16 May - A Face & Memory

I get an update email about a website I belong to and visit from time to time. They’ll soon feature an interview with an old designer boyfriend of mine. He’s a guru these days, has been for 20 years since I still have the K Hamnett t-shirt from those glorious days of ‘Stay alive in ‘85’ Yeeks, back then I though it would be a fantastic job to work for her publicist, Lynne Franks gosh, I may have had to join the chanting west London posse and their ‘every house should have one altars’ at which they prayed Nyom Renge Kyo (see? Can’t even write it properly) for money, that being the greedy 80’s and it was ok. Ultimately I never applied, I kind of knew they’d find out in my dark heart that I thought PR was for morons.
But I digress as usual. I wonder if I should offer my services as the interviewer (that's how we met in the first place) and appear to venerable designer as a blast from the past and ask provocative questions like ‘How come the V&A do retrospectives of Kylie’s clothes but not of your innovative and frankly hard to decipher work? And do you think I should forgive you for forcing me to read black type on purple?’ Uhm, clearly am not qualified to be in his presence. And I don’t remember the size of his cock which is saying something. Did I have a mind blowing good time? It’s all wiped out by the years. Mind you the interview has already taken place, I'll just have to wait and read it.

I guess my taste was always divergent. On the one side there was him, NB with his jazz style early album sleeve designs (the magazine design and typeface invention was just budding then) and he was ugly, and on the other side I adored the clean, classical and futuristic design of what I can only presume was an arch enemy of his, PS who was extremely handsome it seemed to me, debonair and cool in black polo neck, Actually he probably didn’t wear one but I only saw him in the flesh very few times and well, wonder who plays him in ‘Control?’. He was a good few years older than NB, was probably stepping out with some gorgeous blonde. Oh my god, it’s all coming back, he was! Some singer in some echo beach singer, Martha oh the horror he was so cool and the song so naff. In the end my budding romance was crushed by an answering machine (now, isn’t that funny, if you’d just asked me I’d have said they didn’t yet exist in ’84 but he had one… Did I? I wonder. Probably, I mean I had a pager too! So, one day after a couple of days of not hearing from him (he’d moved into new flat, I stupidly gifted him some gorgeous bed linen as what he had in the large but bit squat like flat in Stokey was not up to my Egyptian cotton standards – clearly a ‘I plan to spend all my nights here’ mistake) I rang his house and the message on the answer-phone was not the usual ‘Leave a message’ but a more heartfelt, ‘Fway, I need to talk to you, please tell me where you are’ or words to that effect. My dream of love was crushed. Who was this Fway that he sounded desperate to locate? A dark goddess/model/dancer/sales assistant? What about us? Hadn’t I been left solely in charge of his mum and sister as some triumphant launch/exhibition of his magazine only a weekend before? Had I said something wrong? Had I flirted with his assistant at the magazine (who’s since gone on to Vogue or Tatler but back then was a bit lumpy and I was only trying to be nice? ) I honestly cannot remember what ensued or what explanation was given, suffice to say that in an effort to bash any pain on the head, I walked into a travel agent with dreams of grand gestures and asked for a flight to wherever. Given my limited budget back then… can’t even remember what job I had, I was given the option of Greece or Portugal and chose the latter as the flying time was shorter. What I failed to grasp was that I was being sold an ‘18-30 holiday’. This turned out to be ghastly and full of not the London glittering people I was used to mix with. My time frame was wrong as well, it was in May ie. not really that warm and it was in the infant day of the Algarve so all around me was construction work and I couldn’t leave any earlier than the week booked. Oh how I suffered, did I even have more than 2 novels to read? Or was my entertainment watching the northern girl basting her breasts every day with butter or some such and turning an infernal shade of red? Or studiously avoiding the games the rep set up? God knows how come designer deity and I managed to only run into each other at a gig at defunct Blue Note a good six or seven years ago and didn’t exchange numbers though curiosity was killing me. Who is Fway? I wanted to ask? Was she worth it and do you too now have kids with stupid spellings for names?