Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  In the longer term there would almost certainly have been some kind of Beatles reunion, which probably wouldn’t have amounted to much but would have been enough to remove some of the shine from the most powerful franchise in pop.

  John Lennon might have led a long, happy and fulfilled life, which is the least owed to anyone who has brought so much pleasure to so many.

  Rock and roll would of course have lost its key martyr figure, somebody whose untimely demise allowed us all to believe that the wages of rugged independence were at worst an assassin’s bullet and at the very least some sort of Establishment stitch-up. Lennon’s position as simultaneously the leader of the Beatles and also their most prominent detractor meant that he attracted support from anybody who saw themselves as being above the poison of popularity. Lennon is the rock star that would-be rock stars are keenest to be identified with. Everyone who picked up a guitar in the years after his death felt they weren’t so much advancing their own personal agenda as signing up for John Lennon’s army.

  In the weeks between the murder and Christmas, as the airwaves were monopolized by Lennon’s new record, ‘Imagine’, ‘In My Life’ and anything that seemed to strike the appropriate note of principled solemnity, as the current affairs programmes were inevitably turned over to discussions about John Lennon the peace campaigner and avant-garde artist, as the crowds gathered on both sides of the Atlantic, cupping votive candles, their voices raised in choruses of ‘Give Peace A Chance’, as every public figure from politicians to Churchmen came forward to make it clear that they personally felt the same wound everybody else felt, it seemed that something changed. In the wake of pop music’s JFK moment it seemed only right to regard the rock star’s trade as a very serious business.

  Rock and roll arrived just a decade after the Second World War when life was still overwhelmingly a serious business. Rock and roll was a change, something for the kids to enjoy themselves with until the advent of responsibility meant they were forced to put away childish things. This gained force in the sixties, when the music and manners of the beat generation cast their influence over every corner of society and culture. The death of John Lennon and the period of mourning that followed it brought us face to face with the fact that we had taken this world of fun and escape with us as we got older and had not put it away with the things of childhood. This old music was imprinted on us and the characters who had made it were still part of our lives, whether they liked it or not.

  The encomium of Time magazine demonstrated how the world of twisting and shouting now had to be redrawn as a long journey towards the light. Here Lennon, the anarchic figure who used to enjoy pretending to be what we used to call a spastic, who could never leave an acid retort unspoken, who thought that rock and roll had never improved on ‘Tutti Frutti’, became ‘a figure of poetic political metaphor’. It added that ‘his spiritual consciousness was directed inward’. It sympathized with an entire generation for whom, it said, ‘a bright dream fades’. The final quote in that feature came from musician Steve Van Zandt. He seemed equally keen to elect Lennon to the triumphant company of latter-day saints. ‘He beat the rock ’n’ roll life. Beat the drugs, beat the fame, beat the damage. He was the only guy who beat it all.’

  On the day the news broke Paul McCartney was caught by a TV crew leaving a recording studio. They asked him what his reaction was to the death of his partner. They clearly wanted something grave and fulsome to open the news with. They didn’t get it. ‘It’s a drag, isn’t it?’ said McCartney with meaning in his eyes. Then he got in his car.

  1980 PLAYLIST

  John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Double Fantasy

  The Cure, Boys Don’t Cry

  The Rolling Stones, Emotional Rescue

  Dexys Midnight Runners, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels

  David Bowie, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)

  Bruce Springsteen, The River

  The Jam, Sound Affects

  Pink Floyd, ‘Another Brick In The Wall’

  Talking Heads, Remain In Light

  Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Get Happy!!

  13 AUGUST 1981

  SHEPPERTON STUDIOS, ENGLAND

  Sex, violence and television

  THE SONG WAS originally called ‘Girls In Film’. A semi-pro musician called Andy Wickett came up with the idea for it while working on the night shift in a Birmingham chocolate factory. Andy Wickett left Duran Duran before they were successful. He signed a waiver which meant he was paid £600 in return for which he gave up all rights to the song that eventually became ‘Girls On Film’ and also their major hit ‘Rio’. At the time he thought this was quite a good deal. He used the money to buy new keyboards. Later, as he watched his erstwhile band-mates disport themselves in Antony Price suits on board an ocean-going yacht on the blue Caribbean sea off the coast of Antigua, miming to what was no longer his song, he may have had cause to reconsider. The young men with whom he had so recently shared a cold rehearsal hall were now, via the newly ubiquitous medium of video, apparently translated to a land of dreams.

