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Britain’s bores didn’t know what to do with Wendy James. As the frontwoman of Transvision Vamp, that Eighties collision of brash punk and business pop, she was good and moody, attractive and confounding, cool and unflappable. Naturally, she needed to be destroyed. “Wendy James, John Sessions, Jeremy Beadle and 97 more in our Hated 100,” went the cowl of a 1989 challenge of Time Out journal, alongside a photograph of James defaced by a smashed pie. Ah, the good previous days. What else in all probability bought their backs up? James actually, actually didn’t give a rattling.
“It never occurred to me for a second that I wasn’t equal,” the 58-year-old says at the moment, proudly. She’s wrapped in a pink coat in the front room of her residence in the south of France, her blonde hair lacquered to her scalp, her eyes thick with black liner. “I was the f***ing leader,” she continues. “I was the engine. You could put me on a roster with 10 different acts and I’d go out there to win. Most pop stars worth their salt will have that same killer instinct. I was never a victim. If you were offensive, I’d be like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. ‘Are you f***ing talking to me?’” Her cut-glass English accent could also be delicate, however she reels off that well-known line with such quiet pressure that I really feel like operating and hiding.
That combine of soppy and scary was at all times at the coronary heart of James’s attraction. With her peroxide bob, powder-pink lipstick and performative snarl, James embodied the persona of the “teenage girl gone wild”. Shortly after assembly between London and James’s hometown of Brighton, she and her bandmates marched into EMI Records insisting they had been going to be the greatest band in the world – then instantly bought signed. Their most profitable singles had been equally full-on, thrumming with intercourse and violence. Nothing else in British pop at that time sounded fairly so anarchically enjoyable, all scuzzy guitars and bratty shrieking.
“I don’t want your car, baby/ I want your ughhhh!” James moaned on 1988’s “I Want Your Love”. “Tell that girl I’m gonna beat her up,” threatened an earlier single, “Tell That Girl to Shut Up”. “You can tell me all your stories/ But please spare me the plays,” she sassed on 1989’s “Baby I Don’t Care”. Listen to their deeper cuts, although, and James may very well be mournful and self-aware. “Oh I’m so bad, bad, bad, all the time,” she sulks on the regretful “Bad Valentine”. “You got the skies and you got the stars/ And you got the power to break a young heart,” goes the elegant dream-pop of “Sister Moon”.
“Some people have an instinct to gravitate towards destruction, but I am the opposite,” James says. “Were there cracks? Yes, I’m sure – you do have moments where you’re on the bed crying and thinking you’re all alone. But that’s all it was. You get up the next morning and you go again.” She is aware of, although, that she’s had it fortunate. Her new album The Shape of History – her seventh since the breakup of Transvision Vamp – is pop and blues and thrash rock, its lyrics underpinned by a form of knowledge that may solely come from years of hustle and journey.
“I was a tough little f***ing teenager,” she says. “I had armour. I had a force field. But not everyone comes equipped with that – you just see the f***ing battering that people in their twenties and thirties take. So some of the record is me going, ‘I’m here for you – it’s all gonna be OK.’”
Being flirty or sexual? That’s simply who we had been. And whether or not you’re well-known or not, younger women f***ing present out, don’t they?
The album seems like a patchwork of reminiscences – victories, heartaches, the feeling of racing down a California freeway, no vacation spot in thoughts. Today, James guides me alongside a roadmap of the report’s influences. Joan Didion. Hunter S Thompson. The Fall. Dancing on tabletops. Love affairs and screwball comedies. Breaking America. She remembers being stranded on the freeway, and a truck stopping and driving the band to the auto store. “I was wearing this minidress with green sequins,” she provides, grinning wistfully.
Throughout our dialog, she zigzags by means of contradicting feelings. At one level, whereas discussing the invasion of Ukraine, she begins to cry; at one other, she turns into exercised, shouting furiously about misogyny, energy buildings and the homicide of Sarah Everard. “Women do get taken more seriously now,” she says, “but not if you get raped by a f***ing copper.” James is passionate, opinionated, righteously indignant.
