by Jake Shears
To see the album lying out on the table was surreal. An array of different people passed in front of us, clutching the CD to their chests, passing them toward us, nervously telling us their names. They turned from us grinning, walking away with a little piece of us in their hands.
If there was a panning shot down the table, from left to right, you would have seen the band in our elevated looks, our glam drag. I found myself now to be dressing up for all occasions. There was no such thing as casual anymore. Johnny Blue Eyes, our wardrobe guy, would hold an item of clothing in front of him, close one eye as if framing it on us. “Darling, you must understand,” he’d say, his voice honey-laden, “you are now giving people a glimmer of fantasy every time they see you. Just a dollop of fabulousness, eh?” He’d tilt his head. “You now have the responsibility to brighten people’s day. How magical is that?”
I think I was wearing a leather shrug, without a shirt no less, and a dead pink ferret or some such thing sewn on my shoulder, like half a boa, with black leather pants and a huge elaborate belt buckle, topped off by a fedora, and pointy black boots with a Cuban heel. I now felt like some heightened version of myself in these public scenarios. We had hooked up with a designer named Fee Jones; she’d started making clothes and styling for us and was letting loose on the whole band. We dressed like fun elderly people who had collided with a taxidermy shop.
“I just fucking love you.” An unadorned teenage girl with plain, straight hair held forth a CD for me to sign. “My mum and I have been waiting for it to come out. Feels like forever.”
“What’s your name?”
“Evelyn,” she said. “Linda,” the next one. “Joe, and this is my friend Elsie, we drove from Nottingham.” And so it went.
I looked into their eyes and wondered what they were seeing. I smiled at every person and shook their hand, tried to take a picture with them if possible, told them thank you for buying the record and for coming to see us. Scott, Patrick, and Derek were quieter. But Ana had a special way of making the fans feel like we were all just friends, normal people—albeit ones who dressed like bedraggled, world-weary pensioners turned club kids twenty-four hours a day.
The switch to this other life was drastic. Polydor placed the whole band in a fancy three-bedroom house in the posh Marylebone area. We were literally living together now in the heart of London. It must have cost the label a ton of money, but it was convenient for them to have us in one spot when they needed us to do promo, video, and photo shoots, which were happening now all day, every day. Our mood was jovial: Everyone was getting along, still enjoying the exotic pleasures of our new life. I was sharing a room with Derek, but managed to have enough privacy to jerk off at least every other day. All I had was just a centerfold of a shirtless tattooed porn star named Johnny Hazzard.
There was a scene happening around us—or maybe we were the scene. Two nights before, we had thrown a party in the flat. Our front door opened and in had poured a herd of eccentrics that rivaled any flashy night out in New York. Erol Alkan from Trash, Lady Bunny, Princess Julia, Tasty Tim, Pete Burns of Dead or Alive—each person a master of their own image and personality. With arms draped over one another, party cups tipped back, everyone seemed pleased to be in the moment itself. We’d made it this far, at least.
The weeks had been relentless: I had lost a lot of weight from all the work, being shuttled around to every corner of London. My face looked cracked from the makeup that was applied so my skin wouldn’t shine in front of cameras. I was becoming all eyes: They seemed to get wider the smaller I got.
I was learning how to stare into the lens. Cameras were going off all day, and at every click, I imagined I was hypnotizing people. Buy our records, I chanted in my head. At first it didn’t seem like it was working. Our debut UK single, “Laura,” ended up charting at No. 56, a pretty dismal showing. But Polydor was undeterred and gave no external sign that we should worry, knowing it was in their best interests for the band to feel optimistic and confident.
I turned on the charm everywhere, going out of my way to be friendly with each writer, interviewer, and radio personality we encountered. For the most part the write-ups had been fantastic, though some old battle-ax named Kitty Empire said that our sound was as if someone had been thumbing through an old record box and just discovered Supertramp. When we finally showed up in a piece in The Face, they just gave us a corner of a page, with the headline “Karaoke Nation.” But in general, their snark was obviously not on point (they’d be out of business in another two months). It stung, however, sitting at the Marylebone flat, scanning any lukewarm articles.
