The House of Rumour (9 page)

But Black Freighter didn’t last very long, did it?

No. Jenny always wanted to be experimental. Danny, well, he had his eye on the main chance. Who can blame him?

So was it musical differences that split the band up?

That old cliché. No, it wasn’t that. Jenny and Danny carried on writing together even after the band fell apart. That bit always worked, you know, his music, her lyrics. No, it was in the attitude that they parted company.

The attitude? Annie asks. She has thick, dark eyebrows that intersect in this fantastic frown. And you wonder about her attitude. She’s intrigued by you, you can feel it. But maybe she suspects something.

Yeah, the attitude, you repeat. Jenny was more into a sort of performance art aesthetic. She became part of the gender-bender scene, except she took it one step further. Boy George and Marilyn had this simple gestalt, you know, boy looks like girl. Jenny liked to dress so that no one could tell if she was a boyish girl or a girlish boy. She wanted to keep them guessing. The pirate has no boundaries, she used to say.

That’s cool.

You look straight into her turquoise eyes and watch the inky pupils dilate. You search for some sort of signal from her. Like a lovelorn teenager. But then you are a late starter. You’ve had a sort of second adolescence in your thirties. At an age when most people are ready for a mid-life crisis, you’re still stuck in puberty.

Tell me about that time, she says, holding your stare.

Why are you interested in this stuff?

Well, it’s fascinating, I guess.

And it strikes you that maybe she thinks you’re gay. It’s a common enough mistake: people see the goatee, check the slightly fey demeanour. Maybe her interest in you is just a faghag thing.

Yeah, well, Jenny could get extreme about gender politics but she was an idealist really. She dreamt of a world where none of it would matter. She spent a lot of time in the clubs, you know, Billy’s and the Blitz. The beginning of that New Romantic thing was fabulous.

And that’s when she ended up in the David Bowie video?

You laugh out loud.

What? she demands.

And you love the way she can smile and frown at the same time. And you want to tell her everything.

Look, Anna, you say. About gender politics.

You stop. You feel that you’re about to make a complete fool of yourself. You know you’ve got to be careful. If she finds out too early it could blow everything. You stand up.

What is it?

You want to say, but you’re not ready yet.

I’ve got to go, you tell her.

Johnny, whatever’s the matter?

You start walking and she follows you out of the bar. Outside on the street you turn to her.

Look, this is really stupid. I know you’re only really interested in Jenny but—

But what?

I’m interested in you, Anna.

She smiles.

Well, the feeling’s mutual.

Yeah? You can hardly believe it.

Yeah.

And she kisses you gently on the lips. You get all excited but you know you’ve got to take your time over this.

Then meet me here tomorrow night, you tell her. And I’ll tell you the story about the David Bowie video.

The next night you pick up where you’d left off.

It was a complete disaster, you say.

What happened?

Bowie had come down to Blitz one night, unannounced. Can you imagine? There was an uproar. Every single person in that club would have had his poster on their bedroom wall as a kid. He’d been sneaked in around the back and was upstairs in a private room. Everyone wanted to go up and see him. Especially when word got round that he was looking for people to appear in his next video. Jenny was in with Steve Strange, you know, who ran Blitz. He’d already been picked, so she managed to blag her way in. It had been decided that the costumes should be space-age ecclesiastical: dark flowing robes and gothic headgear. Jenny got into a conversation about Gnosticism with Bowie. She told him how she knew that his song ‘Station to Station’ was about the Kabbalah, and mentioned some other occult influences in his work, the Crowley references and so on. He was impressed, if a little wary. She got chosen to be in the video.

The pick-up was for six o’clock the following morning outside the Park Lane Hilton. The club didn’t close till two-thirty so Jenny just took a bit more speed and kept going until dawn. So, she was a bit wired when the coach turned up to take them to the location, which was on a beach in Southend. Bowie was in a pierrot costume, walking along the shoreline, followed by Steve Strange, Jenny, and two other girls in their robes with a bulldozer coming up in the rear. It was a simple enough set-up but it needed to be precise so people had to concentrate and follow their marks. Jenny was very talkative, from the excitement, the lack of sleep, the amphetamines, and, well, she was going a little bit mad. At first she was charming, you know, raising the energy of the shoot. Clever, too, she talked about the costumes and their meanings. She started to bang on about archetypes, saying Bowie was the Fool in his jester’s motley and she was the Female Pope in her ceremonial gown.

She soon began to get tiresome. In between takes she insisted on engaging Bowie in an intense conversation that he clearly wasn’t keen on. Jenny had no idea how annoying her behaviour was becoming. The final straw was talking to Bowie about the notorious incident at Victoria Station in 1976, when it was alleged that he had made a Nazi salute. Well, he certainly didn’t want to be reminded of that. But in some mad way Jenny thought she was reassuring him, like she was doing him a favour by bringing it up. She announced rather grandly to him that she knew that it hadn’t been a fascist gesture he was making, that it was the sign of Baphomet.

The sign of Baphomet?

Yeah, it’s some hermetic thing. You raise your hand towards heaven, then you lower it to point to the earth. It’s supposed to connect the two. It means: as above, so below, or something like that. From Kether to Malkuth, she kept chanting. There she was, manically demonstrating this sacred
sieg heil
to David Bowie on a beach in Southend. Well, that was it. She was hustled off the set and paid off with the fifty-pound fee. She never actually appeared in the video, though her memory distorts on that one. She was convinced it was her up there, and when ‘Ashes to Ashes’ came out, she even told everyone she had helped with the choreography. There’s this bit where Steve Strange lifts his arm and makes this bowing movement. But it isn’t the sign of Baphomet. He’s moving the hem of his robe so it doesn’t get caught in the shovel of the bulldozer.

