The music had emerged from the clubs of Chicago and Detroit, filtering through to specialist compilations such as The House Sound of Chicago and The Techno Sound of New Detroit. After that, it seemed as if any record with “Jack” or “House” in the title would make it into the charts.

At the beginning of 1988, Record Mirror felt able to formally herald the arrival of a new age of British dance music, as home-grown House emerged. Tim J, one of our new scribes, described the different builds of house – Deep, Traditional and Acid. It was easy to make, the technology was cheap – call it punk rock with computers, if you like.

When I first heard Acid House, I had a flashback to early 80s electropop. Acid had a hip-hop influence but, most importantly, the clubbers who danced to it were fuelled by the same drug I had been introduced to by Marc Almond in 1981– the only difference being that the version of Ecstasy now flooding London was a pale imitation of that original, pure MDMA.

At the end of February, Record Mirror announced that we’d officially entered “the year of Acid House”. Damon Rochefort, who was making these records as well as writing about them for us, described the phenomenon thus: “The Acid tag comes from the intense and aurally psychedelic sound but refers to the drug-induced atmosphere in which the music is created, played and danced to.”

The DJ of 1988 was not a washed-up, wrinkly former pirate disc jockey. He was a techno whizz kid who spent his time jerking his wrists in his bedroom over a pair of Technics turntables, creating scratch-mix bootlegs. And all this was happening at a time when CD singles were eclipsing vinyl in the charts.

One of this new breed of bedroom mixers was Tim Simenon. He was a familiar face to me but in a very different context. I’d first met him three years earlier. To recap: back in 85, at the Embassy club, the Rubber Goddesses (aka me and my pal Gill, aka Nancy Culp) had “adopted” him and his pretty friend Bee as our “fetish toy boys”. Gill had decided to handcuff the pair of them to the club’s staircase, and his was recorded for posterity by a photographer who was in attendance.

Cute little Tim had gone on to form a dance collective called Bomb the Bass, and their single, Beat Dis, duly raced up the charts. Gill was understandably thrilled when she found a print of the photo taken three years earlier at the Embassy. It would provide the lead picture for Lip, the gossip column she wrote for Record Mirror every week. The image was duly published with a suitably suggestive caption.

Hours after publication, Gill took a panicked call from Tim, begging her not to take it any further or mention the incident again. He knew that, even though it was all for show, being outed as a fetish model’s plaything wouldn’t do his street cred much good. Little Tim had grown up and wasn’t too keen on letting anyone rake over his innocent youth. However, it did no harm to the sales of his record. It sailed up to No 2, challenging soap star Kylie Minogue’s sappy I Should Be So Lucky for the top spot – but narrowly failed to knock her off.

Suddenly, Record Mirror had street cred too, and I felt vindicated in my decision to increase our dance music coverage. Tim J was rapidly becoming one of our star names. He was also a DJ, and I had enlisted him to help me compile a series of cover-mounted dance EPs. I dragged him round the record companies, begging for free tracks. I got to know him over the course of many lunches and meetings, and he subsequently became my guide and companion throughout what would come to be known as the second Summer of Love.

It started with trips to the new Acid House club nights – Spectrum in London and the Pink Coconut in Brighton. I saw that this basic electronic sound, twinned with Ecstasy, was beginning to transform youth culture. A new generation of clubbers was experiencing the loved-up rush I’d first revelled in some years before. Endless bleeps and strobe lights weren’t really my thing, but I loved observing it with someone who was clearly swept away by it. He was infected with the new dance fever, so I went along to observe the patient – stopping short of getting on the dancefloor and shouting “Acieeed!” along with everyone else, of course.

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Smiley – that simple, inanely grinning logo – had become the emblem of the Acid House movement – preferably worn on Day-Glo badges or T-shirts with a tie-dye bandana. Dancefloors looked like children’s parties – only the sweeties were tabs of E. The drug that was being called an “empathogen” had made everyone – clubbers, indie kids, drag queens, rock fans, football fans – want to hug each other. While I applauded this in spirit, you’d never have caught me with a rag wrapped round my head or an orange T-shirt hanging limply over my bosom. Style didn’t come into it. This was a million miles away from the precise, erotic glamour of New Romanticism. No elitism here, matey – we’re on one.

It wasn’t my scene or my time. I felt dislocated, detached, even though I could appreciate the buzz. I didn’t take this new E – Uptime (a mixture of caffeine and ginseng) was my drug of choice – and it was perfectly legal. If it hadn’t have been for Tim’s enthusiasm, I could happily have stayed at home. He was gagging to go to Ibiza and dance all night; the very idea made me feel tired.

The end of an era was fast approaching. Gill/Nancy finally laid her gossip columnist’s pen to rest to take a job with a record company. I carried on watching as the biggest revolution since punk swept the dancefloors but I felt a little too long in the tooth to appreciate it. Pop music was getting cheesier. The age of Jason and Kylie was upon us and Bros dominated the charts. Even though they were good-looking boys, I just didn’t get it. They seemed fake. Was I losing my grip on the zeitgeist?

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Record Mirror benefited from no-holds-barred coverage of the House scene – certainly in terms of credibility and advertising, if not circulation – but some readers didn’t like it. They wanted dance music to stay in its box, but they were fighting a losing battle. Rock was embracing rap (Run-DMC did the brilliant Walk This Way with Aerosmith); the pop anthems of the year were dancefloor hits such as Theme From S’Express and Yazz’s The Only Way Is Up; and the most recognisable face in the country wasn’t Matt or Luke Goss from Bros – it was our old friend, Smiley.

The tabloids, inevitably, began to cotton on to the Acid House scene and got it wrong. They took it literally and presumed acid meant LSD. At first, we laughed as the Sun proclaimed that young people were trying to “escape the pressure of work by getting high on acid every weekend”. We chortled even louder when they jumped on the bandwagon, printed hilarious Acid House fashion guides and started flogging their own Smiley T-shirts. The smiles didn’t last, though. The moral crusaders were not far behind and the sensational headlines started to appear: “Ban this killer music”; “Acid fiends spike Page Three girl’s drink” and, of course, “the evil of Ecstasy – danger of drug sweeping discos and ruining lives”.

Many first-timers were evangelical about Ecstasy but I’d been there and done it years before. It began to irritate me and reinforce just how removed I was from this whole scene. I understood that the media were twisting the truth of it but I didn’t care as much as Tim and his friends did. But when the inevitable police crackdown on Acid House clubs began, I had to take it seriously.

After all the headlines, the police had to be seen to be doing something about the consumption of Ecstasy – after all, its parent drug MDMA had been made illegal in the UK in 1977, and possession was punishable by up to seven years in jail. Acid fans were effectively driven off city dancefloors as club owners were threatened with closure. It suited the cognoscenti, who were tiring of arm-waving plebs: they preserved the spirit of Acid House and took it back to the underground.

Just as Record Mirror readers were getting friendly with him, Smiley was on his last legs. The “evil dance craze” threatening a nation’s youth was actually uniting factions. This time, our readers were horrified at the impending demise of a phenomenon. It was clear from their letters that they had formed a real emotional connection to this hypnotically repetitive music. But things soon turned nasty. The police started to ban Acid House nights and even the playing of Acid House music in clubs. Top of the Pops censored all records containing the word “Acid” and TopShop banned Smiley T-shirts from their shops.

Well, it was hardly the end of the world – and even that looked far less likely to happen by the end of 1988, with reformer Gorbachev installed as President of the USSR and George Bush in the White House. But it was still sad to see the fun end. No more daft dancing in silly T-shirts. No more summer of love… no more love.

NEXT WEEK: Former New Romantics report pop fatigue

I knew that he had, by now, got married, but I didn’t want any cosy images of marital bliss impinging on my consciousness. I hadn’t spoken to him for months. We hadn’t fallen out, but I’d had to create some distance between us for my own peace of mind. So, I experienced a mixture of delight and trepidation when I heard Dik’s familiar Brummie twang on the phone one November morning. His band, Fashion, had long since hung up their leather trousers and gone their separate ways, and he had been spending his time messing around in studios and being a roadie at the Birmingham NEC. (He was small, but tough.)

He told me he was visiting London to play drums with some friends he was helping out and wondered if I wanted to meet up for old times’ sake. I thought it would be OK, that we could be friends, that I was over it. So I agreed. We met in a rehearsal studio, where he introduced me to his pals. He was on good form – funny, affectionate and gently piss-taking. But I wanted to spend time with him alone and, as he had hours to kill before the soundcheck, I suggested we go back to my place in south London. He’d never seen my flat and I wanted him to. He needed a lot of persuading but eventually agreed when I promised to drive him back to the venue afterwards.

I wanted to be more in control this time, because there had been so many occasions recently when I hadn’t been. But this time I felt as if I was the one leading him astray. Whatever it was that had glued us together for almost four years was plainly still there. Marriage hadn’t removed it from his side but, with his track record, I don’t know why I thought it would. I saw those years flashing before me and suddenly my desire to be with him rose up again, despite the fact that he had a ring on his finger; despite the fact that I knew it wouldn’t work; despite the fact that he was probably still seeing his other women.

We had a very strange afternoon – a mixture of intimacy and intensity, booze and bewilderment.

“You know I still have strong feelings for you,” I said after a few glasses of wine had loosened me up.

“Yeah, I know, bab. Me too,” he said.

“I know you’re married but believe me, I’d go anywhere to be with you,” I gushed.

“What about the Outer Hebrides?” he said, trying to puncture the moment with humour.

“Yes, anywhere,” I replied, taking his comment seriously.

“I can’t leave the wife,” he said. “She’s done so much for me, and so have her family.”

“I understand,” I said. “All I’m asking is that you think about what I’ve said.”

Even as I said it, I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to think about.

We had entered a strange twilight zone where time did not exist and neither did reason. Darkness fell and we realised he had to get back to central London to play his drums. I didn’t want him to leave, because I thought I might never get another chance to see him again. I shouldn’t have driven – I was well over the limit. I eventually dropped him at the venue after a tortuous journey. He nearly missed the gig, but I didn’t care. I had matters of greater import on my mind. I wove my way home on autopilot, a zombie motorist. I’d made him an offer: he hadn’t said yes, but he hadn’t said no either. There was still hope. Wrung out, I collapsed on the sofa back at home, wanting only to do something utterly mindless, so I switched on the TV.

I was faced with the terrible news that 30 people had died in a fire at King’s Cross Tube station. In our altered state, we had been totally unaware of the unfolding tragedy just minutes down the road from the gig. I believed in omens and portents and this one didn’t look good. My affair with Dik had started in January 1984 with a storm. Was it going to end in November 1987 with a conflagration?

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After our fraught, intense afternoon, Dik didn’t ring me for weeks. When he did, I didn’t get the response I’d hoped for. He ended up rabbiting about a new washing machine – anything to avoid the issue.

“So, haven’t you got anything else to say?” I asked, my patience wearing thin

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he replied, pathetically.

“Just take me seriously. Don’t talk to me about household appliances,” I spat.

“But it’s a great machine, bab,” he said, using his usual technique of distraction through humour. I was having none of it.

“Dik, I’m sorry. I can’t do this any more. I can’t even speak to you. See you in the next life.”

And with that, I put down the receiver. This simple yet decisive action ended years of obsession, longing, painful waiting and sporadic sex. I should hardly have been surprised that my final bid at lassooing the Darkly Handsome Drummer was doomed to failure: acts of desperation usually are. In the end, I felt very little, even as I clutched the Valentine’s card he had hand-drawn for me, showing a bright red heart pierced by an arrow. Perhaps, in that moment, I saw him for what he really was: a weak, frightened man.

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I sleepwalked through the remainder of 1987, exhausted by the emotional dramas in which I had cast myself. I ached for stability and commitment but didn’t know how or where to find it. When I saw other people I perceived as emotionally stable and happy, I felt irrationally envious. That’s what happened when I was dispatched to the Shrewsbury home of T’Pau’s Carol Decker and guitarist/partner Ronnie Rogers. They had a successful career (China In Your Hand had been at No 1 for weeks), a lovely home with a view of the river Severn, and had somehow managed to remain untainted by the music industry.

“The thing is that we’re very boring – we’re very happy together, we work well together, live well together, but that’s not what journalists want to hear,” Carol told me. “They try and bring things down to something really sleazy, and that’s really annoying. I don’t mind people knowing I can have a drink and a good time and I have a giggle and swear, but maybe I’m a bit precious about my own intelligence, and I don’t like it being demeaned, unless I do it myself. I don’t mind people knowing I’m not an angel, but I don’t want to be perceived as some kind of bimbo.”

Yes, even strong-willed, successful female pop singers had to concern themselves with the way in which they were perceived. She was constantly referred to as a ‘flame-haired temptress’.

“A friend of mine walked into this party I was at and said, ‘It’s luscious, gorgeous, flame-haired’... and I went, ‘Oh, shut up’, and he was going, ‘Oh, let me touch you!’. I think it’s more like ‘horrible, bad-tempered, bitchy, flame-haired, etc’... flame-haired was probably the only one that was true, ha ha!

She was now on a rant roll.

“What I can’t stand is huge, great pompous theories from journalists on pop music. For crying out loud, we’re not doing anything important. We’ve got no deep and meaningful reason for doing what we do, we just enjoy it, but they try and find the gravity and credibility behind everything, and there isn’t any.

“You’re in rock music, you’re getting paid a lot of money for doing an hour’s hard work a night. The rest of the time you’re staying in nice hotels, travelling, meeting people. So why does everyone have to analyse it?”

She was right, of course, but I was paid to analyse it and come up with huge, great pompous theories. I felt redundant, that what I was doing was pointless. Maybe she was the one who had it in perspective, not me. I had participated in and reaped the rewards of the music business as a superficial money-generating machine. That was my comfort zone. For me, ‘normal’ was going to a lavish reception held by Sony records for George Michael at the Savoy Hotel – champagne, celebrities, souvenir plate holders. That was the fun, freeloading part. But my experience with The Stud had shown me the ugly, dark part.

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In my post-Dik daze, everything felt pointless. I was 30 years old and felt broken inside, wandering aimlessly, functioning rather than living. I could’ve written a book called All the Men I’ve Left Behind. Or, rather, All the Men Who’ve Left Me Behind (and Deeply Contused).

Not surprisingly, my friends were worried about what precarious or damaging situation I might get myself mixed up in next. But even I had been exhausted by recent events and didn’t have the energy to take the thrill-seeking any further.

NEXT WEEK: Right on one, matey…

I’ve been spending the weekend mulling over the response to my latest Substack, ‘Dazed and contused’. As I shared at the start of that post, I had to think long and hard before publishing it, as it was a story I haven’t shared publicly before, and even 40 years later it can make me shrink into a toxic cocoon of shame.

The minute I knew it had been published, I held my breath. A few kind readers liked it immediately – and I wondered what they liked about it – then I realised that’s the only way you can react to a post on Substack once you’ve read it, and that maybe readers were treading carefully when it came to commenting.

I must thank – who is a brilliant writer, so please follow her or subscribe to her Substack – for being the first to comment. Her first word was ‘wincing’ – which I understand, I wince when I read what I’ve written too. She followed that with, ‘Sorry you went through that. Very brave of you to write about it. And that comment about women wanting a hug must have been soul-destroying.’

I’m glad that she brought up the latter. The Stud’s rejection of any kind of intimacy somehow seemed even more brutal than the assault itself.

