THE PAST IS YET TO COME

Aztec Camera said it all in their greatest hit 'Somewhere In My Heart', from their 1987 album 'LOVE':

 'From Westwood to Hollywood,

The one thing that's understood,

Is that you can't buy time,

But you can sell your soul,

And the closest thing to heaven is to rock and roll ...'

 

I was pregnant with my first-born at the time; ducking and diving between Sunset Blvd and the shadowy confines of Fleet Street, covering the biggest rock tours on the planet for the Daily Mail. I would have sold my soul for Roddy Frame. We all would. He got us.

 

So is the inexorable passage of time eased any by life's soundtrack? I have always believed so. Keep listening, kids, the past is yet to come. Yet it can't all dangle from nostalgia, can it. Music must keep tiger-feeting on. It can nod to the old guys, pay a little homage, and must certainly immerse itself in influences - for inspiration is what it's all about. But it must, must do its own thing. It must invent as well as re-invent. It has got to keep laying its neck on the line, keep putting it out there. If you're any good, the establishment and even your own fans will be suspicious of you. Nobody loves a winner, until they know how.

 

I don't want to sound jaded, but very little stops me in my tracks these days. I've heard it all before. And yet. Every now and then, I have to stop the car, get out for a few moments, take a jig down the freeway, hurl my hat, let down my hair, have a swig. Guess what did this today? Daytona Lights did.

 

I've raved about them before, with good reason. I make no secret of the fact that I've known their guitarist Louis Souyave since he was twelve. What a thrill it is to hear the irresistible music that he and his band mates are making now. So go, spend a little money on their brand-new five-track EP 'Old-Fashioned Love'. Immerse yourself in its spunky, necessary heart-throb beatiness. Its jangly attitude and cheek, its echoey Brian Wilson lilts, its le Bon-ness, its Rhodes-and-Taylor cockiness. Its rhythm, its blues, its light and shade, its sparks and chimes and don't-know-who-you-are. Get this. Drown yourself in its harmonies and hooky choruses and indie-pop energy. Be thrilled that people can still do this.

 

I booked my August ticket to Ibiza today, by the way. If they're not playing this in the clubs, I'm heading for the Midnight Beach, me.  It's what I do. X

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/old-fashioned-love-ep/id635563301

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

Z: A NOVEL OF ZELDA FITZGERALD by THERESE ANNE FOWLER

TWO ROADS BOOKS

Everything is fiction. Our memories and our yesterdays. The conversations inside our heads, and with others. Lovers, children, colleagues, friends; the way we think of them, the way we see and hear and smell and touch and taste them: all made up. They are as we want them to be, their histories rewritten to embellish, enhance and disguise our own. Isn't fiction just another word for perspective – and can perspective be anything other than a point of view?

Whatever it is, here's a story about all of that and none of it, a novel about lovers who really lived, their reckless lives revisited and re-imagined. A book to break your heart, Therese Anne Fowler's 'Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald' is a brave exploration of the blurring. Shredded and in mourning as I turned the last page, I wept, as I hadn't done in years.

Wretched Zelda Sayre, the so-called 'First Flapper' of the Jazz Age, whose charmed life seems to have been cursed from the moment she set eyes on F. Scott Fitzgerald, was out of time. As the born-to-be-wild daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, there were appearances to be kept up, behavioural codes to be adhered to. But teenage Zelda was already shrinking from the thought of a dutiful family future in the backwater yellowhammer state. There had to be more to life, as her childhood playmate Tallulah Bankhead knew ahead of her. Awake, and aware - of a changing between-wars world, of emancipation, of a profound inner smouldering to express, and to create - Zelda craved an enabler. Scott longed for a muse. Theirs was a marriage made in hell.

Their honeymoon sealed their fate. Behind an illusion of wealth and marital bliss, the celebrated pair lived it up in New York, Paris and all over the Riviera. They were sucked, as they went, into a vortex of alcohol addiction, profligacy, jealousy both sexual and professional, creative rivalry and ultimately mental torment. Choked by Scott's public profile, capsized by his obsessive friendship with Ernest Hemingway, Zelda flailed for the life raft of personal identity. She wrote – short stories with a joint Fizgerald byline, or that were published (outrageously) under his name only; and a single, autobiographical novel, 'Save Me the Waltz', which appeared in 1934. She painted, too, and even ballet-danced herself almost to death. She was a talented woman, married to an insecure control freak who belittled and ridiculed her while maintaining undying love. Which of the two was nuts here?

Was it frustration over thwarted potential, over-indulgence in the hallucinogenic Absinthe, her husband's exposure of her as the shallow, self-obsessed Daisy Buchanan living an uptown, Long Island life cluttered with silly distractions in Scott's piece de resistance 'The Great Gatsby' (1925) that rip-rugged Zelda? The author leaves us in no doubt as to her thoughts about that.
Promising lives frittered. The inexorable finitude of existence. Yet here we are … F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most revered American authors of the 20^th Century. Failed, crumpled Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, esteemed feminist icon. You couldn't make it up, and Therese Anne Fowler didn't. All that she did was breathe it back to life. Bewitchingly.