The band was getting pretty hammy in interviews. We were very pleasant to talk to, but it became apparent that we could get a lot of attention talking shit about other people. Ana told one publication that Britney Spears was “dumber than a box of hair.” And I said that “she should be working at McDonald’s.” These would go into print, and then immediately every other interviewer would want to talk about these quotes, which would actually make headlines in the more sensational papers. This was treacherous territory. It wasn’t a good look for any of us, and I got fed up with having to revisit something nasty I had said a week earlier. Scott and I tried to institute a band guideline not to say negative things about other artists to the press. With Ana, unfortunately, that was impossible. If you tried to tell her to do something she would just do the opposite, so there were a lot of moments of sucking it up and hoping no one noticed.
There were also bits of homophobia injected into even the praising articles. They were like backhanded slaps in between the lines, little reminders for us not to get too comfortable. When NME called us “camper than a row of tents,” I seethed a little bit on the inside, knowing they believed they were putting us in our place. Some pieces were full of flat-out lies. Some would feature these weird paraphrases, injecting words and sentences we never would have said. At no point in her entire life can I imagine Ana saying: “Oh, only if it’s Versace, darling!” I wanted people of all kinds to understand that the experience of being gay wasn’t something separate from them. I wanted to tap into a truth broader and more universal, draw a line from my happiness and suffering to theirs, show that it’s all the same. I’ve never made music just for gay people.
We let certain writers into our personal lives, only to be written about as self-absorbed egomaniacs. I was occasionally painted as an unaware and ambitious sociopath who loved talking about myself. What the fuck else am I supposed to talk about? I thought. The anger could color my outlook for days. Probably because I knew they were onto something.
I remember a quiet night in the Marylebone flat, when I lay on my bed and prayed aloud, “If anyone is out there listening, please, please, please make this work. I will put everything I have on the line, but just make this work.”
A clear voice, inside my head, one that wasn’t my own, answered: If you get what you really want, it’s gonna come with a price, you know.
“I’ll pay it,” I replied. “Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”
One night, Derek and I went to Nag Nag Nag. The place was rammed. Justin Bond was there with this hunky guy named Christoph, all big muscles and a mustache, who looked like he’d chop the firewood and stick you for a spit roast. Christoph would later be responsible for introducing me to my future partner. On the side of the dance floor, some guy from New York named Ricardo shoved a bottle of poppers under my and Derek’s noses. My head felt like a balloon.
Derek turned to me. “I suddenly feel like some trashy bottom about to get—” It was probably the poppers, but I didn’t let him finish. I was seized with a sudden rage.
I shoved my finger in his chest. “Just because you’re still not over getting picked on in high school doesn’t mean you’re any better than me, just ’cause I’m open about getting fucked.” I could feel my forehead vein popping out. Derek took my pointing finger and bent it backward, and we shoved each other. The high of the poppers washed over me and I stood there i
n the bar, embarrassed and shocked at what had just come out of my mouth. We didn’t exchange any more words; we just retrieved our jackets at the coat check and left.
Sheepish, I apologized on the walk home, interrupting the long silences. But something ugly had just happened. A jealous animosity had spewed out of me that I had been shoving under the rug. I felt threatened by Derek’s fascination with representations of masculinity: the utility van he drove around, the butch-worship. I thought that because I was a freewheeling fag, it somehow made me less-than. I allowed myself to wear sequins and prance around the stage, performing queenery. But I told myself it was twice removed, an act. I still carried shame about who I was.
Also, it was an undeniable fact that I had a crush on Del, but the closest we ever got to anything sexual was taking Ambien, running down the hallway of the K West hotel in London naked, jerking off onto biscuits we found in the minibar, and then eating them. The next morning we looked at each other with amused confusion, having no proper explanation for what we’d done.
