'The Country Was Filled With Wannabee Stars Who Didn’t Have The Ability, Tenacity Or Ambition To Pay Their Dues. Why Not Offer Them A Shortcut To Fame?'
In part 11 of Good Guys Lost, a cynical revolution takes place in the pop world and a chance encounter in a seedy Amsterdam bar leads to a major bootlegging operation
Read part ten of Good Guys Lost here
THINGS WERE CHANGING in the music business. The mid to late 1980s became the age of the producer. As if to counter Missy’s success breaking America, Duncan Stevenson, still pursuing one-hit wonders, found himself a studio engineer who had a magic touch. In Britain, the second half of the decade was defined by a certain sound. It didn’t matter whether the artists were a talented bunch of musicians and singers or squeaky-voiced soap stars, The Hitman had a song for them and the producers to create something the public wanted. The tiny, independent record company that Missy joined in the waning days of punk was bought by a huge conglomerate. It made her and her on-off sexual partner rich. Both were still dissatisfied.
Corporate life did not suit either. They began planning a new route. In the early 1990s they were regarded as anachronisms by the people who worked with them. It was only a matter of time before they were offered a pay-off to leave. They took the money.
It was corporate tunnel vision. Stevenson and Missy were not tied to the past. They were visionaries. Instead of setting up a new record company, they created a management business. Forget looking for new bands: they were going to manufacture their own pop sensations.
The plan was to develop two acts: a boy band and a girl band. Instead of searching for groups of mates where one talented kid would have to bear the weight of three drudges just because they went to school together, the new business auditioned scores of accomplished singers and combined those with the most ability and charisma. The idea was to recruit a combo that would appeal to a wide range of teenagers and adolescent girls. They wanted stars who could cross genres.
It was cynical, brilliant and lucrative. The first success was five young women. The Modern Girls were not particularly glamorous. Their voices were satisfactory rather than scintillating. Each of the quintet needed a distinct look that appealed to a section of their teenage fanbase. The blueprint was to find a middle-class princess, an athletic tomboy, a soft, fuzzy, compliant blonde and an abrasive, mouthy redhead. After months of auditions they had a foursome. At the last minute, Missy saw a flaw in the plan: the band was too white. After a short search, they added a bookish black girl. Everything was ready. Songs and producers were already in place. The creative process had more in common with an actors’ casting than pop music. Their impact was sensational.
The boy band needed a more subtle approach. The aim was to develop a group whose sexuality was ambivalent. In post-AIDS society both Missy and her mentor believed the world was becoming a gayer place. Ecstasy and experimentation were the order of the day. The lads’ night out that comprised a bellyful of ale and a brawl was becoming something in Britain’s past.
There were dangers in the process. Bandmates with shared histories continue to stay together like bad marriages even when money and fame begin to sour relationships. People who had only been acquaintances since the audition have no loyalty. Missy and Stevenson chose wisely, though. They picked pliable young people with a psychotic ambition that they were unlikely to fulfil on their own. Boys Alone, the male composite, were almost as successful as their female counterparts. And, of course, both sexes were tied to contracts that no artist in the right mind would sign. They were not artists. They were empty vessels.
The Hitman and Missy had their credentials underlined. They now looked to expand their empire.
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Missy felt like she owned the pop business. Her rolling stable of boy bands were regulars in the charts. Stevenson’s girl groups probably edged the battle for sales but the contest was keen. Power led to excess. The Hitman indulged himself with the semi-willing females that came to his auditions and Missy enjoyed taunting the mainly gay teenagers who appeared before her dreaming of stardom. She bullied them sexually, pretending that she wanted them to pleasure her before cackling brutally at their inability to maintain an erection. It was all about control.
She was already thinking about the next move. Football intrigued her. Few predicted much crossover between sport and show business in the early 1990s but Missy realised the potential early. Some of the company’s girl-band members were dating footballers. Tabloid editors loved the conjunction of three of their readers’ favourite obsessions: pop, sport and sex. At first, it was just a matter of getting some horny athletes backstage passes and letting nature take its course. Soon, though, the management company was representing players. Stevenson took some persuading but Missy was convinced that football would provide the next wave of marketable superstars. “We need a foothold in sport,” she said. “Get in now and we can own it when the money starts rolling in.” The Hitman was sceptical but the business soon had a thriving sporting division.
Their greatest idea was a by-product of the production line of composite bands. One cocaine-fuelled night in the Groucho, Stevenson and Missy started thrashing around an idea. The country was filled with wannabee stars who didn’t have the ability, tenacity or ambition to pay their dues. Why not offer a short-cut to fame? They came up with the outline for Charisma in an hour. Starting with a freak show, the series would trim down a cast of thousands to a single star. They could insert some of the most talented discards from their band auditions. And, to make sure they got exactly what they wanted from the process, they would both be judges.
