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

by Rob Sheffield

  I don’t meet a lot of other Haysi Fantayzee fans. Sometimes I’ve played the song for people who respond, “Hmmm, this is interesting,” but in a way that’s more like “There are two exits in this room, the window and the door. If this song doesn’t end soon, I’m going to opt for the window.” So the possibility remains that for all intents and purposes, nobody likes this song. That’s fine with me. It’s part of being a fan—sometimes it’s a lonely thing to devote your heart to a song, especially when it’s a song that literally nobody can stand, from an idiotic group with an idiotic name and idiotic haircuts. Everybody’s got something like this in their life, whether it’s a song nobody else likes or a celebrity crush everybody else finds hideous or a team that always loses. We all have our Haysi Fantayzees. Do we choose them or do they choose us?

  One-hit wonders are a noble breed. It’s a fallacy that artists should have long, productive careers. William Wordsworth invented modern poetry in one ten-year bang, 1795 to 1805, but then he was cashed out, although he lived to write utter rubbish for another forty-five years. Walt Whitman wrote American literature’s most towering achievements between 1855 and 1865, and then sucked for the next twenty-seven years. T. S. Eliot? Spent the twentieth century dining out on a handful of poems from his 1915-1925 hot streak. Rock stars did not invent burning out. They just do it louder.

  It’s hard to guess in advance which one-hit wonders are going to go on to be famous for their hit and which are going to be obscure. If you asked around in 1983, or for that matter, 1993, nobody would have guessed that Kajagoogoo would one day be remembered as a consummate ’80s one-hit wonder. Their song has gone on to everlasting life. (I actually thought their second single, “Hang On Now,” was in some ways a more thought-provoking and inspiring statement of the Kajagoogoo ethos.) Anyway, everybody who likes pop music knows the hits by Kajagoogoo and Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Tommy Tutone. But not Haysi Fantayzee or Total Coelo or the Belle Stars. I’m not here to argue that they should be more famous than they are; I’m just asking why.

  This applies to one-hit wonders of all eras, of course. For instance, every year I hear “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” and “Play That Funky Music” more times than I heard them in the entire 1970s combined. These songs are much more famous and popular now than they were when they were actual hits. “Y.M.C.A.” was a hit for about a month, then vanished for more than a decade, but you will probably hear it at some point in the next week, especially if you attend a wedding, a baseball game, or a mud-wrestling match. Whereas the biggest one-hit job of the 1970s, and in fact the decade’s biggest hit, was Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life,” which I haven’t heard since it came out. How come “Y.M.C.A.” lives forever, while “Undercover Angel” and “Heaven on the 7th Floor” disappear completely from our collective memory? Some songs get pimped on soundtracks, commercials and sporting events, while other equally popular songs sail away like Brandy’s sailor boyfriend. Nobody knows how this works. The gods of pop music are fickle bastards.

  But it’s different when we talk about the ’80s, because the era’s one-hit wonders are by far the era’s most loved songs, and in fact, if you mention “ ’80s music” to someone, they probably assume you’re talking about Kajagoogoo or Dexy’s Midnight Runners or Men Without Hats. Styx were infinitely more popular than these groups at the time, and had a lot more hits. Yet the music we remember as typifying the era is the stuff that seemed most frivolous and temporary at the time.

  Which brings us to Haysi Fantayzee. Man oh man, did I love this band. “Shiny Shiny” was their anthem: a boy and a girl, two Brit kids who looked like they just got lobotomized with knitting needles, wearing midriff shirts and top hats and dreadlocks, chanting about nuclear war over a bouncy little jump-rope riff, rapping lines like “I’m a hot retard / Marquis de Sade!” There’s a fiddle solo. Every time you think the song’s about to end, they rip into another chorus, yelping “Shiny shiny, bad times behind me / Shiny shiny, sha na na na.” The boy was named Jeremy Healy; the girl was Kate Garner. “Shiny Shiny” hit number sixteen in the U.K. and never charted here, but it got a fair amount of MTV airplay. The album was called Battle Hymns for Children Singing, and included a sixteen-page comic book of the two Haysi kids looking alienated over street scenes, and looking naked while looking alienated. They sang in a made-up language of brain-damaged slang like “John Wayne Is Big Leggy,” which is a critique of U.S. imperialism as well as a song about kinky sex, and their major existential statement, “I Lost My Dodi.”

