The story has to begin with Malcolm McLaren, the ex-Kings Road clothier who brought the Sex Pistols to the world. Having seen his punk rock masterstroke self-destruct in a blaze of folly, McLaren was looking for a new outrage.

The legend says that he discovered young Annabella Lwin, who was 14 at the time, in a dry cleaning shop where she was working. Annabella, who came to England with her mother as refugees from the perpetual civil strife of Burma, had dark exotic good looks that rang the cash registers in McLaren’s eyes. He asked her if she wanted to sing in a band. McLaren gathered the musicians, put together the group and gave them their identity.

McLaren’s early-stage Bow Wow Wow (BWW for short) propagated an optimistic, almost cartoonish version of the youth rebellion of the Sex Pistols, with an idealized sexual license replacing the idea of political “anarchy.” Their first single, “C-30, C-60, C-90, Go” celebrated the joys of cassette taping (as opposed to record buying). It was, as McLaren hoped, controversial—BWW’s English record company released it, but refused to promote it.

With the release that followed, an eighttrack cassette called Your Cassette Pet, the BWW strategy was clear. McLaren was casting Annabella as an underage sexpot. In one song she has an affair with a young criminal named Louis Quatorze, who makes love to her “with his gun in my back.” In another, she shrieked “I feel sexy/Sexy Eiffel Towers.” On the side, McLaren was doing his best to stir up London’s trashier daily papers with stories of BWW as some kind of new pop sex scandel. The campaign reached its peak when Annabella posed nude for the cover of the Last Of The Mohicans record, in a parody of the picnic scene painted by Monet, Dejeuner sur I’herbe, and her mother sued to block the record’s release.

In the heat of controversy, everyone seemed to miss, an essential point—the kids in BWW were more than just puppets of a great media manipulator. Now that the band and McLaren have parted company, they are anxious to correct that situation, but they are also fairly candid about the relationship.

“That’s true to an extent,” drummer Dave Barbarossa admits when I put it to him that without McLaren there would never have been a BWW. “But he’s the one who naturallly is going to take the credit in situations like that, because he’s interesting character. But his ideas for the band weren’t really his ideas. Things like ‘C-60’ and ‘W.O.R.K.,’ they were us, they were what we were like. ‘W.O.R.K.’ was a job. He looked at us and said, ‘Ah, you don’t work. You don’t buy records, do you? You listen to cassettes.’ And for ‘Louis Quatorze,’ Annabella was that age. So it wasn’t just popping out of his mind, it was based on us.”

SHOWBIZ

Dave, Annabella and I are sitting in an RCA conference room, guitarist Mathew Ashman artd bassist LeRoy Gorman are off in other rooms doing interviews, the last of “hundreds” they’ve done on this American tour./

Previous interviews has portrayed the boys in BWW as clowns and trouble-makers with Annabella as the reasonable one, but I find Dave more talkative at first and Annabella quiet, pouty, and not trying to cover up how fed up she is with interviews. It takes a while for her to open up, but when she does, it’s clear that for all the unusualness of her position, she is a normal girl trying hard to stay that way in extraordinary circumstances. She’s guarded, she’s got her defenses up, but how else is she going to manage the trick? And she’s certainly not trying to sell herself by living up to any image.

Vm sure Stevie Wonder dldn*t get those hassles from his parents. —Annabella Lwin

I ask the young pop star (now 17) whether she grew up idolizing pop stars.

“No, I didn’t idolize them. I admired them.”

You weren’t the kind of girl who puts pictures up on her bedroom walls?

“No. The first person I thought was really nice in the way of singing was Stevie Wonder. ’Cause he was blind, so it used to make me think a bit about the fact that he used to play all these instruments, and he used to write tons of songs. Another group I liked was Abba, they were great singers, still are. I mean I never used to take it seriously, it was just all in fun.”

Do you think about the fact that there may be kids at home with your picture on their wall?

“Naw, they’re probably putting darts in it or something like that.”

Was it an ambifion of yours to be in a group before McLaren came along?

“No. Even then it was more like a hobby. If it wasn’t that it was nicking Yorkies from the local sweet shop, and that wasn’t good, I’d get too fat.

“I wanted to leave school when I was 16 anyway. I wanted to have my own flat and do what I wanted to do. On the other hand, I had a really domineering parent. She’s given me a lot of trouble ever since I wanted to live my own life. But I don’t want to go into this, it’s really boring.”

We’ve read a lot about her putting up a fuss over album covers and touring.

“Yeah, it’s so unnecessary. I mean I’m sure Stevie Wonder didn’t get those hassles from his parents. Or anyone else. The Ronettes or whoever.”

What would you advise someone planning to be in a group at 14? Is it a good idea?

“Go out and do whafthey want to do. It’s up to the individual. There’s no point following someone else’s footsteps.”

SEX!

It was a neat trick having a young girl sing very sexual lyrics and have everyone' wonder “what does she know about it?”

“Well, before this new album the lyrics were Malcolm’s ideas mostly. ‘Sexy Eiffel Towers’—I didn’t write the lyrics to that or anything else. I was just getting into that sort of role, I suppose you’d call it.”

The new record still has a heavily sexual aspect, though.

