The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,23
was never that musical, you see. But she was full of ideas and she wrote fantastic lyrics. The idea was to be adventurous without being self-indulgent. They were plugged into that post-punk, year-zero feel.
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.