All, in the end, is pointless. All is fiction. As such, this is as good as it gets.

DO THEY KNOW IT'S CHRISTMAS?

On December 10th, twenty eight years ago, the single 'Do They Know It's Christmas' by Band Aid was released. 

 

It all kicked off shortly after Bob Geldof watched Michael Buerk's terrible bulletin from famine-wracked Ethiopia on the BBC News. Horrified by television footage depicting suffering of biblical proportions, Bob felt at once shocked and helpless, his gut telling him that he had to get involved. He had no idea how. He could do what he did best: sit down and write a hit single, the proceeds of which he could pledge to Oxfam. But his Irish punk band the Boomtown Rats were by then in decline, having not enjoyed a Top Ten hit since 1980. Their zenith, a Number One with 'I Don't Like Mondays', had been and gone in 1979. Music fans, he knew, would flock to buy a charity single provided the artist was big enough – especially at the Christmas-Single time of year. It was a question of finding a sympathetic star to record one. How much better if he could persuade a whole galaxy to collaborate on one song.

Bob had a chat with Midge Ure, whose band Ultravox were appearing that week on The Tube - a Channel 4 rock and pop show on presented by Geldof's then girlfriend, the late Paula Yates. Midge agreed to set Geldof's lyrics to melody, and to orchestrate some arrangements.  He  then went to Sting, Duran Duran singer Simon le Bon, Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet. His galactic list stretched as time ticked to include, among the many, Boy George, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the Style Council's Paul Weller, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! and Paul Young. Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt of Status Quo went in willingly. Phil Collins and Bananarama followed suit. David Bowie and Paul McCartney, who were otherwise committed, made contributions remotely. These were sent to Geldof to be dubbed onto the single later. Sir Peter Blake, world-famous for his iconic artwork on the Beatles' album cover 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', was recruited to design the sleeve. Band Aid was born, the name a pun on a common brand of sticking plaster. This was to be a 'band' which would 'aid' the world.

'Do they Know It's Christmas?' was recorded free of charge at Trevor Horn's SARM West Studios in Notting Hill, West London, on 25^th November 1984.  It went straight to Number One on its release in the UK, outselling everything else on the chart put together to become Britain's fastest-selling single since the chart's inception in 1952. A million copies were shifted in the first week alone. The record held the Number One slot for five weeks, selling more than three and a half million copies. It went on to become the UK's biggest-selling single of all time - ending the nine-year reign of Queen's magnum opus, the 'ba-rock' Bohemian Rhapsody. 'Do they Know It's Christmas?' would only be out-sold in 1997 by Elton John's double A-side charity single 'Candle In the Wind/Something About the Way You Look Tonight', re-recorded as a tribute to the Princess of Wales. This notched up sales of more than thirty three million copies, still, incidentally, the world's biggest-selling single since charts began.  

Hot on the heels of the British chart effort came America's contribution, in the form of supergroup USA For Africa and their single 'We Are The World'. Written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, and produced by Quincy Jones and Michael Omartian, the session brought together some of the world's most legendary musicians. It was recorded at Hollywood's A & M Studios in January 1985, and boasted a line-up including Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick, Willie Nelson and Huey Lewis. In all, more than forty five of America's top artists took part. A further fifty had to be turned away. When the chosen ones arrived at the studio, they were confronted with a sign instructing them to 'please check your egos at the door'. They were also met by an impish Stevie Wonder, informing them that if the song wasn't up to scratch nor down in one take, he and fellow blind artist Ray Charles would be driving them home. The record sold more than 20 million copies, and became America's fastest-selling pop single ever.

 

Live Aid the following summer was another story.  The Band Aid single now playing on loop in a supermarket near you was its genesis.  Do they know it's Christmas?  Perhaps they didn't in 1984.  They do now. 

THE GREAT PRETENDER

 

'I've had upheavals and I've had immense problems, but I've had a wonderful time and I have no regrets. Oh dear, I sound like Edith Piaf!'

Freddie Mercury

Freddie died relatively young. A lot of very talented people die young. Maybe it's because they reach their creative peak, and they 'commit suicide' in some way. Because they can't handle fame any more. Although some take their own lives directly, such as Marilyn Monroe with an overdose, most don't do that. Instead, they sabotage their existence in some way. James Dean drove a sports car so fast that it was inevitable that he would one day crash it and kill himself. Elvis was only 42 when he died, but he was wrung out, he had nothing left, and he knew it. Maybe Freddie's death-wish was excessive sex, which, in the climate we were in, was always going to lead to AIDS. It's a way of relinquishing responsibility for a life which has become too much for you.

Phil Swern, producer, BBC Radio 2

'Certain people in this industry are not meant to grow old. Freddie was one of them. I could never see Freddie at 70. Nor Michael Jackson. In any case, Freddie wouldn't have liked the way albums are recorded today. He lived his life to the full. He died young, but he crammed in an amazing amount. More than most people could in 5 lifetimes'.

