No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  On the other hand, she had none of the haughty self-confidence of an aristocrat, but seemed very shy and normal, a ‘tabloid girl in a tiara’.7 She suffered a sense of inferiority and worthlessness, which can be attributed to having been the third daughter of an unloving couple desperate for a male heir, who was abandoned by her mother when she was six. Frances Shand Kydd had left Diana’s father for another man and lost the battle for custody of the children; she reappeared in Diana’s life long enough to try in vain to persuade her not to marry Charles, but thereafter stayed away, explaining to the Daily Mail that she was ‘a firm believer in maternal redundancy’.8 Diana missed her mother and loathed her father’s second wife, Raine Legge, the strong-willed daughter of her childhood idol, Barbara Cartland. ‘I hate you so much, if only you knew how much we all hated you for what you’ve done: you’ve ruined the house, you spend Daddy’s money and what for?’9 she once told her stepmother. Having no educational qualifications, Diana believed that she was stupid, though events would demonstrate that she was blessed with more emotional intelligence, and more skill in the art of handling the mass media, than any member of the family into which she was marrying.

  In those first few months after the announcement of her engagement, she was deeply unhappy and vulnerable. She had to be whisked from her home like a dangerous prisoner and incarcerated alone in a suite of rooms in Clarence House, the queen mother’s residence, and then in Buckingham Palace. She was given professional help to prepare for her role. The queen’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, spent hours teaching her how to wave and how to hold her handbag. Journalists who rang the palace press office to ask about the princess did not know that the nervous girl answering their questions was likely to be Diana herself, doing shift as a trainee press officer. Even with this preparation, it all threatened to be too much. Crossing Vauxhall Bridge in an official car with the queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, she saw a newspaper hoarding with the headline ‘Diana – the True Story’ and ‘collapsed on the seat, crying that she could not take it – and that was before her marriage’.10

  What she lacked was not professional advice but emotional support. At the age of nineteen, she had been torn away from everything that was familiar, and abandoned in the corridors of Buckingham Palace, where emotional contact was unknown. She later complained, ‘I couldn’t believe how cold everyone was. I was told one thing but actually another thing was going on. The lies and the deceit.’11 The visible symptom of her distress was that she lost weight so rapidly that her dress designers worried about how to design a wedding dress to fit. This was the first sign of bulimia, a disease that had afflicted her mother and her sister. Until July, she at least had the distraction of the upcoming wedding to raise her spirits, which ducked and soared between depression and elation. She chose a sapphire ring costing £28,500, which had a catastrophic effect on the market for diamond engagement rings – that year, every fiancée wanted sapphire. On the night before the wedding, she went downstairs to chat with the staff – something the queen’s children would never have done – and seeing a bicycle belonging to an equerry she leapt aboard and cycled round and round, ringing the bell and chanting ‘I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow.’12

  But the honeymoon was not a happy one; sexual relations were not helped by Diana’s inexperience and Charles’s indifference, by the presence aboard the honeymoon yacht of 21 naval officers, a 256-man crew, a valet, dresser, private secretary and an equerry, or by her throwing up regularly because of her bulimia. The second part of the honeymoon, in Balmoral, was worse. Afterwards, life in the emptiness of royal palaces drove the young woman almost to self-destruction.

  The first incident was in January 1982, when the newlyweds were at Sandringham. Diana was suffering from morning sickness, desperate for sympathy and attention, and threatening self-harm; Charles wanted to go out riding. Never in his thirty-three years on earth had Charles been expected to interrupt his day’s schedule for someone else’s emotional needs, so what she got was ‘just dismissal, total dismissal. He just carried on out of the door.’13 She threw herself to the bottom of a flight of stairs, where the Queen saw her. Luckily, a medical examination showed that her unborn child, the heir it was her function to produce, was unharmed. On other occasions, she reputedly threw herself against a glass display cabinet in Kensington Palace, slashed her wrists with a razor blade, cut herself with the serrated edge of a lemon slicer and stabbed herself with a penknife.14 By 1986, the marriage had broken down; Charles had certainly resumed his affair with Mrs Parker Bowles, and may have done so two or three years earlier, while Diana took revenge by starting an affair with James Hewitt, a Guards officer.

