I had also learned by the spring of 1982 that Cat People was an erotic thriller about a young woman’s sexual awakening turning into horror when she discovers that her urges turn her into a monstrous black leopard. Nastassja Kinski played the role of the erotic leopard girl. She was a fine young actress, and she was regarded as one of the most beautiful people in the world. She’d started acting in her teens and had a relationship with the filmmaker Roman Polanski when she was just fifteen and he was forty-three. She was considered very sexy and was a big screen star. She was especially considered very sexy because the previous year she had appeared naked in a famous Richard Avedon photograph with a giant Burmese python. Kinski and the python were lying together. I’m not sure why lying down with a python was considered so sexy, but it was. First she was seen with a snake, and now she was a cat in Cat People.
I wanted desperately to see Cat People, to feel older and hear the Bowie music and see a naked Nastassja Kinski. When the movie was first released in April, there was much fanfare about all the sexuality and therefore little chance that any fourteen-year-olds would be able to get in. The film had a Restricted rating in Canada, which meant it was only for people over the age of eighteen. But after it had been out for a while, I convinced Murray to join me in a cunning plan. We would buy tickets to see another film at a multiplex playing Cat People and then sneak in to watch it. I became quite obsessed with the idea of seeing Cat People.
It was a nervous afternoon when Murray and I hit the Imperial Six on Yonge Street. Murray played it cool. The Imperial Six was a famous movie theatre that featured six big screens. It was located across from the new Eaton Centre mega-mall. It turned out I had overestimated the dangers of our covert sex-film expedition. When we strategically bought our tickets for another movie, I fully expected the guy at the counter to say, “You boys aren’t planning to sneak into Cat People, are you?” No such words were exchanged. The older guy at the counter barely even looked up at us. We dashed into the theatre playing Cat People at the appointed time, and I waited to achieve a new sexual awakening. We were in the clear. The theatre darkened. The movie began.
In the end, somewhat disappointingly, the movie wasn’t all about sex. It followed an intense plot line that was decidedly less interesting to me than seeing Nastassja Kinski naked. I don’t really remember loving Cat People. Maybe I didn’t fully understand it. But either way, I spent weeks afterwards telling everyone I had seen it. It gave me credibility. And the fact that Murray and I had snuck in was badass. Maybe the best part of the film was when the theme song kicked in. That part included Bowie. There were still some things that were more important than carnal desires.
FOR ALL MY NAÏVETÉ about sex and girls, when I started Grade 10 in the fall of 1982, things were different. I was older and more experienced. Okay, maybe it had only been three weeks since the Police Picnic, but each new school year was like a restart, and I had become more self-assured. I had a new black briefcase to replace my long-gone Adidas bag. The briefcase was unquestionably more New Wave. I had also acquired updated pointy black shoes, and I was starting my new band, Tall New Buildings, which featured a drum machine. The drum machine telegraphed that we were a New Wave band and we were cool.
In the fall of 1982, I also started hanging around with a girl at school named Janelle. She was super-smart and did well in classes like science and math. She was also very sweet and played on the Thornlea volleyball team. She and I were both on student council, where I had joined as the head of social events. Janelle was half Asian and very pretty and very grounded. She was a couple of years older than me and was not really very New Wave. But she had a cute haircut like one of the Go-Go’s. She wasn’t really preppy. That was the important thing.
I was still hanging around Room 213, but I didn’t see much of Wendy in the fall. Paula Silverman had been sexy but wanted to move far too quickly for me. Janelle was more patient with all my quirky needs. And she was really interested in my music. I made a mix tape for Janelle so she could become acquainted with more of the cool New Wave stuff I was into. The second side of the tape was all Bowie songs, with little descriptions I’d written for her inside the cassette jacket. Janelle told me she had started playing it on repeat.
12
“LET’S DANCE” – DAVID BOWIE
It’s predictable, I suppose. It may not come as a big surprise to you that the most dramatic event in my life in the closing days of 1982 occurred with a Bowie song as the soundtrack. It somehow makes sense for that to happen, right? You might think I’m making this up. I’m not. It did.
