1982. The year of dance music, garish pink suits, and floppy fringes that left you with 50 per cent vision. Well, it was for me anyway. My band Modern Romance’s record Can You Move was a smash hit in US gay clubs and we were invited to tour the circuit. Quite the eye-opening experience for a straight, young working-class boy from Hackney as it turned out. Geoff Deane
I have always been rather partial to Merle Haggard’s redneck anthem Okie from Muskogee. I particularly like it when he sings the praises of “manly footwear”. Not just because it makes me laugh – which it does – but it also reminds me of a girl I used to know who really was an Okie (native of Oklahoma) from Muskogee. Her name was Cynthia Manley. Were she to have married a man named Hank Footwear, she’d have become Cynthia Manley-Footwear. But that’s by the by.
I met Cynthia in the early Eighties while touring America with my new band Modern Romance. Despite being a full-on country gal and more fun than you could fit in a hillbilly’s bucket, Cynthia was the singer on the Boys Town Gang song, Cruisin’ the Streets – a graphic paean to casual, male-on male sexual encounters set to a jaunty disco beat that was hugely popular in US gay clubs at the time. It was also, incidentally, the first song I ever heard that discussed penis size, at, well, any great length.
Our own tune Can You Move was riding high at the top of the Billboard Dance Charts, courtesy of a ground-breaking nine-minute remix by DJ Richie Rivera and the gay club crowd that had gone nuts for it. And so it was that the Boys Town Gang and Modern Romance came to be touring a succession of gay venues across the States together.
I’d been hanging around gay clubs in London since the early Seventies. Places like Bangs on Charing Cross Road and Yours Or Mine at the Sombrero in Kensington High Street. These clubs had sprung up in the capital after the Sexual Offences Act 1967 had decriminalised private homosexual acts between men aged over twenty-one. I guess the sense of relief was so palpable the gays all wanted to go out dancing to celebrate.
I liked these clubs because they had the coolest music and the best-dressed, most interesting punters. Yours Or Mine had a DJ who spun his tunes from beneath an arch decorated with flowers and boasted a multicoloured raised dance floor that looked like a boxing ring. To conform with the UK’s archaic licensing laws, it also set out a pressed-meat buffet on a trellis table. If they served dinner, they could also sell alcohol and play music.
It is said that Bowie had visited the club and some of the outfits he saw would later influence his look for Ziggy. I cannot vouch for that. But I do like to think of Bromley’s first son throwing a few shapes alongside the disposable plates of Spam and potato salad.
Such quaint establishments were to prove scant preparation for their US counterparts, which we now found ourselves performing in. Clubs like the Glory Hole, the Mineshaft and the Anvil. Especially the Anvil. In a previous life it had been a three-storey hotel and bar catering mainly to sailors and male sex workers. Now it was a gay BDSM after-hours sex club, and the most notorious establishment in New York. It made Studio 54 look like a glee club. Quite how the East London floppy-fringe brigade had ended up performing there was anyone’s guess.
Being on tour and in such a hardcore gay environment, Cynthia and I, both being straight, started hanging out at after-show parties. We found we had a lot in common. She had a huge appetite for life and me, both of which I shared. We made quite the couple, did me and Cynth: the white, country-and-western gay-disco diva and the salsa-singing rapper from Hackney with a spivvy pencil moustache.
We were playing clubs around the LA area when we were told that the next night’s show had been pulled, leaving us with a much-needed day off. Cynthia suggested she pick me up early and we head off into the desert to check out some watering holes. I thought that sounded a splendid notion. I may never cut the mustard as a life coach, but leaving the city behind and driving through miles of beautiful, dusty American nothingness in a battered convertible with a girl at the wheel and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in your hand is something I would heartily recommend to young men everywhere. I felt like I was in a movie. One in which the location manager had thoughtfully arranged for a series of isolated, cool-looking bars to pop up at ever-convenient intervals.
We would pull over, drink beer, do some tequila shots, play a little pool, and then move on. To younger readers, I should point out that driving while under the influence was not then the social taboo it is today.