  They were one of the bands that sent me frothing to the fan mags, devouring any scrap of information I could get. I was thrilled to read that Jeremy kept a wheelchair in his apartment, which he’d nicked from a local hospital. There wasn’t anything wrong with him; he was just lazy. That had to be every teen boy’s biggest fantasy, at least in the non-Phoebe Cates division.

  I was intrigued by their ideas on politics and the impending end of the world. I thrilled when they picked fights with other pop stars, like a synth duo I’d never heard of called Mirror Mirror; according to Kate Garner, “It made a mockery of the idea of a video band. Their image was lousy.” I had no idea it was even possible to make a mockery out of what the Haysis represented, but I guess it was—they took not being taken seriously very seriously.

  From the fan mags, I knew Jeremy used to live with Boy George in London, where they would have loud public fights over hair spray. Kate was a fashion photographer having a bash at pop stardom. They were scenesters from the artsy milieu that gathered around the Blitz nightclub; they explained that “Shiny Shiny” was about nuclear apocalypse, and that their clothes were inspired by literary influences such as Charles Dickens, with his portrayal of Victorian street scruffs in novels like Oliver Twist. (Boy George, in his biography, said Jeremey was “Dickensian . . . with the emphasis on ‘dick,’ ” which could only be a compliment.)

  There was a third member of the group who didn’t sing, but who apparently did nothing besides think about the Haysi Fantayzee attitude of life and make statements to the press giving updates on their opinions, like “The one thing we all had in common was a dislike of doom-laden electronics,” or “I’m very sick of doom. There was a whole couple of years of it, that feeling of romanticism in wandering amongst the atomic ruins and being noble when the world is collapsing around you.” But I never noticed he existed. His picture was on the back cover of the album, so who cares? New-wave attention spans are short.

  There were loads of philosopher kings who got a lot more respect and attention than these clowns—the Police, for example, who I also loved. The difference is that the Police were a rock band, while Haysi Fantayzee was a pop group, so Sting’s ideas about Jung and Nabokov and the Loch Ness Monster were taken more seriously than whatever drivel Haysi Fantayzee were rapping about.

  It would suit my argument perfectly if Haysi Fantayzee made better records than the Police did, but I like music better than arguments, so I’m going to have to concede that point. The Police had lots of good songs; the Haysis didn’t. But the Police never peaked as high as “Shiny Shiny.” I play it more than I play all the Police songs combined.

  I expected a lot more from Haysi than this one song. I thought they were the future of something. I was moved when People magazine reviewed Battle Hymns for Children Singing in their Picks & Pans section, and said, “They do, though, seem to represent an unrest that demands to be recognized.” But I can’t claim it got that recognition, really. The group fizzled out not long after “Shiny Shiny.” They never made a sequel and left their fans hanging, children singing waiting for more battle hymns. They went on to fame and fortune in their different fields. Kate Garner kept rising as a photographer—she took the cover photo for Sinéad O’Connor’s The Lion and the Cobra—and Jeremy Healy became a huge U.K. techno DJ, scoring a hit with his 1990 Clash remix “Return to Brixton,” and joining E-Z Posse for the lowest-common-denominator acid-house cash-in novelty hit imaginable, “Everything Starts with an
E.” He ended up marrying the English starlet Patsy Kensit, becoming her fourth rock-star husband, after Oasis’s Liam Gallagher, Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr and a guy from Big Audio Dynamite.

  Both are still successful and acclaimed and doing nothing at all that would remind anyone of this group they used to be in. It’s safe to say all regard “Shiny Shiny” as a youthful indiscretion, a blot on otherwise laudable careers full of artistic achievement, and wish people would forget this song ever happened. Why stir up the ashes? Why make trouble? Why not let sleeping one-hit wonders lie?

  Because the song is too damn good, that’s why. It’s a Taj Majal of awesome, a basilica of No Fucking Way.

