Biography

Teenager

To me, being a teenager meant FREEDOM!!! I would watch my older sister go out at night with her friends, make up and handbags, stilettos and hair, perfume and all that shit. They looked superb to me, like ferocious, young female warriors, out on a mission to drink as much as humanly possible and dance, kiss, raise hell. I was envious.

So when I finally became a teenager, it was like crossing a threshold of the greatest dimensions. There would be no going back and I intended to raise a bit of Hell myself.

My sister was into Duran Duran big time and bands like Yazoo and Japan. I was still listening to old rock ‘n’ roll singles that slotted into a brilliant little record player that you could carry around with you. One of my dad’s mate’s had stolen it from somewhere and I had fallen in love with it. It had come with about 50 records, The Tornadoes, The Shangri - La’s, Sam Cook, all that cool 60’s Rock ‘n’ roll .

I got a job as a Saturday girl in a hairdresser’s called Rumours, soon after my 13th birthday. That was a riot at first ! I Loved it, being around all that glamour crap and talking about grown up stuff and listening to gossip about the stylists.

The work was very hard though and the money was crap. Those guys were slave drivers, still it was my first job and I found it interesting at the time.

I met a girl called Leigh who was into all this music I’d never heard of. She was about 14 and hung around with all these kids who wore their hair in dreads and spoke quite posh. She lived in a massive house and had a wicked room where we would chill out and listen to Sonic Youth and The Violent femmes and Mud Honey and Nirvana.

I was also into Prince at the time, Raspberry Beret and Little Red Corvette were playing constantly.

You may remember me saying that I had decided that school was a joke by the age of 10, well by the age of 14 , I decided it was beyond a joke and realised school and I were over. I was grateful to the system for being able to read and write but the stuff they were trying to get us to do was twisted man.

I could never understand why teachers would get so bitter about any deviation by us kids, from the school uniform. I mean, it was as though these dudes had had sillicon chips put in their brains that would send pure anger vibes searing through their souls, if they caught you with flourescent socks on, instead of white ones. Or if you decided to wear trousers in the winter and you were a girl, you would be sent home (needless to say I wore trousers all winter).

One time, that we were asked to write a poem about war,I wrote it from a dying soldier’s perspective. As he lay dying from a bullet wound, he reflected on his life and the life of his enemy and realised that they were of equal importance and that he had killed countless people whom he had never met and felt duped by the propaganda of war that had brought him to his death and to the realisation, that war is political, not personal.

The teacher was not into that idea at all and hounded me to write about the glory of war, I told her that I could see nothing glorious about it. She saw my opinion as a challenge to her status and that’s the way it often was for me at school, I learned something about the school system and how it was designed in such a way to force children to thinking a certain way and if the child refuses, they’re labelled ‘rebellious’ or difficult.

Oppression, The teachers were always shouting at everybody. It was a drag and I can still never understand why kids are supposed to sit back and take that kind of shit from teachers.

I guess they’re trying to set us up for the open jaws of society, with all it’s conformities and unjust laws, all the rubbish that you’re just supposed to just swallow because if you don’t watch your step and you rock the boat, ask questions, you could get into trouble. (Break em while they’re young)

So, I started wagging it,playing truant, bunking it what ever you want to call it….from school. First, in the local graveyard with a few other kids but that got boring and the other kid’s mom kept catching us and thereatening to grass us up. So I started taking a bus into the city centre and spending my hard earned £13 from my Saturday job, on records and stuff. As time went on, I realised that I could get into some of the divey rock bars if I wore make up and by this time, I had my own wierd rocker style going on, inspired by my friend Leigh, who now had dreadlocks herself and was dying her hair every colour under the sun.

I started going to see a lot of bands, Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, Mud Honey, Fugazi, X - Ray Spex, Billy Idol : ), Prince, Transvision Vamp, The Stranglers. I went to watch a lot of new bands too. The bride Just Died were one of my favourites. There were so many, most of those nights blurred into a drunken, smokey haze so I don’t remember all the bands now but I was out a lot, watching loads and loads of bands, sometimes, I would go with Leigh and other times, by myself.

I loved it, the anticipation of the band coming on stage, the sexy boys and girls in their rebellious costumes and most of all, the sounds ! Man, the sounds that would fly all over the room and wreck your head and make you wanna scream and dance and jump on a motorbike with someone you love and just keep going and never stop until you reach the screaming sun on the black horizon.

Eventually, I decided to work full time at Rumours the hairdressers. Slave Labour, it was a drag and I soon realised that I wasn’t hairdresser material. I would attempt to cut a hairstyle on some unsuspecting model and end up drifting off into some other world for a while, I would look down at what I had done to their hair and it was so bad ; )

The school officials came once to the salon and said I could continue woking at the salon seeing as I was nearly 16 but they asked me to go back and do the exams for my own sake.

I went back for a couple of exams just to get out of the hair salon and to this day I don’t know the results.
It didn’t matter one bit to me.

I was going out almost every night to watch bands or go and drink in bars with degenerate old punks and lost souls alike, in the city centre I was studying life and there were no exams for drinking or smoking or getting high. School was another world that I had left way behind me and the dust from my heels was already a distant memory.

Looking at the other kids the same age as me, I wondered if any of them were doing what I was doing. Some of the girls in my class had already left to have babies but mostly, the kids were still really straight edged and the teachers looked old and gnarly. I was glad I’d left it all behind.

I met a lot of kids in the bars who were in bands and for my 16th birthday, I bought a white electric guitar. I loved it and even though, I only knew three chords, I began writing songs. Much to the dismay of our neighbours who hated the electric guitar.

I also got my first tattoo, at a place called Jake’s, a biker tattoo shop. I had all my hair cut off short and bleached white and when I got home that day, my mom didn’t recognise me at first : )

I had a makeshift tissue bandage on my arm from the tattoo and the blood had seeped through it a bit.

My dad thought I’d been stabbed but when I told him that it was a tattoo under the bandage, he calmed down a bit but thought I was kind of stupid for having one. He had SEX tattooed on his hand, along with various other home made tattoos he’d done himself in his teens, so he didn’t push the issue too hard.

I got a job at a rock bar called the Barrel Organ and earned my rock ‘n’ roll stripes at that little haven for lost souls. It was a very hedonistic time. I used to finish my job at the hairdressing hell hole and head straight for the bar. There, I would serve behind the bar from about 7.00 pm - 1.00 am. We would get paid £10 a night, so we were allowed free drinks all night and boy did we milk it!

The music was wicked and some of the people were crazy. We would find syringes where people had been shooting up in the corner seat. It was a real dive but fun and I got a gig there with my first band, Psycho Drama which was one of the perks of an otherwise bizarre and unhealthy job. Most of the characters there were fun and creative and good to be around. I have fond memories of that place, it was good to find somewhere I felt I belonged for a while. Unfortunately, the place went bust and we lamented the end of one of the last authentic alternative bar/ music venues in Birmingham.

I left the hairdressers. They were trying to tell me what to wear and they didn’t like my tattoos. I had also been told that I would get paid more being on the dole (unemployed), than I was getting for slogging my guts out at the salon anyway. That way, I could concentrate on writing my music and playing gigs. I was so glad to leave that place. I had been working like a dog for for peanuts for over two years just because I was young enough to be exploited.

So I left and you can read about what happened next in the ‘bands’ section in Cat Tales