For journalists in the previous, being confronted with fairly so many Wendy James dimensions without delay appeared to spark confusion. “Exploiter or exploited? Rock bitch or just bitched at?” requested Vox journal in 1991. “Either way, she loves the attention.” Asked about this at the moment, she says she actually was simply a bundle of issues again then.
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“I surrounded myself with punks and boys from other bands, so I grew up with that tough, boy-gang mentality,” she says. “I wanted to walk into town and throw down. And being flirty or sexual? That was just the kind of teenager I was. I was f***ing happy! And, honestly, the girls who were my friends at the time – Bananarama, or any of us – we were all running around town in little bra tops and dancing our tails away at the Café de Paris. That’s just who we were. And whether you’re famous or not, young girls f***ing show out, don’t they?”
Why did individuals appear so bothered by you, although? “Women have to prove themselves twice as much as men,” she sighs. “And whether it’s rape victims or pop stars, women are expected to explain themselves, when it should be the perpetrator explaining it.” She thinks issues are higher now – however solely simply. “‘Atavistic’ is the word Hunter Thompson would use,” she says. “‘Man equals hunter, woman equals mother’ – we get thrown back into these ridiculous cliches, and that’s not even touching on gay and transgender rights. There are too many variables in the human species to make everyone who isn’t a heterosexual man subjugate to a particular power structure.”
We speak about tabloid parlance. “‘She’s got a nice set of pins,’” she recites, earlier than mock-gagging. “‘Look at her hot body on the beach’ – but then you see Elon Musk with his blubber fat hanging out over his boxer shorts, and it’s disgusting.” She hoots with laughter. “So, yes, we’re making intellectual and factual improvements, but when the old basic instinct kicks in? We get pulled back into the cave.”
James has lived between France and New York since the early Noughties. Britain in the Nineties, in the wake of Transvision Vamp disbanding in 1992, was a little bit of a inventive wasteland for her. Her uncommon first solo report, 1993’s Now Ain’t the Time for Your Tears, was fully written by a man she’d solely briefly met: Elvis Costello, his lyrics impressed by what he thought he knew about James through the tabloids. She then parted methods together with her label and, upon the finish of a long-term relationship, determined to decamp to New York in 2002.
“New York meant freedom,” she explains. She threw out her belongings and all the detritus from her Transvision Vamp days, and acquired a one-way aircraft ticket with simply a suitcase in hand. Inside it was a skirt, some jumpers, a copy of Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and a assortment of Tom Wolfe essays. For a month she crashed on the couch of her former bandmate Tex Axile, then, dipping into the pot of cash gathered from her pop star days, purchased an residence in the metropolis’s East Village. The solo work that adopted tended to be free and experimental – filled with attention-demanding choruses and sonic detours impressed by the whole lot from T Rex to The Shangri-Las to The Stooges.
“Other journalists have asked me what it’s like to be famous and then not be famous, because I did everything arse backwards,” she laughs. “I took ownership of ‘Wendy James’, started over, learnt to write songs and play guitar. Usually you learn to write songs and start out in the bedsit and move on up – but we exploded big, and only after did I go back to the little studio and make my little demos. It was just work, work, work.”
Before we half methods, I ask James about an look she made on Michael Aspel’s discuss present in 1991, the place she informed the presenter that she felt as if she’d “created” herself from scratch. She nonetheless thinks it’s correct – she was adopted at beginning, and has chosen to not attempt to discover her beginning dad and mom. “And what that means is that you start off with a blank slate,” she explains. “I can’t trace my medical history. There was no question of going into the same work field as my birth parents, because I didn’t know what they did. So in that respect, I created myself – I was unburdened by the past, because there was no past. I haven’t had children either, so when it ends, it ends with me. I’m just this little micro-blip of its own thing.”
She laughs, serious about her legacy.
“And I suppose what I’ll leave behind is the people I’ve been nice to, the experiences people have had as they’ve passed through my life… and the music.”
‘The Shape of History’ is launched on 25 October
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