I wish I could tell you something else. I wish I could inject more musical variety into this tale of a formative year. I wish I could answer those of you who’ve been thinking, “Look, you wuss, it’s near the end of the book, where’s the Def Leppard already?” Or maybe some of you are wondering why I’ve not given enthusiastic early ’80s star Lionel Richie his due in these pages. In ’82, he had an impressive Pharaoh-like moulded Afro that made him look like a black John Oates. Why haven’t I talked about that? Or maybe I could’ve woven in some tales about Michael Jackson, too—he was the King of Pop. But that’s not how it happened. I didn’t gravitate towards Lionel Richie at all back in the day. Bowie provided the playlist for most of my young existence. And that was the case in the middle of Grade 10. And that was the case following the most dramatic event of my life at the end of 1982.
“HOW ARE YOU GOING to make sure everybody’s vote gets counted?”
The tone was very dismissive. One of the more conservative older members of the Thornlea Student Association (more commonly known as the TSA) was questioning the merits of my plan to have a big December school dance in the gymnasium that would involve some sort of countdown of the year’s best music. I’d suggested this list would be developed according to an official poll of the student body. It was the third TSA meeting of the fall, and I was making bold promises as the new social director. I was sitting next to Janelle, whose presence was giving me assurance. I had no idea how to execute my plan, but that didn’t affect my passion for it.
“I will personally ensure everyone at school gets a ballot and that we count the votes responsibly,” I said with confidence.
This was bravado. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in Grade 10 now but still one of the younger reps on the TSA, and my experiment was quite audacious. I saw Hussein roll his eyes at the proposal. Hussein had moved into Grade 13 and was even bigger and more intimidating than he’d been the previous year. You may wonder what Grade 13 is. There’s no such thing as Grade 13 now. It probably sounds funny. But I can explain. We had an added school year in Ontario in the 1980s. I’m not sure why. It came after Grade 12 and before post-secondary, and it was mandatory if you intended to go to university. It was some kind of extra lifeline for those who weren’t ready to leave high school, and some kind of torture for those who were. Hussein was now in Grade 13, and in the TSA meetings he sat on top of a desk rather than in a chair. No one would tell him not to do that, because he was big and wearing his leather jacket. He probably considered my countdown dance a threat to the popularity of his Rock Nite. It didn’t help that I was also the guy who had initiated a new coffee house series with live music called SWé. The name SWé was an acronym for “some wonderful entertainment.” I thought of not telling you what it stood for, because it sounds so twee and makes me sound skinny and sensitive—which I was. But that’s what it stood for. In 1983, Debbie Ngo would make a cool poster for SWé at my request that was like the cover jacket of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” single but said “Let’s SWé” instead. That was one of the lyrics in the song, too, but spelled differently. Smart stuff. It would become my favourite poster throughout high school. But SWé was somehow perceived as competition for Rock Nite—albeit with acoustic guitars. And Hussein didn’t like that, either.
Still, I had a growing group of champions for my ideas. The dynamics at the TSA had shifted. The motion for my ambitious countdown event was carried
with the support of Jane Decker and Janelle and a few others. Jane Decker was now a leader at the TSA, and despite the eyeliner incident a year earlier and my desire to tell her to fuck off the way Siouxsie had told us all to fuck off at her concert, she had become a good friend. She supported me during the TSA vote, but then after the meeting furtively asked me if I knew what I was doing. I assured her that the countdown dance would work. I convinced her of this even though I had no blueprint to follow. I just knew I had always been fascinated by lists. I had been making lists since I was a little kid in England.
Anyone who has ever known me well knows that I love lists. When we came to Canada, my father facilitated my interest in lists by giving me a book called The World Book of Rankings. The title handily referred to the fact that it was a book of world lists. It had lists like “Country with Most Oil Exports” and “Most Murders per Year, by City.” I pored over the lists religiously, and tried to memorize parts of the book before going to bed each night. This may be an insight into my nerdy character growing up. While others were playing with model cars or fantasizing about girls, I was staring at international rankings in a book. Fast-forward to Thornlea a few years later, and this was my chance to compile an important list and have a popular event in the gym where a lot of New Wave music would get played. Besides, as much as I respected democracy, it may also have been the case that I intended it to be a cool list of New Wave songs regardless of the votes. Integrity at the polls needed to be compromised sometimes for the sake of a curatorial music policy.
