Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (7 page)

They were to the early ’80s what girl groups like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, and the Chiffons were to the early ’60s: queen pimps of teen bathos, pumping up the drums and the mascara to cosmic levels. All these nobodies teased up their hair to fire-hazard levels and dolled themselves up into glitter-encrusted sex cookies. At the touch of a synth button, they turned into the things that dreams were made of.

The concept was New Romantic, which was a slippery term, since nobody ever admitted to being one. Even Duran Duran, who called themselves “New Romantics” in the first verse of their first single, didn’t want to get stuck with a label this silly. New Romantic songs are questing through the world or elsewhere in search of pleasure and danger and beauty. No New Romantic songs were about sitting in your room and staring at the wallpaper, even though (as far as I could tell) that’s probably how most New Romantic followers spent their time.

The New Romantics were a lot like the Old Romantics, the poets I was crazy about in high school—Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Blake—and none of those dead guys ever called themselves “Romantics” either. (Romanticism, like rockabilly or film noir, was a genre that only got its name after it was over.) John Keats declared, “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.” Boy George sang about a “karma chameleon.” Boy George and John Keats would have had a lot to say to each other—they were both poor London boys who dreamed up an extravagant mythology of transforming the world by transforming yourself. It was a sect where you had to commit to constant personal self-reinvention. That oldest of Romantics, William Blake, declared, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” And the New Romantics were most certainly tygers of wrath. They also obviously had a lot more fun than the Romantic poets, whose favorite recreational pastimes seemed to consist of catching tuberculosis, groping leech-gatherers and planting a deceased lover’s head in a pot of basil.

The Human League were the ultimate New Romantics, at least in terms of how we heard them in America, and they won everyone over, crossing over to the pop charts in that incredibly pivotal year of 1982, the year of
Thriller
and
1999
and “Super Freak” and “I Love Rock N’ Roll” and “I’m So Excited” and “Sexual Healing.” Kiss-108, the disco station, was playing Yaz and the Human League; WCBN, the rock station, was playing Grandmaster Flash and Michael Jackson. The Human League fit right in to a world where the most exciting and adventurous music on the planet seemed to be exactly what was exploding on Top 40 radio. Yet they didn’t lose their New Romantic cred by crossing over—quite the contrary. Their success validated the whole New Romantic credo.

The New Romantic anthem I studied most intently was “Love Action,” where Phil sings, “This is Phil talking! I want to tell you what I’ve found out to be true!” I have to admit, I have loved the Human League passionately for years, and I have never totally figured out what Phil Oakey has found out to be true. But I’ve never stopped delving into the mystery.

 

I would have loved to have gone to the clubs that Phil was singing about, but I was in Milton, Massachusetts, and the only fan here was me. (Were there other Human League fans in town? How would I know? We weren’t an outgoing bunch.)

I mean, it’s one thing to decide you’re Phil Oakey if you are Phil Oakey and you have that slide of hair down the side and the eyeliner. But it’s pretty silly deciding you’re a New Romantic when you’re stranded in the suburbs mowing lawns, playing video games, translating Virgil and just in general being a miserable little teenage fuck. At a thrift store in Saugus, I paid six dollars for a jacket that I hoped looked like the one Phil Oakey wears in the “Love Action” video, but when I got it home, it looked suspiciously like a shoulder-pad maitre d’ jacket left in the Dumpster behind Mr. Tux. I’m sure the collar was real velvet, though. (Pretty sure. Velvet’s fuzzy, right?)

Wearing this jacket to play Asteroids at the South Shore Plaza did not make me feel like a glamorous man of the world. It made me feel somewhat of a tool. But then, Phil had warned me that suffering was part of this path. And I knew ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

My sisters took me shopping and I came home with pants with pleats, which ended badly. (I blame a certain Scritti Politti video. What can I say? I was more into fashion theory than practice.) Although I worshipped Bowie, Roxy and the dashing New Romantics they left behind in their wake like so many droplets of champagne-flavored sweat, and studied their sartorial elegance, I was doomed to dress more like the harmonica player for the J. Geils Band. But I had the devotion, which was much more important than a genuine wedge haircut.