I’m also grateful to , who commented in such an intelligent, thought-provoking way, which expanded my thinking about consent. ‘Consent is never enough,’ she wrote. ‘What if you change your mind halfway through? Trust and respect must be equally important.’

Cherry has written a vivid and compelling Substack post about the sexual assault she experienced the day after her 18^th birthday, half a century ago. It wasn’t OK then and it isn’t OK now. The detail she shared about her right thigh being grazed by his buckle, bleeding, stinging, echoes my own experience years later.

So many women keep these experiences to themselves. I nearly did too.

One commenter brought up the topic of women ‘dressed like that’ and ‘asking for it’. He wasn’t accusing me of that at all – but I told him that in the original version of my memoir, I did accuse myself of asking for it because I was dressed like a dominatrix. I wrote that 20 years ago, but now I know that it doesn’t matter how I was dressed, I certainly wasn’t asking to be hit with a belt buckle. I didn’t help matters by consuming drugs and alcohol, but I was aware enough to know that I didn’t consent to that.

I recently watched the BBC documentary about Hollywood A-lister Jared Leto, who has been accused by four women of criminal sexual conduct when they were teenagers, which he strongly denies. It made me reflect on the power of celebrity and charisma, how seductive it is, and how men in that position can easily take advantage of women who are dazzled by that celebrity and charisma.

The man who assaulted me wasn’t that famous – but he was in a band, and therefore in a position to take advantage of women. I guess he was something of a micro celebrity at the time. He was certainly charismatic, and I was flattered by his attention.

I have to confess that I did see him again, so there is a part two to this story. I’m still mulling over whether or not to share that, as in one sense I feel more shame about what happened next, as I’d been shown enough red flags by this point. In hindsight, I can see that my attraction to him was as addictive and intoxicating as the alcohol and cocaine I was consuming at the time. And talking of which – to be clear, I don’t recommend either. I’ve been alcohol-free for more than 15 years now and haven’t taken any illegal substances since the 90s, so I can look back through a clearer lens.

I’ll leave it there for now, and thanks so much to everyone who took the time to comment in such a supportive and validating way. Sharing this story has been cathartic for me and hopefully helpful to other women. I now feel protective towards my younger self rather than judgemental – she was looking for love in all the wrong places, and I forgive her.

As ever, thanks for supporting Rewind & Reveal. I’m nearing the end of the original memoir now, so I’m thinking about where to go next. In the meantime, I’ll be back on Friday with a new post.

*With thanks to Cherry Coombe. Here’s Cherry’s post – do read it and support her.

Being in Words

Girls Like That.

'One in Three…

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2 years ago · 10 likes · 8 comments · Cherry Coombe

The alcohol, the drugs, the endless ligging and the Stiletto Sexqueen were about to collide in a way neither Betty nor Beverley could ever have anticipated.

I had been invited to Glasgow to interview a band (I’m not going to name them, but they weren’t Scottish and I’d rather you didn’t hazard any guesses). I’d met them before, and thought it would be amusing to give them the full Rubber Goddess treatment. So, I selected the most provocative just-about-daywear I could find – a new rubber skirt and top – to wear at the reception at which I would meet them.

My outfit had already drawn admiring comments but, when the group arrived at the hotel and one member of the band saw me – let’s call him The Stud – I knew it had produced the desired effect.

“Betty, hi – you’re looking fucking horny,” he said, leaving me in no doubt as to what was on his mind.

“Why, thank you, kind sir,” I replied. “If you’re lucky I’ll let you polish me later.”

“You try stopping me, sweetheart,” he said, ramping up the banter.

It was all good, clean, frisky fun. Or so I thought. But by the time band and journalist had convened in the bar to do the interview, we were thoroughly oiled. They were in high spirits – their latest single had made a reasonably respectable entry into the charts and they were in the mood to celebrate. Soon, The Stud was telling me how keen he was to talk to my tape recorder when I was out of the room.

I duly played the game by going to the ladies and, when I returned, the boys were giggling conspiratorially. I rewound the tape and played it back, only to hear The Stud saying: “I’d just like to say Betty Page is gorgeous and I’d really like to fuck her.”

Despite my experience with The Poet, even I blushed at his directness. I laughed, but began to wonder whether my credibility as the editor of a pop magazine might be about to evaporate. But before I could start worrying about my reputation, the evening began to take on its own momentum. It was well past 4 am when the group and their hangers-on had finally had enough, after many lines of cocaine and too much alcohol. I was about to explode with anticipation over the sexual chemistry between me at The Stud. Then, with the exchange of a look, I knew where I would be spending what was left of the night.

He took my hand and led me upstairs to his suite. There, he delighted in slowly peeling off my rubberwear, taking care with every zip and stud. I was surprised at how quickly I fell under his spell. This was lust on overdrive, which served to blind me to the direction his seduction was about to take.

He suddenly announced he wanted to spank me.

“Babe, go and get my belt,” he ordered.

I complied, meekly going along with what I thought was just a game.

“OK, which end to do want me to use?” he asked.

“I don’t mind,” I said, not thinking it through, or thinking he would actually go through with it, as there had been no discussion about safe words.

He took my vague response as permission to spank my naked bottom with the buckled end of his belt.

It stung like hell but I took the punishment, partly because I’d been anaesthetised by the alcohol and cocaine, partly because I wanted to live up to his expectations of me as Betty Page, Queen of Kink. He had clearly assumed I was into sado-masochism because of the way I dressed.

Unfortunately, in the heat of passion, I didn’t know how to explain to him that I didn’t get off on pain and, in fact, generally preferred straight sex. It just didn’t fit with the image. The last thing I wanted him to think was that I was a bit ‘vanilla’ – that was even worse than being considered an ‘easy lay’.

I was left smarting and stinging, wondering how and why I’d allowed this man to assault me in order to prove I was ‘sexually adventurous’. I hadn’t consented to this brutal treatment, but I hadn’t stopped it from happening either. It was complicated. In my addled state, I blamed myself.

It was a huge relief when he got bored with the S&M game-playing.

“Please, can we rest for a while? Just hold me,” I said, craving a little affection.

“God,” he said, abruptly. “You’re just like all the others. I thought you were different. Why is it that women always want a bloody hug?”

It was clear that intimacy was not at the top of his agenda but, at long last, I was able to get some fractured sleep. At around 9 am, I forced myself to get out of bed and put my clammy rubber gear back on. I had to return to my own hotel to pick up my stuff. Walking down the road in my latex and high heels, I felt like a prostitute. As I entered the hotel lobby, the staff probably thought I was one.

Back in my room, I shed my second skin and, for the first time, examined myself in the mirror. I had bruises all over my body but was shocked when I saw the state of my backside. The most hideous black, blue and purple welts were studded all over it and they were beginning to hurt quite badly. I covered myself up in a clingy black polo-necked dress, put on some opaque tights and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.

It did occur to me that, had I presented myself at Sauchiehall Street police station, I could have reported The Stud for assault. But he could easily have claimed it was consensual, even though I hadn’t wanted him to hit or hurt me. But the damage had been done and I was left feeling dazed and contused.

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I had become accustomed to feeling emotionally battered, and now I had experienced its physical equivalent. Now I was the complete Hit Girl. In the cold light of day, back in London, I felt ashamed of myself but dealt with it by treating my bruises like some sort of perverse trophies. I flashed my posterior to close friends with the express intention of shocking them. It did, but it only made me feel worse about myself. Even then it didn’t occur to me to blame The Stud.

When the skin on my bottom had started to display a fetching array of colours from yellow to purply-black, I was asked to take part in another photo session with a Skin Two regular. I turned up in my red and black laced rubber dress at a studio in Belgravia to pose for a ‘friend’ of hers, who would usually charge a fortune for the privilege but said he’d do it for nothing if we were prepared to ‘be adventurous’. I imagined the wounded cheeks would add a frisson to the proceedings. However, I didn’t expect to be plied with whisky and encouraged to adopt sapphic poses.

The photographer was a persuasive if slightly sinister-looking man in his fifties who knew exactly how to get the shots he wanted – and he got plenty of them, most of which I never saw. After the session, he sent us a couple of shots each, including one of my beaten bottom showing through the lacing of my dress in all its bruised glory.

The images were of such high quality I had no doubt they were subsequently going to be added to someone’s private collection. I had a dim awareness that I had, again, allowed my boundaries to be violated, but it was all done in the name of outrageousness – of Being Betty.

Such extremes of experience had the dual function of maintaining Betty’s reputation and giving Beverley a dose of excitement to help her deal with the long stretches of life where nothing much happened and all she had to look forward to were long days behind a desk followed by dark evenings on her own. Betty had twisted everything and the Beverley underneath didn’t know how to untwist herself.

NEXT WEEK: The drummer and the Decker

Their humility was hardly surprising, given that they had just emerged from a harrowing couple of years during which they’d had to cancel two tours, Tom had been seriously ill and Alannah had suffered a miscarriage five months into her pregnancy on the same day that her mother died. When they were finally able to tour, half of their dates had to be cancelled due to lack of interest.

“It’s a fact of life,” said Tom. “We had to admit to ourselves that we’re just not that big in England any more.”

Both of them seemed to face this with a degree of equanimity but it can’t have been easy for them to accept after such a sustained period of chart success that had started early in 1983 and lasted until late in 1985. They’d never had a No 1, but they never seemed to be out of the top 20.

“When we started, we were naïve,” said Tom. “We were obsessed with chart positions, this territory and that territory, and being on the front of magazines. It was a way of measuring yourself and, in the end, if you measure yourself in that way, you’ll have an unsatisfactory life.”

“We just got tired of all that – we felt we were missing out on life,” said Alannah, still sporting her trademark shock of platinum blonde hair topped by a black hat.

Thoughts of global domination and rack momentum tend to go out of the window when personal tragedy knocks on the door. When it happened to them, Tom and Alannah had to grow up fast and reassess their priorities.

“They were just really hard times,” said Alannah. “It was hard to be frivolous. I couldn’t do interviews… It’s a year since all that stuff, and I still get more vulnerable, a lot more intimidated by people. Then I go through bolshy stages.”

“When death looks you in the eye, suddenly everything else becomes pointless,” said Tom. “Although it would seem that being in the Thompson Twins had been so important to us for all these years, suddenly it was just… we didn’t even want to know about it.”

“It was actually this time last year when we were called and told we had to come to Montreux,” said Alannah, “and I was lying in a hospital bed, having been seriously ill, Tom was there and we were both crying, and the record company were saying, ‘You’ve got to do this thing for publicity.’ What can you say? How do you do Top of the Pops when you just feel so sad?”

“And they say, ‘Well, your record sales will suffer,’” added Tom, “but who gives a fuck, you know. In a way those tragedies saved us. We used to drop anything personal in order to do something professional, and that’s unhealthy. It twists you off your true course, or at the very best you’re always putting parts of your personality on hold. That’s what fame does to you.”

Alannah described how the pressure to repeat their early successes became intolerable – being pushed to tour when they weren’t ready, being pushed back into writing for the next album, being expected to come up with another Hold Me Now, one of their biggest hits. And how they were back in control, writing material they thought was better than anything they’d done before, no one was interested. ’Twas ever thus.

Tom and Alannah hadn’t even seen much of the money that must have been rolling in during the mid-80s.

“We’ve seen millions come and go,” said Alannah, “but it wasn’t until 1984 that we got our first lump sum. We don’t have much now, we’re certainly not millionaires.

“We got a cheque for over a million dollars, but the accountant was standing there with this cheque in one hand and a tax bill in the other. Never mind, that’s OK. We certainly had good parties, and we will certainly have more.”

I could vouch for that. Their 1984 bean-feast at Stocks, though over the top, was undoubtedly one of the best parties of the decade.

Mariella Frostrup was right. Even though I wasn’t a fan of their music, I really did warm to this pair: in fact, I really felt for them – they’d paid the price of fame several times over. I was taken aback by their honesty and openness.

“We’re the survivors of the shipwreck of pop,” said Alannah. “Would that make a good headline?”

Yes, Alannah, it would. And it did.

Despite the best efforts of Left-wing pop stars with a conscience, Maggie Thatcher swept to victory once again. I was disappointed that the loathed Tories were back in charge but had to admit that I wasn’t exactly strapped for cash, so it didn’t really bother me.

I had, by this time, reacquainted myself with cocaine and become a regular consumer. It was easily obtainable via a string of contacts and I rarely went out without my own modest supply – presuming, of course, that I would be offered a number of free lines by PR friends. The fact that I could support such an expensive habit firmly put me in the proto-yuppie bracket.

One of the central conceits of a cocaine user/abuser is that you believe it’s your little secret and no one else (apart from fellow users) knows you are chemically enhanced. At least, you think no one else knows. Except that the change in your behaviour is so pronounced it’s pretty damn obvious you’re on something. I usually made sure I only took it in relatively safe places – in the ladies’ loos at clubs and parties – and there were plenty of parties going on to take my mind off Thatcher’s stinging victory.

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Island records had a huge bash to celebrate their 25th birthday, complete with funfair. Sting also had a top shindig at which my best pal Gill Smith and I took the opportunity to take the piss out of Jonathan Ross, who had been busy looking down the cleavage of every Page Three girl in London.

Mr Ross had started to develop something of a cult following for his first TV show, The Last Resort, one of the producers of which was a contributor to Record Mirror. Via this route we had convinced the up-and-coming presenter to do a voiceover for one of our radio ads. I always joked with young Jonathan that he must remember that we gave him his first big break.

In those days, it was easy to convince yourself you were on the same level as these celebrities, but the fact that journalists working for minor publications were never placed on the top table was made perfectly clear to me when I failed to secure an invite to the event of the year – Madonna’s 29th birthday party in London. I was sick to my kinky boots when I found out Paula Yates was in attendance. The truth was, no matter how many celebrity shoulder-pads I stood next to or class-A drugs I took, I would never make it on to the A-list.

Whatever the Lig of the Year was deemed to be, I always took it upon myself to attend as Record Mirror’s representative. Having failed to make the guest list for Madonna’s bash, I thought it both essential and face-saving to travel to Amsterdam for the launch of MTV in Europe. It was to be quite a caper – a trip to the Dutch capital and back in the same night.

Plenty of ligging stamina was required, so it was a good job that I’d put in some training in Montreux. MTV had become so big in America that they had dollars to burn and were willing to spend as much as it took to launch the brand abroad. This little shindig involved some 300 freeloaders, three chartered planes, a fleet of executive coaches and enough free food and drink to keep a Roman orgy going for a few weeks.

It wasn’t a bad life. I remember feeling privileged on the one hand, but on the other, taking it for granted. But I’d still have given it all up for the chance to share my life with a decent bloke. After the last free drink had been drained, I was on my own again. Like my glass, empty.

REWIND IS TAKING A BREAK NEXT WEEK: See you in two weeks’ time.

The Swiss were particularly unprepared for the arrival of the Beastie Boys, the Eighties’ answer to the Sex Pistols – a bunch of white American brats who had done what the black heavyweights of rap couldn’t do at that time, which was to take hip-hop into the mainstream. Run DMC had done the hard graft, but when the Beastie Boys – Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D – toured with them, the trio’s humorous take on hip-hop took the genre to another level. The Beasties’ irony was often mistaken for arrogance or political incorrectness, but underneath they were just nice, middle-class boys, not “vile Beasties” or “obnoxious New Yorkers”, but they did become victims of their own hype.