  On 13 August 1981, just a couple of days after the world’s first fundraiser to combat the scourge of AIDS had raised a mere $6,000, the members of Duran Duran turned up at Shepperton Studios near London to make a video for their single ‘Girls On Film’. The directors were Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, the two former members of 10cc who had transitioned smoothly into the nascent industry of shooting videos. Duran Duran had already had a couple of hits in the UK and had a growing teenage following. However, the band’s managers wanted a video that would get them talked about by older people in the United States. In order to do this they agreed it had to be about sex. Creme and Godley had recently been on their travels, during which one of them had seen a fashion show and the other an exhibition of mud wrestling. They decided a conflation of the two might do the trick. There was no agonized discussion about whether this was a good idea on the grounds of either ideology or taste. They just did it. That’s how the music business had traditionally worked. In the early eighties the video business was setting itself up as the more daring older brother of the sometimes prudish music business.

  The footage they shot that day was subsequently re-cut a number of times in order to satisfy the sensibilities of different countries and broadcasters. At its fullest the video featured the band miming to their song from inside a boxing ring, two girls in baby-doll nighties trying to push each other off a greasy pole, a nurse in a short skirt, stockings and suspenders, a girl in the attire of a sumo wrestler throwing a real sumo wrestler over her shoulder, a naked girl whipping a naked male model, two girls wrestling in mud, and then, just in case there was anyone who hadn’t got the point, naked girls being hosed down by an obliging technician. ‘Girls On Film’ saw the injection of girlie magazine aesthetics – lips parting in slow motion, crotch-bisecting thong, pouting pole worship, ice cube on the nipple, the full wardrobe of glamour stereotypes – into the mainstream of the music business. What they were up to that day seemed so naughty, even to the people doing it, that the band had to be kept away from the girls during the shoot. Nobody expected it to get shown beyond the Playboy channel and a few nightclubs that had recently taken to showing videos. However, as Kevin Godley was to recall, ‘it had glamour, it had polish, it had sex, it had good-looking boys, it had girls sliding on poles. It was a dirty film. These were the ingredients that made it MTV-able.’

  Obviously no network would show the full version. But they could do something better, which was ban it. It was the publicity surrounding TV’s refusal to run their video that made Duran Duran a story in the United States. It was MTV’s willingness to play a tame version that made them popular. When Duran Duran shot the video they had never heard of MTV. This new station had been launched only two weeks earlier in those parts of the United States where they had been able to sign up cable providers. The idea for the channel had come from a bunch of radio programmers who thought there could be something in showing music videos
round the clock. The investors had difficulty believing there would ever be anything in music television. They had seen the increasing popularity of groups like Blondie, who were unquestionably telegenic and had gone so far as to shoot a clip for each track on their album Eat To The Beat, but they didn’t believe there would be enough acceptable product to fill the screen time and they were worried about what it all might cost.

  What they didn’t realize is that the music business was not scientific. They underestimated how desperate it was for exposure. The music business paid for promotional clips if the act was popular in Europe because over there they had music shows and Saturday-morning kids shows that ran the clips and these were proven to sell records. Therefore it didn’t have to cost MTV anything at all. Some record companies were happy to provide this material to MTV free of charge. Once they did that the other companies had to fall into line for fear that their artists wouldn’t get the exposure. They placed enormous value on the all-important caption at the end of the video spelling out the track’s full name and what album it came from, the absence of which was one of their main frustrations with radio. Once the backers realized that this was one cable network where the cost of the product being broadcast was virtually nil they scrambled on board.