Rick Wakeman

Having at last achieved an elusive BPI (British Phonographic Industry) Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, and mindful that time was running out for Freddie, Queen cooked the calendar to make 1990 their 20^th anniversary. They hosted a celebration for 400 friends at London's Groucho Club, a private members' establishment. The venue was chosen for its name, in homage to early Queen albums named after Marx Brothers movies. Liza Minnelli, George Michael, Patsy Kensit, Michael Winner and Rod Stewart turned up. he celebration cake was in the style of a Monopoly board, with Queen hits pasted into the squares. 
As bloodthirsty picture editors foamed at the mouth over gaunt, give-away snaps of Freddie as he arrived at and left the party, the death-rumours continued to be denied.

There were a lot of people at that party, but curiously, not many people were talking to the band.
It was almost as if they were afraid to approach them. I found myself standing near the bar with Freddie, chatting for about 20 minutes. I couldn't quite believe that I was talking with this icon like we were old pals. He was very pale and quiet. I suddenly realised that I was shaking and nervous. Why? The aura. He had it. Who else? Frank Sinatra: I was invited backstage at the Royal Albert Hall with Tony Blackburn once. Before I even set eyes on Sinatra, and even though my back was to the door, I knew the second he walked into the room. You felt it like a nuclear wave. Very few people have it. Not Paul McCartney. Not Mick Jagger. They're too accessible. Barbra Streisand does: she's ethereal, of another world. I met her at Wembley, and I've never forgotten it. You can't put your finger on whatever it is that these musicians have. Not even movie stars have it. That nuclear wave brings you out in a sweat. It still does now, when I think of it.Whatever it is, I believe that you are born with it. You never lose it. You can't work on it. You can't buy it. It is magical. You can't cut through it – so an ordinary mortal cannot have a successful relationship with a person like that. It's the primary reason why they have such disastrous love lives. Look at Liz Taylor, Madonna, Liza Minnelli. It's a tragedy on so many levels. You win the adoration of millions, but you cannot get or retain the love of just one person.

'Freddie and I chatted a bit about Queen's long career', said Phil Swern. 

'We even discussed the structure of his songs. He grew quite animated when he started talking about his music. It's what defined him, there's no question. I'd written a few songs in my time, which had achieved chart success. Songwriters are always fascinated by how other songwriters do it. So I had to ask the inevitable: where did he get his inspiration from?

''The lines just come to me', he smiled.

'It was very hard talking to him', Phil added, 'because I knew that he was dying. It hadn't been announced at that point, but I knew. Jim Beach told me. And I remember thinking that, if you have this aura, it crushes you in the end. It suffocates you. It is a huge cross to bear, and it's probably the price you pay for genius. Within that aura, you're only human like everyone else'.

Their final party over, the band returned to Mountain Studios.
'Innuendo was very much made on borrowed time, as Freddie really wasn't very well', Roger would reveal after Freddie's death.

During the last year of his life, hounded by the press, he would return to Montreux as often as his health would permit, finally allowing the peaceful place to become his refuge.

                                                                   * 

'Innuendo's' title track was released as a single in January 1991. It gave the band their first UK Number One for a decade. The February album, their fourteenth and final studio effort to be released during Freddie's lifetime, hit Number One in the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, and became the first Queen album since 'The Works' in 1984 to go gold on release in America. In the video for the single 'I'm Going Slightly Mad' made by the Torpedo Twins in London, a painfully gaunt, heavily made-up Freddie aped a crazed Lord Byron. 'Headlong', their thirty ninth single, emerged in May. On a relentless mission now, against all clocks, Queen returned to Mountain Studios to begin work on 'Made In Heaven'. The album would not be released 4 years after Freddie's passing. Despite his dwindling strength, Freddie drove himself harder ever, and vodka'd his way through long and arduous studio sessions.

'I think maybe there was a part of him that thought the miracle would come', said Brian.

'I think we all did'.

'Those were very sad days, but Freddie didn't get depressed', said his assistant, Peter Freestone.
'He was resigned to the fact that he was going to die. He accepted it … Anyway, can you imagine an old Freddie Mercury?'

                                                                    *

On 5 September, Freddie's forty fifth birthday, his partner Jim Hutton gave Freddie one last gift, a set of Irish crystal champagne glasses intended for their flat in Montreux. They were never to make it. The end was nigh-er than they knew. Soon afterwards, Freddie informed his household of his decision to stop taking his medication.

'He stopped everything except painkillers', says Peter Freestone.

'For weeks, 24 hours a day, the press had camped on his doorstep. He was a prisoner in his own home. He was going to decide when to die'.

He'd had enough. Not only was Freddie losing his sight, but the will to live was ebbing away.
He would meet death on his own terms.

'I think his only regret at the end was that there was so much more music inside him', said Peter.