Initiating my countdown event at the TSA was not inconsistent with a new bit of confidence I had in Grade 10. I was taking more responsibility around Thornlea, and I had the support of Janelle. She was quickly becoming a very beautiful presence in my life. And hitting the age of fifteen didn’t hurt either. You see, the good news about high school is that, for the most part, over the course of your time there, things get better. That is, you get older. And as you get older and move into the higher grades, there are waves of young new recruits who enter the school and struggle to build their courage and get their bearings the way you once did. So you can look at the younger students and laugh at them, and then you feel better about yourself. That is what high school is ultimately designed for: laughing at others to feel better. And so, by Grade 10, I was no longer an insecure Thornlea rookie. No. I was more of an insecure sophomore with a year of high school experience and a briefcase instead of an Adidas bag. This was a big difference.
Aesthetically, I had also made progress by the fall of ’82. My uniform was certainly more solid. For all that I’d grappled with a fledgling New Wave image the previous year, I’d made major strides in my presentation. My days with Toke and our Lolas from Mac’s Milk seemed an eternity away. We were kids then … even if it was only the summer before last. Most of my clothing was now black, and my hair was longer and had more blond and jet-black streaks. I had a sleek black briefcase that I carried to school each day, and a few black shirts that I wore throughout the week. Concerts like the Police Picnic had taught me the look I was going for. And my involvement with Theatre Troupe at the end of Grade 9 had catapulted me into being considered one of the cool artsy students. This was important.
I was also honing my New Wave musical tastes in Grade 10 to include alternative rock and electronic groups like Gang of Four and Kraftwerk and Simple Minds. Simple Minds were a post-punk Scottish band with a charismatic singer named Jim Kerr who acted a bit like Bowie. No one could be Bowie, but Jim Kerr set a good example. I became a Simple Minds fan. Jim Kerr wore jackets with shoulder pads and black pants and black eyeliner. And he crouched when he sang. I was never sure why he did so much crouching. I assumed that’s what the latest trendsetting New Wave singers did. I started crouching when I sang, too—for a while, anyway.
By mid-autumn, I was doing fairly well in school, I continued making the morning announcements and was in the Vocal Group as well as other extracurricular activities. A good portion of my time between classes was spent with Janelle. She was in Grade 11 and considered by many to be a great catch. She was definitely a girl that a lot of the boys had noticed. She was diminutive and sweet and had a natural beauty. She wore very little makeup except for a touch of eyeliner. She was graceful from being a ballet dancer as a kid but also a strong athlete. She was soft-spoken and well-grounded. She had been an exchange student in Europe and now spoke French fluently. She was also one of the top students at Thornlea. She was the kind of person that gets one hundred percent on a science test. Those kinds of people are usually annoying. But Janelle wasn’t. Everyone liked Janelle. She was pretty much the whole package. And she was very nice to me.
My crush on Janelle felt strangely mature. I felt little of the nervousness and insecurity that had come with Wendy. On one of our first occasions alone in the hallways of Thornlea, I had spontaneously kissed Janelle on the lips outside the photography room. I remember her looking quite shocked and commenting on how I had some gall to do such a thing. I wasn’t so sure where I’d found such confidence, either. But soon we were seeing each other regularly.
Janelle had a calm demeanour and was a good balance for my outgoing and neurotic personality. She was what others would see as an ideal partner. But we didn’t actually become boyfriend and girlfriend in the fall. At least, I never fully acknowledged us that way. She asked me on a couple of occasions if I was her boyfriend, and I changed the subject. Maybe Janelle was just too good for what I was ready for. She was not my sexual fantasy girl or ersatz New Wave role model. She was solid and real. That probably scared me. And Janelle really didn’t have the background in punk or alternative music that I valued in a person. I needed to change that. I set out to try to educate her with mix tapes.