  Most groups, after recording a hit this transcendently ridiculous, would run for the hills and try to atone, like Kajagoogoo or Haircut One Hundred after they ditched their pop-idol lead singers, remade themselves into tastefully mature jazz-rock combos, and slipped into quality nothingness. It was a big letdown to find out that Kajagoogoo were big Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell fans who wanted nothing more than to climb out of the teen-pop ghetto as fast as they could. Nick Beggs even told Smash Hits their name was based on infant language. “Goo-ga-ga-goo was the first thing that came into my mind. I didn’t like the goo-ga-ga part and went for something more casual. So Kajagoogoo. The sound of primal life, don’t you know.” Yeah, real primal. But once they ditched the “goo goo” and started calling themselves Kaj, they lost their dodi.

  Haysi Fantayzee had no “We hope you like our new direction” phase. They blew it out, in true “Shiny shiny, bad times behind me” style. They went down in a blaze of glory. But that suits the song. That’s part of their beauty. They were phonies who never sold out their phoniness.

  I wonder why phonies spoke to my teen self more profoundly than . . . truies? But they did. I suppose it goes back to the time I spent in the hospital when I was eight. Six weeks is a long time to be laid up with pneumonia when you’re that age, and I was often too feverish to read, and the TV in my hospital room only had a couple of channels. But I got The Banana Splits every day at four. I bonded with the Splits. Fleegle had the power to heal. In case you don’t remember, the Banana Splits were four animals playing in a . . . okay, guys in animal costumes, pretending to be a rock band, living in a wacky psychedelic clubhouse. It’s one of those drugged-out ’70s kiddie shows that has an unexpected afterlife in reruns, much like Scooby Doo. Fleegle (the dog), Bingo (the ape), Drooper (the lion) and Snorky (the elephant) were a jungle culture club, and I found them immensely comforting.

  Their best song was “You Can’t Buy Soul”—for some reason, the Banana Splits really liked to sing about soul, a surprising fixation for a band comprised of cartoon characters. But they had other great songs too, like “I Enjoy Being a Boy” and “Doin’ the Banana Split,” both of which were on a special 45 single you could cut out from the back of a Frosted Flakes box. A lot of talent and energy went into these tunes, much more than anybody should have felt obliged to give, considering they were never going to get the credit and that nobody past puberty would hear it. I felt bad for Snorky, who never got to talk (much less sing), but merely played keyboards. I had so much time on my hands in the hospital, so I wrote customized verses for him to sing in their songs. (I never got around to mailing them in to the band because . . . well, at a certain point, I realized he was just an elephant. They don’t talk.)

  There was something soothing about the Banana Splits, even knowing they weren’t real animals—I was too young then to know who Oscar Wilde was, or what he meant when he said, “Give me a mask and I’ll speak the truth,” but I knew what Fleagle and crew were trying to say. “I Enjoy Being a Boy” was such a beautiful song, it was as if they had to disappear behind the animals in order to sing it or they’d shrivel up. It was as if the Splits were the only boys who felt safe speaking the truth about what they enjoyed about being a girl, which was being with a girl. The Splits were hugely different—realer—than the boys I knew at school, with their endless dumbness and meanness. It was good training for a pop fan, since I didn’t worry too much about what was going into the music; I was just enjoying what came out.

  All kiddie shows had rock bands in those days: Josie and the Pussycats, the Archies, the Chan Clan, Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution, Fat Albert and the Junkyard Band. They’d sing a song at the end of the episode to remind us all what we’d learned. Sometimes it got pretty freaky, as in the glam-rock weirdness of Kaptain Kool and the Kongs. There was one episode of Electra Woman and Dyna Girl where they had to save the world from an evil madman genius named Glitter Rock, who wore a rainbow-colored Afro wig and threatened to cause massive destruction with each strum of his guitar.

  All these fake bands gave me a preference for pop stars who rejected the pose of naturalism, the pose of really-meaning-it. There’s probably a direct correlation between all the cartoon bands I grew up loving as a little kid in the ’70s and the new-wave poseurs I loved in the ’80s. The Banana Splits didn’t look any more ridiculous pretending to play guitars than Missing Persons did.

