparently been released before the album with the alternative title 'Intimate Strangers', but I never knew this, and neither did the charts.) I suspect it was the video that persuaded me to make this purchase of a song I already owned on the LP. The single was different: a live version as featured in the video. I doubt that would have persuaded me; I generally can't be bothered by live tracks. This was Carol Decker singing about s-e-x though (something I still knew nothing about at 15... and arguably haven't learned a whole lot about since) and to top it off, she even mentioned Spider-Man in the lyrics! This was my kind of woman: I'm telling you, we were destined to be together.
Strangely, that never happened.
Sex Talk remains my favourite T'Pau song, and it's probably the only one I would take a punch for these days, particularly as their subsequent albums (which I bought out of duty rather than love) did very little for either me or the charts.
More of these will follow. And they will plumb depths this blog has never plumbed before.
In the meantime, I'd love to hear about the records you bought purely because you fancied the singer... either in the comments box or, preferably, in your own blog (if you have one: if not, set one up so you can embarrass yourself in a public forum like I do).