THE TRUE MEASURE of your affection for another human in the 1980s was in making a mix tape. It’s different now. These days, you can throw together an iTunes playlist in a couple of minutes. You can make a playlist without caring very much. It’s not so much of an investment. But in the ’80s, the mix tape took time and consideration and creativity. The right amount of space left between songs on the cassette was not unimportant. The flow of the music was paramount. The choice of the material was key. And writing meticulous and artful liner notes was also a major element. The all-important title of any particular mix tape could make the difference between a regularly played classic and something that got tossed in a shoebox with other cassettes. Making the right mix tape was never easy.
One of my primary goals with Janelle was to instruct her about Bowie. This might sound like some kind of attempt at indoctrination. I assure you it was. I was on a mission to teach Janelle everything I could about my idol. I couldn’t very well be attached to a girl who didn’t know much about Bowie.
I called the Bowie mix tape “Scary Monsters Mix” as a nod to his 1980 album featuring “Ashes to Ashes” and “Fashion.” Here is a list of the songs that appeared on Side A of the mix tape I made for Janelle in the fall of 1982, including the year Bowie released each song (as I outlined on the cassette liner notes):
“The Laughing Gnome,” 1967
“When I Live My Dream” (David Bowie), 1967
“The Secret Life of Arabia” (“Heroes”), 1977
“Five Years” (Ziggy Stardust), 1972
“Cat People” (Cat People soundtrack), 1982
“Please Mr. Gravedigger” (David Bowie), 1967
“Karma Man,” 1967
“Fashion” (Scary Monsters), 1980
“Speed of Life” (Low), 1977
“Breaking Glass” (Low), 1977
“What in the World” (Low), 1977
“The London Boys,” 1966
“Wild Is the Wind” (Station to Station), 1976
As you can see, I wanted to include a lot of very early David Bowie on this mix tape, to demonstrate my credentials as a true fan and for Janelle to be aware of his beginnings. I also balanced things by taping “Cat People” and “Fashion,” some of his latest work. I got some of the in
formation wrong on my liner notes for Janelle. As a case in point, the gorgeous cover song “Wild Is the Wind” is from 1976, not 1978, as I had labelled it. But I didn’t have the advantage of Wikipedia back then. And nor did anyone else. So details like this mattered less.
It made sense that I started the mix tape for Janelle with a quirky little song called “The Laughing Gnome.” It went the furthest back for me. The first time I was introduced to David Bowie was in England. I was five years old. I mean, I wasn’t actually personally introduced to him, but I was made aware of his voice and his music as it emitted from the radio in our house. We lived in a house on a street called Beacon Close. Beacon Close was in Middlesex, a suburb of London. Middlesex was like the equivalent of Thornhill in England, but with less heating and more peas.
By the time I was five, my mother had taught me to record sounds that came from the radio by pressing the two top buttons on our new Panasonic tape deck. It was a portable tape deck that was also a radio. This device was a technological wonder. It could do it all. It was the cutting edge in the early ’70s, and my Uncle Boyuk had brought it from America. Actually, he had brought it from another part of the world and then from America. My Uncle Boyuk always had the newest gadgets. He would get them from Japan or Germany and bring them to the United States, where he lived. Then he would deliver them as gifts to us in England when he visited. It probably would have made more sense for Uncle Boyuk to just send the gadget gifts straight from Germany to England, but it was more glamorous this way.
The Panasonic tape deck required alertness and quick reaction time. The way it worked was that you inserted a cassette into the player and cued it up to a blank part and then left it there. If something was on the radio that you really liked, you could then press “Rec” and “Play” simultaneously, and whatever sound was on the radio would transfer onto the tape. It took skill to do the double-press at the appropriate moment. You had to be physically ready for any possible taping opportunity. And so the problem was that if you were on the other side of the room—say, eating pistachios, or thinking about eating pistachios—you would have to run to the tape deck to catch the song just as you heard it come on the radio. This might explain why there is a generation of people walking around who don’t remember the first ten seconds of most radio songs of the 1970s. Those parts just didn’t make it onto their cassettes. But mix tapes were popular and became very much the norm. Of course, it was easier to make a mix tape when you were recording music that you owned on vinyl. But when it came from the radio, it posed athletic challenges to get to the buttons on time.
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