Post by valerie davenport on Aug 2, 2007 16:16:38 GMT -5
Pin-up-turned-singer Samantha Fox joins the international acts at the Countdown Spectacular 2.
Samantha Fox
Yeah, yeah, we know how it goes. The Countdown Spectacular is a pathetic example of how middle age deadens the senses, leaving imagination flaccid and nostalgia as the only cultural aphrodisiac.
To which the 100,000 people who got their dose of musical Viagra last year will respond, "Yeah, whatever." Followed by, "Can we get tickets to this year's show?"
Those who sneered then may well sneer again as Countdown goes "international" after last year's all-Australian line-up. After all, if the Choirboys, Paul Norton and Wendy Stapleton made you question your attendance at the show last year, what can you say about the presence this year of some bloke from Racey, the "king of Belgian punk" Plastic Bertrand and Robin Scott alias M, alias the chap who had his (only) hit with Pop Musik?
Still, you do get Samantha Fox. You know, the favourite of the British tabloids in the 1980s when page three girls came in two forms: blonde and busty and slightly less blonde and busty. Whose hit, Touch Me (I Want Your Body), tickled many a teenage boy's, ahem, fancy. Who it turns out has released eight albums that have been big in Germany and Scandinavia (where David Hasselhoff is also popular).
Today in a London hotel room with the sun making a pathetic attempt to shine through, Fox is in no need of illumination. Platinum blonde and seriously tanned, she's wearing a black tank top with diamantes and loads of silver bling.
With the working-class London accent, the hair, the laugh, the cleavage and the look, it feels rather Barbara Windsor-ish. Eventually, as you'll see, things will get all Carry On but for now Fox - whose manager and very close friend Myra Stratton sits nearby throughout the interview - is explaining that while she's "not too big on the nostalgia stuff", practicalities count.
"I thought this was a great opportunity for me to come back to Australia," she says. "Basically I've just written a new album and I think it's one of the best things that I have done. This would be a great opportunity to see if my fans in Australia still respond to me in the way they used to and at the same time release something new, as well."
We assume her singing career began when she went from page three to a recording studio in the '80s, but Fox says she has been a singer since entering her first talent show, aged five, in the seaside resort of Bognor Regis. She insisted on spending eight months touring the US with a band after her first album was released.
So, respect and all that. Particularly if you're Russian.
"Not many people have played in Siberia. They've put me in a museum in Siberia now. A nice museum," Fox says proudly, going on to explain that, "I got this letter saying, 'We work in the gas plants in Siberia, we are a team of workers who live here for three or four months, we earn little pay and we would love nothing more than for Samantha Fox to come and cheer us up.'" So she did.
That would have been impossible at the height of her fame; the insurance wouldn't have allowed it. You may remember that key body parts normally uncovered, clothes-wise, were well covered, financially.
"When I was doing page three I had my boobs insured for a million pounds with Lloyds Insurers. Half a million each. And every time I went on telly somebody would say, 'I have never held a million ... could I?'..." Fox laughs. "They [insurers] said I couldn't do any fire-eating or topless sunbathing."
Half a million each? How much would they be worth now?
"I don't know. They are in good nick. They just need a bit of polish."
Um, is this the point where the interviewer-straight man is supposed to say, "Do you need a polisher?" Good God; being Sid James wasn't in my job description. Luckily Fox doesn't need the line fed to her: "They've been on the shelf a little while. They just need a little dust."
Right. We'll take our leave and join Les McKeown, who between 1973 and 1978 was the singer for Scotland's biggest export of the decade, the Bay City Rollers. McKeown cheekily orders cigarettes from room service, charging it to the publicist's account, then smokes them in her non-smoking room.
I'm guessing he's never had his lungs insured a la Fox?
"No, but I'd like to have new body parts on insurance. Maybe 100 per cent of my body."
As he's about to spend several weeks being "Him out of the Bay City Rollers", does he see those five years as bittersweet ones? "They are bittersweet. We had a lot of success all over the world, we put tartan back on the map, but we were never like really cool. We were always a girl band, fancied by the girls. We weren't the Sensational Alex Harvey Band."
Fairly or unfairly, legend may not attach itself to Doug Fieger, singer and main songwriter for the Knack. But the 54-year-old has not had a bad life for someone most famous for having lusted after a teenager called Sharona.
You think of him as a one-hit wonder but he doesn't need to point out the band has had six consistently good albums. He can just point out he doesn't need to work any more and that he does weekend tours around the States with the other two original members of the band.
He doesn't remember a lot of that only Knack tour to Australia - let's say a few drinks were had - but he has written a song about one former Australian, Rupert Murdoch. The song, Mister Magazine, was on the Knack's fifth album, 1998's Zoom, an album that featured a wider subject range than the girls, girls, girls of the 1979 debut Get the Knack.
"Well, I wrote it in my late 40s, not that I am not still interested in girls - I certainly am - but the focus isn't the same," Fieger explains. "I'm no longer writing from the perspective of a remembered adolescence, which is what we were doing specifically on the first couple of albums."