At Montreux that year, they were the main attraction for a bevy of tabloid journalists eager to whip up a scandal. They got their headlines when the Beasties apparently lobbed a few unkind remarks at a group of terminally-ill children involved in a charity event at the Hyatt hotel. “Pop idols sneer at dying kids”, was the Fleet Street version.

I bumped into the band several more times in the course of that week, and they were always rowdy but personable, and just getting on with the job, like everyone else. They were only acting like any lads their age would do if they were bored. And Montreux was a pretty dull place to be if you were 21 with a reputation to live up to.

Apart from the opportunity to perform their music on a BBC1 broadcast, Montreux was a chance for pop groups from all over Europe to get together and get pissed. The other, more boring reason (for them, at least) was to do a few interviews with the assembled European press. However, the social focus of Montreux was not the conferences or the performances at the Casino; it was the nightly ritual of getting absolutely bladdered at the Hyatt bar. This was where the assembled bands, hacks and TV people mingled after the day’s work was done.

It was a 24-carat opportunity to get the best gossip, such as hearing that Depeche Mode and UB40 had held a wanking competition (even I found it hard to believe that one); that Simon Le Bon was considering selling his boat; that Bob Geldof had cancelled his press conference in a fit of pique; and that Chrissie Hynde was splitting up with her husband, Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr (that turned out to be true).

The bar guest list included Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Swing Out Sister, Level 42, Boy George, A-ha, the Pretenders, Alison Moyet and Paul Young. More pop stars per square inch than anywhere else on the planet at that moment – and all easily accessible to the media. No one did anything particularly outrageous or had a prima-donna fit (except, perhaps, for Eighth Wonder’s Patsy Kensit, who wouldn’t go anywhere without a limo, darling), because there were too many famous people there for it to be noticed.

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Polydor records had paid for my flight to Switzerland so that I could interview Robert Smith of The Cure. I’d never been a huge fan of their gothic, gloomy student rock – but I was intrigued to meet Smith himself. The Cure were already elder statesmen compared to most of the assembled Montreux talent – they’d been going for a ripe old decade, and it was clear that Bob was treating this whole event with a sort of detached bemusement.

He loped towards me across the hotel lobby with a sheepish grin on his face, which was made up with his trademark kohl-rimmed eyes and gash of red lipstick. His hair was a giant, hairsprayed nest. He looked like Persil Boy in a neat white shirt and grey pullover. He sat down, coyly, while cameras snapped in his face, looking as comfortable as a specimen in a jar.

Robert was amazed that he and his band had been invited to the festival – a bunch of eccentrics trying to fit in with pop’s plastic playmates. He told me he had considered doing “something really horrid” but then decided there was no one he despised enough – apart, perhaps, from Duran Duran, who, he told me, “shouldn’t exist”. I didn’t dare tell him that I was partly responsible for their inexorable rise.

In the quiet of his hotel room, Robert became surprisingly chatty, confounding the popular image of him as a morose, monosyllabic doom merchant.

“We’re lucky,” he said, quietly, “because we’ve never had a fashionable profile and it’s never really bothered us what goes on around us, so we can do whatever we want. It’s just how being in a group should be, only for most people it isn’t, ’cos it’s such a horrible business.”

And how had they managed to outmanoeuvre all this horridness?

“By being belligerent and obstinate at the right times,” he said. “I’ve never thought of the group as something that’s being sold. I’m horrified by the motivation of some people in groups. Doing something like this in Montreux is really strange ’cos it’s like we’re in competition with the other groups here.”

Despite the carefully crafted anti-image image, I found Robert to be an authentic kind of guy who was true to himself and stuck out as an individual staying afloat in a sea of artifice.

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Talking of authenticity, I was hugely grateful to have my fellow lizard liquor drinker Mariella Frostrup around to entertain me during the long Swiss evenings. Because it was her, I agreed to interview UB40. In my earliest days at Sounds, I had dismissed UB40 as politically-correct bores and wasn’t a fan of reggae, so they rarely troubled my radar. But the Campbell brothers – Ali and Robin – being Brummies, were friends of Dik, who had introduced me to them a couple of times. They shared Dik’s Moseley brand of humour, and that helped me to get over my lack of interest in their music.

Of course, it helped to have “ice breaker” Frostrup there to liven up proceedings, so by the time she’d worked her magic, all I had to do was switch on the tape recorder and let them go. Ali Campbell and Brian Travers were in a kind of Beastie Boys mood. They’d just returned to the Hyatt from the Casino, where they’d been rehearsing for their festival slot, and they seemed to be losing the plot. So this was UB40, the band with a social conscience, who had just returned from a culturally significant visit to the Soviet Union, where they’d played 12 dates in Moscow and Leningrad to audiences of up to 12,000 a night. Just their sort of thing, I’d have thought.

“No, I hated Russia,” said Ali. “It was horrible. I come from a long line of communists, so I went expecting to admire it, saying, ‘Yeah, it’s working, this socialism,’ but it was totally dour, out of order, horribly miserable.

“The people are great but they’re living under violent oppression. We saw people get arrested. The Marxist thing may have made sense 200 years ago, but it doesn’t now and it’s not fair to expect people to live like that.”

Rather surprised by his anti-socialist onslaught, I wondered if the Soviets had ever heard music like theirs before, and why they were invited to go and play.

“Elton John and his Thousand Reggae Guitars went before us,” said Ali, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Ours was the first ever proper rock concert. When Elton played it was to Party members, but we played in big sports halls to the people.

“I don’t know why we were chosen. I think it was because we’d had reviews in Russia where we were called ‘the dole queue band’. I think they thought we were socialists, or ‘the acceptable face of Western pop music’ – which, of course, we’re not, but they didn’t know that.”

We all agreed that Montreux was an especially boring little place.

“All you can really do here is get drunk. Which is why we’ve been banned the last three times we’ve been here. Last time, Brian threw a speaker out of the window and it landed on top of Shakin’ Stevens’ car. We blamed it on Madness…”

My encounter with Ali and Brian didn’t make me want to rush out and buy UB40 Live In Russia, but they got top marks from me for entertainment value.

As ever, Mariella was persuasive. She convinced me that I’d really get on with the Alannah Currie and Tom Bailey, so I agreed to do an interview with them, too. 'I’ll be honest, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to meeting them. The Thompson Twins had always seemed superficial to me. Having started life as an avant-garde indie band, they had somehow transformed themselves into pop royalty. And my abiding image of the pair was as hosts at the lavish party they threw at Stocks in 1984, at the height of their powers. But I was about to be surprised…

NEXT WEEK: Survivors of the shipwreck of pop

Mariella was fantastic company – gregarious, able to break the ice in almost any situation, and always up for a laugh. Together, the three of us were a potent cocktail – me high on alcohol and jetlag; her just perpetually bubbly; him lapping up the female attention. That evening, we indulged in a three-way flirtation Olympics that made Paula Yates look like an also-ran.

When we finally got back to our hotel, I wasn’t that surprised when Mark sidled up to me out of Mariella’s view and asked for my room number. I drunkenly gave it to him but, thankfully, I woke up the next morning without a singer in my bed. I was absurdly flattered but my bubble burst when Mariella told me he’d asked for her room number too. It was part of his schtick, and she would never have let anything happen anyway.

The next day, work had to be done. I watched Mark run the gauntlet of 200 excitable Japanese girls. Then Jerico were far from big in Japan, but they knew a pin-up when they saw one and their interest could guarantee healthy record sales and a lucrative Japanese tour. They wanted a part of him, this pretty boy. But however cute, Mr Shaw was fully capable of living the rock lifestyle to the hilt. How many delicate pop stars could stomach drinking several glasses of a wild and possibly illegal Chinese spirit until 4am while entertaining a journalist and his PR and then get up at 8.30am feeling like death to do a day’s worth of back-to-back interviews and signings?

The alarming concoction in question was a special import kept under the counter for connoisseurs of bizarre tipples. Never mind the tequila worm – this hooch had a dead lizard staring out from the bottom of its bottle. Trust Mark to find something so beyond rock and roll. At another signing session in the Ginza, the girls tried to foist a selection of natty headgear on Mark, but had to be told again why he would only wear his Artists Against Apartheid cap.

“I want to be able to go back and say I’ve done something about apartheid in Japan, where no one really knows what it is,” Mark said. “AAA is something I really believe in. It’s partly guilt, because when I was 15, I got attracted to fascism and thought Hitler was fascinating. I got into the clothes, then into the National Front, because of where I grew up. I didn’t even meet a black kid until I was 14, and I was frightened. I hated blacks for two years and I don’t want anyone to be taken in by the same sort of shit as I was.”

Mark’s candour and idealism impressed me. He was not just a pretty face: he had a lot more to him than that. I was as captivated as the sea of Japanese femininity in front of me.

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Very late one night, after too many glasses of lizard liquor, I went back to my hotel room and phoned The Poet in London. He was in the bath, and clearly in an odd mood.

“I decided to have my head shaved,” he told me.

“Why? I really liked your hair,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

“I was sick of all this shit about what you’re supposed to look like,” he said.

“Right. Was someone telling you what to look like?” I enquired.

“Photo sessions, all that marketing shit. It’s just knob cheese,” he replied.

“Charming. But surely, if it means getting your songs heard by a wider audience, so be it,” I said.

He was clearly making some kind of tortured artist statement that I was failing to appreciate the significance of. The conversation soon descended into the usual wordplay and evasion before ending up in familiar territory: a fantasy performed entirely for his submerged benefit. We ended up speaking for an hour and it cost me £150 (which was a lot of money in 1987). It was the most expensive and least satisfactory phone sex I’d ever had.

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My few days in the high-tech madness of Tokyo were coming to an end. I had bonded with Mariella, mind-melded with Mark, and we hadn’t stopped laughing: it was the best time I’d ever had on a foreign trip – without drugs, that is. The lizard certainly helped, though, and I knew I could look forward to plenty more flirting with Mark when I got back to London.

As for The Poet, he didn’t seem to appreciate the extravagant gesture I’d made on his behalf. When I saw him again, he and his brutally shaved head started behaving more and more strangely. I put this down to the torture of the creative process but wasn’t sure where this left me with him, or whether there still was a “me with him”.

Soon after, he called me at work, rather unfairly expecting a few words to aid his, erm, satisfaction. At the risk of being overheard by my staff, I obliged, but he seemed distracted.

“What’s the matter?” I said, breaking the spell. “Are you listening to me?”

“Um…. Yeah…” he mumbled, unconvincingly.

Something was off. Then I heard a muffled sound in the background. Someone else was in the room with him.

“What’s going on? Is someone with you?” I said, indignation mounting.

“Umm… Yeah… Uh, it’s OK, it’s just... She wanted to finish me off…”

In that moment, I felt my stomach drop and I felt sick. My way with words deserted me and I slammed the phone down, trying to compose myself for the benefit of my colleagues. It was all unravelling. I realised that the woman with him in the room, presumably the one we’d ‘bumped into’ in the street, was not an ex; she probably never had been.

Days later, The Poet called to apologise for what he thought of as a minor indiscretion and ask if I’d like to come over for dinner to meet his ‘ex’ properly.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” I lied, scarcely believing his cheek.

We made all the arrangements but I never had any intention of turning up. I let him think I was coming but gleefully went off to a record company party instead, hoping they both choked on their ciabatta. I was not remotely interested in a threesome.

I never spoke to The Poet again. Without realising it at the time, I’d managed to do complicated again, really effectively. Did I ever do simple or straightforward?

I hadn’t even been too Betty this time round – he wasn’t fussed by all the rubber and leather Stiletto Sexqueen posturing. I’d been a bit more Beverley, and where had that got me? Back to square one, trying to avoid love triangles.

Postscript: I hope you now understand why I haven’t identified The Poet, particularly because of the child I saw sleeping in his bed, whom I later confirmed was indeed his daughter. I don’t know if he got back with the ‘ex’ but suspect I was right in thinking she was never an ex at all. But thank you for your often hilarious guesses as to his identity. No, it wasn’t Mike Scott, Rupert Everett or (gasp) Morrissey!

NEXT WEEK: Beasties and Brummies rip boring Montreux

Perhaps the most controversial of all was Ferry Aid, starring a motley crew of musicians and celebrities – including Paul McCartney and Boy George – assembled by the Sun newspaper to raise money for the relatives of the 200 or so people who lost their lives in the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster. And guess which sterling bloke was behind that? My old mate Garry Bushell, of course.

One of the other good things to come out of Ferry Aid was the rehabilitation of Boy George. After his tabloid-revealed heroin shame, he had clawed his way back into the nation’s favour with his first solo single, Everything I Own. At least he had turned it round, but his contemporaries seemed to be floundering. Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran had both done well with their “comeback” singles late in 1986 (Through The Barricades got to No 6 and Notorious No 7) but now the tide seemed to be turning against them. Only die-hard Spandau fans could sing along to How Many Lies (a high of No 34 in February 1987); and Skin Trade (which peaked at No 22 in the same month) brought to a halt Duran Duran’s run of 12 consecutive top 20 hits.

Even Paula Yates, Queen of Live Aid, consort to St Bob and tabloid darling, was having a tough time of it. Now that she was Mrs Geldof, every time she was seen talking to a male pop star, a rumour would immediately spring up that she was having an affair. First it was the comically named Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot, the lanky, black-capped singer of new pop-funksters Curiosity Killed the Cat, then she was linked to new soul sexsation Terence Trent D’Arby, a man who proclaimed he “wasn’t afraid of Aids” and “made love as often as I wash my hair”. (Spoiler: years later, he revealed that he did indeed have a long affair with Paula.) Paula played up to the rumours by flirting to the point of caricature on The Tube. But her days as a top music TV presenter were numbered. The final edition of the show went out in April 87, with Lady Geldof staring wistfully into the eyes of Duran Duran’s John Taylor.

However, no one needed to invent rumours about me when I was in impetuous mode. I’m going to anonymise the person I’m about to mention, for reasons that will become clear as I tell the story. Let’s call him The Poet. Suffice to say, he was the singer/songwriter/vocalist in an up and coming band who had landed a support slot on a big tour (I’m not going to say which band, as that would give it away).

I’d first met The Poet when I was introduced by a record company PR and had found him to be entertainingly full of himself. I thought no more about it until his band released a single that I really liked. I expressed an interest in interviewing them, and so, a few months later, we met in a pub in north London to discuss their forthcoming album. The Poet was bright, charming and arrogant – a combination of qualities I seemed to find hard to resist. He was good-looking in a Byronesque sort of way, and would probably be quite happy with that description of him as he was, as he told me earnestly, a poet as well as a songwriter (hence The Poet).

He was not averse to a spot of verbal banter and, as our chat progressed, the body language was shrieking that we were attracted to each other. At the end of a remarkable interview, the two of us retired to the bar for one more drink.

“So, how about it, then?” he said, out of the blue.

“What do you mean, how about it?” I replied, knowing full well what he meant.

“You and me, right now,” he continued, knowing full well I wouldn’t say no.

“What? Don’t you think you’re being a little presumptuous?” I protested.

“No. I know you want to,” he continued, unabashed.

“Christ! How arrogant!” I spat.

“But you like that,” he said, reeling me in. “I know a B&B just round the corner – we could book in there now.”

“I can’t believe this!” I said, protesting far too much.

“Are you coming or not?” he asked, coolly.

