by Tim Moore
Pausing only to light another Marlboro, Celia moves on to the events that led to her departure from Kiss Kiss, in a new and careless tone that contrasts with the tale’s comprehensively unnerving content. Her troubles began with a dispute between Celia and the show’s hair stylist, a row ‘about some fucking extensions’ that somehow escalated into a feud. And then escalated again, to a point where Celia succumbed to a conviction that the stylist wished her harm. Harm of the fatal variety.
Too scared to sleep she began wandering the streets at night, occasionally pursued by another man, ‘a guy with a tired arm’, and regularly confronted by a group of five children who would stop in front of her and stare.
‘In the middle of the night?’ I hear myself enquire, faintly.
‘That’s right,’ she says, pushing up her shades and giving me that Robert de Niro look again. But I’m not scared; just very sad. Feeling I ought to say something, I raise the possibility that these children, and the man with the tired arm, simply recognised her; she’s earlier said it still happens. She narrows her eyes, then her features mellow with happy enlightenment. ‘Yes,’ she says, nodding rapidly. ‘Yes, yes, yes. I like this theory.’ Oh, Celia. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to convince myself, as I’ve so far just about been able to, that this conversation is for her a beneficially cathartic experience.
Her family stepped in. Having left the show, she was invited to stay with one of her Peterborough cousins, a publican who bought Celia a big PA amp and allowed her to scream out rock anthems after hours, alone in a back room. Returning to Portugal, she went up to her uncle’s house in the rural north, and spent some months there ‘like a hermit, just watching animal documentaries on TV’. From there she made two visits to nearby Santiago de Compostela, which allows me to discuss my own pilgrimage to the city a couple of years previously. That I undertook this in the company of a donkey should by rights have lightened the mood, but Celia just nods distantly as I falter through a repertoire of set-piece twit-v-ass anecdotes. ‘I have to beg to God there,’ she says when I give up, ‘because I had been a pagan, oh yes, solstice, moons. I did one love ritual, and then bad things happen. So after Santiago I was for many months going to church every day.’
She forgets my name again; again I remind her. ‘Tim,’ she says, gently, ‘you think about people the same as me?’ I mercifully can’t recall the non-committal blatherings that now escape my lips, except in so far as they procure from Celia a single, disappointed nod. ‘Well, Tim, it’s all a lie,’ she sighs, shades back on, unseen gaze fixed at the dimming heavens. ‘You think I live rock ’n’ roll? I don’t. Christ Jesus, I was an air hostess.’
As darkness falls Celia retracts her affection for the town above us. ‘I have nothing here,’ she mutters bleakly. ‘Well, I have a boyfriend, but he won’t speak with me. I don’t know the, huh, arrangements with him. And except him – nothing.’ Thereafter she holds waywardly forth on anarchy, on Margaret Thatcher (‘she was a good one, no?’), on a friend lost to drugs. This last reminiscence catalyses another of her wide-eyed epiphanies. ‘So many bad things happen to me,’ she says, in slow, dawning wonderment, ‘and yes: they all began with Eurovision.’
It’s a horrible moment: I want to sever the connection, tell her not to take on so. But because she’s right, I can’t. Instead I just sit there, watching the streetlights flick on in the hillside above, contemplating the pustular underbelly that heaves unseen beneath that fluffy, frothy fiesta of silly little songs.
Without warning, Celia leans slightly back and fills the dim old valley with a throat-shredding burst of high-pitched girl rock. The short silence that follows is ended by a distant bark that swiftly multiplies into a twilight canine chorus. ‘My first song,’ she breathes. ‘I wrote it right here.’ And with that, and a carefree little hum, she jumps to her feet. ‘Come,’ she says, lightly, ‘next train to Lisbon in ten minutes.’ I hadn’t anticipated going back to Lisbon until the morning, nor travelling there in Celia’s company, but I scamper up the hill after her just the same. It seems the least I can do.
Just outside the station Celia jabs a finger at a little Peugeot parked outside a bar. ‘Was my car,’ she calls out over her shoulder. ‘I sell it before I went to the US.’ On the platform, and afterwards in an empty strip-lit carriage, she expands on this revelation. For the last three years she’s been putting together a new album, and now that ‘On the Road to the Unknown’ is finished she’s been travelling to Britain and the States, recruiting a band to gig the material. ‘I am the band, in reality,’ she says, as we creak and squeak out of Sintra. ‘But it is not Celia Lawson. It is Ira, I-R-A.’ We chortlingly agree that she might wish to adapt that for certain European markets. ‘It means “anger” in Portuguese. It’s back to my first love. You like metal?’