  It was an odd way to run a TV channel. The majority of MTV’s output was provided for them by outside suppliers over whom they had no control. The videos were the products of the whims of artists, the ideas ones that directors wanted to try out in the hope that they could get a commercials deal, and the treatments a reflection of the limitations of their budgets. Only two minutes out of the average hour of programming actually came from the network. These two minutes were provided by a department called ‘Programme Services’. The graphics, trails and stings that occupied this time were crucially important because it was here that the fledgling network could tell its viewers who they were, what they were providing and why they should want it. The key graphic was of an MTV flag being planted on the moon. The key message was ‘I want my MTV’. They talked Mick Jagger into saying the words and soon they had everyone else parroting the same message. It was a marketing masterstroke in that it co-opted youthful idealism for the benefit of the business plans of Madison Avenue. At no cost.

  The service launched at midnight on 1 August with ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ by the Buggles. They figured it didn’t matter that nobody in the USA knew the record because nobody would be watching. The second video to be aired was a more reliable clue to where MTV would soon head. This was ‘You Better Run’ by Pat Benatar. Pat had not sung anything that could be called rock until she was twenty-two but her time in stage musicals had equipped her with the ability to project herself. This was something the camera valued. She had only been in a rock band with her husband Neil Giraldo a short time but it was long enough for her to have inherited a few key pretensions and to make her suspicious of working with film people. During the shoot, she recalled, ‘I got really angry. I kept thinking, “What do they think I am, a runway model?” As a musician, it was your whole life to be edgy and underground.’ By the standards of subsequent videos, by her and a thousand others, Benatar is dressed quite demurely in a striped top, albeit with shiny leather trousers. Following the launch of MTV there would be a lot of leather trousers.

  It’s difficult to recall the excitement caused by the arrival of MTV. It took a while to establish itself thanks to the conservatism of cable operators. This was overcome by the fact that MTV was one product people couldn’t take or leave. It was a revolution in its time as dramatic as the arrival of social media twenty years later. You emerged from your first exposure to it slack-jawed in the face of its effects, sated by the succession of newly familiar faces seen in close-up for the first time and dazzled by its plenty, which was its most important feature. Videos had once been as rare as truffles. Now here they were in stunning profusion, one after another. If you didn’t care for what was showing you were bound to be beguiled by the next of its succession of racy images: Debbie Harry’s bare shoulders in Blondie’s ‘Rapture’, Mick Jagger’s oddly considered dance moves at the beginning of ‘Start Me Up’, Devo singing ‘Whip It’ in their black shorts and plant-pot hats, the boyish U2 doing ‘Gloria’ in the open air of Dublin docks, and even Foreigner dutifully miming to ‘Waiting For A Girl Like You’.

  MTV increased the visibility of both rock stars and would-be rock stars. It moved marginal acts with strong visuals quickly into the mainstream. People like the Stray Cats, who would previously have had to rely on college radio, suddenly found themselves drawing big crowds, some of whom were dressed up like them because they had seen the way they dressed. In the early days MTV had unusually high penetration in rural areas. Junior acts like Def Leppard noticed they were starting to show in retail charts in secondary markets, which could only be down to MTV. Whereas radio operated unspoken quotas of records by ‘chick singers’, MTV, knowing the early adopters of their service were young men, discriminated in favour of female acts, whether it was the Go-Go’s, who initially had to be persuaded that there wasn’t something essentially immoral about them being filmed driving around Hollywood in an open car while miming to ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’, or older acts like Olivia Newton-John, who happily cut her hair, toned her body and belatedly transformed herself into a sex symbol with ‘Physical’.

  Some musicians were remarkably conservative when it came to doing what video required them to do. At the time Miles Copeland was guiding the career of REM. Michael Stipe, who was twenty-one, recalled: ‘He said, “I want you to make music videos and I want you to lip-sync.” And I said, “No, I’m not going to do it.” He said “OK” and that was the end of our meeting.’ Stipe went on to lip-sync in scores of videos.

  Some of the older acts were worried about what the close scrutiny of the camera would reveal of the shortcomings of their appearance. In 1981 Elton John’s hair was at the end of the retreat from which it would triumphantly return. Thus his video offering had to be shot from one side only in a darkened room.

