Scratch ‘n’ sniff

Simon Napier-Bell’s second book Black Vinyl White Powder is currently being touted as the pop industry’s answer to Peter Biskind’s excellent Hollywood exposé Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s a neat, if somewhat disingenuous marketing riff: Easy Riders… focused on a specific era dominated by the New Hollywood wonder boys, while Napier-Bell takes an ambitious bash at documenting 50 years of rock ‘n’ roll through its practitioners’ chosen narcotics.

Similarly, the techniques differ – Biskind portrayed his players in gobsmacking detail, down to the colour of an executive’s tiepin, while BVWP favours more anecdotal evidence, sometimes citing chunks of previously published secondary sources.

But despite occasionally biting off more than it can chew (and this reporter would suggest it’s better to be too ambitious in a book than not enough) Black Vinyl White Powder is never less than entertaining, although the drugs issue can be something of a white elephant. While there is an undoubtedly a strong relationship between illicit substances and pop music (acid and psychedelia, Ecstasy and dance) at times the author can over-egg the pudding, especially when he makes claims like “sulphate users needed to find a new type of music as rough-edged and disgusting as the drug itself… what they came up with was punk rock”. Class A’s were merely one of many social factors responsible for The Pistols, The Clash et al.

Napier-Bell gets it most right when documenting the tight cliques of predominantly gay or bisexual middle class pop impresarios who controlled the swinging 60s: Andrew Oldham, Brian Epstein, Lionel Bart, not to mention the writer himself, who took care of business for The Yardbirds and later Marc Bolan, Japan and Wham! He also does a good job of tracing the impact of gay sub-culture on pop – one of the few coherent ideas in the film Velvet Goldmine stressed the importance of glam’s bisexual chic in encouraging hitherto hetero young men to swing.

“To some degree that probably started in the 60s with the Stones, but then perhaps the ’60s also created Bolan and Bowie,” Napier-Bell points out. “I remember there was a line in Hair where two of the guys were talking and they couldn’t possibly see how anyone could be homosexual, and then they said, ‘Think of Mick Jagger’. So there really was a tolerance being bred in everything, and then when Bolan and Bowie came along, they just ripped it away. Both of them were bisexual rather than gay, and yet Bowie found it really necessary to go further and say he was gay, he wanted to take the extreme course.”

Was there a sense of resistance in gay circles to the dilettantism of pop stars co-opting their culture?

“There was and there still is,” the writer responds. “All the best clubs and discos in England, are, or were five or six years ago, gay clubs, and what happened is the straight kids dropped their prejudices and pretended to be gay to get into the best clubs. And now there just aren’t gay clubs anymore, they’re half full of straight kids. And the point I made is, straight kids discover clubbing and dancing at anything from 13 to 15, and at around 21 they drop out again, so they’re not around to establish a long term culture. They pick up on copycat gay culture for four or five years and then go on to become adults and have children.”

One of the more amusing episodes in the book describes how straight American audiences felt hoodwinked by Village People’s comically camp tunes ‘YMCA’ and ‘In The Navy’.

“That’s the real reason that America still won’t accept dance music into the mainstream of pop,” avers the author. “They were outraged that they should have mistaken what was going on. Can you imagine that the military tried to use them to recruit people for the navy?!”

One of Simon Napier-Bell’s most remarkable achievements as a manager was, through an ingenious series of scams, setting up a Wham! show in China in 1985, making them the first western pop group ever to play the country (although this event was somewhat overshadowed by Bob Geldof’s Live Aid the same year). Surprisingly though, he doesn’t hold with pop historians’ view of George Michael as the group’s premier talent, reducing Andrew Ridgley to the status of an industry in-joke.

“I’ve always said that Wham! was Andrew first and foremost,” he claims. “Y’know, people can be taught to sing or have people sing for them, they can have record producers and songwriters, but the one thing they can’t have is their own natural image and style implanted on them – if it is they just end up looking like Westlife or someone. George aspired to being Andrew when he was 13 or 14, and really the image of Wham! was Andrew and George; two wonderful, go-getting young guys.”

Did Simon believe that George didn’t actually discover his own sexuality until he was in his mid-20s, and love songs like ‘Careless Whisper’ were written for women?

“Oh, I have no idea,” he replies. “I thought it very strange that he felt it so necessary to have to say it. Maybe those songs were written without anyone in mind, by copying other love songs. Frankly, he obviously had a huge problem coming out and I totally understand it. I remember thinking in the ’50s, ‘I’m 19 and I’m unknown, what the hell would happen if I was Elvis Presley?’”

If Andrew Ridgeley has his reputation readdressed in Black Vinyl White Powder, then Bono receives less than favourable notices and U2 are dealt with in a couple of perfunctory passages. Why so?

“Well at least I mention him!” Napier-Bell laughs. “Well, Bono, look, he is the most self-righteous, annoying person. He is like a vicar and he’s so often right which makes it even more annoying. You could tolerate him if he was spouting rubbish and was always wrong, you’d put up with him, he’d be a nice eccentric. But to spew all this and to pontificate and to always be right… but in the end my prejudice comes down to music: if I turn the radio on and hear a piece of music which I love, most of my prejudices drop away. But I’ve never been a U2 music fan.”

One last question – does he miss all the bad boys and girls in pop, the hotel wreckers, tantrum throwers and prima donnas?

“Yes, yes, desperately. It’s so nice when Robbie Williams gets drunk and does silly things and has a nervous breakdown and doesn’t turn up. Pop music without any edges to it, it’ll fade away, it won’t exist as an industry.”

Black Vinyl White Powder is published by Ebury Press. The hardback edition retails at £16.99 sterling.