If it’s good, I lie, and out come the laptop and earphones. The gap between my desperation for a nul-pointer’s new material to impress me, and the expectation of it being able to do so, has never been more yawningly cavernous. There are no limits to the musical possibilities of what I am about to behold: it could be a sobbing child banging a saucepan, ten minutes of hissy silence, a backwards remix of Antes do Adeus. ‘Here we go then,’ I say, plugged in and palpitating as Celia, Mac in lap, clicks up the opening track. Please, I pray silently, please let this be at least 400 times better than I think it’s going to be.
Ten seconds into Nights in Baghdad it is wondrously, gloriously apparent that through the dark, swirling chaos that shrouds planet Celia, the beacon of her musical talent shines as bright as ever. The grinding, distorted power chords that blast in after a haunting Arabian intro give no doubt that her studio alchemy has produced some especially heavy metal, but of twenty-four-carat quality. From shrieking rage to whispered entreaty, Celia’s voice is an extraordinary instrument, far too potent and adventurous to be kept on a tight Eurovision leash. The production is slick and distinctly more imaginative than is typical of the genre – bongos, a bit of flamenco guitar, multi-tracked fado-esque Celia harmonies.
Seeing my head bob, but hopefully not the nascent tears of relief threatening to spill down its sides, Celia pulls out my right ear phone. ‘Lyric and melody,’ she half-shouts, ‘all mine.’ I bob, smile, hold up a thumb. A mighty chord rounds the track off; I pull out the phones.
‘That’s great,’ I say, ‘that’s really, really good.’
Celia seems shyly delighted. ‘And it’s the first time an English guy will understand my words!’ she says with a beam, before launching into a track-by-track account of the album’s lyrical themes. By focusing on sin, religion and ‘a capital message of anger’, this proves to be a backward step, a step that becomes a flying leap when Celia describes one song thus: ‘This is about how I come back from the dead people, and I make the sushi! Ha ha ha!’
When she reveals that the title track is subtitled I’ve Killed the Monsters Under My Bed, I interrupt with a blurted enquiry into the album’s release date. The bottom line is that there isn’t one, or possibly even an interested label, though this doesn’t appear to concern her too much. ‘All the money I save, from advertising songs, karaoke, from Estoril casino – all has been spent on this,’ she says, but with pride rather than regret. She shows me a promotional photo she’s had done: Celia standing before a floodlit castle, looking like a demonic flamenco dancer in a Shakespear’s Sister video – great, flouncy dress, back-combed, hip-length mane.
‘Is that hair all yours?’ I ask, then wish I hadn’t.
‘My family goes to India often, and every time I make them carry home for me much, much human hair.’
We creak slowly through the streetlit suburbs, talking about her plans for Ira. She’s hoping to go to Seattle soon – ‘the world’s loudest city, wooh!’ – in search of suitably hardcore musicians and gigs, plus maybe back to England. ‘I was there in fact a few months ago, for work,’ she reveals. Music work? Another of those reckless smiles; there’s nothing to hide now. ‘Hotel work. As a maid! But I
didn’t have the right papers.’
The train sighs into Entrecampos station, and off we get. A forest of roof-top neon has alerted me to a nearby plethora of hotels, but the niggling mystery of Celia’s continued presence – it’s nearly 10 p.m. – has yet to be resolved. ‘Um … I’m just off to that Ibis up there,’ I tell her, and Celia shrugs and says she’ll walk with me, mumbling something about meeting a friend later.
Our conversation falters into a rather stilted discourse on flight times and bus numbers on the chilly, uphill walk. But as I reach towards the handle on the Ibis’s glass door, Celia says, ‘So – that was my life, what you see.’
I turn and thank her, for inviting me to her country, for showing me her beautiful home town, for sharing so much of her time with me. And then, because that all sounded rather crap, I tell her that her new album is fantastic, and that she’s due a break, and that in spite of all her setbacks she’s still doing things that everyone around – which sadly means me and the tramp zipping himself back up across the road – could only dream of, and if that’s her life, then it can’t be bad.
‘No, not bad,’ says Celia, quietly. ‘More and more I try to enjoy it every day.’ And with a sideways smile and a wink, she turns back down the hill.