“God… OK, then…”

So there we were, two people who hardly knew each other, who should have been a little more careful and professional, checking into what was effectively a knocking shop in north London. It was a bit sordid but really rather exciting. Yes, it was foolish behaviour, but I was at the mercy of the thrill-seeking risk-taker hard-wired into my brain, which was usually switched on when I’d had a few glasses of wine.

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After that exhilarating experience, I wondered if I would see The Poet again. Despite the unusual nature of our first encounter, which had all the hallmarks of a one-night stand, he did, in fact, want to continue making my acquaintance. Having reassured myself that he wasn’t courting me to further his career, I allowed myself to feel chuffed. After all the romantic disappointment I’d been through, it had seemed so easy, so straightforward. And oh – joy of joys – there seemed to be no retinue of women waiting in the wings, just an ex-girlfriend with a child (not his, he assured me) whom he still cared about.

We arranged to meet at his flat, which was suitably moody and bohemian and betrayed none of the telltale signs of a female in residence. He regaled me with stories of his poetry chums and the sexual demands of a prominent pop diva with whom he’d recently toured. And then, without warning, he announced that he was sick of speaking and that henceforth we would communicate only in writing. I thought this a trifle odd, as any normal person would, but I soon got into the game of passing notes between us. It certainly cut out the smalltalk and made every interaction that much more intense. Each scrap of paper became a mini love letter: we did, after all, both have a way with words. I imagined myself to be some kind of romantic literary heroine.

Thankfully, the no verbals rule did not extend beyond the four walls of his apartment. We would have long, rambling, pretentious telephone conversations that would often have a juicy conclusion. It all seemed to be going terribly well until I arrived at his place one day to find his ex-girlfriend’s daughter sleeping soundly in his bed. I couldn’t begin to understand how this arrangement worked and started to wonder whether the child was, in fact, his. But I didn’t dare ask. Then there was the time when we were walking down the road, arm in arm, near his flat, when his ex just happened to be walking along the other side of the road, coming towards us.

“Are you sure she’s OK with this?” I asked.

“Of course. She’s fine, don’t worry,” he said, gripping my arm rather too theatrically for my liking.

My bullshit detector was on amber alert. It was as if this awkward meeting had been prearranged so she could check me out. I was starting to smell a rat.

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Before I could tie myself into knots of paranoid fantasy, I received a welcome phone call from Then Jerico’s PR Mariella Frostrup. The long-awaited trip to interview Mark Shaw had been given the go-ahead. We were off to Tokyo, on one condition: that I put Mark on the cover of Record Mirror. Fantastic, I thought. I’d wanted to get back to Japan since I went on that grand tour in 1982. Now all I had to do was convince my sceptical new deputy, Eleanor, that it was a good idea to put Then Jerico on the cover of our magazine. I would probably have to pull rank: there was no way I was going to miss out on a chance to travel to the other side of the world with one of my favourite PRs and her handsome charge.

In the end, I arranged a trade-off with Eleanor: I could put Then Jerico on the cover if she could put football warblers Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle on the cover in FA Cup final week. Deal done, Mariella booked our passage to Japan.

NEXT WEEK: Bizarre love triangles

After we’d had a good old moan about our love lives (or lack therof), she took me to the Marquee to see Then Jerico. “Ambition burns in Mark Shaw’s eyes,” I wrote in the review. “You couldn’t wish for a more charismatic vocalist.” Words of that kind written by the editor of a music magazine were priceless for a PR. They were the sort of words that ended up in record company ads, rather like film posters.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was being groomed as the chief champion of Then Jerico. Mariella mentioned a major foreign trip being lined up in the next year to interview the band; I was, of course, top of their list. I realised that if I wanted to go, I could. No one could overrule me. Suddenly, I realised there were parts of this editrix job that I really rather liked…

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After writing an embittered letter (yes, we had to communicate via post in those days) to Go West’s Pete Cox about his behaviour during our interview in Denmark, I felt that justice had been done and he’d been put in his place (hell hath no fury like an editor scorned). Not surprisingly, he didn’t reply, so I buried him, so to speak, in a box alongside Dik (now married, Repent In Peace).

I was, yet again, unencumbered by male attention and threw myself into cracking the whip at Record Mirror. Christmas was fast approaching and I had to decide what to put on the cover of the all-important double festive issue. I wanted to champion one of the new acts we were hoping would break through in 1987 to counteract what we all saw as the tragic state of the charts at the time. The likes of Europe, It Bites and Anita Dobson and Nick Berry of EastEnders were cluttering up the charts, topping off a year of cover versions, film theme tunes, reissues and Chris de Burgh’s saccharine Lady In Red.

Madonna was still the dominant force, but she was beyond our reach. However, Soft Cell’s manager Stevo had managed to get his hooks into me again. He wanted me to put his intense young protégé, Matt Johnson, on the Christmas cover. As the The, Matt had released a powerful, provocative album called Infected, with an accompanying film, which was actually saying something about the world in 1986, about Aids, about the US bombing of Libya, about the state of the West.

Deputy editor Jim Reid and features editor Eleanor Levy liked the record but didn’t feel it was a suitable for a festive cover. I said that was the whole point. They wanted Big Audio Dynamite on the cover. Being a natural diplomat and people-pleaser, I suggested a radical compromise: Matt on one cover, BAD on the other – back-to-back and upside-down; two covers for the price of one! Half the pages would be one way up; the remainder the other. It would confuse WH Smith and the distributors, and probably the readers, but so what? Within the industry, I hoped it would be seen as innovative rather than indecisive. Jim and Eleanor weren’t convinced, but I was the editor and, on this occasion, my decision was final. So I flew to Sweden to interview Matt Johnson.

I arrived in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm determined to make my readers choke on their Christmas puddings. I saw it as my way of making a mark: to get them to start thinking about the world. Matt was the perfect interviewee for this: you couldn’t have hoped to meet a more Serious Young Man. Matt was not happy with the way the world was in the late Eighties. To him, life was a struggle between corruption and innocence and he believed that devils existed within the human heart. He did not occupy his mind with trivial details such as whether or not his videos would be played on MTV. He was more interested in metaphors that described extreme emotions.

Matt and Betty bonded in a Swedish hotel room over symbols, ideological pollution and the decline of Western civilisation. Matt sang a lot about trapped, unspoken feelings, but still didn’t think he could truly express what he felt. I thought I might as well say what I felt, given the tenor of our conversation.

“I think music is the spiritual language this generation understands,” I pronounced, without a thought as to how pompous that would look in print.

“People deride pop music, but when it’s good, it’s superb,” agreed Matt.

“Politicians would love to affect people as much as music does,” I continued, warming to my theme. “That’s why they try and get their hand into it. The Tories realise the power of popular culture. Fortunately they’re alienating people, and a fucking good job. You’ve got to keep kicking against it.”

Matt was a pop prophet. The release of Infected coincided with the Tory government sending out 23 million leaflets telling us not to “Die of ignorance” about Aids. They were trying to terrify us. Their chief concern was the spread of Aids from the homosexual to the heterosexual community.

Of course, there was a deep sense of unease permeating the music business, but no one I knew personally had been diagnosed as HIV positive. Or at least, I thought not. I was shocked and upset when I discovered that Go West’s brilliant guitarist, Alan Murphy, whom I’d met on the Isle of Man and remember as being super-healthy and the first in the gym every morning, had developed full-blown Aids. While one of Pete’s best friends was dying, I was busy feeling snubbed. I felt guilty and embarrassed.

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I had prayed for something new and exciting to happen in 1987, but I must have picked the wrong deity. Nostalgia was in, and it wasn’t about to go out: it was shifting a lot of units. The biggest selling singles in the UK charts were Stand By Me by Ben E King and When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge – two old standards brought back to life by an advertising campaign for Levi’s 501s. Soon, half of the top 10 were songs that had been written years ago.

One of the few new bands to make an impression were Five Star, Romford’s answer to the Jackson Five, whose inoffensive pop/soul and wholesome, sexless image had won them the Best British Group gong at the BPI Awards. Then there was Mel & Kim, a couple of giggly, streetwise girls from Hackney who’d been turned into pop stars by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Their first big hit was Respectable, and in most of their interviews they would push the line that they’d “always been moral people”. There seemed to be a puritan backlash, an attempt to return to innocence that was reflected in the music that was being made.

But I felt that the industry was trying to put its head in the sand and ignore the reality of Aids. Edwin Bernard, one of Record Mirror’s writers, was active in the gay community’s fight against the disease, and lobbied me to put the magazine’s weight behind the awareness campaign. I decided to dedicate an entire issue to the subject to coincide with International Aids Day. We asked the question, “Does the pop business really care about Aids?” The answer was yes and no. Artists such as Boy George, George Michael and the Communards’ Jimi Somerville certainly did, but most of the musicians I knew were still stuck firmly in the good old days, when you could sleep around and not worry about the consequences.

With an immaculate sense of timing, after an indifferent response to their single Watching The Wildlife, Frankie Goes To Hollywood announced they were splitting. The single had been launched with a condom campaign, profits from which went to Aids research. Holly, Paul and the lads had moved from the irrepressibly sexual Relax to promoting safe sex; it was a sign of the times. And yes, it coincided with the release of the Prince classic Sign O’ the Times.

I was proud of Record Mirror’s support for Aids Day and, even if the issue didn’t sell that well, it was worth it. I hope it might have changed just a few music fans’ attitudes towards what was still thought of at the time as the “gay plague”.

NEXT WEEK: Bittersweet charity and poetry in motion

It was hard to believe this was the same George who had seemed so happy in his notoriety, so quick to condemn others (even for wearing short skirts). Not even he could cope with the demands of fame. It all reached an ugly head in August when he was arrested and convicted of possessing heroin.

Meanwhile, his old nemesis Steve Strange was struggling to cope with the wreckage of his pop career and had himself sunk into drug-induced oblivion. What was happening to all my old mates? Duran were nowhere, Culture Club were at No 32, Wham! had split, and it wasn’t polite to ask about the Thompson Twins.

All of this was in stark contrast to the fate of the King and Queen of Live Aid – Bob and Paula – who had become major tabloid celebrities. The public’s love affair with the pair reached its high point when they eventually got hitched in August (the bride wore crimson), attended by every pop luminary in the book, including all of Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, George Michael and David Bowie. I was more envious of her than ever. She looked perfect and adored. I felt damaged and dumped.

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Go West had left the Isle of Man and taken up residence in a studio in a field somewhere in Denmark. I hadn’t heard from Pete Cox for a couple of months, and wasn’t best pleased about it. No matter that he was hard at work producing the Difficult Second Album – I thought he should have made time to get in touch.

At the end of the summer, my friends at Chrysalis started planning the band’s press to promote the album and presumed I would want to go to Denmark to interview the band. I wanted to talk to Pete, so I agreed to go. But the moment I stepped into the state-of-the art glass and wood studio, I knew it was a mistake. I felt about as comfortable as the concrete cow standing lamely on the grass outside. Richard acknowledged me with a wave but it was hardly a cheery welcome, and Pete – or so it seemed to me – completely blanked me. Here I was, supposedly a pal and also the newly appointed editor of Record Mirror! I deserved more respect!

When we finally met up to do the interview, I was frosty and Pete was on the defensive. Out of their natural habitat, the studio, the pair started shifting in their seats. I was no longer a friendly face; now I was their interrogator, wanting them to “say something interesting”. They clearly felt under the cosh, and not just from me. Pete and Richard had spent nearly a year trying to get their new album right, but “technical problems” had led to a postponed tour and release date. And now they had to justify it to the likes of me, who had spent all that time listening to the demos on the Isle of Man.

It was awkward. No amount of assurance that I thought the new album was great and they were staying true to their high standards of craftsmanship thawed the ice. They seemed to think I had it in for them. At the end of the “interview”, I struggled to identify a single quote I could use. Far from opening up more because it was me he was talking to, Pete had made it really difficult for both of us. Or maybe I had. I couldn’t help it – my feelings about what had (or hadn’t) happened between us were getting in the way.

I briefly met up with Pete back at the band’s apartment. He was a little more relaxed and tried to explain away his initial froideur by telling me he was too focused on studio problems, but I didn’t really believe it. I had expected to be operating on a different level with him than before. Unfortunately he had reverted to treating me, as perhaps he should, as The Journalist. I hadn’t wanted that. It was a ghastly blurring of the boundaries and I should never have contemplated it.

I flew back to London with my self-righteous tail between my legs, my pen itching to send him a letter giving him what for. How dare he treat me like this? If I’d been distraught when I got back from the Isle of Man, now I was a crumpled mess. So the very last thing in the world I needed right at that moment was for Dik to crawl out from under his stone. My mad, sexy drummer, now engaged to be married, had started calling again and leaning on me for emotional support. I didn’t have the strength to tell him where to go, probably because he would listen my stories about Men Who Didn’t Care. It probably made him feel better. With the altar fast approaching, he was panicking. He wanted to know that His Women were still there for him. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. He seemed more sensitive than ever, more needy. Very sweetly, I thought, he asked if I wanted to come up and stay with him in Birmingham.

I weakened. Despite everything that had happened, I felt he had somehow always cared about me. I knew this would be the last time, so I thought to hell with it, I’ll go. He even arranged for his flatmate to pick me up in London and take me up to Brum. On the way up the M6, he told me that Dik had lovingly prepared the bedroom for my arrival, changing the sheets and cleaning the room. I was curiously touched.

Dik was so pleased to see me in a way that he’d never been before. It was as if we were in that calm, clear space you get to when you’ve just agreed to split up with someone – the point at which you both remember what first brought you together. We had an idyllic, if rather surreal, couple of days during which he looked after me, cooked my meals, brought me cups of tea, and was more tender than he’d ever been. It was as if he’d tried to make up for the years of disappointment and hurt. Maybe it was his way of saying thank you before he rode off into the sunset. For once, I appreciated it for what it was without thinking of the future, of expecting anything from him. I knew I couldn’t. In a perverse way, and in my world of back-to front thinking, it was the right thing for me to do.

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When I returned from Birmingham, I felt strangely serene. Just as well, as I wasn’t finding life in charge of Record Mirror easy to cope with. Suddenly, every PR in the business wanted to be my best friend and I was being invited to everything. I found it hard to say no, and became something of a work-and-play-a-holic. As I struggled to fit in with my new responsibilities, my social life became indistinguishable from my job. I thought it essential to be the public face of the magazine, networking as much as possible to raise our profile.

There was no escape from Betty Page, Editor, and even she was finding it hard to deal with the fact that her colleagues were starting to treat her like The Boss and not one of the gang. I guess it was inevitable but it came as something of a shock and I began to feel isolated. I wasn’t the sort of person who relished confrontation, so rather than try to impose my will on everyone else, the content of the magazine was often decided by committee. For my part, I felt I’d had no training, preparation or support in my new role. I was just left to get on with it – and I was by no means a natural leader. I was too easily swayed by other people’s opinions, especially if they were strong.

Some of the front covers from early in my reign were regrettable, simply because I’d allowed someone to shout louder than me. I had to please the indie, pop and dance faction within the staff and half the time I hedged my bets by doing split covers to keep everyone happy. I was learning a tough lesson: if you’re in charge, you can’t be liked by everyone all of the time. If some of your staff like you some of the time, you’re lucky. It’s more important for them to respect you.