If I
had
wanted a wedge haircut, I have no idea how I’d have gotten one. Like everyone else in town, I went to the only barber around, Singin’ Jack in East Milton Square. Jack gave everyone the same haircut, while singing along with the radio’s Continuous Lite Favorites. He was particularly into Jim Croce, and you were lucky to show up for your haircut on a Croce day, because you would get to hear him sing “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song” as he snipped. (Kenny Rogers days were unlucky, and if Jack was singing “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” it was best to sneak out before you ended up with a whiffle.) Since Jack was erratic at best, it would be foolhardy to ask him to try anything sideways, or to bring in a
Dare
tape for inspiration.

It didn’t matter. New wave wasn’t really about the right look; it was a state of mind. Still, shame about those pleats.

Something about this style of pop lent itself to devotion from shut-ins, losers, social twitchers like me. The electro bleeps were whispers from the wider world outside, beckoning us out, like the lights flickering from the stereo. I would watch the red vertical flickers of the EQ and imagine they were skyscrapers of a city just outside my window, a city full of the kind of clubs where the clubsters were getting around town in the sort of clubs Phil Oakey would sing about, and occasionally recruit girl singers from, and dance freely without worrying about startling the nice old lady next door. It was a club you could join just by believing it existed.

In any new-wave fan mag, you could find the lonely-hearts pen-pal section. From the
Smash Hits
from February 1983, which I’ve always kept because it had Kajagoogoo on the cover:

Still using CB radio in 1983? Poor guy. But these were the fans that flocked to the League. These were my people.

With new wave for inspiration, I took to the stage, playing Duncan in the tenth grade production of
Macbeth
. (If you’re not familiar with the play, Macbeth kills Duncan to possess his donuts. He ends up having to kill Banquo for a coffee.) The kid who played Macbeth was the son of Franklin Cover, the late great TV actor who played Tom Willis on
The Jeffersons
, so I can look back on my acting career secure in the knowledge that Tom Willis has seen my Duncan.

“Don’t You Want Me” was the huge hit, a song that brought in the rock crowd, the gold-chained disco crowd, the Top 40 stations, everybody. It was massively influential on the club music that went on to dominate the decade. (Madonna’s first hit, “Burning Up,” nicked the drum track from the League’s “The Sound of the Crowd.”) Afrika Bambaataa once said, “I remember when we all heard ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ and people would say, ‘That’s all synthesizers, that’s a drum machine,’ and we’d say, ‘It can’t be, those sound like real drums.’ ”

They’d started out as all-male arty techno introverts from the northern steeltown Sheffield, which was full of great (and mostly incredibly solemn) synth groups, as chronicled in the fantastic documentary
Made in Sheffield
. They began their climb with “Being Boiled,” an art-twaddle track that began with the lines “Listen to the voice of Buddha / Saying stop your sericulture,” and then proceeded to get silly. (In case you’re wondering, “sericulture” means farming silk from worms and has nothing to do with Buddha.) But the silliness was lovable—they were all too human, this League.

The inspiring thing about
Dare
was the emotional journey behind it, the fact that they got there after starting out with “Being Boiled.” They began as an art band for boys, and then became a pop group for girls. If these guys could go from being dour, introspective twits who not only met girls but had girls
in the group
, well, there was hope for all of us, right?

Why did they let the girls sing in the first place? When I interviewed Phil Oakey a few years ago, he told me, “We’d made two LPs as a male-only group. But two of the guys left and we had to do a tour, so we went out and recruited a couple of women. And then we had to give them something to do, really.” After the other guys in the group left to form Heaven 17, Phil was out at a local club, the excellently named Crazy Daisy Disco, and picked up a couple of girls. They crossed the line from fans to starlets. As one of those girls, Suzanne, put it in 1981, “He wanted a tall black singer and he got two short white girls who couldn’t sing.”