Having three gay guys in a band was tough for a few different reasons. We were probably measuring ourselves against each other constantly—the men we slept with, the groups we ran in. Fortunately, I think we all had our own, very individual sex appeal that attracted different kinds of men. There was, however, a hierarchy of masculinity between us that remained, and was constantly getting switched out as we attempted to one up each other, testing my insecurities. When Derek and Scott and I would check out a giant, muscular straight man, rather than enjoying objectifying him, I suddenly felt like I did when I was in high school. Like I would never measure up to the standards of what it meant to be a real man.
To prove that I was unafraid of myself, I wore outrageous looks, with tassels and sparkles, buckles and sequins. When I put them on, the shine was my resistance and rebellion to feeling inferior, just as it had always been. I knew I made ugly, sweaty faces onstage—I’d started seeing my distorted scream in the papers—but I didn’t care about that, either. I didn’t want to look handsome, I just wanted it to look like I was in control, and exorcise the hurt that remained under my skin.
THE HORSEMEAT DISCO GUYS WANTED to put together a club show at Crash in London on a holiday weekend. When we showed up at the big space in Vauxhall to do sound check, there was barely a half-broken drum kit waiting for us on the stage, which caused momentary drama. We thought we were going to have to call Pete Burns, who was performing with us that night, and cancel the show. Eventually a proper drum kit showed up and we were able to proceed.
I had been introduced to Pete by Tim Hailand, one of the guys I’d met on the Barcelona beach a couple summers before. Pete Burns was dialed up to fifteen, with his droll Manchester accent and constant desire to be wearing the most insane fashion at any given moment. He had a heavily augmented face—some people would say disfigured. I had no judgments about what Pete did; I saw an otherworldly beauty about him. I liked hanging around him just to see what he was going to wear or say. One night before our show, I watched him try on a closetful of stage clothes and listened to his running commentary regarding his own runway.
“Oh, here she is.” Pete displayed a shapeless tartan blob with straps on a hanger. “When in doubt, Westwood. It’s open in the back. What do you think Ana’s going to have on?”
I shrugged, exhausted.
“How you hanging in there, doll? You look bloody tired.”
“I’m knackered, as I guess you’d say over here. It’s been all guns blazing. We haven’t stopped for months.”
“Babe, you either let the wave wash over you, or you ride it.” He paused and checked his face in a mirror. “I say just ride the wave, love.”
We were singing “Tits on the Radio” with Pete at Crash, and we rehearsed in a moldy East London space the night or two before. Pete showed up in a black jumpsuit with a plunging neckline and an orangutan-fur coat. I could sense he was nervous, but the band was so friendly and happy to have him, his nerves seemed to dissipate. “Can I warm up, doll?” He pulled out a CD, which I stuck in the boom box. I handed him a mic, and he started swaying to the intro. For the next twenty minutes, the band just sat cross-legged and slack-jawed, getting our very own private Dead or Alive set.
The next night, when we sang together at Crash, some guy must have been taunting him from the crowd. In the middle of the song, Pete leaned into the audience and pummeled the guy in the face. Usually if there was ever a fight, it would be reason to stop the show. But we kept on singing, giddy. The room was an electric stove: quick to cook, faster to burn. It felt like anything could happen.
When the set was done, Pete and I were on our way back to the dressing room with my friend Andy (who was living in London now) and Wolfgang Tillmans, when some very disheveled drunk teenager (could have been the same one in the crowd, who knows?) passed by with his chin tilted up. “Yeh, off ya go you fookin’ tranny shite!”
Without missing a beat or changing his expression, Pete turned around, threw the fucker down the staircase, fixed a stray hair, and kept going as if nothing had happened. “Doll,” he said, “definitely ready for a bloody cocktail.”