The tension was building and I took every opportunity to escape from it. I was so busy with paperwork and production that I rarely got to do interviews: when I did, I made the most of them. I’d wanted to meet the wonderfully camp half of Erasure – Andy Bell – since earlier in the year when Gill Smith (Nancy Culp) and I had been invited by Blancmange’s Stephen Luscombe to join him and a motley crew, including Andy Bell and Neil Tennant, to sing on stage at the ICA for an Aids benefit.

I met Andy at a Kensington hotel for a champagne breakfast. We hit it off immediately and carried on dishing the dirt, sharing our secrets and fantasies until teatime. I rolled back to the office at 5.30pm, trying to pretend I wasn’t pissed, to a sea of disapproving faces. I didn’t give a shit: I’d had a great time, got a brilliant interview and remembered why I’d got into this lark in the first place.

NEXT WEEK: Dying of ignorance

As I boarded the quaint propeller aircraft bound for the tax haven in the Irish Sea, I realised what a small world it was. A few rows ahead of me sat my friend, Janice Long. Of all the flights in all the world… It was great to see her, but I decided to fudge the reason for my visit and tell her I was doing an interview.

When Pete Cox and Richard Drummie greeted me at Douglas airport, Janice looked a little puzzled. After all, pop stars don’t usually meet journalists at airports. But at least chatting to her on the plane had stopped me from getting too nervous, and being matey in arrivals with a Radio 1 DJ made me look pretty cool.

As we set off to Go West’s temporary HQ, the candyfloss castle in my fantasy slowly began to crumble. For starters, they weren’t staying in a delightful old country house or a mansion. No, it was a large Sixties redbrick bungalow on a nondescript suburban estate without so much as a glimpse of a sea view. The “rehearsal studio” was a small room full of keyboards and microphones wedged between the kitchen and the lounge. Vying for space alongside the dynamic duo were guitarist Alan Murphy, backing singer Carol Kenyon and a personal assistant or two.

As I dumped my suitcase in the hall and did a quick recce, I could see there was no room set aside for me. So I gradually relaxed and the evening was spent laughing and drinking, until Pete and I were the only ones left with the empties. Then he dropped the fantasy-smashing bombshell.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, nonchalantly.

“What do you mean, leave me to it?” I said, my heart thumping.

“Well, it’s late and I’ve got work to do tomorrow,” he said, moving towards the door. “There’s a z-bed in the cupboard, you can put it up in here.”

I could feel myself sinking into a panic. I had to act quickly to divert his attention. Time, I thought, to show him my etchings. Well, at least the set of saucy photographs of me in various states of rubberised undress that he had expressed a keen interest in seeing. Surely that’ll mesmerise him, I thought.

It was my way of saying, “Look at me, look at how interesting and sexy I can be,” feeling as if Beverley, in the flesh, wearing ordinary clothes, wasn’t enough to be of interest to a pop star.

He thought the photos were great, of course, but didn’t understand why I’d placed such importance on them. He wasn’t really interested in the dominatrix cosplay – the very thing that I thought made me sexy and interesting. What was I trying to prove? Yes, he liked me. That’s why I was here. So why, in this moment, did I feel so small and insignificant?

Eventually, he disappeared to his room. I put up the z-bed (a z-bed – the ignominy!) on my own, fell in and cried myself to sleep.

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The next morning, I thought everyone would know what had (or hadn’t) happened. But they all carried on being perfectly friendly, not seeming to worry that I was taking up space on the only sofa. I spent hours scribbling down my fractured thoughts in a notebook while Pete, Richard and the others worked on songs in the next room.

One, provisionally titled From Baltimore To Paris, became a bittersweet soundtrack to my inner turmoil. There, in that modest suburban front room, I felt stripped of my status – rock journalist, fetish model, gossip queen – and was just poor little Beverley from suburbia. I might as well have been sitting there naked. At least most of the time when you feel small, you can run away from the situation - but I was stuck on this wretched island for a week.

Pete was never less than a gent, but it did confuse me when he would sit on the sofa with his arm around me, give me foot massages, or put his head on my lap. A girl doesn’t need that kind of mixed message, however enjoyable it is at the time.

Eventually, we went out for a walk in the rain. It was one of the few times Pete and I were on our own. We ventured into the open countryside, watching an ominous cloud drift by – could this be the nuclear fallout we’d been warned about?

Back at the house, he invited me into his room and gave me a gift – a silver dragonfly brooch of his that I’d admired earlier. I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. Or, rather, I didn’t understand that he didn’t want anything from me beyond friendship. It was sad, really, that I had come to believe a man could only be interested in me in a sexual way. I’d spent too much time being trying to be a Stiletto Sexqueen. That wasn’t really me. Why did I ever think it was? I wasn’t even sure who I was any more. Betty had once protected Beverley but that armour had now been pierced.

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I didn’t have a chance to sink into gloom after the Isle of Man episode because Michael Pilgrim, the editor of Record Mirror, announced that he was leaving. I didn’t want to deal with it. I was muddled up, half thinking of leaving myself. But I quickly felt pressure to apply for the job. So I did what was expected of me. It seemed obvious that the company didn’t want to bring in a new editor from outside, and the publisher wanted to pass the baton to me as quickly as possible.

The trouble was, that made me feel as if I hadn’t really earned the job, because I didn’t have to fight for it. So I decided to seek the counsel of Pete Cox, who had become my new chief adviser.

“If you don’t want the job, don’t take it,” he said, as if I hadn’t already thought of that.

“Well, I’m not sure I do, but I feel obliged to take it. It would look good on my CV, though,” I argued. “And I get a company car.”

“Don’t come running to me if you hate it after six months, then,” he said, sounding like my mum.

And so, having ignored the pop star’s advice, I became the reluctant editor of the UK’s smallest but most perfectly formed weekly music magazine. I proceeded to convince myself that this was the best thing that could have happened to me. I had a new focus. I was the maitresse of the most female-dominated music paper ever. It gave me a helpful boost when I had just emerged from a period of feeling powerless.

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Before taking the helm, I had the chance to dwell on my decision when I was flown, alone, by Virgin records to interview a Norwegian band called Fra Lippo Lippi in Oslo. The weather was glorious and I was able to spend hours sitting on a hill overlooking the harbour, staring wistfully into the distant fjords.

I had been particularly taken by the band’s single, Everytime I See You, the lyrics of which spoke volumes to me and could have been applied to the men who had turned my life upside down, most notably Dik. But I had started to realise that they weren’t the problem – I was, especially when I was wrapped up in a fantasy of my own making.

Back at the hotel, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a frazzled, slightly too rounded woman who had been battered by strong emotional currents. It was time to get back to shore.

NEXT WEEK: New flames and old flames, sputtering out

I was getting ready to go out when the phone rang. I answered, and heard a deep male voice that seemed familiar. At first I couldn’t quite place it.

“You don’t know who this is, do you?” it said.

“Err… no, I don’t think I do…” I replied, rifling through my memory banks.

“It’s Pete…” the voice continued.

“Pete?” I said, blankly.

“Pete Cox. From Go West,” the voice replied.

“Oh my God! Hello! How are you?”

My heart did a few backflips and ended up in my stomach. Mr Bombshell had actually called me! At home! This totally unexpected situation caused my prefrontal cortex to freeze. So much so that I cannot recall a subsequent word of that conversation.

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When I put the phone down, I realised I had been so discombobulated that I hadn’t asked why he was ringing, how he got my home number, or whether he wanted to meet up. Nevertheless, I wafted out of my flat to the photo session and endured hours of torture, contorting my ankle into inhumane positions for the camera, because I was floating on air.

So I wasn’t imagining what happened on that hotel bed in Holland! I couldn’t believe it. I spent the next few days in fantasyland, but when a few weeks had elapsed, I started to come back down to Earth. He hadn’t called back and I wasn’t sure why.

I decided I had to take action. Could I call his record company? His management office? No, neither of those were options. I was starting to lose hope when I received a press release about an awards show being filmed at the Hippodrome for the Australian TV show Countdown. There on the list of artists was the name I wanted to see: Go West. I immediately got myself onto the guest list and recruited my fellow Rubber Goddess, Gill Smith, to be my wingwoman. The only snag was that the show was going out live in Australia and we’d have to get to the club by 9.30 am on a Sunday morning.

So we arrived, groggily, to see Aha’s Morten Harket, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and Culture Club’s Roy Hay being wheeled out in front of the unforgiving camera lights with their eyes half open. With my well-honed gossip columnist technique of checking out a room in an instant, I saw Pete and Richard of Go West at the on-stage bar, flashing their pearly whites. Unfortunately, the bar was in the VIP area and we didn’t have the right passes, but I had my quarry in my sights and I wasn’t giving up that easily.

I played every “Don’t you know who I am?” trick in the book to blag my way past the clipboard gatekeepers and snuck up on Pete, who swung round, looking a little surprised (but pleased) to see me.

“Hi!” I said, nonchalantly, as if I just happened to be passing. “Fancy seeing you here…”

“So a promise of a free drink can get you out of bed on a Sunday morning, eh?” he joked.

“I’m not quite that bad,” I countered. “I just thought there might be some good gossip to be had at an event like this.”

I was, of course, anxious not to betray the fact that this “chance” meeting had been planned like a military operation.

“So what are you up to at the moment?” I asked, in interview mode.

“Well, apart from this type of promotional overhang, we’re trying to write songs for our second album,” he answered, in pop-star mode. “In fact, we’re off to the Isle of Man soon to start demoing.”

“Why the Isle of Man?” I asked.

“Because even with the small amount of success we’ve had, we now have to spend several months of the year out of the country, otherwise we have to give most of our money to the taxman,” he said.

I’d forgotten that just about every band I’d watch rise to the top of the charts had to spend much of their time away from home, friends and family on the advice of their accountants. It was not a situation that was conducive to great creativity. After a couple of hit singles and a big-selling album, Go West had become tax exiles. This Isle of Man information stung me. No chance then, I thought, of us getting together in the near future.

But then the conversation somehow turned to holidays and I bemoaned the fact that I was exhausted and really needed a break. What he said next completely floored me.

“Why don’t you come to the Isle of Man?”

“What, while you’re working?”

“Well, yeah, we will be working, but not all the time. If you need a break, you’re very welcome.”

“Umm… God, I don’t know what to say. That’s really kind of you. But I’ll need to think about it.”

Which meant I had already decided I was going, but I didn’t want him to know that. My heart was pounding and Gill could barely contain herself. I knew she was thinking that our mission had been accomplished. If only men understood the lengths to which women will go to get what they want…

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After the awards ceremony was over and the boys had done their duty, Richard disappeared and Gill made her excuses, so Pete and I went off to have a coffee. Now, this would have been the ideal time to clear up any misunderstandings but I didn’t. Fairy dust was circling around my brain and rendering me incapable of logical thought.

“So, are you sure you want me to come?” I asked.

“Yeah, of course – we’ll all be driving each other mad by then so it’ll be nice to have someone else to talk to,” he replied, coolly.

“Well, only if I’m not getting in the way…” I said, still giving him an easy out.

“I wouldn’t have asked you if you’d be getting in the way,” he insisted.

“Well… OK, then… when?”

“Some time in May? I’ll arrange the tickets and let you know,” he said.

“You don’t have to buy my tickets!” I protested, to no avail.

“Believe me, we can afford it. I insist.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I said, genuinely taken aback.

“Don’t say anything. Just get on the plane.”

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So, I was going west with Go West. I’d finally met a pop star who had shown me some kindness, generosity and understanding. At this point, I had reached the scene in the movie in my head where he spends his days in a rehearsal room in an Isle of Man mansion, his evenings with my head resting on his shoulder and his nights with me in his four-poster bed. I carried the weight of this fantasy around with me for the few weeks between invitation and departure and therefore slowly became a nervous wreck. The anticipation was killing me and my imagination was running riot.

Pete eventually called to put me out of my misery.

“So you still want me to come, then?” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to say no.

“Of course. If you still want to, that is,” he replied.

“Yes, yes, I just thought you might have changed your mind,” I said quickly.

“Stop it before I do,” he joked. “I’ve arranged for you to pick up the tickets at the airport. We’ll meet you at the other end.”

“OK. Great. Thanks so much – I can’t wait.”

“I’ll see you then. Look forward to it.”

And with that, I almost had a panic attack. It was really happening. Gill was happy for me but a tad worried that I might be building it all up into candyfloss castles…

NEXT WEEK: Nuclear fallout and total meltdown

I’ve been really lax about publishing Reveal posts lately, for which I apologise. It’s not that I don’t have anything to add, it’s just that I’ve been busy with other editing work.

I’ve covered a lot of ground since publishing the last Reveal at the end of March, from embarking on a situationship with a guy who turned out to be a coke dealer, to being interviewed by a young Ben Elton for a documentary about the London fetish scene that never aired, to reconnecting with two halves of Duran Duran (the Power Station and Arcadia), to how I missed out on going to Live Aid due to cynicism, to interviewing Simon Le Bon after his near-death experience, to interviewing Go West on a hotel bed in Holland, to a memorable night out in a limousine with the Pet Shop Boys, to my adventures on the road with Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

When I list my experiences like that, it does make me stop and think, wow, what a life. Which is what several of you have commented on many of my posts. One even said, “If I’d met you in 1984, I’d have been blushing to death!”

And there were similar comments about my choice of clothing at the time, notably, “How did you get into all that rubber stuff?” Which is also the question Ben Elton asked. My answer is always, “With a lot of talcum powder!”

It was such a weird experience being interviewed by Ben Elton. He was well known at the time as a stand-up, but I had no idea he would go on to become something of a national treasure. Like many straight men at the time, he was a bit creepy about all the fetish stuff, but I don’t hold that against him.

It still makes me smile all these years later that Duran Duran wanted so badly to be taken seriously. It’s fair to say they weren’t at the time. They had to wait many more years for that. But I think they’ve reached legendary status now. And I’m glad they’re still out there doing their thing.

Another band still out there doing their thing are the Pet Shop Boys, who provided me and my friend Gill Smith, also known as Record Mirror’s Nancy Culp, a legendary night out on the town, visiting the landmarks mentioned in their hit single West End Girls.

It was a memorable night for us and for them. And I found out only recently from a mutual acquaintance that Neil and Chris still talk about it! If you haven’t read the whole story, do check out Rewind Part 49.

One of the joys of working for a pop magazine in the 80s was interviewing such diverse acts. You couldn’t get much more different than Go West and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, but both of them found a place in my heart for very different reasons.

Go West struggled with having to promote themselves, but Sigue Sigue Sputnik were all about self-promotion and manipulating the media. As Rewind Parts 50 to 52 explain, I joined them on their 1986 UK tour as an unofficial ultravixen, which is what they called their all-female road crew.

It was chaotic but exciting to be part of a story that was unfolding in the tabloids on a daily basis. And it’s the closest I ever got to feeling like a reporter as I had to phone in my stories to the Record Mirror offices.

It also gave me a glimpse into the darker arts of tabloid journalism as my old Sounds pal Garry Bushell merrily invented stories for The Sun while the band were a hot topic. He always saw it as a bit of a laugh, but I found it all a bit worrying.

Thanks to another old pal, my former NME colleague and now brilliant novelist and comedy writer David Quantick, for sharing his review of the notorious Sputnik gig at Reading, which resulted in drummer Ray Mayhew, or Ray Mayhem, actually, we called him, being charged with malicious wounding. You can find that in the comments on the note I published on 5th June.

