I’ll say it now - I’m not cool. Especially when it comes to Rock ‘n’ Roll. I’ve never understood what exactly it is that makes people respond to rock god posturing with awe and envy, because the whole Michael Hutchence / Bono / Jim Morrison thing just doesn’t do anything for me. I mean, Hoboes piss in their clothes as well, but do you see gangs of teenage girls squeal-chasing them down the street?
Even now, I only have two real perceptions of ‘cool’ as filtered through music. One is the Beatles on the back of the ‘Revolver’ sleeve. Look how confident they are in that picture, so nonchalant about dropping of the most creative and varied albums of all time in your lap, and they’re off for a smoke whilst you listen to it, because they aren’t remotely insecure that you won’t be impressed. Plus, you know you’d dress like that if you could get away with it.
The second? Ray Davies, *all the time*.
Teenage girls, however, have a very different idea of cool, and it never seems to change. You either have your squeaky-clean, sexually-non-threatening pin up boys, whom they can get together with their friends and have endless discussions about which of them would marry whom; or you have the ‘Bad Boys’, who supposedly ooze sex and drugs, but usually just look very peaked and smelly, to the extent you wonder if you should toss their velveteen rabbit onto the fire.
Richard Maiden was one of the latter, the Pete Doherty of his day. Girls were obsessed. One minute it seemed the girls at school were all squealing over David Essex and Rick Springfield, the next, he was unceremoniously dropped as every girl was clutching a pin-up of Richard from that month’s issue of ‘Dolly’, (Australia’s preeminent teenage girl magazine, full of in-depth and exhaustive three paragraph articles about Periods ‘n’ Shit, framed by explosions of squiggley lines in every shade of pastel, which girls loved it because it talked to them ‘on their own level’, which to my eyes just seemed to mean writing, say, ‘ver. brill’ instead of ‘very brilliant’, and displaying an almost pathological hatred / obsession with a town called Budgewoi, wherever the hell that was. Girls *still* are a mystery to me).
I came home to find my sister and the Twins From Next Door lying in a semi-circle on the lounge room floor around a copy of ‘Smash Hits’, taking turns to read aloud all the ‘fun facts’ about Richard’s band, ‘The Lysergic Suede’.
It’s was Catherine’s turn. “According to Richard,” she said, with all the serious pomposity of a Catholic High Mass, “Mick has the hairiest legs in the band”.
Merrideth looked puzzled. “Which one is Mick?”
My sister dragged her copy of Dolly closer and looked. “He’s the drummer”.
They took this in for a second, then chorused “Ewwwww”. Looking now, I can see his Excessive New Romantic makeup did him the least favours out of all of them. He looked like what you’d get if you took a cricket bat to Split Enz for a couple of hours, and I doubt that even if was only for the combined lengths of ‘I Got You’ and ‘I See Red’ matters wouldn’t have been improved much.
“My turn,” Merrideth said, pulling the magazine closer. She paused, then said “Oh wow,” and was dumbstruck, clutching the magazine to her chest.
I was puzzled. What on earth had she read? Had one of them died? Luckily someone eventually had the sense to ask her what was wrong, and it snapped her out of it long enough for her to deliver a hyperventilated explanation.
“It says Danny writes in his diary every day! I write in my diary every day as well! It’s meant to be! We’re soulmatessssssss”. I was surprised she had enough air to drag the last word out, but she managed.
I expect the other two to say “get real”, (as was the style at the time), but no, the three of them just squealed again.
“What do they sound like?” I asked, not realising that this was of lesser import to girls than what the bass player’s favourite colour was.
“They don’t have a record out yet,” Catherine said, with that particular undertone-that-isn’t of ‘don’t-you-know-anything’ that kids specialise in delivering to someone three years younger than them.
My sister rolled her eyes theatrically, then filled me in, desperate to prove that despite the fact she didn’t know they existed until that morning, she was the one true fan in the room, not like these Johnny-Come-This-Afternoonlys. “Their first single comes out in three weeks”.