  Yet all these problems were kept out of the public eye for the whole of the 1980s, during which Diana was, after the Queen, the greatest public-relations asset the royal family had known for generations. The phoney love story fulfilled a public yearning for good news to compensate for stories of inflation, unemployment, political and industrial strife, terrorism and crime. In the few weeks that the couple were engaged, shop windows filled up with an estimated £400m worth of ‘wedding souvenirs’ – commemorative plates, tea towels and other hastily manufactured tat. The wedding itself, on 29 July 1981, was a public holiday in Britain and was watched by an estimated 750m people worldwide. In London, around 1m people lined the route on which the couple rode in an open carriage, with the crowd waving and shouting ‘I love you’. From 8 a.m., the crowds in the Mall and Trafalgar Square were ‘so thick that it was almost impossible to move’.15 Throughout the country, pubs stayed open all day so customers could crowd in to watch the proceedings on widescreen televisions. Even the weather favoured the newlyweds with brilliant sunshine.

  After the event, there was a voracious appetite from the public for more, but nothing much to tell. The couple were married and were going about the dull routine of life in the royal family. Their first joint public appearance, in October 1981, brought camera crews from as far afield as Japan and the USA, which descended on Welsh villages for a shot of the young princess, who was terrified and feeling sick, as she was in the first stage of pregnancy. ‘I cried a lot in the car, saying I couldn’t get out, couldn’t cope,’16 she later told her biographer, Andrew Morton. When the couple paid a visit to the White House, the press corps stationed outside was twice as large as it had been for the Pope a week earlier, though Diana was not yet so famous that Ronald Reagan had remembered her name – he raised a toast to ‘Prince Charles and Princess Andrew.’

  Early in her first pregnancy, Diana slipped out of the palace to buy wine gums; the photographers spotted her, and the news was all over the tabloids. This worried the palace to such an extent that the editors of twenty-one national newspapers, plus the BBC and ITN (but not including Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sun) were called to the palace to hear a plea from Michael Shea, backed up by the Queen, for the Princess to be allowed privacy. Only Barry Askew, of the News of the World ventured to argue in front of the monarch. ‘If Lady Di wants to buy some wine gums without being photographed, why doesn’t she send a servant?’, he demanded. According to another participant, ‘the semicircle of editors froze, and then collapsed in laughter as the Queen, with a smile, replied: “What an extremely pompous man you are!” ’17

  An eager public was not kept waiting long for news of a birth. Prince William Arthur Philip Louis arrived on 21 June 1982, followed by his brother, Henry Charles Albert David, usually known as Harry, on 15 September 1984. Diana overcame her terror of crowds and cameras, and taught herself to dress fashionably and look confident, hiding her insecurity and low self-esteem. She continued to be the most photographed woman on the planet.

  Fittingly, Diana’s favourite group was Duran Duran, who also existed to be photographed. And just as the royal family badly needed Diana to revive support for the monarchy, so the music industry was in desperate need of a band like Duran Duran. An industry that had taken the world by storm in the era of The Beatles was in a sorry
state by 1980. EMI, the biggest of the British labels, the ones who had signed up The Beatles, showed a trading loss of £4.7m in 1980–1.18 It was around that time that it lost its dominant position in the British market to CBS, an American multinational.

  The industry was also beset by scandals. In August 1980, a Granada TV World in Action programme exposed the practice of chart-rigging. The teenagers who were the voracious buyers of new singles generally only wanted records that made the charts – to own a hit was to be cool, to own a record that missed was to open yourself to ridicule – so nothing sold a record so well as evidence that it was already selling. Gallup, who compiled the charts, took returns from 275 shops out of roughly 5,000 in the UK. Everybody seemed to manage to get hold of the lists of those shops, whose managers were besieged either by mystery punters coming in to buy large numbers of a single that no one else wanted, or by promoters offering free-gift T-shirts to go with their records, or just offering outright bribes. In July 1983, members of The Nolan Sisters’ fan club each received letters telling them that if they bought the latest single ‘Dressed to Kill’ at any one of 100 shops listed on the letter, they would be given a free poster. Gallup saw the list, and removed the single from the charts. Heavy fines were handed out to others caught attempting to rig the charts; EMI was fined £10,000 in March 1984. Eventually, Gallup brought in what was then very new computer technology so that they could police the sales returns sent by shops and spot any suspicious figures, which meant that if you wanted to rig the charts, you had to do it simultaneously in every shop Gallup was monitoring in order to avoid suspicion – but the potential gain was not worth the effort.

