The Fameless One.
I've been thinking about Wendy James. This is unusual. Prior to this sudden influx of James related speculation, I'm not sure I'd thought about her in thirty years. Then she was the singer of a pop group called Transvision Vamp. She wasn't a very good singer and they weren't a very good band but they did have some hits and their second album, Velveteen, was quite big. They toured the globe and were big in Australia. The press didn't like them and you could see why. There was something a bit off with them. They seemed a bit prefabricated, as though a Svengali had assembled them from a kit: there was a punk one with a big white falcon guitar. The drummer was a skinhead and the bass player had a quiff and was tall so he was...what? A Smiths fan? A Soul Boy? A Ted? Then there was Wendy. Wendy didn't actually seem that fake. Her singing was a sort of 40 a day bark and her dancing consisted of her jumping up and down a lot. And she WAS a proper punk. She'd left home at 16 and had ended up hanging about in West London with members of The Clash and West World. That's what Transvision Vamp were like: the second band of an ageing Punk Rocker, one of those ones where they started playing with samplers in baseball caps and understanding post-modernism. So Transvision Vamp's songs sounded like T Rex and Bo Diddley with big 80's drums and lyrics about 2000AD and Andy Warhol.
They were the best at it and they looked good in photos. They talked absolute horse-shit in interviews but the pull-out quotes were fun. They lasted two albums. They made three but their record company didn't release the last one in the UK. After that they split up. Wendy wrote a letter to Elvis Costello and he wrote a snarky album for her over the weekend (titles included "Puppet Girl" and "We Despise You"). That was it.
She was in a band called Racine. She's released a few solo albums. But realistically her successful years were over by 1993.
Wendy James is five years older than me. She'd been a wannabe, an actual proper pop star and a has-been by the time she was 25. When I was 25 I was still drinking saline pints of Fosters in Basingstoke's Ziggy's night-club every Thursday night, while my fellow patrons got younger and younger. I absolutely could not imagine what I might be, or what I should be doing. Beyond drinking heavily and dancing to "Been Caught Stealing", which seemed to be quite a reasonable thing to do at the time. It would be true to say that I wasn't fired by ambition then. I was barely fired to get up in the morning.
It would be another two years before I moved to London. It would be another fifteen before I wrote anything worth showing to anyone. So I'm not looking to have a pop at Wendy James, that's not what this is about. Also the press at the time were absolute fucking pigs to her. They slagged her off for being an airhead and too-clever-by-half, a slut and a prick-tease, a puppet with a voice like a goose warning you about incoming fog (that one's sort of true). These 80's "new men" lectured her on feminism while still taking full advantage of her skimpy outfits to shift units. Imagine the hypocrisy of lecturing a woman about what she can do with her body while that body is on the front cover of your magazine in a provocative pose. That's the music industry!
(And every other industry.)
Wendy, like Terrence Trent Darby, was an early-bloomer, blessed with good looks and a couple of really good pop songs. They both rode out the wave of that early success and found themselves dragged up on a shingle beach, reviled for all the things that made them so attractive a year before: their youth, their newness, their swagger, their style. There's nothing uglier in the pop world than careworn, over-familiar youth. Those once useful attributes made them absolutely untenable. Arrogance was* not attractive in a pop star in Britain, not really. Madonna weaponised her confidence - but that's all tied up in the "Jersey Girl/ Flashdance" romance of her 80's existence. Arrogance is the preserve of Rock Stars, particularly male ones. Liam Gallagher has made a career out of being the scally manque for doughy lads in polo shirts - he is their rock avatar, giving them permission to smoke a bifta and drink Sol from the bottle with the Lads twice a year on a sports holiday. He is the soundtrack to an infected calf tattoo, to undetected chlamydia brought back as a souvenir for the wife.
Once she ceased to be a viable pop star Wendy had no constituency. Exhausted from three years of relentless touring and snide pop-shots from the press she craved some respite and some credibility. So - and this almost makes me cry - she wrote to Elvis Costello to ask him for advice. With the sort of vinegary spite that that has peppered his career, Costello and his then wife Cait (also a prick) wrote her an albums worth of songs, each of which called her a cunt and poor, gullible** Wendy recorded them as her first solo album! Costello then told the press that all the songs were shit, like the classy guy he is.
She got her band Racine together. They didn't bruise the charts. She made a few solo albums. The world sullenly refused to set on fire. She has been functionally unfamous (never infamous) for a quarter of a century.
You would never know it if you asked Wendy. Wendy thinks she's had a brilliant life. She is not at home to self-doubt. If she's not the Wendy James she used to be that's fine - she's a brand new one, a better one. She has homes in Paris and New York. She has some money, I suppose. On her latest album she put together an astoundingly accomplished band of rock royalty: Lenny Kaye, James Sclavunos, Glen Matlock, James Williamson. She can sing now too. And there's a definite Barclays Records vibe to her songs, which she writes herself. And they're quite funny. She plays with 20th Century Outsider tropes, its all gangsters and broken down boxers, and runaways living for kicks. Its standard punk rock last gang in town bullshit coupled to a "reader, I martyred him" vibe.
Wendy sees no point in dwelling on the past. She travels light, only what she can store in her overhead locker. When men are like this I hate them. Titanium toothed psychopaths who are never wrong and never consider the possibility they might be wrong while being everything wrong with the planet.