The icing on the cake was that they would allow the public to vote for their favourites on a nightly basis, on premium phone lines that would accrue a further profit. Within two days Stevenson had set up his own production company – Missy was a junior partner, as usual – ready to sell the idea to a television station. Nearing 40 as the millennium loomed, the girl from the East End was about to be catapulted into the public eye. She had never craved fame. When it came, she enjoyed it.
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Missy was an expert at manipulating publicity. Early on in her career, before the money really started rolling in, she had made a little cash on the side from a variety of extracurricular activities.
She knew the secrets of the bands under her wing and other figures in the industry. One rock star built his image around ferocious womanising. In reality he was gay. Missy had a drink with a contact from the News Of The World and within weeks the nation would learn the true nature of the rocker’s sexuality. A wholesome crooner was cheating on his wife. Missy steered the reporter in the direction of the mistress. All for a fee, of course.
By the mid-1980s, when the red tops were running wild and almost every celebrity’s private life was fair game, she had high-level contacts behind the fences at Wapping. Inside ‘the Fortress’ – as Rupert Murdoch’s News International, union-free plant was known – Missy was regarded as someone who could provide reliable, salacious material.
Many of the youngsters she placed on the fast-track to stardom saw her as a shoulder to cry on and turned to Missy for advice and solace. She exuded an empathy that they were too young or too ambitious to see through. It was easy to cover her tracks. Once the showbusiness desk at the Fortress had all the information, journalists could squeeze the various parties involved in the scandals. No one, except Missy’s favourite reporter, knew the source of the sensational exclusives. This was a jealously guarded contact. Missy made sure she worked with just one journalist and one newspaper for the biggest stories. She was extremely careful to protect her own credibility. At the same time, she placed lesser stories around various other newspapers to give the illusion that rival reporters across the media were also in her confidence.
When Charisma became successful, she ran her own black publicity campaign that complemented Stevenson’s PR machine. Her boss was frequently sent into a fury by the sort of tales Missy placed at the Screws. He had no idea she was behind some of the exposes and she enjoyed the power that this gave her. “Remember,” she would say when he raged at the way his latest protégé’s sex life had been laid bare in print, “all publicity is good publicity. And you should be happy. You’re creating stars who are so big that the tabloids target them. They sell records and they sell papers.”
These days she didn’t need the money. She just liked doing it. Manipulating people, taking individuals from obscurity to fame and back again, was a game she enjoyed.
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In the middle part of her career, back when she was an employee and did not have a slice of the company, Missy was resentful. Her bosses – even Stevenson – were stupid, sexist pricks and they used her instinct to build their empires. Those houses in Weybridge with their Lennonesque white carpets and massive lawns? They would not have been able to buy them without her knack for knowing the British public’s baser tastes.
There was another easy way to make extra cash. She would give desk engineers a tenner and a tape – and sometimes a blowjob – to record the live performances of her bands. At first, it was just selling copied cassettes to fans.
In the early-1980s she accompanied a group to Amsterdam. They were in a coffee shop, getting high before a visit to a brothel, when she thought she heard a voice she recognised. It was Scouse, with a particular inflection. It pulsed through her brain, provoking instant anger. It was no one she knew, though. But she stared through the darkness long enough for the man to notice.
“Alright, luv,” he said. “You OK.”
“I thought you were someone I used to know.”
He laughed, looked her leather-clad body up and down and said with affable jollity, “I’d remember such an impressive rock chick. You in a band?”
“No, I’m not a performer,” she said.
“That’s a shame. You’ve got the look of a star,” he replied. “I’m in the record business.”
That intrigued her. They talked for a while. The one-hit wonders she was guiding around the red-light district disappeared for what they thought were rock’n’roll adventures but Missy stayed. She wanted to know more.
“Really?” She arched her eyebrows. He took it as encouragement.
“Yeah. I’m a producer. Of sorts.”
“That turns me on,” she said. “I was going to go window shopping and pick a girl to fuck, but you’re more interesting.” He was hooked.
By the time the bar shut she had established that he was a bootlegger. Gently, she rebuffed his advances. Instead, she took his number, went back to the hotel and thought about her strategy for a day or two. Then she rang him. “I’m back in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks,” she said. “You can buy me dinner, Mr Big-shot record mogul. I have a proposition for you.”
The man at the other end of the line thought he was going to get laid. He even fantasised that he might get a wild, bisexual girlfriend who lived far enough away to rarely interfere with his lifestyle. It was obvious that the girl was in thrall to the pop-music business and she gave no suggestion that she was anything more than a putative groupie. She’ll do for a while, he thought.
Well, he got himself a partner. Just not the sort he expected. And from the second she heard his accent there was never a chance that the Gasman would get into her knickers.
Next: It’s 1981, Billy is back home and Liverpool 8 is burning