'The Show Must Go On', Queen's brave, heart-rending single, backed by 'Keep Yourself Alive', was released in October. The band, their management, their publicists and entourage, all sworn to secrecy, continued to contradict rumours and to to their nearest and dearest, while EMI continued to pump out product – Greatest Hits II, Greatest Flix II. With Freddie's life hanging by a thread, the band appeared more prolific than ever.

Peter Freestone and Joe Fanelli nursed Freddie through the final days.

'There was nobody else', shrugs Peter.

'Freddie had now begun to cut people off. He just didn't want to see certain people again. His parents, for example … he didn't want them seeing him as he now was … that was the reason he turned his back on so many during the final year. A few really close friends were wonderful to him: Dave Clark, Elton, Tony King.
'It's amazing how quickly you learn things you never expected to have to do. Freddie had a Hickman line inserted into his chest, for example, through which we were able to give him his drugs. One comfort is that one of us was with him all the time – Jim, Joe, myself – even through the night, during those last weeks. Freddie was never once left alone'.
On 23 November, with Jim Beach at his bedside, Freddie approved his last-ever statement, admitting to his fans and to the world that he had AIDS.

24 hours later, the Great Pretender was dead.

BOLAN, BOWIE & THAT BROOKLYN BOY

As his lightning-bolt image is set for pasting all over London ahead of a forty-year V&A retrospective next spring, David Bowie, the most iconic of all rock stars, could not be more conspicuous by his absence. Having handed over the keys to an obsessively-amassed cornucopia of sound and vision, comprising costumes, lyrics and instruments, videos, stills and artwork, the man who fell to earth follows proceedings remotely from the city he has long called home.
North of Little Italy and Chinatown, a saunter east of SoHo, David Bowie's Manhattan manor is an enclave of cupcake cafes, vintage emporia and hip boutiques. The reclusive musician who turned 65 last January and who has reassumed the name Jones, moves easily among the downtown dawdlers and bustlers. His base is a £5 million penthouse. His routine includes strolls to and from school with his 12 year-old daughter Lexi. He'll browse through volumes on art, photography and architecture in local bookstores en route to an Upper East Side lunch with a friend or colleague, often right-hand ma'am 'Coco' Schwab. Evenings are low-key: a quiet supper in Greenwich Village's Babbo or Indochine on Lafayette Street, say. He'll attend an occasional fundraiser but prefers the odd classical concert, just he and Mrs Jones - the Somalian supermodel Iman.

The couple's woodland retreat in the Catskills has replaced the Balinese temple to hedonism (I say this first-hand, having stayed there myself) that Bowie built on the Caribbean isle of Mustique. Although his private art collection boasts Tintoretto, Rubens and Damien Hirst, he confessed recently that his 'most treasured possessions' are a Sellotaped photograph of rock'n'roller Little Richard that he bought in 1958, and a pressed chrysanthemum that he picked on his Kyoto honeymoon. So nothing grand about 21^st Century Bowie. His preferred attire - drab overcoat or hoodie, denims, shades, a working man's cap - is anonymous. There's no hint of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, nor any other rock incarnation in the bloke-ish hair, tidied teeth and soapy cheeks. He invites negligible rubber-necking as he trolls about undisturbed, eschewing limos for desert boots and yellow cabs.

There was a time when he would have given his mis-matched eyes to be recognised. When, as a suburban pop hopeful, he watched helplessly while his East End Mod mate Marc Bolan went stratospheric ahead of him, and seriously considered throwing in the towel.
Brixton-born, Bromley-based Bowie was still Davie Jones in 1964 when he met Bolan, who at the time was plain Mark Feld. The former was nearly 18 years old, the latter not quite 17. Each had been striving since boyhood to make it in the music business, experimenting with sounds and styles. The setting for their first encounter was the DJM offices of talent scout Leslie Conn, who saw nothing in Bolan but agreed to take a chance on his chum. The Bolan-Bowie attraction was instant. They forged a special relationship upon which plenty have poured scorn, but which was real enough to those who watched it unfold.

'There was always a certain rivalry,' admits Keith Altham, who over the years acted as publicist for both artists.

'But they were very close. They had what they had between them, they didn't have to prove it to anybody else. Which is why, I think, David doesn't ever speak about it. There was a real love there. They were very similar, in so many ways. They could have been brothers.'
They took to meeting regularly at La Gioconda, a cafe on Tin Pan Alley. Marc started recording for Decca Records and gained airplay on offshore pirate stations. He hustled – anyone, everyone - proclaiming irresistibly his intention to be 'bigger than the Beatles.'