  Alongside the chart-rigging scandal, there were the court battles between artists and record companies. Sting, lead singer of The Police, and the Virgin Group, headed by Richard Branson, met in court in July 1982. According to Miles Copeland, formerly of The Police, Virgin had risked just £200 on launching Sting, and had got back £5m. Branson claimed in the New Musical Express that it had actually risked £2,000, and the return had been £1.5m. The 1970s star Gilbert O’Sullivan went to court in the same year with a similar story: his albums had generated a gross income of £14.5m; he had received £500,000. Elton John issued a writ against his record company in the hope of recovering the copyright for his early songs. Hazel O’Connor also embarked on a gruelling legal battle with her record company, making a familiar complaint that it had induced her to sign a contract when she was alone and desperate to break into business, which meant that she was now seeing a derisive portion of the money she generated. In 1983, the new duo Wham! came to court with a very similar story about their record company, Innervision, run by a hard-nosed twenty-three-year-old named Mark Dean, who had discovered the duo. Wham! had sold millions of records worldwide, but the two performers, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, were receiving something like £40 a week. They settled out of court, were signed by CBS, and were multi-millionaires by the time Wham! split in 1986.

  None of this unseemly litigation would have stopped teenagers from buying records, if the music had been there to draw them. Punk rock, which exploded on to the British scene in 1976, had not caught on abroad, and by 1980 had degenerated into ‘a movement dominated by blank-eyed, gobbing, safety-pinned droids’.19 The big sensation of 1980, if it can be called that, was Bucks Fizz, a two-boy, two-girl singing group cobbled together by a promoter named Nichola Martin to perform a song written by her husband Andy Hill, which had been accepted as an entry to the ‘Song for Europe’ competition to find Britain’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. The band had a huge run of success churning out one catchy, forgettable song after another, until about 1984, when they were injured in a serious road accident. One of the women Martin recruited, Cheryl Baker, moved on into a solo career, but success brought no happiness for Jay Aston, the band’s youngest member. After that near fatal accident, she had a brief affair with Andy Hill, and then attempted suicide when Nichola Martin found out. She fought a court battle to escape from her contract, which left her almost bankrupt. It took almost ten years for her life to pick up. She married, launched a solo career, and founded the Jay Aston Theatre Arts School in Chelsea.

  Meanwhile, tribes of spiky-haired teenagers were awaiting a new fashion to fill the void left by the collapse of punk. It was ingeniously filled by a figure who called himself Adam Ant, whose trademarks included eye make-up, a white band across the cheekbones and bridge of the nose, copied from the Apache Indians, a nineteenth-century military tunic, previously worn by David Hemmings in the film The Charge of the Light Brigade, earrings and other androgynous items of self-adornment. In sharp contrast to Bucks Fizz, everything about Adam – his songs, his image, his style of dress, his band, his name and his persona – were his own invention. He started life as Stuart Goddard, from Marylebone, London, the grandson of a Romany gypsy. He was a bright child, whose teachers at St Marylebone Grammar School thought he should try for Oxford University, but he insisted on going to the Hornsey School of Art. There, he had a breakdown and emerged from psychiatric treatment insisting that everyone call him Adam. It is arguable that his true vocation was as an actor; he certainly immersed himself in playing the character he had invented, refusing to be guided or controlled by others. The one exception to this self-imposed rule was when he fell briefly under the influence of Malcolm McLaren, the man who had launched the Sex Pistols after going into business with Vivienne Westwood, running a boutique called SEX on the King’s Road in Chelsea. McLaren was looking for a group that would help promote the Westwood look and even had in mind a name, Bow Wow Wow. Unable to manipulate Adam, he persuaded his three backing musicians, the Ants, to walk out on him. McLaren then added a fourteen-year-old singer, an Anglo-Burmese girl from Liverpool called Myint Myint Aye, who changed her name to Annabella Lwin. He had her pose in the nude with the three ex-Ants for a record sleeve that parodied Eduard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, and launched Bow Wow Wow into the Top Ten with a single called ‘Go Wild in the Country’. One of their subsequent singles was about masturbation.