9 May 1998 National Indoor Arena, Birmingham Gunvor Guggisberg Switzerland Lass’ Ihn
I SIFT THROUGH silver disks and pull another bonus offering from the bottom of the Andreas stack: the 1998 Swiss Eurovision qualifier. Can I face it? That I find I can is down to the heartwarming spectacle of catching a nul-pointer in happier times, on the verge of rousing victory rather than dreadful, barren defeat. Not that it’s much fun to witness reigning champ Katrina Leskanich step out on-stage as the pre-vote interval act, bravely working through a rendition of – oh, have a heart – Ding Dinge Dong. Seven months on and for her it’s come to this already.
The handsomely deserved winner, bagging a runaway 400,000 votes, is a tall, slender, corkscrew-haired brunette with beady green eyes and a shy yet minxish grin, now reprising with leather-trousered gusto the violin-accompanied torch song she’s co-written with Switzerland’s 1990 contestant. Gunvor Guggisberg is twenty-three, but when the result comes in she looks half that age, literally jumping up and down in unrestrained glee. It’s the tenth anniversary of Céline Dion’s victory; the host, a former Swiss representative herself, invokes the Wailing One’s name by way of evidently favourable vocal comparison.
But of course Gunvor spectacularly fails to emulate her Canadian forebear, and six years, eight months and twenty-four days after failing to do so she sends me this electronic message:
Hi Tim
Thank you for your several email and your letter offer.
But I don’t wanna talk to you about my experiences at the Eurovision Song Contest. Hope that you understand.
Regards,
Gunvor
My initial response to this inbox arrival is a loud and prolonged denigration of Mittel Europa’s humourless pomposity, its unappealingly stubborn reluctance to accept failure, and, while I’m about it, its stupid, mulleted popular music. After Tommy and Wilf, it’s a nein-danke hat trick. What’s up with these people?
I’m still not sure to this day, but by the end of that one I know precisely what’s up with Gunvor Guggisberg. No Forstner cold trail for her, no sparsely fact-speckled Scheutzian wilderness. Acquiring Gunvor’s postal address has involved painstaking detective work with IP address registers, but a cursory glance at the bounteous online biographies archived under her name makes it abundantly apparent that I will be making no additional efforts to track her down. A barely credible catalogue of scandal, betrayal and relentless humiliation, the Guggisberg tragedy makes Celia Lawson’s seem like a skip-along nursery rhyme. Gunvor: I do understand. Regards, Tim.
Gunvor’s name derives from a Scandinavian heritage: her Swedish great-great grandfather is proudly feted as the composer of that country’s national anthem. Raised in Bern’s mid-rise suburbs, the curly-haired toddler quickly demonstrated the genetic endurance of this musical ancestry, encouraged by her parents, both office clerks. By the age of five Gunvor was singing in school and church choirs (‘from that moment I always wished to be on a stage’, she said later), and soon after began to improvise precociously on the family piano. But it was as a tap dancer that she would enjoy her first taste of performing glory. Coached by mother May Gun, a frustrated ballerina, at the age of thirteen Gunvor won the Swiss championships, the first of seven national titles she would secure in this demanding yet inarguably peculiar discipline.
Her parents split when Gunvor was sixteen; she would reveal that the trauma endowed her with ‘an unhealthy father complex’. Sharing a two-room apartment with her mother and younger sister, the teenage Gunvor nobly endeavoured to fill the paternal void. ‘She shouldered all our problems on herself and took responsibility for the household,’ May Gun recalled. ‘It was too much. Really she missed out on adolescence.’ The Guardian would later deride Gunvor as ‘a middle-class tap-dancing champion’, but it’s clear that her journey to the stage of Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena was a genuine up-by-the-boot-straps job, and not just by Swiss standards.
Supporting the family meant taking a secretarial position as soon as she left school, and by the age of twenty Gunvor was supplementing the meagre Guggisberg coffers with cocktail-bar engagements that exploited her personable charm and blossoming vocal versatility. In 1997, while working in the Air Force ministry’s personnel department, she idly put her name down for Switzerland’s two biggest talent shows, and rose to abrupt prominence by winning both. ‘A voice such as Céline’s!’ trilled an excited media, not for the last time. ‘Gunvor sings as a world star!’
The defence minister invited his talented employee to his office in the Upper House, serving coffee in return for a song; after Gunvor was dutifully selected for the forthcoming 1998 national Eurovision qualifier, he issued a public statement affectionately wishing her well and pledging telephone votes from every extension in the ministry.