Marc's first foray into electric pop was with John's Children, a band managed by flamboyant pop guru Simon Napier-Bell. A disastrous tour of Germany, supporting The Who, had the Children breaking for the border and Marc heading home to his acoustic. Tyrannosaurus Rex, the folk duo he founded with bongo-player Steve Peregrin Took, attracted a sizeable following with the support of DJ John Peel. Then along happened Brooklyn boy Tony Visconti, a musician and fledgling producer, who had left his native New York on a mission to find 'the new Beatles'. He wandered into London's Middle Earth club one night and was bewitched by Tyrannosaurus Rex. His partnership with Bolan would generate an incredible ten albums, and embraced Marc's metamorphosis from underground pixie to the undisputed king of glam.

But it was when Tony Visconti was introduced to David Bowie that the real sparks flew. The pair forged a deep rapport, sharing exotic interests – foreign art films, unusual foods,Tibetan Buddhism. There was an inevitability to their eventual creation of some of the most original and enduring rock music ever recorded. Marc Bolan fell second fiddle to Tony's adoration of Bowie. Both artists resented the triangle, and competed, if at times subconsciously, for the cool young American's time and talent.

Although Visconti would describe Bolan as 'the most focused artist I've ever worked with', it was Bowie with whom the producer fell irrevocably in love.

As Tyrannosaurus Rex gained popularity, Bowie couldn't give it away. When Marc and Steve Took played a string of UK dates including the Royal Festival Hall, Bowie opened for them. Marc met his future wife, agency secretary June Child, and the couple dropped in on Visconti once a week for baths and boogie nights.

'There were a few nights when David came over and we all jammed together,' recalls Tony.

'Marc and David on guitars, and me on bass.'

In January 1969, when Tyrannosaurus Rex debuted their new tour at Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank, they were supported by David Bowie. The frustrated musician had given up and become a mime artist. The career-change was happily short-lived. That July saw Apollo 11 deposit Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. The second release of Bowie's 'Space Oddity', about the launch of a fictional astronaut, could not have been better-timed. With the BBC playing the single constantly during their coverage of the lunar landing, David was at last in line for a hit. He and future wife Angela Barnett set up an unthreatening hippie commune in a Gothic mansion in Beckenham, Kent – and invited Tony Visconti and his girlfriend to move in.

Bolan and Bowie recorded together on David's 'The Prettiest Star', produced by Visconti. Marc's tangible envy of David's personal relationship with Tony boiled over in rage and rudeness on the part of June Bolan, who told David he 'wasn't good enough' to play with her husband. The single was lovely, but it flopped. After the success of 'Space Oddity', this was a blow. David would have to wait almost three more years for his next UK hit - 'Starman' - while waving off his bopping-elf friend and rival on the multi-coloured scream ride of fame.

During their brief reign, T. Rex forged and owned the quintessential sound of the Seventies. They came as close as anybody to becoming 'the next Beatles'. Things warmed up when Bolan and Bowie began trading blows in the all-important 'hit parade'. In 1972, David Bowie was on the up with 'Starman' (Number 10), 'John I'm Only Dancing' (12) and 'The Jean Genie' (2). Bolan went higher with two Number Ones – 'Telegram Sam' and 'Metal Guru', and a pair of Number 2s, 'Children of the Revolution' and 'Solid Gold Easy Action.' But by the following year they were neck and neck: Bowie's 'Life On Mars' and 'Sorrow' and Bolan's '20^th Century Boy' all made it to Number 3. It was as if they had declared war. When Bowie took off internationally, reinventing himself at every turn and breaking into the American market at a level that Marc could only dream of, it was Visconti who was producing the hits. As the Seventies progressed, Bowie evolved as a complex and multi-faceted artist, exploring heavy themes via concept albums and other disciplines. His hit singles seemed merely an aside. Bolan, meanwhile, was delivering a simpler blend of glitter-bugged Fifties rock'n'roll. Bowie went schitzophrenic and deep on his discerning and more sophisticated rock fans. Bolan, oblivious, carried on serving up teenybop dance tunes for hoards of screaming girls. The Punk interlude barely crossed Bowie's radar. Marc, however, was threatened by and felt he had to get in on it, in order to move with the times.

All comes full circle. Marc flared, followed David into drugs and booze, then faded. He had cleaned up his act and was making a credible comeback when he landed his own show for Granada Television. It was his old pal Bowie, now a drug-addled and emaciated superstar living reclusively in Switzerland, whom he invited to close the series. He did so with 'Heroes.' It was the last time Bowie saw his friend alive.
When Marc was killed, aged 29, on September 16^th 1977, it was the twelfth anniversary of the day David Robert Jones changed his name officially to David Bowie.

                                                                    *

'David Bowie is not my godfather', says Rolan Bolan, Marc's only child – who was just a toddler when his mother, American singer Gloria Jones, crashed the Mini 1275 GT in which Marc died.
'A lot of crazy stuff has been written and said down the years. Not true.
'Nor did David pay for me to go to school. I've never even met him.'

What David did, though he's never talked about it, was to invest in a fund for Rolan enabling the child and his mother to survive. Their home had been stripped of everything they owned. Marc's estate was frozen, and his fortune disappeared. When Gloria returned to her family in Los Angeles with Rolan, she was penniless. Bowie coughed up of his own volition, without once having been asked.

