Baby Jane’s In Acapulco, We Are Flying Down To Rio

Gordon Scargill, fifty-three next Tuesday, pondered as he ate his two egg and chips supper, prepared with usual haste and absence of assembly by Gladys, his partially blind and chronically deaf mother (eighty seven on Sunday), that if one was to read any post-modernist account of Britain in the early 70’s the overriding colour, like Gordon’s rapidly thinning barnet, would be grey. The dream of Woodstock was dead and buried and picket lines had replaced posies, and while there may have been a few peacocks still strutting around Carnaby Street, they were not so much dedicated followers of fashion as cultural anachronisms from what was rapidly becoming a bygone age. Besides, thought Gordon as his false teeth fought a losing battle with a large, undercooked wedge of potato, on the streets where he had lived the order of the day was NCB donkey jackets, Doc Martens and the kind of sideways stare that screamed, “are you lookin’ at my bird, or what?” This was most certainly no time for putting flowers in your hair and dreaming of San Francisco. Occasionally, invariably as a result of consuming too much strong cheddar just prior to bedtime, Gordon sensed he could hear the grass grow, although it was more likely because the council park keepers had been on strike for weeks over a summer filled less with love and more with a barely suppressed hostility. Thing was, if you believed the daily papers, it was nearly always a case of them and us. The sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party? Not on Gordon’s estate it wasn’t.

Read the history books, mused Gordon, as he dabbed at the warm yolk dripping down the front of his fawn coloured cardigan (a gift from mother on the occasion of his forty sixth birthday), and you’d think we were all tripping out to the likes of Deep Purple, King Crimson, Yes and all those other progressive rock dinosaurs, a kind of cultural Taliban, intent on taking civilisation back to the dark ages. That rubbish was strictly for Sixth Formers – spotty faced Bamber Gascoigne clones who sat around the common room getting high on Players Number Six, Van Morrison and ‘The Hobbit’. Down there in the Third Form things were different; something was stirring and the times they weren’t so much a-changin’ as being attacked from all sides. Forget those boring bands with their tie-dyes, flares and beards - Gordon and a few like-minded souls were plugging into something entirely different. First there was Bolan, the boppin’ elf; cross-legged pixie chic crossed with Eddie Cochran flash. Then there was Bowie, the Spider From Bromley High Street, strung out on lasers and slashed back blazers. And then there was….well, who could tell? One thing was for sure - they were positively post-modern, choc-a-block full of influences – the cultural equivalent of a motorway pile up. The clothes, the hair, the make up. They were so cool it hurt. And that name. What did it mean? Everything and nothing? Futurist retro meets 50’s greasy kid stuff filtered through 40’s Hollywood glamour all dressed up to go by Antony Price. Under his stewardship Roxy Music became the art school intellectuals of glam rock, their self-conscious construct of outrageous spivvy dressing, greased-back hair and gorgeous, curvaceous backing singers ushering in a whole new mindset. In short, nothing would ever be the same again. Certainly not in Gordon’s world.

Gordon, mopping up the sticky yellow gunk from the edge of his plate with a slice of Best Of Both (mothers way of weaning him off what she considered to be something of an overreliance of own brand thick sliced white) recalled in a manner that could best be described as ‘misty eyed’ that he had never seen nor heard anything so clearly made for him and his slightly pretentious (and somewhat unrealistic, considering his future career as a local government officer) art-school manqué world-view. The album cover, with Kari-Ann Muller in classic 1930s’ pin-up pastiche, all pink ribbons and silver platforms, was one Big Biba Rainbow Room (not that Gordon had a clue where the former Derry & Tomm’s building was situated, although he’d once read that the New York Dolls had played there). The contents of the sleeve covered all the bases: the Warholian ones, the art history ones, the Ladbroke Grove, gay-friends-of-Hockney ones. Of course, thought Gordon as he melodramatically flipped back an imaginary quiff (prompting mother to consider as to whether her only son was developing a nervous tick), Bryan Ferry was the absolute business and looked unbelievably fantastic and, despite all the unbearable cleverness, (most of which sailed straight over Gordon’s head), the music moved like an express train – Little Richard inspired sax, bricklayer drums – and all offset by Brian Eno’s peacock clad synth weirdness. In a world full of denim, leather and getting back to The Garden, this truly was Tomorrow Calling.

