After a small ripple of public demand, I’m going to start posting a series of extracts from my unpublished memoir Hit Girl: My Bizarre Double Life in the Pop World of the Eighties – which may be undergoing a title change to avoid confusion with the character Hit-Girl in the Kick-Ass movies.
The first extract is from chapter three – Betty Page Is Born Again, which tells the story of my transition from shy secretary to the editor of music paper Sounds (and part-time backing vocalist in a pub band) to novice rock critic, via my first meeting with a proper rock star…
Early in 1979, when the winter of discontent was at its most troubled and you couldn’t move for piles of rubbish in the streets, my rock journalist boyfriend Tony announced: “Let’s escape the strikes and go to Yorkshire.”
He had been invited by Bill Nelson, a friend of his, to come and see him on tour and stay at his house in Selby. Bill had been a bona fide guitar hero with his band Be Bop Deluxe earlier in the decade, but now he was heading in a new wave direction with his combo Red Noise.
When we arrived in Leeds to meet Bill it was more like Siberia than Yorkshire. Our train had been so delayed that by the time we reached the university, we’d missed the band altogether. I was shivering with cold and nerves. What should I say? How could anything I’d experienced in my boring life mean anything to a rock star? In my head I was still very much a fan.
“Hi Bev, nice to meet you,” Bill said, Northern grace and warmth personified. “Tony has told me a lot about you.”
“Oh, has he?” I stuttered, wondering why on earth anyone like him would be interested in me.
“He tells me you sing in a band too,” he continued, sensing my nervousness.
“Erm, yes, but it’s nothing really, we’re only semi-professional,” I offered, lamely.
“That’s still great, though,” he said, carefully putting me at ease. “We all had to start somewhere! I sometimes wish I was back at that time when no one expected anything of me.”
“Yeah, I suppose there is something in that,” I said, finally able to string a sentence together. “But I’m afraid I’m getting a bit fed up with playing pubs,” I continued. “I want to write…”
“Then I’m sure you will,” he said. “You’re in the right place and with the right people!”
And I was: supported, encouraged – even by a rock luminary who was about to welcome me into his home. Mr Nelson lived in a manor house and drove two cars – one of them a Rolls-Royce. The house had magnificent art deco fittings and enormous stained-glass windows above the sweeping staircase. It was breathtaking.
Bill and his wife, Jan, dressed impeccably, were generous hosts and had beautiful, blond children. In my eyes they were the perfect couple. They seemed to have it all and, on top of that, they were lovely, salt-of-the-earth people.
After a night in their enormous guest bed, we were woken by the elegantly distinctive sound of Django Reinhardt’s guitar floating up the stairs and the delicious aroma of a home-cooked breakfast. It was like staying in a five-star hotel after a lifetime of B&Bs. I could get used to this, I thought.
I remember being vaguely aware at the time that Sid Vicious had died of a heroin overdose and wondering if he had not been strong enough to cope with fame. It was sad, but why destroy yourself when you could enjoy yourself? Fame is so fleeting, why not make the most if it? Bill certainly had.
Listen to me. Who was I kidding? I was living life vicariously, depending on Tony for my social connections. I wanted to have pop-star friends, travel abroad to do interviews and have backstage access on tours, in my own right. I was acutely aware that my place was behind a typewriter in an office. I was an excellent secretary, but it was a role I was growing out of, without being sure of what I was growing into.
Circumstances conspired to lead me down the road to a split personality. One day, Tony had too much on his plate and didn’t have time to write a review of a band we’d both been to see.
“You do it,” he said. “You pretty much wrote the last one anyway.”
I couldn’t deny that, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to put my pen above the parapet.
“God no, I couldn’t,” I said. “They’d never print it.”
“Yes they would,” he said. “Just do it. I’ll help you with it, but your byline’s going to be on it.”
Gulp. With his support, I could just about do it, but there was a problem. I couldn’t use my own name. The company that owned Sounds would never have countenanced a secretary becoming a writer. This was the Seventies, after all. We weren’t living in a meritocracy and secretaries knew their place.
If I was going to do this I had to get myself a nom de plume. My first thought was to use my mother’s maiden name, but Tony had a much more subversive suggestion.
In 1979 only a few dyed-in-the-wool fetishists knew the name Betty (or Bettie) Page. In the Fifties, she was a strictly underground heroine, the “Anti-Marilyn” who, by day, was a Fifties cheesecake model posing in leopardskin for covers of cheesy compilation records.
By night, she modelled for countless thousands of soft-porn photographs depicting her in various states of undress – and quite often tied up with rope, or brandishing a whip over a supine woman in bondage. She was covertly worshipped by men the world over, and Tony in particular. Using her name was like a secret code.
This was much more fun. Now I could stay in my bubble and Betty could be the rebellious, controversial and opinionated one. And so, the name appearing at the end of my first review, of a minor Stooges-influenced Detroit band by the name of Destroy All Monsters, was indeed Betty Page. She spoke her mind. “Lead singer Niagara – who looks like Nancy Sinatra dressed as Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC – is more than the token dame: she’s the saving grace for a bunch of old men who’d still be stuck in a bar in Detroit if it wasn’t for her charms.”
Ouch. I surprised myself, and the review was published in Sounds without major surgery. Thus began my year as a secret rock writer, slaving over a typewriter by day and frequenting the sweaty dives of London by night. I was leading a double life, just like my saucy namesake.
© Beverley Glick, 2005. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
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