Friday, May 18, 2012

1978: Your fantasy


While we were having our extension built, this was a minor hit. But it caught my imagination.

As the plaster dried to a darkish grey colour, I'd slink into the upstairs room that was to be my extended bedroom and imagine I was some sort of rock sex god, throwing myself against the walls in an suggestive, yearning fashion, rolling around to sing this song - to me the very pinnacle of eroticism in music - into the camera in my imaginary head-to-toe leather gear like I was indeed the lead singer of Exile.

I was 13. I was wearing turquoise polo neck knitted by Auntie Maggie and ghaslty too long for me wildly flared denims my dad had got wholesale from a discount warehouse somewhere in Somerset. But you have to fill your pockets with dreams, right?

I'm not sure I really heard it again until 1998, when I was the passenger of an ancient chain-smoking Granada TV on-set photographer zipping across the M62 from Coronation Street, where I'd had a 15-minute window to present the similarly chain-smoking Anne Kirkbride with a magazine award (amazing legs), to Emmerdale, where I was to do a similar thing with some other cast members I cannot now recall. Lisa Riley and Claire King may well have been involved.

It all came flooding back. I died a little inside and took another cigarette. I've since discovered Serge Gainsbourg.





5 comments:

  1. This is a Chinn/Chapman composition, isn't it? That always surprises me when I hear it; it's totally unlike anything else they wrote.

    The lead singer has a gruff, masculine voice but when you see him in 1977, he looks like a woman. And not even in a satirical weary dad-like "can't tell if it's a man or woman!" kind of way, but an actual woman.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've always had an embarrassing soft spot for this song. However the vision of the 13 year old you rolling around the walls to it in an erotic fashion just might have cured that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What have I done! I've ruined one of your favourite songs.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm sure I'll cope. It would be worse if I started liking Joy Sarney.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I cannot stop laughing at that image. One of the funniest things I have ever read...oh dear me...

    ReplyDelete