This confused me even more. “Then how do you know they’re any good?”
“You’re sooo dumb. They had heaps of record companies fighting over them.”
“Just tell him to go away,” added Merrideth. “He’s too much of a baby to understand”.
Being obsessed with a band you haven’t heard seemed really strange to me, but Richard Maiden had either a very big mouth, or an even bigger talent for self-promotion, depending on the source. I think Rock stars understood the ‘sound bite’ concept a good 20 years before the mainstream media latched onto it. “Love me or hate me, you’re going to remember me,” he’d say, predating the ‘Haters Gonna Hate’ meme by a good 29 years. Of course, I’d argue it’s only sad bastards like me who do still remember him.
He claimed to have been signed by Arista for a million pounds, after an intense bidding war between most of the major labels, but there were suspicions it was just a hugely inflated figure purely to fuel the hype machine. A photographer who wanted to remain anonymous had done two photo sessions with the band with the month of the bidding war:
“They were fine at the first shoot and acting like stars at the second, and all that was happened was the hype. It got them believing they were far bigger than they were. In their eyes they went straight from being totally unknown to being famous, and wanted to be treated as such.”
Arista were keen to capitalise on said hype, and quickly threw the band into the studio with seasoned producer Rod Toddsten, which is where things started to get even worse. Toddsten’s quotes about the band are taken from a very funny online interview.
He dismissed ‘The Lysergic Suede’ as being both ‘overpretentious and undertalented’, and that ‘they spent more time in the studio practising their posing than their playing’. A week’s studio time had been booked to complete both the A and B-side of their first single, but the band ‘would turn up hungover 7 hours late into a 10 hour recording block’.
It gets better. “Maiden called me an out-of-fashion Dinosaur, and said that he knew better what the kids wanted since he was what they all wanted. Then he turned around and unceremoniously sacked the drummer”.
I guess even the band thought he was unfuckable.
“Richard decided the future was the Roland 808 drum machine. He couldn’t be told anything. I remember scanning the lyric and asking him if he didn’t mean ‘observes the sad parade’, and the temperature dropped 10 degrees in the space of the second.”
‘I don’t make mistakes’ Richard said.
“He really was an insufferable twat, so when he came to do his vocals and started singing the chorus, I looked at Mike [the engineer] and asked if we should say something. Mike only thought for a second, and then said ‘No, he doesn’t make mistakes’”.
Which is how ‘Uruguay’ b/w ‘Uruguay (instrumental)’ ended up in the hands of a very-disappointed Arista, whom faced with an already-set imminent release date and an consumer base of undiscerning teenaged girls and older paedophiles, threw up their hands in defeat and put it out there anyway.
Rod’s finishing line, “It came out the same week as ‘Planet Earth’ by Duran Duran. They were over before they began.” Indeed, my sister seemed to have instantly forgotten them, since things move very fast in the pop world for teenage girls, and instead was obsessed with John Taylor. (In her defense, at least her allegiance to ‘Duran Duran’ lasted through the initial run of singles and albums, through side projects, disappearing members, unexpected comebacks, outright derision, and original line-up reformation).
As for the Suedes, they supposedly recorded two, (much cheaper), follow-up singles: ‘Earthbound Memories’ and ‘Pin Up Video Girlz’ before splitting up. Both went absolutely nowhere, and are seemingly impossible to find.
As a footnote, ‘Uruguay’ lived on in my memory in two ways. I think of your standard new wave song as being about countries, since Kim Wilde’s ‘Cambodia’ and Flock Of Seagulls ‘I Ran’ were roughly contemporaneous, even if that childhood misunderstanding proves I never actually listened to the later song.
The second way? For about a year or so, when the older boys would beat up the younger ones on the playground, they’d often sing ‘U R Gayyyyy U R Gay...’.
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