I don't think I'd get on very well with Wendy. She believes her own hype which is in her own handwriting. But I need some of that moxy. She can live with the fact that she was really popular for three years and then really not popular for the next thirty and turn that into a success story - and I genuinely believe it is - then perhaps I can deal with the fact that for the first forty years of my life I didn't do very much of anything except living. I've only really done any proper work for the last eight or so years, a period that has simultaneously been the most poverty stricken of my adult life. But I refuse, like Wendy, to believe I've failed and that my best years are behind me. I live in a permanent now. And surely tomorrow can only be better - after all I've done so much prep! With Wendy as my household goddess, her duck face a sculpted version of my own, I know I shall steer the ship right.
I just think: WWWD - What Would Wendy Do?
*today there are no popstars
**she would dispute this.
They were the best at it and they looked good in photos. They talked absolute horse-shit in interviews but the pull-out quotes were fun. They lasted two albums. They made three but their record company didn't release the last one in the UK. After that they split up. Wendy wrote a letter to Elvis Costello and he wrote a snarky album for her over the weekend (titles included "Puppet Girl" and "We Despise You"). That was it.
She was in a band called Racine. She's released a few solo albums. But realistically her successful years were over by 1993.
Wendy James is five years older than me. She'd been a wannabe, an actual proper pop star and a has-been by the time she was 25. When I was 25 I was still drinking saline pints of Fosters in Basingstoke's Ziggy's night-club every Thursday night, while my fellow patrons got younger and younger. I absolutely could not imagine what I might be, or what I should be doing. Beyond drinking heavily and dancing to "Been Caught Stealing", which seemed to be quite a reasonable thing to do at the time. It would be true to say that I wasn't fired by ambition then. I was barely fired to get up in the morning.
It would be another two years before I moved to London. It would be another fifteen before I wrote anything worth showing to anyone. So I'm not looking to have a pop at Wendy James, that's not what this is about. Also the press at the time were absolute fucking pigs to her. They slagged her off for being an airhead and too-clever-by-half, a slut and a prick-tease, a puppet with a voice like a goose warning you about incoming fog (that one's sort of true). These 80's "new men" lectured her on feminism while still taking full advantage of her skimpy outfits to shift units. Imagine the hypocrisy of lecturing a woman about what she can do with her body while that body is on the front cover of your magazine in a provocative pose. That's the music industry!
(And every other industry.)
Wendy, like Terrence Trent Darby, was an early-bloomer, blessed with good looks and a couple of really good pop songs. They both rode out the wave of that early success and found themselves dragged up on a shingle beach, reviled for all the things that made them so attractive a year before: their youth, their newness, their swagger, their style. There's nothing uglier in the pop world than careworn, over-familiar youth. Those once useful attributes made them absolutely untenable. Arrogance was* not attractive in a pop star in Britain, not really. Madonna weaponised her confidence - but that's all tied up in the "Jersey Girl/ Flashdance" romance of her 80's existence. Arrogance is the preserve of Rock Stars, particularly male ones. Liam Gallagher has made a career out of being the scally manque for doughy lads in polo shirts - he is their rock avatar, giving them permission to smoke a bifta and drink Sol from the bottle with the Lads twice a year on a sports holiday. He is the soundtrack to an infected calf tattoo, to undetected chlamydia brought back as a souvenir for the wife.
Once she ceased to be a viable pop star Wendy had no constituency. Exhausted from three years of relentless touring and snide pop-shots from the press she craved some respite and some credibility. So - and this almost makes me cry - she wrote to Elvis Costello to ask him for advice. With the sort of vinegary spite that that has peppered his career, Costello and his then wife Cait (also a prick) wrote her an albums worth of songs, each of which called her a cunt and poor, gullible** Wendy recorded them as her first solo album! Costello then told the press that all the songs were shit, like the classy guy he is.
She got her band Racine together. They didn't bruise the charts. She made a few solo albums. The world sullenly refused to set on fire. She has been functionally unfamous (never infamous) for a quarter of a century.
You would never know it if you asked Wendy. Wendy thinks she's had a brilliant life. She is not at home to self-doubt. If she's not the Wendy James she used to be that's fine - she's a brand new one, a better one. She has homes in Paris and New York. She has some money, I suppose. On her latest album she put together an astoundingly accomplished band of rock royalty: Lenny Kaye, James Sclavunos, Glen Matlock, James Williamson. She can sing now too. And there's a definite Barclays Records vibe to her songs, which she writes herself. And they're quite funny. She plays with 20th Century Outsider tropes, its all gangsters and broken down boxers, and runaways living for kicks. Its standard punk rock last gang in town bullshit coupled to a "reader, I martyred him" vibe.
Wendy sees no point in dwelling on the past. She travels light, only what she can store in her overhead locker. When men are like this I hate them. Titanium toothed psychopaths who are never wrong and never consider the possibility they might be wrong while being everything wrong with the planet.
I don't think I'd get on very well with Wendy. She believes her own hype which is in her own handwriting. But I need some of that moxy. She can live with the fact that she was really popular for three years and then really not popular for the next thirty and turn that into a success story - and I genuinely believe it is - then perhaps I can deal with the fact that for the first forty years of my life I didn't do very much of anything except living. I've only really done any proper work for the last eight or so years, a period that has simultaneously been the most poverty stricken of my adult life. But I refuse, like Wendy, to believe I've failed and that my best years are behind me. I live in a permanent now. And surely tomorrow can only be better - after all I've done so much prep! With Wendy as my household goddess, her duck face a sculpted version of my own, I know I shall steer the ship right.
I just think: WWWD - What Would Wendy Do?
*today there are no popstars
**she would dispute this.
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