MIDDLE OF THE ROBES

MIDDLE OF THE ROBES

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

by Cynthia Rose

What with our recent illusions of cable TV—a.k.a. The Olympics, covered nightly from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. for the duration— and Boy George back in town, things are picking up. Recently returned from Jamaica where he was born again as a blond, George turned up on Ear Say, Channel 4’s pop magazine program, as a Special CoPresenter. Clad in a black Siouxsie Sioux wig and definitely not averse to parodying himself, BG reported disarming potential slanderers encountered on his holiday by “suddenly bursting into Jamaican folk songs...they really respect musicians.”

He also tattled on rude ole Keith R: “Yeah! I went over to his house while I was there and he was calling me a bag lady every time I turned my back. Just making schoolboy limp-wrist jokes while I wasn’t looking.” George paused. “I mean, what a MAN he is, right?”

The Boy’s verdict on this week’s chartprone product? U2’s new, Eno-produced “Pride” (with accompanying overweening vid): “The best of their kind, I think. I like it.” Bronski Beat’s “Why?” with its attractive poster of a defeated skinhead’s slumped head, hands hiding his face: “They’re— alright. A bit persecuted if you ask me.” Malcolm McClaren’s latest plagiarism, Puccini-into-pop with a Terence Donovan video imitating the style of fellow fashion lensperson Deborah Turbeville? “I think the record’s great,” piped up BG. “But I think Malcolm’s an idiot full stop. He should just make the record and shut up.”

Not only is George on the nail about the babbling haberdasher (who has of late seemed much under the influence of something uhpleasant during his frequent TV turns). He’s also right on with his assertion that “Really everyone in the charts just now is terribly normal...they all look like Dallas; take George Michael. I like that song, too— but what a Dallas haircut!”

One could enlarge on this a tad by realizing that while Wham! were just a version of the Police for preteens, G. Michaels is definitely This Year’s candidate for the old Bryan Ferry persona. Little wonder that O’Dowd’s sympathies shift towards Jerry Dammers in this case...the Wham-scam is symbolic of a much bigger battle than the familiar Record Company versus Your Wallet. Oh no: it’s very much about Class with a capital C, all these ideas about frankly aspiring to money, leisure and the correct leisure-wear.

Sure, you can say that George is a Cypriot Londoner (nee Georgiou Panayetiou) with seven Greek uncles,running restaurants in the capital’s northern suburbs. Andrew Ridgeley is half-Egyptian. But what Wham, George M., Duran Duran and their ilk most embody is American money—copped via that venerable Ferryboy image of the successful social climber as projected through MTV—creating the m^h u an ^nSlish middle class. Worth r®rn®m’:,ering, too, that Wham’s first hit was all about how cool it was to be unemployed, “n • u exPlicitly song the Special AKA’s Bright Lights” mocks so effectively.)

But in a Britain where the (still largely unreported) miners’ strike enters its sixth militant MONTH next week, “middle class” is more than just a factual inaccuracy—it’s a willful delusion. This whole shtick Ferry patented back in the ’70s—the tasteful, Noel Coward-style rock figure—now rests purely and simply on the financial gullibilities of Anglophiliac Americans. Like Sting and Co. before them, Simon Le Bon and his cronies, George and Andrew, can sell records in their own country. What they simply couldn’t do in this day and age is keep their chic profile up to a “standard” on British earnings alone.

Playing out the role of Professional Briton has its female front, too; these days a lady has three choices. There’s the tough cookie (for anyone with Sioux reservations, pioneering work has been carried out lately by Bad Seed Anita Lane and cult novelist Kathy Acker, who gives readings backed by Genesis P Orridge’s Psychic TV). There’s the torch priestess—perfectly embodied at this mo’ by Sade—SHAH DAY—Adu, whose Diamond Life LP haunts the Top Ten. She is also on record saying women peace protesters would get further if they paid more attention to their makeup. (None of the ado about Adu seems to mention she lives with junior McClaren figure/flak Robert Elms.)

Then there’s the inevitable Laura Ashley model of femininity—an update of the Swinging ’60s Yardley Girl, personified perfectly today by the deliberate, ethereal Virginia Astley. Of late performing in tandem with screenings of Elvira Madigan (yep), Ms. Astley boasts two class weapons. Socially: she’s classically-trained (so is Annie Lennox, of course, but even Annie’s newfound Krishna consciousness seems less lowbrow than Astley’s pretentious references to the likes of Wilfrid Owen and her choice of limiting venues to the likes of the Bath Pump Rooims).