At every dive we pit-stopped, Cynthia was warmly welcomed. She seemed to know all the owners and a motley array of boozers, cruisers and three-time losers. And they knew her. She was a popular gal around this neck of the desert. It occurred to me that I may not have been her first. I consoled myself that I was at least her first salsa-singing rapper from Hackney with a spivvy pencil moustache.
As daylight and sobriety became distant memories, we decided to head for home. Cruising back beneath the shadow of dusk, I felt like we were the only two people left alive on the planet. This sadly proved not to be the case as, from nowhere, a cop car was suddenly on our jacksy, sirens wailing. Seriously? Old Bill of the desert. Who knew? Cynthia pulled over.
It quickly became evident that septic cops were as different as their gay clubs. Guns were flashed and orders harshly barked. They apparently had reason to believe that she was driving while drunk. The three-quarters-empty bottle of Jack sitting in her lap being something of a clue in this exemplary piece of detective work.
At this point they didn’t have Breathalysers in the US, instead relying upon a series of sobriety tests. First off, she had to stretch out an arm with her eyes closed, then bring her hand in and touch the tip of her nose. Yup, this was some seriously scientific shit. Cynthia coasted it. I threw her a smile, which she hung on to for good luck.
Next, they asked her to recite the alphabet backwards. Jesus. I couldn’t do that now, stone-cold sober. But again, she cracked away, no problem. Finally, she had to walk a distance of some ten yards in pigeon steps, while maintaining perfect balance. Piece of cake. She tippy-toed along gracefully and crossed the finishing line. I breathed a sigh of relief. At which point she spun around, lifted her skirt, curtseyed, lost her balance and fell flat on her deuce and ace.
“You’re nicked, love.” Or the American equivalent thereof. They searched her motor and found a wrap of coke in the glove compartment. To be honest, I don’t think any of us had expected them to find gloves. They cuffed Cynthia and slung her in the back of the cop car. I protested that I wanted to go with them. The cops responded in the traditional manner when dealing with an uppity, second-tier British pop star in a desert situation by completely ignoring me and driving off.
I was alone. In the middle of nowhere, miles from anywhere and anything. I thought of phoning my manager to come and rescue me, but then remembered that cell phones hadn’t yet been invented. I looked at the car and saw the cops had left the keys in the ignition. I had never driven in the States and didn’t have a US licence. Neither was I insured. Plus there was the not insignificant matter that I had drunk enough to take down a small buffalo.
I became convinced it was a trap. I’d drive off and the cops would pull out from behind some big f***ing dune or whatever and have me bang to rights. I knew I would not do well in jail, being heavily reliant on hair products at that time. But what option did I have? It was dark, the temperature was dropping, and I could hear the angry squawking of vultures as they began circling above me. Okay, that last bit’s not true. But I was bricking it. You get my drift.
So I started the car, switched on the headlights, and pulled away into the blackest of nights. In truth, I probably never covered much more than a 150 miles, but gripped by fear and with the devil’s own hangover now hammering away at my temples, this was the slowest, most painstaking road trip of all time. I sweated every foot of that bitch of a journey.
Finally, after about four hours, I reached civilisation. Or as close to it as West Hollywood could ever claim to be. Day was breaking and there was traffic on the roads. Figuring that a weird-looking drunk bloke wearing a Johnson’s antique leather jacket covered in Japanese writing and driving a battered convertible had already pushed his luck to indecent levels, I parked the car and walked the last few miles back to the hotel.
I arrived exhausted and collapsed on the bed fully dressed. As I drifted off towards much-needed sleep, I made a pact with myself to stay away from bad women. The next time I had a day off, I would read a book. Cynthia didn’t fare so well. She was hauled up before a judge who relieved her of her licence and sent her off to a rehabilitation centre. As for me, I saw out the rest of the tour but never did get around to buying that book.
NB. A few years back I heard the sad news that Cynthia had died. She was still performing, touring and recording right until the end. I read an online obituary and saw that she had spent time and energy working for AIDS charities in later years. Giving back to the community that had so loved her. She was always a big-hearted girl, and it seems she was a big-hearted woman also. I would say that I hope she rests in peace. But peace was never her thing.