  After the McLaren episode, Adam’s fortunes were so low that, according to his official biographer, ‘the only music label that was interested in signing him was EMI [who] only took him on because they were unaware of what had happened, which was the funniest thing in the whole affair. Anybody who was in touch with the street was saying, “Adam is finished, he’s a joke . . . ” It was only EMI that was sufficiently out of touch.’20 However, the abandoned singer had two valuable assets – his dogged determination and his ‘Ant people’, the corps of dedicated fans who turned up in whichever town he was performing. In 1980, with his reformed band, he made a single called ‘Dog Eat Dog’, a title borrowed from a newspaper article about the kind of society that Margaret Thatcher was creating. It climbed high enough in the charts to earn the band a slot on BBC’s Top of the Pops, helping the record to reach no. 4. The follow-up, ‘Antmusic’, would have reached No. 1 had it not been for the success of ‘Imagine’, reissued after John Lennon’s murder. At the relatively advanced age of twenty-six, Adam Ant was an international star, the biggest live name in British music. Curiously, having battled so hard to break into the big time, he gave up singing in 1985 to become an actor.

  The post-punk generation had no collective name until an article in the Evening Standard used the term ‘New Romantic’ to describe the strangely dressed young clientele of a new club in Covent Garden, called the Blitz. It was run by a man who called himself Steve Strange, and who later enjoyed transient fame as the front man for Visage. The club drew a mix of fashion-conscious ‘straight’ men (such as the handsome young Martin Kemp), cross-dressers and ‘out’ gays, who, according to Peter York, created ‘a powerful mix of magpie retro, fastidious taste (it was hard to wear the look if you were a true-born slob) and market exploitation, tailor made for what they were calling the art form of the eighties’.21 The club was deliberately exclusive; Strange stood at the door turning away anyone who looked out
of place, including Mick Jagger, who arrived in sneakers and a baseball jacket. David Bowie was an honoured guest who featured the clientele of the Blitz in the video that accompanied his No. 1 hit ‘Ashes to Ashes’. ‘Inside the Blitz there was only one God and his name was David Bowie. It wasn’t just the music, it was his chameleon dress sense,’ according to Midge Ure, who also noted: ‘It was never an overtly gay scene, more a little limp around the edges, like an old lettuce leaf.’22 George O’Dowd, soon to be known as Boy George, worked in the cloakroom until Steve Strange sacked him on suspicion of theft. O’Dowd did not think much of the club or the ‘New Romantic’ scene. He reckoned: ‘There really was no scene. It wasn’t a national phenomenon like punk.’,23 But it did throw out one successful new group, Spandau Ballet, with Gary Kemp as singer/songwriter, and his older brother Martin as bass player. Their first single, ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’, reached No. 5 in the charts in 1980.

  The origin of Spandau Ballet’s name speaks volumes about the attitudes of the New Romantics. It arose after a group of youths from London, including Robert Elms, an aspiring young music journalist, paid a visit to Berlin. The city was divided by the notorious wall, patrolled by East German guards with orders to kill anyone attempting to cross without permission. The group came upon Spandau prison, where Rudolf Hess, the eighty-five-year-old former deputy leader of the Nazi Party, was the sole prisoner. This did not cause these young men to reflect at all on recent European history; they were interested in how the locals might react to their outfits – which in Robert Elms’ case was ‘bondage trousers (there was a minor punk revival thing going on), with white socks and loafers and a skin-tight satin top with a Lenin badge on it’. Elms spotted a piece of graffiti, saying ‘Spandau Ballet’, which he thought ‘nicely nonsensical’.24 Martin Kemp liked the name because it was ‘trendy enough for the designers and hairdressers not to be frightened away, but heavy enough in case we ever made it to Wembley’.25 Such indifference to anything as serious as international politics was not born of ignorance or stupidity; it was a deliberate, conscious attitude of mind, a reaction to the economic decay and seemingly unsolvable political problems besetting Britain. Elms claimed, ‘Even my travels had revealed to me that my country was odd, perhaps ill, but that its sickness – some kind of national autism perhaps – gave us a contemporary brilliance at just one thing: youth culture.’26