When a record label contacted her wanting to reissue her 35-year-old debut single, Kate Fagan thought it was a prank call. She had released the track, I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool, on her friends’ DIY imprint; it had made the rounds in the underground clubs and bars of Chicago’s punk scene before fading into obscurity. Now, Fagan is based in New Orleans, where she still performs and plays shows – but she says that nobody knew who she was when she got the call in 2016. “The call stunned me, it tickled me,” she laughs. “Who knew that all these years later that song would still mean something to people?”
The song was written in response to the “hipster culture” she had come of age around in New York; over a skippy drum machine and a jangly bassline, Fagan tears apart the materialism and commercialism she had seen in the late 1970s. It became an anthem for those disillusioned with the scene. “I felt Studio 54 was based on status, money, being able to get on to the list, things like that,” she says, describing the “cocaine glamour” and designer clothes that were in vogue. “I didn’t wanna wear a logo on my shirt, I didn’t wanna wear Calvin Klein on the back of my jeans.”
So what was she wearing? “I’d put together yellow men’s pyjama bottoms, a crazy corset from the 50s and some trashy jewellery I’d find at a secondhand store, that kind of stuff.”
Fagan had grown up with a keen interest in music, playing the piano and the cornet and singing in church choirs and school musical theatre. Soon after she arrived in Chicago, she says she fell into the city’s nascent punk scene, drawn in by the collaborative spirit, the opportunity to rebel against her parents and the low-stakes approach. “I wasn’t trained to a point where I was going to have a career in being a classical type of musician,” she says. “But I realised you didn’t have to be a trained singer or musician, you could really do it yourself. It was about self-expression rather than hitting all the right notes.” She bought a cheap bass guitar and started writing songs.
The single was pressed thanks to a “stroke of luck” from one of her day jobs. The attorney she was working for had wanted to give her a bonus, perhaps an item of jewellery. “I said: what I’d actually like to do is put out a record.” On the B-side of Too Cool was Waiting for the Crisis, a jittery attack on Reagan-era politics with dub and post-punk sensibilities. “A lot of people had lost their jobs, it was a bad economic time,” she says. “I wanted to make a stand.”
Releasing music was also a way for Fagan to assert herself in a new scene. “I really wanted to get into the recording studio and put something down that proclaimed that I was now in this business, in this music scene,” she says. “When I put out the record I was like: this is me.” The first run sold out that same year. Fagan continued to make music throughout the 1980s – namely a rock opera called The Kissing Concept, inspired by the NYC nightclub scene. (Although she performed the show live in theatres and clubs at the time, the music remained unreleased until 2016.)
As well as working a string of jobs in offices, universities and clubs, Fagan organised ad hoc concerts and jam sessions with her friends and label mates. She went on to form Heavy Manners, a ska band that supported the Clash, the English Beat and Grace Jones. But she was a “real force” behind these musical endeavours, she says: “I was a hustler. I went to all the record stores, I got my single into the jukeboxes at all the clubs, and I gave copies to DJs. And then it caught on.”
It is still catching on now: this month, the extended edition of her debut record is being re-pressed once more, this time with additional unreleased material from Fagan’s rock opera. Stabbing synths wrestle against shrill guitar riffs and seductive vocals as she channels the eccentricity and sleaze of the clubs she spent time in. “The nightclubs were where a lot of change was going on,” she says, recalling the prominence of queer communities and the explosion of new sounds they were fostering. To her, they were a sanctuary. “I really liked the wild, dancing-all-night part of it and the loud, throbbing music,” she says. “I’ll always be a club kid.”
With her surprise at the continuing attention in mind, I ask Fagan what she thinks of the songs now. “They’re timeless,” she says, earnestly. “I like that on each song, I just come charging into it. I like listening back to it and thinking: you go girl, you get out there and just tell ’em.”
• I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool is out now on Captured Tracks