Dave: “Oh yeah, of course. Because it’s the old story, it wasn’t just him. It was us as well. But we can’t keep going on telling people that forever. We’lJ wait and have people listen to our music.”

Julie Burchill recently wrote about the attitude the French call nostalgie de la bone, nostalgia for the primitive beginnings of man, and said it has to do with wanting to go back to an imagined time when sex was “a thrill, not a skill.” That seems to be the Bow Wow Wow attitude.

Dave: “That’s all very interesting. To me, having#a fuck is having a fuck. You knpw I’ve done it with thousands of women on the road, it’s no big deal. We all do. It’s very nice to talk about.

Annabella: “I don’t.”

Dave: “She don’t. But, it’s very nice to talk about sex being a thrill not a skill, but it’s entirely up to who you’re with and how you feel.”

Annabella: ‘Tm going to get a cup/of coffee, this is getting really boring. Excuse me.” (she leaves the room).

Dave: “She’s really hung up with sex.” Oh?_

“It’s one of those things. She thinks anybody talking about sex is talking about having it off with her, so she tends to build up quite a defense mechanism. If you talk about sex generally she thinks everybody’s going to try and have sex with her because she’s a pop star. And she’s had her clothes off in front of cameras and she’s only young and she’s a bit inexperienced.”

At this point Annabella bursts into the ;oom, yells “HIHOWYADIONALLRIGHT!,” smiles, and sits down.

We were just saying you really can’t talk about pop without talking about sex.

Annabella: “No. A lot of it’s got to do with sex, in one form or another. That’s why people are so interested.”

But then, in the context of show biz, doesn’t sex always become a commodity, to be sold?

“Yeah, but it isn’t just in music, is it? It’s in films, everything.”

Is there a way out of that?

“Why do you want to get out of that? What’s the point? There’s no problem. Well, the only problem is, I get some guys who come up to me, all they’re interested in is just to, uh, you know, have sex with me: But I just tell them to fuck off, because they’re just crude bastards as far as I’m concerned. I mean I know there might be a few slags in the business...”

Dave: “And I’m one of them.”

Annabella: “But I’m not. I know it sounds strange, especially for me because I’ve posed nude a number of times. You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here with clothes on. But it’s just that people can get into that, they starr pinning you down as being one thing or another. And just because you’re trying something out doesn’t mean that’s what you definitely are. People actually come £ along to see me and they come backstage s and they think, because I sing, like, ‘Sexy f Eiffel Towers’...”

^ That you must be some kind of hot 1 pot...

“That’s right. I mean they go away thinking ‘she’s nice’ or whatever I suppose. I don’t know. It doesn’t really bother me. It’s no big deal. I suppose Joan Jett has the same-problem now and again. Or any other female singers. And girls get that all the time in society anyway.”

MORE SHOW BIZ!

. And so, to the reason for this promotional exercise: the new album. It’s called When The Going Get Tough The Tough Get Going, it was produced by Mike Chapman (oLBlondie fame) and it’s very good. Bright, snappy, tuneful, and very clever. In fact, it proves what BWW have been claiming all along, that they can do it on their own.

Dave: “It’s very nerve-wracking for us, this new album, because it’s like our first album. It’s a lot more from soul ’cause it’s the four of us against the world, rather than having Malcolm McLaren being responsible or someone else being responsible, or an image being responsible or someting. It’s just the four of us writing songs. I think the songs are really strong.”

Annabella: “It will make me proud. Like a peacock.”

What did you think of Mike Chapman?

Annabella: “Great producer to work for. Really great. Didn’t like'toast much, but he was great.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 38

Dave: “This is the one that all four of us done without any flack or any rubbish. And I just hope it does really good, ’cause I need to pay the rent. There’s a love song here, there’s a little message song there, there’s a bit of everything. No conscious effort to have a bit of everything, it just seemed to work out that way.”

My own favorite song is “Do You Wanna Hold Me?,” which is also the pick for first single. It has such intriguing lines as, “Children I wanna warn ya/’Cause I’ve been to California..

Dave: “That’s about the fickleness of California and Hollywood. Nice and poppy,. isn’t it? It’s like the Archies or something.”

Annabella: “We’ve done a video for that. We would have liked to have filmed it in Disneyland,* ’cause it’s about all those sorts of characters. You know, Disneyland, Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, they’re so powerful. You get kids, adults, they’re all interested in going to see it. And people just look up to these creatures, they’ve got a lot of power. And all it is is people dressing in these costumes.

“People believe in illusion a lot. They try to be what they see, I think.”

Dave: “It’s just to say how people feel nice and safe when they identify with things like Mickey Mouse and Pinnochio. How much more safe they feel in their little worlds. We wanted to blow Mickey Mouses up in the video, but weren’t allowed to.

“What else? ‘Roustabout’, yeah that could be Louis Quatorze after he got caught. It’s a good rocking song. ‘Lonesome Tonight,’ that’s brilliant, that’s my favorite one. That’s just a girl pining for her boy. Yeah, it’s just another fun silly little record, that’s all. Like we said, it’s got something for everyone on it.”

My advice: don’t believe, too hard in the pretty Bow Wow Wow bubble, because it’s certainly going to burst. But it is pretty, so enjoy it while it’s still so happily afloat. ^