Thirty five years since Marc's death, Rolan is still trying to make sense of his father's affairs.

'His company Wizard (Bahamas) no longer exists', he confirms.

'It was acquired by the Spirit Music Group in New York, but rights are still all over the place. I'm still looking for questions to be answered.

'My father was a very proud Englishman. A London Boy. His music was and remains so special. People all over are still discovering him for the first time, which is amazing after all these years.'

To the many who believe he is rolling in Bolan millions and living the high life in LA, Rolan says this:

'I make my own living. There are some royalties (to Rolan and to the PRS for Music Members' Benevolent Fund), but there are no 'Missing Millions'. It has all gone. The people who took the
money know what they did with it. What's left is a great story of music, of love, and of a piece of time when everything stood a little differently. We all need to remember where we came from.

'The most important thing is that my Mom raised me to know that he loved me very much. To the fans, he will always be Marc Bolan. To me, he's just Dad.'

                                                                          *

Acknowledged to this day as the most influential figure in rock, Bowie's rich catalogue of classics assure him a place in the pantheon well into his Golden Years. But he hasn't shaken off his old rival yet.

Marc's music is as familiar to today's young fans as it was to the legions who worshipped him during his lifetime. Much of it is disseminated via commercials and films. The soundtrack of the 2000 movie 'Billy Elliot' featured no fewer than five Bolan hits. Marc's records are played on mainstream radio as frequently as David's. Countless younger acts - Marc Almond, Boy George, Morrissey - not only cite Bolan as their childhood inspiration but pay homage to his sound in their own songwriting. The T.Rex tribute acts, of which Danielz and T. Rextasy are the best, are in popular demand all over the world. Several Bolan pressings remain among the most highly-prized in record-collecting history. Nor have the original teenaged fans who idolised Marc during his lifetime deserted him. At this year's 35^th Anniversary Marc Bolan Tribute Concert at the 02 Shepherd's Bush Empire, and at the Official Marc Bolan Fan Club's London Bop at The Castle, London's best rock pub on the Finchley Road, hundreds of glitter-clad, feather-boa'd women in their 50s and 60s danced the night away in platform boots.

According to Marc's and David's loyal old friend Jeff Dexter, the latter's most common lament during their lengthy, regular telephone conversations is that he is 'not 29 anymore' - a sentiment shared fully by Dexter. Perhaps the thing that irks Bowie most is that Bolan still is.

 

Ride a White Swan: The Lives and Death of Marc Bolan' by Lesley-Ann Jones is published by Hodder & Stoughton

THE SOUND OF SILENCE AND THE ALLIES OF EVIL

Three things allowed Jimmy Savile to become one of the most notorious sex offenders of all time: apathy, a blind eye and a mute tongue. Within a culture of indifference, a refusal to acknowledge what they saw or to speak up about what they knew, the DJ, TV presenter and charity fundraiser's friends, colleagues and even family members colluded with a monster. Vile Savile, we now know, used and abused the weak, the vulnerable, the ignorant and the under-age. Many people knew what he was doing. Not only fellow BBC employees, but good, clean record company folk, no strangers to sex and drugs and rocknroll, mind - the likes of an old chum of mine, a former EMI executive,who confesses to me today, 'A lot of us know too much.  We may not have known at the time it was all happening the full depth of his depravities, the alleged necrophilia and so on ... but we knew he was coercing girls and some boys under the age of consent into sexual activity. There was a mutual dislike between him and we industry personnel. He kept his distance from us.'

I bet he did.

Another music business pal responded to my email today to say, 'What investigations have uncovered thus far is but the tip of the iceberg.  I know everything, and I truly wish that I didn't. It disgusts me, and it makes me lose sleep. It has done for years. I always think, what if it had been my own kids? But I'm keeping my distance from any Savile association, sorry.'

Isn't this precisely why and how he was able to get away with it for so long?  And aren't such people, my friends though they are, as guilty as Savile himself?  What about Esther Rantzen, once the most powerful woman at the BBC;  also the wife of Desmond Wilcox, himself a mighty player within the same organisation.  Didn't she admit on camera to collusion recently, simply by knowing what Savile was doing, but doing nothing?  Was the founding of Childline Esther's atonement, then: an offering too late for the zipped lips she kept over all that past?

Simon & Garfunkel wrote 'the Sound of Silence' in February 1964, about the assassination of JFK.  Forty eight years on, can it really be, its lyrics are now haunting me. In the context of Savile, how apt they seem:

'Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain ... still remains ..'

The song pounded in my head as I listened to BBC journalists Liz McKean and Meirion Jones talking about why their Newsnight Savile investigation about Jimmy Savile being a paedophile was dropped. The excuse given - that a Surrey police inquiry had produced a lack of evidence - wasn't even known about at the start of the investigation.

'People who knew the truth, and told the truth, were ignored'. 