So far, so Celia. Just two months separate the pair; Gunvor’s youth is. arrestingly underlined in an interview during which she names her childhood Eurovision hero as Johnny Logan. Like Celia she entered the contest without a professional recording to her name, and like her was chaperoned through the procedure by an elder Eurovision statesman: electro-fiddle under his chin, Switzerland’s 1990 entrant Egon Egemann would stand beside Gunvor on the Birmingham stage as she sang the song they’d written together. Music by Egon, words by Gunvor: her lyric to Lass’ Ihn (Leave It, in the Sweeney-esque Google translation) was a pack-your-bags ultimatum to a recidivist philanderer.
Perhaps by coincidence, Gunvor celebrated victory by swiftly binning her then boyfriend. No less blunt was the resignation letter dispatched shortly afterwards to the ministry. Her cheer-leading colleagues’ disappointment was soon upgraded to embittered alienation when, in an interview with leading tabloid Blick, she described herself as ‘overqualified’ for her old job.
Blick had earlier declared Gunvor their artist of the year, and as the Eurovision final approached, the association between the pair grew ever closer. It was Blick for whom Gunvor posed with her new boyfriend (‘With Michi it was love at first sight!’ she gushed, flashing the ring he had given her on Valentine’s Day), Blick again who bagged the exclusive on Gunvor’s new job as a PA to her manager, Rolf Egli (‘I’m so lucky: which other singers can stand on the stage and at the same time see behind the window blinds of the music industry?!’)
Eager and indiscreet, Gunvor was a tabloid interviewer’s dream subject; by April the fresh-faced Swiss everygirl was an almost daily fixture in Blick’s colourful pages. Proudly welcoming its photographer into her new flat, ‘a romantic three-room oasis in Bern, with garden and mini pool’, the singer confided that she’d jumped a long queue of potential buyers ‘because the owners are fans of mine’. Blick’s readers knew her favourite designers, her little sister’s name, Michi’s golf han
dicap. They knew of her cocksure ambition (‘the people who selected me for Birmingham will buy my record – of course I’ll be in the charts’), and her gigglingly confessed consumerist extravagance (‘I like kir royal, Versace, my black Lancia – and I’m a shoe fetishist!’). If all this seemed sweetly inauspicious, then so did the paper’s chortling coverage of ‘Gunvor’s most embarrassing moment’, when the year before the singer’s dress had fallen off during a church-hall performance of Miss Saigon.
As a licensed purveyor of Alpine tittle-tattle, it is tempting to imagine the editor of Blick dutifully processing approved press releases from the ministry of gossip; not for this well-ordered, sternly bureaucratic nation the loose-cannon nastiness of our tabloid press. But as diplomats, refugees and visiting motorists have long been aware, it never pays to second-guess the Swiss. It’s as well to remember that the cradle of civic obedience is also the country that less than 100 years ago prosecuted a dog for conspiracy to murder. As Churchill nearly said about something else, Switzerland is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, stuffed up the back of a cuckoo clock and punted into the fondue.
With the benefit of hindsight and an enormous internet archive, it’s possible to detect subtle portents of the astonishingly brutal assault Blick was preparing to launch against Gunvor. Almost every profile, questionnaire and interview they published was snidely embedded with undermining revelations: that the singer had proactively begun marketing her Eurovision release amongst work colleagues, ‘already selling five copies’; that the sponsorship she frequently boasted of securing had yet to extend beyond four pairs of Fogal socks and a discounted Nokia phone; that in a celebrity general-knowledge quiz, Gunvor had failed to name the incumbent Swiss president.
With Eurovision less than two weeks away, Blick turned up the gas. ‘150,000Fr debts!’ yelled their front-page splash. ‘The vulture of bankruptcy circles over Gunvor!’ Over page after gleeful page the details of her ruinous extravagance were laid bare: the 20,000SFr she still owed for her Lancia, the water bed, and above all, the shoes. In a single visit to the Nobel footwear emporium in Bern, Gunvor had acquired shoes and leather accessories to the value of 3,530SFr (which may be more familiar to you as £1,500). And all without paying: ‘When I asked for a financial guarantee to secure the goods on thirty-day credit,’ said Nobel’s manager, ‘she just told me, “I am Gunvor,” and walked out.’ Two months after the credit deadline, the shop contacted Gunvor’s management to insist on full payment or the return of all purchases. A few days later an anonymous gentleman scurried in, dropped two bags on the Nobel counter and scurried out. Inside, the manager found several pairs of graphically abused shoes and a note: ‘Unfortunately my new puppy has a taste for footwear,’ wrote Gunvor, ‘and the leather jacket is currently in my sister’s possession. As for the Divina boots, with all the exposure I’ve given them you should be paying me!’