  Making videos had previously been an optional extra for the rock star, a box to be ticked should he or she be so inclined. Once MTV was established as the gatekeeper to the hit parade, rock became a visual medium and making a video became part of the rock star’s routine. Whole days of their lives were now spent sitting around on a draughty film lot or in a remote, inhospitable location while the really important people, the technicians, titivated the elements of the latest conceit, wondering whether they could get the thin model hired to play the adoring fan to come back to the hotel and staving off the boredom with the stimulants that had been laundered through the record company budget as ‘fruit and flowers’.

  In September 1981 Rod Stewart’s organization took over the whole of Hollywood’s Sunset Marquis, which at the time was promoting its reputation as the rockers’ hotel of choice. His band set up on a stage by the shallow end of the swimming pool and he mimed to his new single ‘Tonight I’m Yours’ while all around him undulating young models advertised their availability from the balcony of every room and every recliner around the pool. Most TV can be quite adequately understood with the sound turned down. Hence it’s a medium that sets great store by the power of dressing up. The MTV revolution flung open the world’s biggest dressing-up box and invited the would-be rock stars to help themselves. They dragged themselves up as pirates, dandies, cowboys, gangsters, ghouls, city slickers, spacemen, soldiers and, inevitably, rock stars. As that Rod Stewart video proved, and numberless similar efforts in the years to come served to underline, this version of the rock-star life was about as faithful to reality as Adam Ant’s version of the pirate life. It was, however, an idea of rock-star glamour that lots of people wanted to buy.

  1981 PLAYLIST

  Duran Duran, ‘Girls On Film’

  Phil Collins, ‘In The Air Tonight’

  Queen and David Bowie, ‘Under Pressure’

  Kraftwerk, Computer World

  Kid Creole and the Coconuts,
Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places

  Foreigner, 4

  Bob Dylan, Shot Of Love

  Pretenders, Pretenders II

  Meat Loaf, Dead Ringer

  The Police, Ghost In The Machine

  19 MARCH 1982

  LEESBURG, FLORIDA

  Road fever

  OZZY OSBOURNE PREFERRED to travel by bus. Apart from the saving on flights he found it was better to get in the bus and travel directly after a show than to have his hotel room used as the centre for drinking and drugging. He knew he would be too weak to resist joining in. Ozzy had been eased out of Black Sabbath two years earlier because the others, who had major substance issues of their own, found they simply couldn’t deal with his as well. It had always been Ozzy’s role in the band to be slightly further out of control than the rest. This was a role he took so seriously that eventually the other three asked him to leave.

  Ozzy was fortunate at this time in having someone prepared to manage both his professional and personal life and keep his drinking under control. Sharon Arden was the daughter of Don Arden, a singer-turned-manager with a fearsome reputation within the business. Arden was the man seen trying to tempt Chuck Berry out of his dressing room during his 1964 tour by sliding dollar bills under the door. Sharon had grown up among people who settled their disputes with their fists rather than lawyers. She was learning the business by managing Ozzy’s post-Sabbath group Blizzard of Ozz. The two weren’t yet married but she was his partner and had already begun her journey from homely boss’s daughter figure to sculpted Hollywood wife.

  Ozzy’s was a curious form of stardom. The majority of his fans were young men. They looked to him to play the traditional role of the member of the gang who always goes too far. Ozzy had quickly learned what was expected of him. He decided to enliven his show by hiring an actor who was 3ft 10in to dress as a monk and materialize through a trapdoor on stage to hand him water and a towel. During the song ‘Goodbye To Romance’ the unfortunate man would to all intents and purposes be hanged on stage. On the same tour Ozzy appeared before a meeting of executives at his label in Los Angeles and appeared to bite the head off a dove he was supposed to be releasing. Actual witnesses to this surprising meeting are impossible to trace but what mattered is that the dove incident was appended to his growing legend. When he played Des Moines, Iowa in January 1982 teenager Mark Neal tossed a dead bat on to the stage. Ozzy naturally took a bite. Later he thought better of it and had a rabies shot. Although he played the wild man on stage, in the real world Ozzy was as helpless and needy as a small boy. Sharon found this side of him attractive. Without her he simply couldn’t function. Together they flourished.