The “Comfortably Numb” single debuted in the charts at No. 10, and the album landed just out of the Top Ten at No. 11, which was a little disappointing. But the chart position of the single meant that we got to go on Top of the Pops, a singular institution of British music. I sat in a café with Neil, our manager, and mused, “If all this goes to shit, at least someday we can look back and say we were Top of the Pops.” It was funny, there were so many of those “At least ifs.” At least if the album bombs, we can say that we made one. At least if no one buys tickets to this or that concert, we can say that we went on a tour.
Being in the BBC studios for the first time felt monumental. The dressing rooms were fancy, and they treated us like we were stars. I had a brand-new hand-sewn pair of purple suede dungarees made by Fee. Derek had grown these huge muttonchops overnight that I thought made him look really different. When I found out we were going on Top of the Pops, I demanded that Derek shave them. I thought we should be consistent, mimic our album cover and promo shots, solidify the looks we had already established.
Scott agreed, but didn’t think it was worth really harping on, just to keep friction low. But I hadn’t figured out how to pick my battles yet, and I stuck with it, making Derek shave before we made our biggest television debut to date. It didn’t make me feel good, but I rationalized it. Someone had to steer the ship. But Scott was right, I should have just let it slide.
Before we went on, Andy asked me if I was nervous. I lied and said no, but I was losing my mind with anticipation. Derek was too, having a meltdown that his guitar was detuned for some reason. And I was just scared. But we got on the stage, my nerves aflame. About halfway through the song three things occurred to me. My voice was sounding good, the audience all looked excited, and I was singing for thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people. This was what the word broadcast actually meant.
Joy shot up my spine and plastered itself on my face. It was a kind of connective pleasure I’d never felt before. There were eyes and ears, tons of them, watching us, listening, making judgments good or bad. I had people’s attention and fuck, it felt good. The song ended. I leaped up and down on the stage and hugged anybody who was nearby. I was so happy. I wanted to feel more. We were right where we needed to be, doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing.
FROM MY DIARY:
February 10, 2004
As of this morning, I’m missing the States. Homesick for California or Miami for some reason. My throat is fucked. I feel like I’m destroying my voice every time I sing. Not getting enough days off. Had to seriously yell at Neil on the phone yesterday. He booked another show now, the day before the Astoria gig, without Scott’s and my permission. Scott and I have to keep control of this stuff. We played a great gig last night at the Charlotte in Leicester. Really sketchy, dodgy, dingy place. Totally packed, with
the crowd going crazy. It was so hot, the clothes came off earlier than usual.
We played at the Scala in London last night. I woke up a little more nervous than usual. Could be those stupid Madonna rumors. Some radio station in an interview said that apparently she and Guy Ritchie were coming to see us play. I thought it was horseshit, but then later on in the day, Ana started to cry, saying that she thought Madonna was going to come and take Scott and me away, vampire us somehow.
Had video and artwork meetings, and then Scott yelled at me for running around in my underwear in front of the merchandise people. I yelled back and got in his face. We made it to the Scala, where David Ross, our new lighting guy, had his rigs all set up and it looked fantastic. Lots of LED panels, etc. I was pleased with our performance, though Paddy’s drums could have been a lot tighter. I wore deerskin trousers with fur, and a brown cotton-ball genie boa. “Mary” for the first time went really smoothly. Afterward, Mark Moore [DJ and founding member of S’Express] had a great after-show party, lots of champagne, very Wizard of Oz. Lots of old friends and many new ones. I could hardly get across the room in under thirty minutes.
June 2, 2004
In a good state of mind and it’s the first day back in the US on a bus. Just arrived two days ago from a five-day European jaunt that included Lisbon: playing on the ocean outdoors, Barcelona (4:30 a.m., of course), England for the Homelands festival (about ten thousand people in the crowd). Then on to Ireland for a little pub gig with a GQ shoot in the middle of it. At one point at Heathrow I fell asleep facedown on the cold floor right at British Airways ticketing. My body just shut down. Before we left for those shows, we played two great ones at Bowery Ballroom in NYC. Both sold out.