She smiles. You check out how she looks at you. That flicker in her eyes. You’re sure now that she really does find you attractive. You do look good, after all. Pretty more than handsome, but that’s probably what she’s into. It’s just your confidence that’s the problem.

After that Jenny started acting really weird, you say.

What happened? she asks.

She started wandering around in a trance in her high-priestess drag. Taking too much speed, not sleeping, making scenes.

And it all catches up with you for a second.

It was, you give a little shrug as if trying to shake something off. Embarrassing.

You notice that Anna Guttridge has this look of concern on her face. You know, you can play this for sympathy but you can’t help but feel a kind of guilt. Which is stupid.

I tried to talk to her, you say. I tried to get her to calm down, but she wouldn’t listen to me, not back then.

And the voice in your head adds: oh, but she listened to you in the end, didn’t she, Johnny boy?

She told people that she’d been consecrated in a Gnostic Mass, performed by the Holy Fool before a juggernaut god. She declared that she was the Female Pope, come to save humanity.

What’s with this Female Pope?

Well, you know, there was supposed to be a woman pope. Sometime in the eleventh century. Pope Joan.

Wow.

Yeah. And you can imagine how Jenny loved that idea. She came up with this mad belief system of her own. She called it matrianarchy. It was all about the reversal of power. The Female Pope was like a direct assault on patriarchy, attacking it at its highest point. The world had to be turned upside down, she insisted, then we’d have utopia.

Sounds interesting.

And suddenly you feel angry. At Jenny. At yourself.

Oh, yes, it was interesting. There is a catch in your voice. It was interesting when she was picked up babbling incoherently to the ducks in Regent’s Park at four o’clock in the morning. It was interesting when I found her in a pool of her own vomit after she’d OD’ed in the squat.

Another pause.

It must have been hard for you.

Yeah.

And you realise now how much grief you still feel about Jenny. It was so clear at the time. Rational. You want to explain to Anna how it all made perfect sense. That after Jenny’s last suicide attempt failed she asked for your help. And you promised that you would help her do it properly. But you can’t tell Anna that. Not yet.

You were close to her? she asks you.

Yeah, you say with a smile, trying to make sense of the idea. But she was far away from me.

How do you mean?

I was always somewhere in the background. Her shadow, if you like.

And what is it like now?

What?

Now that she’s, you know—

Officially missing?

Yeah.

Well, Jenny never did anything completely officially. Not even her disappearing act.

Were you jealous of her?

Oh no. If anything it was the other way round.

You hope that Anna will be able to understand what happened. You need a bit of time to unravel it all for her. To unroll the scroll. You decide to tell her about Danny. Everybody wants to know about Danny Osiris.

It was Danny who helped her through the worst of those bad times, you say. He’d got himself a manager and a solo record contract. All that street credibility and bohemian chaos had never really appealed to him. He’d seen enough squalor as a kid. He wanted real success. And he knew that he needed Jenny to help him get there. They spent the first winter of the new decade writing what would become the
Up Above, Down Below
album. Musically, Danny knew exactly what he was doing; I mean, the album sounds pretty middle of the road now but it was so, I don’t know, calculated. It’s the lyrics that make it special. They have a deep romantic melancholia that was way beyond him. And there’s a tone and vibration in his voice that he got from her. Before that it was all technique. She taught him how to sing like a man, the real sadness of that sound. He got something else as well. It’s hard to explain in any terms other than the metaphysical. This will sound slightly ridiculous.

Try me.

Danny needed someone to sell his soul to. See? I told you. When I say this, people think that I mean selling out, but that never bothered him. Danny was clever enough to know that there was going to be two types of eighties – you know, the squats, the riots, the warehouse parties, and then the yuppies, the big bang and selling off the family silver. And he was sharp enough to know it was going to be a one-horse race. He knew all about compromise, but this was more than that. It was an energy he needed. A magical energy.

He believed in magic?

Oh, they both did. Jenny always said she merely respected the Western esoteric tradition but there was plenty of ritual and hocus-pocus with those two. I mean, pop music is so tricky, so seemingly insubstantial. A good recording session is always a bit like a seance,  you’re channelling something. And when it works it’s like casting a spell. Danny definitely needed Jenny’s energy. I mean, he was having his own problems with identity.

Really?

I suppose you want to know all about that.

No. Not really.

Oh, come on. The enigmatic Danny Osiris. The press are always speculating, you know: is he or isn’t he?

I’m not really interested in that, honestly.

Well, most people are. Of course Danny knew, when he became a big star, especially when he moved to LA, that the important thing was to keep a sense of mystique. America is essentially a puritan nation. Besides, the great artist who’s a little bit repressed, that’s always going to be more interesting than someone who’s completely open about themselves. It’s all about dreams, isn’t it? Hidden desires. Jenny always wanted more than that.

And what did happen to Jenny?

Oh, well, that is a mystery. But anyway, most people want to know about Danny. He’s the one that became the superstar, after all.

I’m more interested in Jenny.

Well, they parted company, her and Danny. Sometime in the mid-1980s. On Tottenham Court Road, as it happened. They were both walking past that Church of Scientology place, you know, where those disciples hustle outside and try to get you to go in for a free personality test. Well, they both went in. Just a laugh. Or so Jenny thought. Turns out Danny took their bullshit seriously. Signed up on the spot.