As I continue to reflect on how the media landscape has transformed since those heady days, I’m grateful that I was able to have these experiences before everything was recorded, photographed and shared on social media. I’m glad that I made most of my mistakes when we only had landlines and it was uncool to ask a musician to pose for a selfie!

That’s all for now – see you again soon.

Beverley/Betty

Tony James was busy calculating the publicity value of the band’s burgeoning collection of newspaper front pages – each tabloid banner headline being worth some £30,000, by his reckoning. Meanwhile, Martin Degville was coping manfully under the pressure, reflecting on what he had said to the audience in Coventry.

“I couldn’t believe how personally they took it,” he said. “I could hear them saying, ‘How dare he say that to me?’ Don’t they realise I’m just trying to get things going?” Drummer Ray Mayhew entered the room, looking worried. He’d just found out that the Reading police were pressing charges against him after a bottle-throwing incident. Everyone realised this was serious.

I decided to stay on the tour for an extra day to see what happened at the next gig in Stoke. A gloom descended over the party when it was confirmed that Ray had been charged with malicious wounding and, even after all the tabloid hype, the band’s single Love Missile F1-11 had stuck at No 3 in the UK charts.

Martin’s scar photo made the front page of The Sun, but how much longer, I wondered, before Fleet Street tired of them, chewed them up and spat them out? Lord Bushell of Wapping tried to get a few lines out of rent-a-quote Tory MP Teddy Taylor. Instead, he got hold of Peter Bruinvels, MP for Leicester East, and asked for a comment about the saucy nature of Sigue Sigue Sputnik T-shirts: “obscene”; “poor taste”; “grave offence”; “repulsive”. Mr Bruinvels said he hoped the police would intervene to ban this vile merchandising, which depicted a “masturbating transsexual”. It smacked of desperation.

But the press corps duly descended on Shelly’s in Stoke to see “the new Sex Pistols”. A crash barrier had been erected at the front of the stage and the security advisor charged with ensuring there were no bottles or glasses in the place.

In an attempt to avoid trouble, the tour bus dropped the band at the stage door minutes before they were due onstage. Three bouncers stood between the band and the audience. Martin, having been briefed earlier by his agent, said nothing provocative to the audience. “You’re the most beautiful audience – I love you, Stoke,” he fibbed.

These restrictions knocked the stuffing out of the group and the show fell flat. The beast had been tethered. The cheesy house DJ summed it up: “Yeah, wow, what a nice band that was.” For a band that thrived on incident and unpredictability, the only thing to do was up the ante back at the hotel.

Moorville Hall looked like something out of The Shining, but it did boast a large room full of pool tables and an owner who was more than happy to keep the bar open for as long as we were buying. Martin started the games by chasing me around the tables and practising his pelvic thrusts against my helpless form. Ray, seemingly recovered from the bad news he had earlier in the day, joined in and pulled me, laughing, on to his lap. After several games of drunken pool, I ended up back in my room with another drummer. Well, a Stiletto Sexqueen had to live up to her reputation…

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The morning after, it was time for Betty to go home. Ray was about to be spirited off to Reading police station to face the music and asked me to accompany him for moral support. Despite the temptation to carry on being part of the circus, I had to leave the madness behind. The whole thing was a fake, really. An exciting, sparkly, throbbing fake, but a fake all the same. Stripped of their soundbites and stage costumes, they were just another bunch of jobbing musicians trying to make a quick buck.

I was as much of a phony myself – being “Sweaty Betty”, being an ultravixen, being a Stiletto Sexqueen – none of it was me, just roles I was happy to play. But for a few days, it took me out of myself and away from the emotional chasm that had opened up in my life after Dik had delivered his devastating news. Now it was time to go: home alone, no flirting, no polishing, no cheeky drummers.

The aftermath of my stint as a tabloid tart was as follows: Ray was charged with three counts of wounding; Tony made an impassioned speech at the gig in Dunstable, underlining once more the fact that the band didn’t condone violence; Martin was hit by a coin onstage in Leicester and stormed off; despite all The Sun’s efforts, Love Missile F1-11 peaked at No 3’ the tour continued, but the red tops had moved on to another story.

Although we’d all laughed about the more amusing inventions, some had been damaging – such as the accusation that Martin told racist jokes onstage. Even Tony, arch spinmeister, had turned down The Sun’s offer of riding into Fortress Wapping with Samantha Fox on the back of a Chieftain tank. I’d witnessed the reality of media hype at first hand and vowed never again to believe anything I read in the papers. But it hadn’t undermined my faith in the power of high heels, high hair and high drama.

After Sweaty Betty’s impromptu liaison with Ray Mayhem in Stoke, I was surprised to discover he wanted to see me again. He was a sweet guy with a marshmallow centre when he wasn’t in Sigue Sigue Sputnik character, but as soon as he donned the stage gear he behaved like a cross between Billy Idol and Sid Vicious. It was an act – but one that constantly got him into trouble. He was let off with a fine and a caution after the wounding charges but I could see in his quieter moments that he was worried he might have gone to prison. This all fell by the wayside when he was out on the town in London, when he felt obliged to maintain Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s notoriety. For a few weeks, Ray, fellow drummer Chris Kavanagh and Sweaty Betty made quite a team – seeking freebies wherever we could find them.

At the 100th edition party for The Tube, the pair of them tried to disrupt proceedings – which caused Paula Yates to leave the building – and Ray posed with me for a few “blackmail” photos. They also invited themselves to an elite party for Depeche Mode, where Martin Gore debuted his leather skirt and New Order attempted to break the world record for continuous consumption of free Pernod.

When Sputnik played a flagship show at the National Ballroom in Kilburn, I was among friends again. It was a riot of fishnet, fur, rubber and leather and I was in my element. I smiled when a member of the audience shouted: “Hey, you an ultravixen?” Not many artistes made me write the words “so fucking sexy and exciting” in my notebook – apart from Prince, of course.

Ray and Chris were particularly happy to accompany me to any event that involved free champagne, so I took them along to the Hippodrome, where I was on the judging panel for the final of their Star Chase 86 talent competition. After several glasses of bubbly, I thought it was a good idea to give up my place on the panel (plus my chance to clink glasses with the likes of DJ Mike Read and the actress who played Mary on EastEnders) to let the Sputnik glamour twins spice up proceedings. They surprised no one, least of all me, by judging all the bands to have no artistic or musical merit whatsoever, articulated in their own inimitable style.

“They’re shit,” sneered Ray.

“Absolute crap,” echoed Chris.

“Pillow Fights Back? Bite the pillow, more like…” said Ray, pressing his point.

Backstage after the show, they were ejected from the premises after Ray uttered a few mild obscenities to the organisers. As he was my guest, I was forced to follow. I decided after this that I was trying to be a punk ten years too late and was in danger of dragging Record Mirror’s reputation into the mud (I had been on official business at the Hippodrome, after all…) Thus it was that I eased away from Sweaty Betty and a pair of cute drummers and let Ray go back to his hell-raising and Sputnik to their attempts to fleece the world.

PS: I was sad to hear the news that Ray Mayhew passed away last year. Sixty is no age at all. For a fleeting moment, we had a lot of fun together, and I’ll always remember him fondly.

NEXT WEEK: Nuclear fallout…

The gig in Reading the night before had been a tense affair. Plastic glasses and coins had been flung at the stage; Martin had been accused of making racist jokes and, under extreme provocation, drummer Ray had allegedly thrown a bottle back into the audience. Sputnik were attracting identity-seekers and troublemakers – kids who seemed to have been storing up their anger and frustration, waiting for a band to vent it on. Before leaving for Colchester, the gang reflected on the morning’s press cuttings. “It’s wild, isn’t it?” said Neal. “None of it’s true, though.”

“World War Four – A Clockwork Sputnik” was underway and Betty Page, the newly crowned Stiletto Sexqueen (I think that was Tony James’s idea), was part of it. To some of my politically sensitive, Left-leaning journalist friends, I was about to sup with the devil. Tony James and Magenta De Vine, co-conspirators in the Sputnik project, had made the commercial decision to “get into bed” with the Sun newspaper, agreeing to let my old Sounds mucker Garry Bushell, now chief reporter for the Bizarre showbiz column, come and make mischief on the tour.

I knew from the days of Oi! how inventive Garry could be, and now that he had a national newspaper to play with, he was about to have a lot more fun. When the band, ultravixens and Betty arrived in Colchester, Garry and his Jaguar were there too, eager to generate the next tabloid sensation. This would have been bearable but for one important factor: a couple of weeks before, some 6,000 employees of News International, the company that owned The Sun, had gone on strike after negotiations for the workforce to move to a new plant in Wapping had broken down. Journalists had been given two days to choose between their employer – Rupert Murdoch – and the unions.

Garry had neatly side-stepped the problem of whether or not to cross the picket line at Fortress Wapping by going on the Sputnik tour. He was more concerned with keeping his rival, the Daily Mirror’s John Blake, away from the band, and concocting new stories at every opportunity. I was soon in danger of becoming the story myself. At the hotel, I was cornered by the genial and impeccably well-spoken Neal X, who had poured himself into a pair of red rubber trousers that left nothing to the imagination, and told he was keen to avail himself of my expertise in the Mr Sheen department. It did not occur to me that I might be the victim of a set-up until I realised that he was also wearing a Sun T-shirt bearing the words: “I love a Wapping one”.

Nevertheless, there I was, down on my knees with a can of Mr Sheen in my hands, my head at crotch level. “I call it Little Elvis, you know,” Neal told me, referring to the bulge in his trousers. The photographer, Joe Shutter, captured the moment for posterity and I was close to agreeing to let it be used in The Sun. At the time I had only a dim awareness of what was really going on back at Wapping, but did at least have the presence of mind of draw the line at the picture being published anywhere but in the pages of rm. But, as an honorary Ultravixen, I had my part to play.

My first real taste of World War Four came that night at Essex University, standing at the side of the stage in my fishnets, stilettos and bright red PVC mac. Although there was some evidence of gob emanating from the Degville lookalikes in fishnet masks and high heels, there was no sign of the violence reported in the tabloids. But there was plenty of lust in the air. Sex, rather than violence, emanated from this band – no surprise there, with all that leather, rubber and plastic in evidence. I could feel the sweat dripping down between my thighs. Unfortunately, I chose to share this information with Martin when he came offstage. Pumped up by his performance, he was feeling frisky. I knew from other members of the entourage that you had to watch out when he was in this mood – he was likely to grab any part of your body, be you male, female or she-male, and torment you. Thankfully, he spared me the physical humiliation but nicknamed me “Sweaty Betty” to endless chants of “Betty Page, I want to lick your knickers dry!”

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Over breakfast the next day, the so-called shock-rockers accused of flinging filth at our pop kids mulled over the Sunday papers, especially the News Of The World and its “Horror Of Sputnik Maniac” front page. The story claimed that Ray had thrown a bottle into the audience, which had hit an innocent kid who subsequently needed 34 stitches. The band renamed him Ray Mayhem, but the drummer himself was subdued, clearly worried that a moment of thoughtlessness could have caused such damage.

None of them looked like hell-raisers. Neal was in his Noel Coward dressing gown, sporting odd socks and carrying his own supply of toilet paper. Tony was in his shorts, having just returned from his morning run to eat his muesli. Martin looked unrecognisable without make-up and a towel round his head.

Later, at Coventry Poly, the show barrelled along as planned until the last song, when it became clear that a contingent of football hooligans were keen to cause trouble. I could hear them growling in the audience. Unfortunately, Martin rose to the bait and started to wind them up. “You’re pathetic,” he screamed when they shouted, “Poser!” at him. “Come on – gob, then. Throw things at me.”

Sadly, someone did. Martin fell over, a melee ensued, and he rushed offstage past me with blood dripping on to his rubber trousers from a cut in his head. He was taken straight to hospital. When he returned to the hotel, the wound on his head newly stitched (a bottle had caught him above one eyebrow), he was putting on a brave face. “Do I look all right, Betty? It’ll make me look beautiful on Top of the Pops.”

We had a long drive ahead of us – to a country hotel in Stoke. I joined Bushell in the Sun Jaguar with Ray and Martin taking turns to sit on my lap. Next day, Martin posed for another Sun photo, showing off his seven stitches. The paper’s late edition had another front-page story about the band, saying the incident was a “revenge attack” after Ray had thrown the bottle in Reading. They were making news to order.

“We don’t advocate or glorify violence,” said Martin, carefully. “But we have a pulsating throb of energy. I was flaunting an uncertain sexuality in their faces and it was too much for them to handle.” Actual bodily harm wasn’t enough for your super soaraway page seven Wapping fella Garry. He had an idea that we should play “let’s create a love affair for Martin”. And guess who was going to be the girlfriend? I was cajoled into inserting myself on to the back seat of the sexy-exy Jaguar and Martin duly positioned himself on top of me. I pouted at the camera and Martin expertly indulged in some aural sex (ie he put his tongue in my ear). Why did I agree to do this?

I was starting believe the hype. I was caught up in the hysteria of being on the road with Britain’s most notorious band. It was an adrenaline rush. Extricating myself from this faux-amorous clinch, Martin announced: “Betty Page, the only woman ever to give me an erection.” We then performed for the camera the “Loving Couple Pose” – my arms round his neck, me looking adoringly past the fishnet mask into his eyes. A story was constructed. Degville (sexuality dubious) is having an affair with Betty Page, singer with Stiletto Sex, and No 1 Sigue Sigue Sputnik fan. Garry got very excited about all this. I’d already started to regret it. Thank God, it never made it into print.

The morning’s scandal sheets were still full of stories about the band. The Daily Star called them “Sicky Sicky Sputnik” and that the air around them was “thick with obscenities”. The Mirror dubbed them “the worst behaved, least talented band we ever came across” (but only because they didn’t get exclusive access), and The Sun said Coventry was a “bop concert”.

No one could ignore the Sputs but the hate was starting to get out of control. An odd atmosphere started to surround the band, and a security adviser who’d worked with Duran Duran was drafted in for the rest of the tour. Everyone started to feel hounded, like a bunch of fugitives on the run.

NEXT WEEK: High heels, high hair and high drama

As we loosened up in front of the camera, I agreed to be photographed semi-naked – but only from behind, as if that was more demure. It was but a small step from flashing the cleavage of my bottom through a laced rubber dress to displaying the full cheeks, so I posed in a satin corset, crouching down and balancing precariously on six-inch heels with nothing on my bottom half, while Gill reclined on a chaise longue in front of me, dressed in a PVC French Maid’s outfit and rubber stockings. It was a strange response – exposing myself like this when I felt so vulnerable inside.

There was a measure of defiance in such behaviour, though. I didn’t flinch when Trevor, the photographer, came in for one of many close-up shots of my rear. Or, rather, Betty didn’t flinch.

“Fuck him,” I thought about a certain former lover. “Let’s show him what he’ll never have again…”

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I could always rely on Mariella Frostrup to spice up my life. I had met her a few years previously, when she was the young bride of Skids frontman Richard Jobson, but we hadn’t really got to know each other until she started working in the press office at Phonogram records, where she handled PR for Soft Cell, among other acts. Since then, she had moved on to work for an independent PR and plugging company.