A Roxy Music performance on ‘Top Of The Pops’ was something of a postmodern extravaganza (although, some forty years on, Gordon still hadn’t a clue what the term meant – it was one of those expressions arty-farty presenters on ‘The Culture Show’ tossed around like confetti at a wedding) – a Pandora’s Box full of influences and quotations scribbled, scrawled, scratched and collaged into something so fantastically new Gordon and his friends imagined they had retired to bed, dozed off, and awoken on another planet, far stranger than anything encountered by Captain Kirk and his motley crew of space pirates. In short, reflected Gordon as he sipped his tepid tea (mother always insisted in adding way too much milk on the grounds that the calcium would aid his somewhat delicate constitution), Roxy were nothing if not a celebration of every kind of artifice going. The staging, the lighting, the clothes, hair and make-up were all credited on the album sleeve, draped in the twenty four inches of the aforementioned unbelievably seductive Kari-Ann, who Gordon drooled over in the privacy of his tiny bedroom with such an unwavering fixation that Mr. Tomkins, his Scout Leader, should he have known, may have felt inclined to describe his actions as ‘unhealthy’. But what really clinched it for Gordon, at the time in the grip of a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the cartoon keyboard player from The Archies, was the absolutely uneqivicable absence of that horribly hairy sweat soaked faded denim display of roots and authenticity you got in hard rock guitar-solo world. For that alone, Ferry & Co deserved our eternal gratitude.

For devotees such as Gordon, a naturally callow youth with chip shop hair and a bad case of acne, invisible to even the most wall flowered of teenage girls caught up in that Monday night youth club last dance desperation, Roxy Music became a national rallying point for art-school, fashion-land and every kind of council estate cool kid going. They weren’t just part of Glam – they were Glam, setting its agenda, mapping its borders and then pushing at the parameters with each successive release. A band where men wore glitter and eye shadow but didn’t look as if they were a bunch of transvestites on day release from the building site, unlike West Midlands Slade – ‘hod-carriers wrapped in Baco-foil’ – or the South Yorkshire Sweet, with their three-minute epic poems about teenagers rampaging through the blitzed ballrooms of suburban high streets. No – Roxy were the future and Gordon was all kitted up for the ride.

And what a ride it was – especially if your name was Gary Kemp, Robert Elms, Peter York or George O’Dowd. But for our Gordon it became a world filled with promise that ultimately delivered little. For, while he was willing to concede that mothers somewhat overly dramatic histrionics displayed upon the occasion of discovering him perched precariously on tip toes in front of the bathroom mirror applying her mascara to his newly pruned eyelashes, played some part on restricting his development in the style stakes (she had carted him off to the local surgery post haste where a somewhat bemused locum from Uganda had questioned him rather overenthusiastically regarding his feelings towards older men), Gordon also felt that much of the blame could justifiably be laid at Bryan Ferry’s doorstep. For while ‘For Your Pleasure’, ‘Stranded’ and, to a lesser degree, ‘Siren’ could all be described as classic texts from the Roxy oeuvre, the stuff that followed was a pale imitation, constructed around Ferry’s louche lounge lizard persona – all designer tuxedo’s and expensive cologne and, while still up there in the style stakes, the music became diluted and ultimately irrelevant, to the point where even Gordon, the most ardent of fans (he’d developed a nasty cough and yellow fingers as a result of replicating Baron Ferrari’s pose on the cover of ‘These Foolish Things’) began to lose interest. The thrill of it all became a bitter comedown as Gordon realised that, as if preordained by The Almighty, his life would never rise above the ordinary. The God’s, mused Gordon as he watched Dennis, mothers overweight tabby, perform ablutions on what remained of its wedding tackle, were truly stacked up against him, as courtly love became less and less of a reality and more a short sighted contestant on ‘The Golden Shot’. “Oh heavenly hearts, oh celestial beings”, sighed Gordon as Dennis licked his rear end with a level of attention unseen outside of an operating theatre, “where art thy winged archers? I pray for Cupid’s mighty arrow but all you give me in return is Bernie The Bolt. The injustice. The unfairness. Oh the heartache! Dream home heartache”.

So, as his school companions journeyed off to university (just like Bryan, Andy and Eno) Gordon drifted into a life of local government obscurity. And, as those very same (now ex) friends became designers, artists and advertising executives, Gordon sat at a desk and pushed paper. Reams and reams of paper. For years and years. In fact, he contemplated, as mother served up toffee flavoured Instant Whip for after’s (under the somewhat misguided and long held assumption that it was his favourite), he was still pushing the very same paper, only now it was at the end of a keypad as opposed to a pen, and stored on a hard drive rather than in a filing cabinet. Twelve more years and I’ll be able to retire he thought, as mother poured the tea. I can pick up my lump sum (for fifty years is along time in any job), claim my pension, and buy a ticket on Easy Jet. I’ll lose some weight, purchase a few suits, take up smoking and drinking Martini, and get one of those hair transplants you see former Australian cricketers advertising on the back pages of ‘The Daily Mirror’. Then I’ll move to Monte Carlo, find myself a supermodel, and hang around the poolside discussing Richard Hamilton and Marcel Duchamp with the cream of the European art crowd. I’ll show them, thought Gordon, as he fingered the bread knife in his sweaty left hand while serrupticiously eyeing the gravy stain on the front of mother’s mustard coloured bri-nylon blouse. The one just to the right of her pacemaker assisted heart.

Just you wait and see.