Biz-wise: she’s Pete Townshend’s sister-in-law.

Ray Davies recently broached concern about rock’s illusions with references to the past—only to have TV’s High Sheriffs censure his remarks. “The Swinging ’60s,” he had said, “were more than a bit of a lie— and a very political lie too. It was all, ‘OK, let those guys do this and that, give ’em the MBE and all but keep the plebs in their place.’ You know—make sure they’ve got drugs in their house or whatever. Make sure they always remember where they stand.”

One wonders if the British-based 12-yearold forking over for most of the U.K.’s current product knows he’s buying the image of a—literally—unattainable dream. Or, in other instances, a pale Xerox of some Other Reality being promoted in a reduced version.

An instance: The “jazz boom” is with us once again. (It usually follows torch songs and Sade has been preceded by chanteuse Regine of Hard-Corps, Hermine Demoriane’s newest dissonant LP, and a host of other contenders—all lacking the grit of a Lennox, the tenacity of a Terry, the pure projecting muscle of Ms. Moyet.) It’s EVEN about to be institutionalized in a “National Jazz Centre” (“sited right in trendy Covent Garden!” screams my telly).

In order to give this event its appropriate second of TV time, a few jazz vets are trotted on. Wheeled on, in the case of practically-paralyzed Robert Wyatt—who, from his wheelchair, seemed the only participant with an ounce of humor. In the event, however, his “Shipbuilding” video gets more air-time than the pioneer himself : cut-off in mid-sentence when he tries to speak. If he’d been allowed to continue perhaps the nation would have heard what Wyatt quietly told me last week: that he felt jazz would always flourish best as a “sidebar” to other mainstream music.

Wyatt’s as good as his assertion—his favorite jazz artists in town are the Iggy Quayle trio, “who are lucky if they fill a pub room every other Sunday night.” (Quayle’s current drummer Larry Morgan happens to be the man who first loaned young, pre-Soft Machine Wyatt his drumkit: “A true gentleman, because I could never have afforded my own.”)

But Ronnie Scott, whose club with its extortionate door prices has maintained a nearmonopoly on the London jazz scene for many a moon, got his shot in on telly. “I’ve had more kids in my place this year than ever before,” he claimed. “And I think it’s because a lot of them are just getting fed up with the rubbish pumped out at them 24 hours a day in the media.”

Useful or not, the fact remains that we have lost a five-story banana warehouse and we have gained a National Jazz Site generally regarded—as one of the genre’s nationally-known critics pointed out to me—“as a disgraceful farrago...utter nonsense.” Sorta leads me to wonder if a Heavy Metal Museum wouldn’t be more appropriate—or at least complementary. There, for starters, we could enshrine our own successor to Spinal Tap: a band by the name of Hanoi Rocks.

“Rocks,” as they like to be called, are onto a sixth LP this week (Two Steps From The Move is its illuminating title) and every word .they utter or warble sounds suspiciously like something Rob Reiner thought up. It’s like hearing echoes from a breakfast I recently shared at London’s posh Savoy Hotel with in-town Spinal Tappers Chris Guest, Mike McKeaR and Harry Shearer.

Had these men—two winging their way back to Manhattan to begin filming the new Saturday Night Live—heard Hanoi?

“No,” admitted Shearer, Tap’s “bassist” Derek Smalls. “But we did come over here to go on the road with Saxon just before the film. Their press release said that Saxon’s bass player was known for his antics and for inciting the audience. So I was really up for it!”

“And in the event,” laughed Guest, “all he did was play open strings and punch the air the whole time with his fist. These bands are unbelievable—they out-Kiss Kiss.”

Well, Hanoi Rocks’ frontman Mike Monroe bears a pretty eerie resemblance to the be-wigged Mike McKean. And, come to think about it, McKean wasn’t very forthcoming about his future projects...not to mention the fact that he excused himself moments after we met claiming he had to catch a plane. Has he embarked on a new career here? Or did Tap come by the clues to their very funny parody from genuine HM scambamboolahwallah? To quote one of Rocks’ more popular titles, maybe it’s really just “Mystery City.”

Next month: Which Manchester-born New Folk hero goes by the pseudonym “Troy Hip” in the less dignified personals columns of that august burg? Who are the Woodentops? What is the back-scratched Secret Message on Aztec Camera’s version of Van Halen’s “Jump”? Anyone with all the correct answers wins a free copy of “Smell The Glove.” HI