Over one of our many gossip-juicy lunches, she told me that her husband was very keen for Gill and Betty to dress in rubber gear and visit him at his gentlemen’s club just off St Martin’s Lane in central London. Rather than laughing this off and politely declining, I was, of course, well up for it and so was Gill, so the pair of us duly talcum-powdered ourselves into our best latex outfits and turned the grey hair of the club membership white, while Jobbo enjoyed the spectacle.

Mariella, however, had another mission on her mind. She was unnaturally keen for me to meet the singer of one of her new bands, Then Jerico. “He’s good-looking but also bright and really funny,” she said, knowing how to hook me in. “You don’t have to write anything about the band, just come and meet him.”

So Mariella took me to a press party at the Kensington Roof Gardens and introduced me to Mark Shaw. He was, indeed, drop-dead gorgeous – like a cross between John Taylor of Duran Duran and Aha’s Morten Harket. But boy, did he know it. My first thought was: “Great! A distraction from soon-to-be-married drummers and muscular but enigmatic vocalists.”

If I had learned anything from my past mistakes, here was one to test me: Mark boasted a killer combination of confidence-bordering-on-arrogance, wit and style that I found highly attractive, but he had “high risk” written all over him. His career was in the ascendant and he wanted to make the most of his chances. What better way to progress than charm the socks off the deputy editor of a small but influential music magazine?

That he was an absolutely unsuitable was clear: but I did absolutely unsuitable really well. Searching for a potential long-term partner in the music business was never easy. There was a plentiful supply of men – especially ones in pretty packages – but unwrap them and they were usually full of empty promises. Crushes? There had been a few: the young buck who had just signed a record deal but turned out to be far too arrogant, even for me; and the PR who was sweet and attentive but turned out to be gay.

Despite the fact that I had met and interviewed many of the musicians who occupied poster space on teenage walls in the early Eighties, I fancied very few of them. They felt more like mates, or colleagues – not potential boyfriend material. I’d been slightly intimidated by the Kemp brothers; amused by Simon Le Bon; dazzled by the prettiness of John Taylor; had a weird, sexless kind of infatuation with Marc Almond; but been totally swept to sea by Dik, a drummer who didn’t have even 15 minutes of fame. Perhaps that was the key – I felt Dik was more accessible, that I had more of a chance with him – even though the evidence clearly indicated otherwise.

Underneath the leather and the rock ‘n’ roll persona, he was a flawed human being who concealed his sensitivity beneath layers of addictive behaviour. I always knew he had strong emotions but couldn’t really cope with them, and that’s why he surrounded himself with people who loved and supported him. But his need for multiple sources of comfort was one I found deeply hurtful.

It seemed to me that Dik was constantly being looked after, but no one was looking after me – least of all myself. I had rarely let anyone get as close to me before, and he had done it without really putting in much effort. That scared me. The Boudicca in my head vowed to be more careful in in future; no more going into battle without armour; no more leaving yourself open to attack. The soft option would no longer be required.

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I was getting a futuristic vibe about 1986, thanks to a bunch of post-punk retro electro renegades by the name of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Chief conceptualist and guitarist Tony James, formerly of Generation X, had been taking notes since 1976, learned all the lessons of punk and New Romanticism, and fused them to create his new pop beast. Just like Spandau Ballet in their early days, and with the help of his then girlfriend, muse and publicist Magenta De Vine (who once worked with Steve Strange), he booked the band into obscure, arty venues and advertised them by word of mouth. I had been effortlessly attracted to SSS because they flirted with S&M imagery. They had female roadies, called ultravixens, who wore rubber, leather and PVC, and carried amps in their five-inch stilettos.

The band had crafted an extraordinary image. They melded elements of classic rock ’n’ roll – Elvis chic, punk rock, big hair and fetish fashion. Tony James wore pink rubber trousers with a boxer’s leather protector over the crotch, with a hand-crafted “Sputnik IV – the Next World War” T-shirt, black leather gloves, and pink hair extensions piled on top of his head like a giant yucca. Guitarist Neal X wore a red rubber mac and used several cans of hairspray to get his blonde hair to stand up in a huge quiff. Ray, one of their two drummers, looked like Billy Idol’s little brother, and Chris, the other drummer, favoured rockabilly cool.

The lead singer was something else entirely. Martin Degville was a familiar face to me from the New Romantic days, when he ran a clothing stall and hung around with Boy George. He was perhaps the most unusual looking of all the posers of that era – gaunt and angular, with lashings of attitude. Now that he, too, had joined a band, he had become a thing of terrible beauty.

For his first Record Mirror cover, he wore lashings of leopardskin and black leather, with sharpened black talons for fingernails, a huge orange and black mohican wig and – sinister touch, this – a ripped black fishnet across his face. OK, the band looked amazing, but did they sound as good? Well, they were mostly a triumph of form over content. A relentless electronic rock ’n’ roll bass sound triggered by Tony James’s newly acquired Roland guitar synth rumbled beneath manic tunes mingling Donna Summer, dub and the spirit of Elvis.

Never mind – at the start of 1986 they were the biggest news since the Pistols 10 years before. Signed to EMI for a rumoured (but exaggerated) £1 million, their debut single Love Missile F1-11, was being launched at the British charts and Tony was racking up the rhetoric: “Sputnik is going to be the biggest corporation in the world,” he told rm. The man wasn’t stupid. He knew that talking in hyperbole gets you column inches. His latest girlfriend was, after all, the influential journalist Janet Street-Porter, who was busy reinventing “yoof” TV. “She’s an intelligent, powerful woman,” he said. “I find powerful women incredibly sexy. She’s one of the only people who can make me forget about Sigue Sigue Sputnik.”

His knowingness and irony wasn’t lost on me. Whatever sound they made, Sputnik promised titillation and I wanted to hitch a ride on their sex machine. It was rm editor Michael Pilgrim’s idea that I should volunteer as an ultravixen and join the band on their first tour of the UK. After all, I wouldn’t need to visit the wardrobe department.

NEXT WEEK: Betty Page: ultravixen and tabloid tart

The idea was that we would tour London in a limousine, visiting some of the places that inspired their re-recorded and re-released version of West End Girls (they were the East End boys, you see…) All I wanted was an early night, but the sight of the Daimler waiting outside the rm offices, with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe planted cosily in the back seat, gave me my second wind.

As the glossy black door closed behind me, Gill, Parlophone press officer Murray Chalmers and photographer Russell, chilled champagne flutes appeared through the glass divide. As we glided into action, Neil commanded: “Driver – the East End!” as if he had waited all his life to say it, and thus an evening of merriment began.

Our first stop was St Katharine’s Dock near Tower Bridge, where a photo call was greeted by much ribaldry and rum jokes about sailors from the Champagne Charlottes from rm. A group of tourists gawped at Chris in his ubiquitous Boy cap as he announced: “Ooh, I don’t fancy this mud lark,” gamely clambering over the river wall to have his picture taken on the shore of the Thames.

Well, we’d already consumed several bottles of bubbly and weren’t even in the East End proper. Neil left us in no doubt as to the reason for this display of decadence. “To spend as much of EMI’s money as possible,” he confirmed, glancing at Murray, who was beginning to realise how much this outing was going to cost him.

“When you’ve had a desk job like me and you give up working to start making records for a living, you can do things like this!” said Neil, draining another glass. Fifteen minutes later, we were in the heart of Soho, being led by Neil down a red-lit staircase to a subterranean bar, where a jukebox was churning out the cheesiest selection of tunes we’d ever heard. This cavern of kitsch was none other than the dive bar mentioned in the song.

“And here we are live,” said Neil. “But it’s not as scuzzy as it used to be.”

“We come here because no one else wants to,” said Chris.

“West End Girls is just about going out,” said Neil, explaining the meaning of the song. “You know, when you’re going mad with boredom and you come somewhere like this as a prelude to going out somewhere exciting.”

The “somewhere exciting” in our case was Dan’s Restaurant on the King’s Road, one of Neil and Chris’s favourite eateries – obviously so, because they were playing a loud Euro-disco tape especially provided by the duo. But we were not tempted to kick in chairs or knock down tables, because this was a pleasant establishment run by a very sweet gay man, and the food was rather lurid nouvelle cuisine.

The wine continued to flow while Gill attempted to do an interview (I was literally just along for the ride), but she was fighting a losing battle against a tide of drunkenness. It was time to get back in the limo for a heady midnight drive around the streets of London – windows down and champagne out. We were cruising down Sloane Street, all singing along to Grace Jones’s Slave to the Rhythm and having a preposterous conversation about its excellence.

“I want to be this record!” announced Neil.

“I want to eat this record!” shrieked Gill.

“Well, I want to marry this record!” yelled Chris.

“Oh, I’ve already got this record’s children!” proclaimed Neil.

We asked the peak-capped chauffeur what he was making of all this nonsense and he told us his last assignment was Diana Ross, in this very limousine, a revelation that caused a scramble to search for any stray diamonds…

The final stop on our West End rampage was the Pyramid night at Heaven. “We like the Pyramid in New York and it’s an imitation of that,” explained Neil. “It’s just kind of outrageous and transvestites dance on the bar.”

“It’s a very Pet Shop Boys place to go,” continued Chris. Once we had managed to get past the rudest, most obstructive door staff on the planet and on to the dancefloor, we were greeted, on cue, by the strains of the PSBs’ jolly track Opportunities.

We could have danced all night, but the poor driver was still waiting to take us all home. After a final photo in which we were as trashed as we looked, we tracked the limo down in a side street and fell into the leather seats. Gill and Chris, being north Londoners, were dropped off first, then Murray and photographer Russell, leaving me in the back seat with Neil.

We were almost too tired to speak by this point, but I was surprised to feel an unexpected frisson in the space between us – so much so that I was relieved to get home. As he made his final drop-off, with empty champagne bottles rolling round the bottom of his car, the driver told me, “It’s been more fun than bloody Japanese businessmen or Diana Ross.”

Now that was something. We were officially more exciting than the diva of Motown. I’d have to tell my new “friend”, Peter of Go West…

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It occurred to me rather late in the day that it wasn’t going to be easy getting back in touch with Mr Cox. When I interviewed bands, especially for the first time, it wasn’t the done thing to swap phone numbers with them, so the only point of contact was the record company PR or the vague possibility of bumping into one another at some industry event. I experienced a slight feeling of panic but dismissed it as ridiculous. After all, he knew where I worked, so if he was keen to get in touch, he would.

Still, all thoughts of the steely-eyed Go West frontman went out of my mind when Dik called out of the blue to announce he was in London and wanted to take me out for a drink. Despite his failure to take my proposal of elopement seriously, I agreed. Letting go is never easy. He dutifully turned up at the rm offices, and we went off to Primrose Hill to meet up with a couple of his old mates.

My delight in seeing Dik was almost childlike; he still wore that familiar battered trenchcoat and beaten-up bikers’ leathers that I’d first seen him in backstage at the Dominion in 1982. On his neck, he wore the charm necklace (featuring a miniature penknife, as I recall) with which I had toyed so many times during our intimate moments (he never took it off). Plus, of course, he still had that cheeky smile and deadpan Brummie humour that rarely failed to win me over, even when I was really cross with him.

It was all going swimmingly and I was feeling chuffed that he felt able to introduce me to his friends, when one of them dropped him in it. Big time.

“Can’t believe you’re actually doing it, Dik… Didn’t have you down as the type!”

“Well, it comes to us all in the end…”

Fear gripped my stomach. I didn’t want to think about it but I just knew…

“When’s the big day, then?”

“Oh, July I think. The missus is making all the arrangements, you know how it is…”

These friends clearly didn’t realise that I was more than just one of Dik’s London mates. Or perhaps I wasn’t. I felt myself sinking into a black hole that I hoped would suck me in and take me as far away from here as possible. I couldn’t believe he’d let me find out like this. What a coward. For the first time in years, I felt pure, unmitigated fury.

When we were, eventually, alone, the inevitable conversation ensued and I told him this news changed everything. There was a perverse logic operating in my head: even if a man has a girlfriend – or even several women on the go – he’s fair game, because you might turn out to be The One; but if he’s married, he’s spoken for. Therefore Dik would soon out of bounds. Finally, I had a cast-iron reason to end it.

NEXT WEEK: Girl-on-girl posing and high jinx with Mariella

He didn’t seem to want to let me go. Now that was plain greedy, but his neediness hooked into my own and kept us unhealthily involved. The confusion that resulted from this state of affairs sent me off into an emotional pinball game, ricocheting from party to bar, getting hideously drunk with record company pals at the trendy new Soho Brasserie and the Video Café and modelling rubberwear for new designers.

I decided through this haze of kamikaze behaviour that I really had to do something about Dik; I had to force the issue, one way or another. But, rather than admitting defeat, I upped the ante.

“Dik…”

“Yes bab…”

“Listen to me…”

“I’m listening…”

“Will you run away with me?” [Silence…] “I’m serious. I’d go anywhere with you…”

[Still silence, but a growing awareness of horror coming down the line from Birmingham.]

“Ummm… look, no, I can’t… sorry bab… you’re lovely, but…”

“OK, fine. I just needed to know. I’ll speak to you soon…”

Even though I knew he wouldn’t say yes (and I would probably have been horrified if he had), I was still left feeling as if I was wearing my skin inside out. I vowed to begin the long, slow process of letting go.

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Post-Live Aid, the big acts just got bigger and rarely did interviews. We might, after some heavy negotiating which usually involved the promise of a cover, get Annie Lennox, George Michael or Tears For Fears, but most of the stars didn’t trouble themselves with second-rung pop magazines such as rm. They might do one interview with the NME, one with The Face and another with Smash Hits, just to prove they understood the range of their audience, but if you weren’t a market leader you didn’t have a chance.

Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA had taken up residence in the charts thanks to the new Compact Disc format, as had anything by Phil Collins, Sting and U2, but we didn’t want to talk to them anyway. Madonna, whose star we had spotted rising in 1983, had gone stratospheric, selling more singles in 1985 than anyone else. But now she was a fully-fledged phenomenon and way out of our reach. So we were left with a reasonable slice of the Smiths, a lot of dance music (great but largely faceless) and plenty of up-and-coming combos, many of which turned out to be no-hopers. The acts that really sold records no longer appeared in rm. We were officially “alternative”.

The charts were not, however, entirely dominated by acts that had grown fat on their post-Live Aid success. Chrysalis had struck gold with a Twickenham twosome called Go West – aka Peter Cox and Richard Drummie. Their debut single, We Close Our Eyes, reached No 5 in the charts and their next two singles had performed well. I liked their high-octane, soulful synth-pop and particularly their image – all vests, muscles and general ruggedness.

It soon became an office joke that I fancied Richard Drummie, the dark-haired one, so it was cause for great amusement when I was booked to do a telephone interview with the band while they were on tour in America. However, on the day, it was frontman Peter who had been tasked with speaking to me. I soon began trading banter with the singer, who turned out to have a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour. He told me he was never that confident about anything, so we had a lot in common.

Come October, my friends in the press office at Chrysalis had persuaded me that it would be a good idea to go to Holland to interview Go West in person. I was transported to a studio somewhere in the Hague where the band were recording a video. I didn’t get to meet Pete and Richard properly until we were back at the band’s hotel in Doetinchem. When I did, it quickly became clear that I wouldn’t be able to joke about muscles and vests.

Rich was far more likely to go for it in any situation and adjust to the often ridiculous demands of being a pop star. Pete didn’t feel comfortable in this role and emerged as the eternal doubter who questioned everything, and thought a bit too much for his own good. He looked as if he’d rather be somewhere else half the time. However, they both had a robust sense of humour that had helped them through one hell of a year.