How many times has this kind of thing happened over the past fifty odd years at the BBC?  And why don't people speak up about things going on around them which they know to be wrong?  We all know the answer to that: they are afraid of muddying the waters, of ruining reputations, of tarring themselves with the same filthy brushes.  Afraid, ultimately, of losing their own jobs. 

As former Fleet Street journalist turned Paul McCartney's publicist for twenty four years, Geoff Baker, comments on Facebook today,
'If MPs, the police and the media want to discover the extent of celebrity molesting at the BBC (and at ITV), don't interview Director Generals.  They will know bugger-all.  Interview the BBC/ITV press officers, as they would have been the poor sods who had and have to keep What Goes On out of the papers.  Fact.'   

Geoff would know.

In the spirit of glasnost, I have a confession to make.  As a young, virginal graduate doing part-time shifts at a rival station to Radio 1, I was assaulted by and narrowly escaped rape by a BBC DJ every inch, no pun, as famous as Jimmy Savile. This happened in the London apartment of a celebrity agent who represented the DJ.  The packed, wild party was brimming with household names.  Many of those names have resurfaced in the papers since the Savile scandal broke. Every one of them has denied all knowledge. I was saved, literally, by the hair on this brute's head. A sickening story, and one I have not told, for fear of upsetting my children. I must confess, stripping open my heart here, that I thought at the time (I was barely out of my teens) that it might damage my 'reputation'.

'Their words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed ...  in the wells of silence ...'

The sound of my silence has deafened me for years.  What this man did, and tried to do to me, is something he is likely to have done to others.  Could I have prevented futher abuse on his part, by speaking up?  Or would I have been dismissed as a flibbertygibbet, his word against mine?  I am older, wiser and braver these days.  I have three children, two of them daughters, two still under the age of consent.  What I know with complete certainty is that if any such man attempted to harm my children in such a manner, I would be moved to kill. Well I could do it with my pen.

While we're on the subject of confessions:  years ago, when I was a twenty-something trying to break into newspapers, I was taken by a family friend who happened to be a famous cartoonist to see a distinguished Fleet Street newspaper editor. You'd know his name.  I was seeking a break. He agreed to let me write a few pieces, asked me to file some feature ideas, and said that he would be in touch.  In response to the gushing list I posted to him, he telephoned to invite me to dinner. I thought nothing of this ... nor of the fact that he called again on the day in question, to say 'I've been working from home and running late;  rather than meet in the restaurant at the Royal Garden, can you pick me up from my house and we'll go together?'  I was still living at home, and borrowed my dad's car to drive to the given address. The editor answered the door in a towelling robe, and invited me in, saying he'd only take a few moments to get dressed. He showed me into the drawing room, and went to fetch two glasses of Champagne.  Then he excused himself again, returning, somewhat agitated, with a tee towel in his hand, which he thrust in my direction.  It was suddenly all too clear what was expected of me.  Reader, I dropped my glass and fled.  I never did write for him.  Why the sound of silence all these years?  I bet that this scumbag tried it on with plenty of others:  could my speaking up not have prevented similar occurrences?  Two reasons.  One, I knew his wife, a journalist. I did go on to work in Fleet Street, and although I never saw him again, she and I crossed each other's radar for years. Two, he was one of the most powerful figures in the industry.  I was a nobody, on the bottom rung of any kind of  career.  I thought, quite simply, that I would not be believed... and worse, that I would never get a job on a national newspaper. 

'People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
No one dared disturb the sound of silence
Silence like a cancer grows ...'


Labour MP Ben Bradshaw spoke on SKY News this morning about the BBC being 'still robust', pointing out that self-regulation does not work, and that the Beeb should be regulated by OFCOM. He tempered this with his view that the Savile affair is 'not yet the biggest crisis the BBC has ever faced.'  It could, however, be the biggest crisis of conscience we have all ever faced.

Maintaining the sound of silence makes us the allies of evil.  Standing up to be counted - knowing the truth, telling the truth, creating a culture in which the abused, the challenged and the compromised can feel secure about it being 'all right to tell', that someone will listen, that they will not be ignored - is a collective and very serious responsibility. Fall at its fence and we are nothing but abusers ourselves.

A SUM OF PERVERTS

Good song, wasn't it, the 1980 Police hit single 'Don't Stand So Close To Me'.  With its hooky riff and off-the-tongue lyrics, throbbing with the guilt, shame, excitement and self-loathing of a teacher who fancies one of his pupils - a girl 'half his age' - the Grammy-winning song from their album Zenyatta Mondatta hung around forever, and was even re-recorded and re-released in 1986.  It's still played on the radio, thirty two years after its original release.  Remember the line 'Just like the old man in that book by Nabokov'?  Wasn't this Sting confessing to his own 'Lolita' moments from his days teaching English in a school? We did wonder, and some of us asked.  He always and vehemently denied any autobiographical inspiration. Well, he would, wouldn't he.