  There were tons of nuclear-annihilation songs back then, but for some reason, the one that I still shudder for is the one by the biggest phonies around. Haysi Fantayzee left absolutely nothing behind that anybody could conceivably build on, least of all themselves. That’s how pop trash works. So as to the question we started with—“What kind of idiot actually listened to this shit?”—it still seems to remain a mystery. It’s one of the mysteries that makes “Shiny Shiny” the quintessential artifact of a unique moment in the history of this pitiful planet.

  “John Wayne Is Big Leggy,” though? That one blows.

  A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS

  “Space Age Love Song”

  1982

  There are times in a man’s life that can only be described as “times in a man’s life.” The first time he experiences A Flock of Seagulls is one of them.

  It was my first rock concert: A Flock of Seagulls, the Fixx and the Police at Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, in August of 1983. The master of ceremonies was everybody’s favorite MTV personality, Martha Quinn. I tagged along with my sister Tracey and her friends, one of whom drove us in his Pontiac Parisienne station wagon. Since this was the Synchronicity tour sponsored by MTV, there was a giant video screen playing MTV all day between the bands. It was a long, hot afternoon in the bleachers, but fortunately I’d brought a book in my back pocket. So while the couples around me necked, I read the Pelican Shakespeare edition of Hamlet.

  Sting probably would have been gratified to know that at least one of his fans out there in the nosebleed seats was psychically wandering the castle in Elsinore in preparation for the literary rock-and-roll rigors of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” But it wasn’t like I felt out of place—far from it. Au contraire mon frere, I felt right at home.

  The Fixx went on first, committing the classic touring-band gaffe of yelling “Hello Foxboro!” between songs, even though Foxboro is merely the town where Boston keeps its local football stadium. Since I was curious about the right and wrong ways to comport myself at a musical event, I studied the crowd—some people were standing up, but most people were sitting down. The guy right in front of me kept yelling for “Saved by Zero,” as if he were worried they weren’t going to play it, after huddling backstage: “I don’t know, lads—maybe we should skip the hit this afternoon?”

  The Police headlined, by which point it was dark and everybody was standing up. Martha Quinn came on to introduce the band and ask, “Is everybody ready to see the Police? I can’t hear you! Is everybody ready! To see! The Police!” It was an intensely moving experience, with everybody dancing while Sting sang “hee-yo, hee-yo-yo” for two hours. I had never seen the everybody-raises-their-lighters scene before, and it took my breath away. It was the same communal thrill I’d experienced in the dark of the Madrid discotecas, except it was outdoors under a starry sky.

  But it was the Flock who moved me most that fine day. The singer
wore a fetching powder-blue jumpsuit, darting from side to side behind his keyboard. Even from half a mile away, it was easy to see their bleached bat-wing haircuts wiggle as they performed their huge hit (“I Ran”), their medium-size hits (“Space Age Love Song,” “Wishing”), and assorted non-hits that nobody except me sang along to (“Telecommunications,” “It’s Not Me Talking”). The ’Gulls never had a chance, getting stuck in the middle spot, their hair wilting in the dog-day afternoon sun before a jaded crowd that was already exhausted waiting to see the headliners. But they gave it all they had.

  Not everybody was into the music part of the event. In fact, the couple two rows ahead of me completely ignored A Flock of Seagulls and spent the whole set going to second. (Or at least what second base was in 1983. I couldn’t even guess what second base means now. A foursome that doesn’t involve dairy products?) But it was a glorious night. Back in the Parisienne, as we waited in line in the parking lot traffic jam, Synchronicity played in the tape deck so we could sing along with all the Stingian odes to Jungian mythology we’d just heard. It took us three “Miss Gradenko”s to even get out of the parking lot. Hamlet was excellent too.

  But the thing I carried around with me most from that day was the sensation of dissolving into a crowd of other people. I didn’t even make an excuse to go back and hide in the car. At any kind of party or social gathering, I was a pro at borrowing the keys from my ride, on the pretext of having left something in the backseat, and then staying there with my book until it was time to go home. I felt an immense debt of gratitude to my sister, Sting, the Dark Prince of Denmark and Martha Quinn. But especially to the Flock, who had gotten less love than anyone that day, despite working harder for it.