Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

But Black Freighter didn’t last very long, did it?

No. Jenny always wanted to be experimental. Danny, well, he had his eye on the main chance. Who can blame him?

So was it musical differences that split the band up?

That old cliché. No, it wasn’t that. Jenny and Danny carried on writing together even after the band fell apart. That bit always worked, you know, his music, her lyrics. No, it was in the attitude that they parted company.

The attitude? Annie asks. She has thick, dark eyebrows that intersect in this fantastic frown. And you wonder about her attitude. She’s intrigued by you, you can feel it. But maybe she suspects something.

Yeah, the attitude, you repeat. Jenny was more into a sort of performance art aesthetic. She became part of the gender-bender scene, except she took it one step further. Boy George and Marilyn had this simple gestalt, you know, boy looks like girl. Jenny liked to dress so that no one could tell if she was a boyish girl or a girlish boy. She wanted to keep them guessing. The pirate has no boundaries, she used to say.

That’s cool.

You look straight into her turquoise eyes and watch the inky pupils dilate. You search for some sort of signal from her. Like a lovelorn teenager. But then you are a late starter. You’ve had a sort of second adolescence in your thirties. At an age when most people are ready for a mid-life crisis, you’re still stuck in puberty.

Tell me about that time, she says, holding your stare.

Why are you interested in this stuff?

Well, it’s fascinating, I guess.

And it strikes you that maybe she thinks you’re gay. It’s a common enough mistake: people see the goatee, check the slightly fey demeanour. Maybe her interest in you is just a faghag thing.

Yeah, well, Jenny could get extreme about gender politics but she was an idealist really. She dreamt of a world where none of it would matter. She spent a lot of time in the clubs, you know, Billy’s and the Blitz. The beginning of that New Romantic thing was fabulous.

And that’s when she ended up in the David Bowie video?

You laugh out loud.

What? she demands.

And you love the way she can smile and frown at the same time. And you want to tell her everything.

Look, Anna, you say. About gender politics.

You stop. You feel that you’re about to make a complete fool of yourself. You know you’ve got to be careful. If she finds out too early it could blow everything. You stand up.

What is it?

You want to say, but you’re not ready yet.

I’ve got to go, you tell her.

Johnny, whatever’s the matter?

You start walking and she follows you out of the bar. Outside on the street you turn to her.

Look, this is really stupid. I know you’re only really interested in Jenny but—

But what?

I’m interested in you, Anna.

She smiles.

Well, the feeling’s mutual.

Yeah? You can hardly believe it.

Yeah.

And she kisses you gently on the lips. You get all excited but you know you’ve got to take your time over this.

Then meet me here tomorrow night, you tell her. And I’ll tell you the story about the David Bowie video.

The next night you pick up where you’d left off.

It was a complete disaster, you say.

What happened?

Bowie had come down to Blitz one night, unannounced. Can you imagine? There was an uproar. Every single person in that club would have had his poster on their bedroom wall as a kid. He’d been sneaked in around the back and was upstairs in a private room. Everyone wanted to go up and see him. Especially when word got round that he was looking for people to appear in his next video. Jenny was in with Steve Strange, you know, who ran Blitz. He’d already been picked, so she managed to blag her way in. It had been decided that the costumes should be space-age ecclesiastical: dark flowing robes and gothic headgear. Jenny got into a conversation about Gnosticism with Bowie. She told him how she knew that his song ‘Station to Station’ was about the Kabbalah, and mentioned some other occult influences in his work, the Crowley references and so on. He was impressed, if a little wary. She got chosen to be in the video.

The pick-up was for six o’clock the following morning outside the Park Lane Hilton. The club didn’t close till two-thirty so Jenny just took a bit more speed and kept going until dawn. So, she was a bit wired when the coach turned up to take them to the location, which was on a beach in Southend. Bowie was in a pierrot costume, walking along the shoreline, followed by Steve Strange, Jenny, and two other girls in their robes with a bulldozer coming up in the rear. It was a simple enough set-up but it needed to be precise so people had to concentrate and follow their marks. Jenny was very talkative, from the excitement, the lack of sleep, the amphetamines, and, well, she was going a little bit mad. At first she was charming, you know, raising the energy of the shoot. Clever, too, she talked about the costumes and their meanings. She started to bang on about archetypes, saying Bowie was the Fool in his jester’s motley and she was the Female Pope in her ceremonial gown.

She soon began to get tiresome. In between takes she insisted on engaging Bowie in an intense conversation that he clearly wasn’t keen on. Jenny had no idea how annoying her behaviour was becoming. The final straw was talking to Bowie about the notorious incident at Victoria Station in 1976, when it was alleged that he had made a Nazi salute. Well, he certainly didn’t want to be reminded of that. But in some mad way Jenny thought she was reassuring him, like she was doing him a favour by bringing it up. She announced rather grandly to him that she knew that it hadn’t been a fascist gesture he was making, that it was the sign of Baphomet.

The sign of Baphomet?

Yeah, it’s some hermetic thing. You raise your hand towards heaven, then you lower it to point to the earth. It’s supposed to connect the two. It means: as above, so below, or something like that. From Kether to Malkuth, she kept chanting. There she was, manically demonstrating this sacred sieg heil to David Bowie on a beach in Southend. Well, that was it. She was hustled off the set and paid off with the fifty-pound fee. She never actually appeared in the video, though her memory distorts on that one. She was convinced it was her up there, and when ‘Ashes to Ashes’ came out, she even told everyone she had helped with the choreography. There’s this bit where Steve Strange lifts his arm and makes this bowing movement. But it isn’t the sign of Baphomet. He’s moving the hem of his robe so it doesn’t get caught in the shovel of the bulldozer.

She smiles. You check out how she looks at you. That flicker in her eyes. You’re sure now that she really does find you attractive. You do look good, after all. Pretty more than handsome, but that’s probably what she’s into. It’s just your confidence that’s the problem.

After that Jenny started acting really weird, you say.

What happened? she asks.

She started wandering around in a trance in her high-priestess drag. Taking too much speed, not sleeping, making scenes.

And it all catches up with you for a second.

It was, you give a little shrug as if trying to shake something off. Embarrassing.

You notice that Anna Guttridge has this look of concern on her face. You know, you can play this for sympathy but you can’t help but feel a kind of guilt. Which is stupid.

I tried to talk to her, you say. I tried to get her to calm down, but she wouldn’t listen to me, not back then.

And the voice in your head adds: oh, but she listened to you in the end, didn’t she, Johnny boy?

She told people that she’d been consecrated in a Gnostic Mass, performed by the Holy Fool before a juggernaut god. She declared that she was the Female Pope, come to save humanity.