Poor, misguided Megan Stammers now finds herself cast in some quarters as a latter-day Lolita:  a 21st Century variation on the theme explored so uncomfortably by Vladimir Nabokov in his celebrated 1950s novel. Why was twelve year-old Dolores 'Dolly' Haze, aka Lolita, presumed to be a sexually precocious child for becoming intimately involved with her stepfather Humbert Humbert?  Why was this girl the temptress and Humbert, an ageing professor of French literature, the victim? The man, said to have been inspired in part by the extra-curriculars of Lewis Carroll and Charlie Chaplin, was a child molester. How did this 'funny, charming' novel get away with making it the minor's fault? I read this as a teenager, as many of us did, and still find myself wondering. 

My children will tell you how obsessed I have been by the Megan Stammers/Jeremy Forrest case;  how I sat glued to the news reports, bereft at the sight of both sets of parents speaking in press conferences - an ordeal for even the most seasoned, let alone those who have never before had to face such a thing. How we all, including my fifteen year-old son, found ourselves weeping with relief when Megan turned up. The obvious reason is that I am a mother of two daughters.  One is grown-up enough to live independently and to take care of herself, which of course never stops me worrying myself sick. The other is still a schoolgirl, and just thirteen.  I drive her to school in the mornings because I live in fear of her being snatched off the streets, bundled into a car and murdered like Milly Dowler. On the days that I allow her to walk back with her friends, my heart is in my mouth until I know that she is safely indoors.  All manner of nightmares invade my mind while I am supposed to be working. At least, I think, I know she is safe at school. But is she? 

I cast back to my own final year at secondary school, when a seventeen year-old classmate became involved with a twenty eight year-old drama teacher down the road at the boys' school. Our two establishments were collaborating on a co-production of 'Romanoff and Juliet' - Peter Ustinov's modern take on the Shakespeare tragedy (guess the storyline). Most of the rehearsals took place after hours at the boys' school, where the play was eventually staged. Were the rest of the cast shocked when we saw our friend wander off down the pub with the teacher who was directing the production?  I think we were, actually.  Shocked and impressed. The relationship scandalised two sixth forms.  We knew what they were up to. She wasn't making it up. But no one did anything about it.  Our schools both turned a blind eye.

Married Jeremy Forrest came on like a lovesick mongrel to Megan - at fifteen, half his age  - writing her songs and love notes, getting a tattoo in homage and holding her hand on a plane. What was a pupil doing sitting next to a teacher on a twelve-hour return flight from Los Angeles in the first place?  Not in our day. Her school and the local authorities were aware, yet did nothing. They didn't even inform Megan's parents when they eventually saw fit to investigate Forrest. For this, heads if not Head must roll. Body parts should tumble, too, in the Rochdale sex gang case.  Young girls were deliberately targeted, made to asume the blame, the authorities knew and did nothing, and must now pay.

Talking of which, isn't it time that former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, father of three daughters with his current wife Suzanne, is held to account over his 1980s relationship with and abuse of Mandy Smith?  Mandy was just thirteen years old when Bill met and befriended her at the Daily Mirror Rock and Pop Awards event at the Lyceum ballroom off London's Strand. I was with him that evening. I was his date. Another high-profile media friend teamed up with us, and we took to going out as a foursome.  What the pair of us never knew, and which infuriates us both to this day, is that he and I were used as the foils for Bill's and Mandy's relationship.  Where was Mandy's mother, Patsy, while this was going on?  Gadding about with Bill's son Stephen, would you believe. There's a book in all that.  Maybe one day we'll get around to writing it.

There's another book, too, in that great pervert in the sky, Jimmy Savile.  You can bet your bottom quid that someone's penning it as we speak.  I tweeted early this morning, and got quite a reaction, about a dinner party I attended some ten years ago, at which two former household-name Radio 1 DJs regaled the assembled throng with tales of the vile exploits of the zany Leeds-born presenter.  Outraged by stories of him molesting under-age girls in his BBC dressing room, I contacted the Daily Mail, where I once worked as a staff journalist.They turned it down.

Esther Rantzen and others now reckon that Savile was clearly a paedophile. Singer Coleen Nolan reports that the fright-haired yodeller was 'all over her' when she was only fourteen. How's about that, then? BBC bigwigs were aware of all the rumours, yet did nothing:  perhaps wary of trashing the image of such a high-profile charity do-gooder whose magnanimous reputation reflected so well on the Corporation itself.  Jim fixed it for himself? You have to wonder. At least ten women have now come forward with claims of sexual molestation at the cigar-fingers of Savile. At least one has found courage enough to admit that he raped her, and has told the gut-wrenching tale of her illegal abortion to the Daily Mail. The mother-fixated, tracksuit-wearing Roller-driving, Gary Glitter-defending nutter got off Scot-free during his lifetime. His 'disgusted' family are now up in arms that such allegations are being made against a  deceased individual no longer in a position to defend himself.  If only, I can't help thinking, the Daily Mail had been more on the ball. Their coverage of the 'Savile scandal' is all too late.