After a blinding start with We Close Our Eyes, Call Me and Goodbye Girl were unable to match its chart performance. The band were at a critical point in their career – approaching their first UK tour and that “difficult” second album – and I felt it was up to me to ask a few leading questions. The interview took place on a hotel bed – how very Paula Yates – but all my notions of objective reporting went out of the window when my eyes locked with Pete’s. I was thrown by the meaningful glances we were exchanging across the mattress.

“You don’t seem to have the killer instinct,” I lobbed.

“Absolutely not,” parried Pete. “In America, we constantly meet career-orientated people who are very conscious of where they are in their lives. I’m not like that.”

“So what are you doing this for, then?” I shot back.

“Because it’s fun, it’s really that simple,” he said, artfully dodging.

“You seem to have low self-esteem. You keep saying how terrible you look,” I ventured, rather unfairly.

“It’s not that,” countered Pete. “We just don’t want to blow our own trumpets.”

“But if you don’t, who else will?”

“If people like the records they’ll buy them. It’s a disposable, unimportant thing.”

“It’s not unimportant! Your records are really good!”

“Anyone who thinks they’re great is labouring under a misapprehension,” Pete continued. “Maybe one single is made every decade that could be said to have a major effect on people’s lives.”

“OK, you believe in what you’re doing but you don’t communicate it very well.”

“If people interpret the way we are as false modesty we’re on to a loser because I don’t want to be the kind of person who says we’ve made a fucking great album and everyone should go out and buy it.”

“So what’s the answer?” I asked.

“I think you have to be yourself while maintaining your sanity… Wearing a pink dress,” said Pete, finally showing some levity. “Wearing a pink dress and maintaining some kind of protective persona.”

The interview ended in the small hours of the next morning and I realised I’d been a lot more challenging than I would usually be in such a situation. I was testing the boundaries with Pete, seeing what he was made of. I wanted to find out what made him tick. I’d been flirty, sarcastic, cheeky – and sometimes borderline rude. Why was I doing this? Because I’d made an instant yet unfathomable connection with this man and didn’t have a clue what to do with it. I scuttled back to my hotel room in a state of shock and was still reeling when I flew back to London the next morning.

NEXT WEEK: East End boys and West End girls…

This news coincided with the sound of the British government’s propaganda machine grinding into action. Margaret Thatcher allocated £1million to advertise the dangers of unsafe sex of any description. So what would become of careless heterosexuals? Would this really become an epidemic? Were we being punished for our sins? It started to dawn on me that promiscuous people – ie, many musicians – might start dropping like flies.

Some, but by no means all of us, sobered up and kept our trousers on, just like the Tories wanted us to. The story was that the virus could have been transmiitted anything up to seven years previously (and at the time, I certainly didn’t know whether this was true or not). This meant that many people I knew in the music industry began looking back at their sexual histories with mounting terror. In the clubs of London, I started seeing more and more ashen faces, as people reflected grimly on the risks they had taken. It was a dark time.

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Simon Le Bon had a very different kind of risk on his mind. Fresh from his Live Aid triumph, he took on another personal challenge: taking part in the 600-mile Fastnet race. You’d have thought his brush with the briny while making videos for Rio and Wild Boys would’ve put him off – but no, Simon had always been a man to throw himself wholeheartedly into life. He joined a crew of 24 on Drum of England, a 77ft ocean racing yacht.

It was all going swimmingly until, three miles off Falmouth, the keel sheared off. Simon was asleep below deck and awoke to find the boat had capsized. He and four other crew members were trapped beneath the hull, waist-deep in oily water, for 40 minutes. They were rescued by a Royal Navy diver, who was blissfully unaware he was saving the life of Princess Diana’s favourite pop star.

I met up with Simon a month or so after his near-death experience and he was, indeed, a changed man. “When the helicopter dropped us off,” he told me, “the first thing I did was tread in a cowpat. It sounds so funny, but (a) I was relieved to be back on dry land, and (b) it was warm and squidged up through my toes and it was so fucking freezing, it felt so good. I’ll never quite be able to explain the joy of that cowpat.”

He explained to me that he did, at one point, really think he was going to die. “I asked myself, ‘Is this it? Is this what death is going to be like?’ I thought, ‘God, I’m too young, I’m 26 and my girlfriend will kill me.’ I laughed at myself for thinking that. Then I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to die, it’s not my time, mate.’ It was so close to tragedy. Everything was lucky – when and where it happened, everything. Ten hours later, at night, in the pitch black – we wouldn’t have seen how to get out.”

You’d have thought being the singer in one of the world’s biggest pop groups would have satisfied Simon’s craving for excitement. What was it with him and fast boats? “On a big boat, with a large crew, they don’t treat me like a pop star,” he explained. “When I sail, I’m able to concentrate on a simple but important job. When I nearly drowned, I came back thinking, ‘I love pop music, but man, I know what life’s about!’. More than anything I learned about the will to survive and the physical strength required for it.”

This led to another of our occasional conversations about the esoteric arts. When Simon and I met, we often swapped notes about interesting books we had read and spiritual disciplines we had explored. Today we discussed the merits of the Tarot, Rosicrucianism, palmistry and the Moonies. As you do with someone who nearly died.

“Have you read the Koran?” he asked, in all seriousness. “I’m going to read that next. It’s probably very heavy-going and I think I’m going to find a lot of it quite objectionable.”

Good old Simes, he was never afraid to show the gaps in his knowledge.

“You get so far and you think, ‘What is the bloody meaning of life?’ It’s such an incredible cliché. What is it, Betty?”

I couldn’t help him there, apart from to witter on about life being a journey, so the conversation inevitably turned to Live Aid. How was it for him?

“To actually make the effort of feeding those people, that was the best thing of all. For young people to feel they could do what needs doing, not sit down and bloody talk about it. I think we have a duty to keep it going now, but not to have another Live Aid show, not to come up with another bloody record, ’cos it would become another charitable thing and that’s something Bob made a very important deal out of. This isn’t charity – a whole nation is being wiped out and it shouldn’t happen.”

Simon was fulsome in his praise for Geldof. “I’m proud to have worked with him. All credit is due to him, nobody else could have done it. He’s totally honest, blatantly uncompromising. He has a lot of friends, people who’d stick up for him, and that’s why they did it.”

Simon had seen, through Live Aid and the Drum incident, that he must have a life beyond pop music, even though he was still a young man.

“How old are you?” he asked me, suddenly.

“Older than you,” I countered.

“I bet you’re not. I’m 26,” he teased.

“I’m 28,” I admitted.

“Are you? You don’t look it,” he said.

“Good. You don’t look 26,” I replied, honestly.

“Thanks. OK. We must meet again. I’ll need this in six months’ time.”

So would I.

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September 1985 was a big month for Record Mirror. We had already anticipated the need to change direction in a post-Live Aid world to a less mainstream-poppy, more considered read, so we redesigned and repositioned the magazine accordingly, renaming the magazine “rm”, a pared-down and suitably meaningless sobriquet that was an attempt to cast off the “pop parade” connotations of a title that had been around since the 1950s.

Our poster boy was to be Steven Patrick Morrissey: his band, the Smiths, had been judged by students and music journalists alike to be the best band in the world, a view I did not entirely share. I thought they’d written some great songs but the insight I’d been given, via our mutual friend Gill Smith, into the man they called Mozza, made it hard for me to see him as a hero. To me, he appeared to be a needy, manipulative, emotionally challenged man.

On the few occasions that we met, he was understandably wary of me, suspecting that Gill might have told me more about him than he would have liked me to know (but she was loyal and circumspect). He had control of his image and fans and writers hung on his every word. But he didn’t fool me. I knew how selfish and impossible he could be. And when I looked at him, he knew I could see straight through the façade.

“People seem to treat me in a very awkward manner,” he complained to rm. “I find that almost nobody is ever familiar with me. Nobody slaps me on the back or is willing to drop their defences in front of me.”

‘No, they don’t, because you make it so difficult with your defensive attitude and lack of social skills,’ I thought to myself as I read the interview.

He continued: “A lot of people do seem to feel that I live on the emotional edge and I’m very precious and can only be touched with velvet gloves.”

Well, Mozza, your preciousness is an affectation you have cultivated at every turn. In my admittedly limited experience, Morrissey was rude and awkward, but because my best friend was one of his close circle, I agreed never to interview him or write about him. The trouble was, I was one of the few music journalists never to have written about the Smiths in the glowing terms his vanity demanded, so he didn’t trust me not to knife him in the back.

One particularly excruciating example of his behaviour was demonstrated on the night Gill took the God of Miserablism to a Marc Almond gig, at his request. I went along with Gill to meet him at his mansion-block apartment in Kensington and was ushered into a downstairs hallway. Gill was invited upstairs to his inner sanctum while I was left to stew in the vestibule, feeling like an idiot and gazing at the many photographs of himself he had adorning the walls.

I was made to wait, like a servant, until His Mozzesty was ready to depart. Gill was visibly embarrassed but couldn’t say anything in the boss’s presence. I seethed quietly and inwardly. Things didn’t improve much at the gig. He sat in between us like an overgrown schoolboy on a day trip, studiously ignoring me and whispering conspiratorially into Gill’s ear between songs.

He was demonstrating his monopoly of our mutual friend’s attention. Even at the after-show party, he barely said a word to me – only a few wry comments and suspicious glances, but none of his famous bon mots. Thank God Marc was there to break the ice. Still, I thought, if being polite and charming to Morrissey’s face ensured his continued support of my magazine, then it was worth the sacrifice.

NEXT WEEK: Don’t make me Go West…

It nearly didn’t happen, because the promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, thought it couldn’t be done in the time available – just ten weeks. But Bob was a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer. His efforts had already inspired Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie to write We Are the World for USA for Africa (the American version of Band Aid). Perhaps that’s what gave Geldof the balls to organise the biggest gig of all time.

Logistically, it was a mind-numbing undertaking, relying on armies of people to give their time and skills for nothing. Veterans of the music industry waited with interest to see if – and how – he could pull it off.

And so, picture the scene. It’s Saturday 13 July, 1985: a blisteringly hot day. Wembley Stadium: 72,000 people. Live Aid was underway and Betty Page (now deputy editor of Record Mirror) wasn’t there. Why? Because, in the run-up, I had been consumed by cynicism and sent another staffer to cover it.

As soon as I sat in front of the TV to watch the global jukebox – the only way to make sure I didn’t miss a trick – I began to feel one step removed from the excitement of the day. No privileged backstage access for me – I was reduced to the level of a fan. The ignominy! I should have been there, been a part it all – these were my people, my peers, making history – but here I was, back in my parents’ house in the London suburbs, watching it on TV with my teenage brother.

“This is how it must have felt at Woodstock,” I mused, wishing I was that sweat-drenched girl in the front row. To try and make amends, I vowed to watch the entire broadcast from London beginning to Philadelphia end, forcing donations from every member of my family.

I’ll never forget that initial aerial shot of Wembley Stadium as we waited for the midday kick-off. No one who considered themselves to be cool could admit to liking Status Quo any more (that was so 1973), but when they struck up the chords to Rockin’ All Over the World they were Our Boys playing the Greatest Tune of All Time.

My usual critical faculties were suspended as act after act emerged blinking into the sunshine to play on the biggest stage of their lives – the Style Council, Boomtown Rats, Adam Ant – all brilliant for 15 minutes; Ultravox, Spandau Ballet – praying they’d fill that stage and not panic; Elvis Costello, Nik Kershaw, Sade, Sting and Phil Collins, Howard Jones, Bryan Ferry, Paul Young and Alison Moyet, and then, U2.

It’s strange to watch what you recognise as a pivotal moment on a momentous day. U2 made Live Aid their showcase. Brimming with intensity and commitment, Bono forged the group’s reputation as the one of the best stadium rock bands in the world. Queen merely underlined their pre-eminence in the field; Freddie Mercury’s larger than life performance remains unsurpassed.

I guess it was seeing the Who (minus the late Keith Moon, of course), reunited for the first time in years (“like getting one man’s four ex-wives together,” as Geldof described it), that made me realise just how much Geldof had achieved. He was the unstoppable force who had pulled this whole thing together; no one else could have achieved it – Live Aid was his destiny. One man can make a difference in the world. One woman sitting in a house in south-east London could only give that man money, and she did.

I wish I could say that Live Aid was a life-changing experience for me, but it wasn’t. I was a spectator, not a participant. I wish I could have been my opposite number on a rival pop magazine, who shadowed Geldof in the days leading up to the gig, watching him pull a million strands together but still having time to watch a persistent videomaker’s tape. It would end up being the defining image of the day: the footage of starving children in Ethiopia with The Cars’ Drive as a soundtrack. They both watched, open-mouthed, until Geldof said it was OK to cry. And then David Bowie insisted that the video should be shown to the crowd, in place of one of his greatest hits.

Still, I made the most of it, being as involved as I could through the medium of television, shouting with encouragement at the screen when Geldof, exhausted and in despair because he thought the donations weren’t coming in, screamed, “Just give us the money”; cheering as Phil Collins was whisked off to Heathrow to board Concorde for his second set in Philadelphia; thinking, “Those are my boys!” as first the Power Station, then Duran Duran funked for America at the height of their powers.

“Remember,” said Geldof later, “on that day, for once in our bloody lives, we won.” My team had triumphed and I should have been cheering them on. Instead I was left with images of royalty – Charles and Diana with King Bob and Queen Paula. I’d never been so jealous of the woman, and her man was about to become a saint.

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A slight compensation for my absence from The Greatest Gig of All Time was the fact that I helped to rush out a special edition of Record Mirror with Live Aid on the cover, which came out on the Monday (they said it couldn’t be done, but it was).

British audiences had answered Geldof’s impassioned plea to the tune of £60 million, but there was also a considerable knock-on effect in another direction. Live Aid filled the pockets of the artists who had most impressed on the day: U2 (whose LP sales quadrupled), Queen (whose Greatest Hits album went ballistic), Madonna, Dire Straits and Phil Collins. The Cars donated all post-Live Aid royalties from their single Drive; but other record companies were not so generous. Many of us thought that stank. After all Geldof had done, there they were profiting from his efforts. I was incandescent with self-righteous rage.

“The whole bloody world came together for a higher cause and the record companies are tainting it with their capitalist greed!” I shrieked in the office.

Even the proceeds from Bowie and Jagger’s specially recorded version of Dancing in the Street were not wholly donated to the Band Aid Trust. So much for artists using their power to effect change. It was back to the same old money-making games within days. I was sickened when I found out that Queen had gone to play in South Africa and outraged when I heard that Duran Duran had been offered £1 million to play one concert. Call me naïve, but I really was disillusioned. Wasn’t this supposed to be the New Age of Worthiness?

Postscript: Last year, I conquered my cynicism (again) and went to see the Live Aid musical in London. It was surprisingly well done, the singers were fantastic, and I experienced that feeling of pride all over again that my peers had raised so much money for Ethopia. Yes, I know that there were subsequently a lot of problems with where the money went, and then there was the whole “white saviour” problem, not to mention the questionable nature of some of the lyrics of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, but that aside, I’m glad I was alive to see it happen, even though it was only on the gogglebox.

NEXT WEEK: The life-affirming joy of cowpats…