But they had personality, the totally ordinary charm that put the human in the league. Together they bumbled into pop stardom, without paying any dues. In the U.K., the band was thoughtful enough to release their singles with color codes on the label; the red ones were for “poseurs” and the blue ones for “ABBA fans,” but anyone who liked the League could be both a poseur and an ABBA fan.

I guess the League fascinated me because they truly embodied the anyone-can-do-it spirit of this music—in fact, the hardly-anyone-
can’t
-do-it spirit. Phil cheerfully admitted to the fan mags that he only started singing in the first place because he failed at playing the synthesizer. At a time when guitar bands complained that keyboard geeks were too lazy to learn a real instrument, Phil Oakey had the gall to announce he found synths just
too hard to play.

Oh, how I pondered the Phil Oakey perspective on life. The hours I spent poring over the lyrics, wondering how he did what he did. He seemed to have provocative ideas about love and religion. “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of ” articulated his worldview: “Everybody needs love and adventure / Everybody needs two or three friends.”

From the sounds of this album, Phil Oakey spent most of his evenings in glitzy clubs arguing with girls about philosophy. Life was a battle of Good Times versus Hard Times, every man for himself, God against all. He sang like a Sinatra-style cocktail crooner, sharing some of the hard truths he’d learned along the way, alluding to broken marriages and dashed dreams. “I’ve lain awake and cried at night over what love made me do,” he sang, and I couldn’t help but be jealous, less for the love part than the glamour of having tragic love affairs to look back upon with rue.

I yearned to cultivate decadence, without the hard work of actually doing anything decadent. The seductivosity of this music went without saying. Phil Oakey was a sensuous man, and took his stand as such. Indeed, he came on like an even more pretentious Barry White (his next project after
Dare
was a remix album under the name of the League Unlimited Orchestra) and, supposedly, putting on “Open Your Heart” in the right bedroom would lead to existential crises with sexual resolutions. In the “Love Action” video, Phil gets taken hostage by agents who strap him to a chair and interrogate him. They apparently represent the pro-hate faction. But Phil defiantly tells them, “No matter what you put me through, I’ll still believe in love,” a very Morrissey thing to say, although not even Morrissey would have the gall to put it this way. And like Morrissey, Phil specialized in feeding me ludicrously unusable advice about how to conduct an adult emotional life. For him, being a New Romantic was more than a fashion fad—it was a code of honor, an ethic.

My fantasy life, warped completely by the Human League, began to resemble a Human League song. I would judge everything by whether it was new wave or not. I related to Johnny Slash on the show
Square Pegs
; any time one of the other kids would call him punk, Johnny would pull his shades down and say, “Not punk, new wave. Totally different head, man! Totally different head!” Or as John Keats would say, “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.”

1982

 

 

 

 

Spain was where I learned to dance with girls. Not dance with a girl, but in a gang of girls. This was a discovery that shook my foundations. I was used to school dances, where the boys stood on one side, the girls on the other, and you awkwardly asked a girl to dance. Maybe. But just going out on the floor with a bunch of girls and dancing? You could do this? It was like I’d discovered some secret crack in the fabric of the universe, something not just new but previously unthinkable. It was like I found the Shroud of Turin in my sock drawer.

I spent the summer of ’82 in a student exchange program at Colegio Estudio, a school in Madrid. The Spanish girls were all groovy. They all listened to Simon & Garfunkel, who they called “See-MOAN y Gar-FOON-kel.” They all listened to “techno-pop,” music that in my country only weirdos liked. They wore
minifaldas
on hot days. They had very strong feelings about the evils of the Catholic Church, unless they actually had Catholic mothers, in which case I wasn’t allowed near them in the first place. I fell in love with every single one of them.