OLD TURN BLUE, WISE PLAY NEW
Wow—is it getting weird here! I just turned on the telly to catch new-model Phil Oakey’s U.K. preem of the Human League’s “The Lebanon.” Two colleagues present at the Drury Lane Theatre during yesterday’s video-making of same reported things were being played super-straight (aka dull) “because they seem to think it’s controversial.” Something should be controversial when a lurvely young blonde obviously trying to shed a skin-tight, slit-to-the navel fake leather sheath dress stamps in her stilettoes and moans, “She dreams of 1969, before the soldiers came,” on MY TV screen.
OLD TURN BLUE, WISE PLAY NEW
LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Cynthia Rose
by
Wow—is it getting weird here! I just turned on the telly to catch new-model Phil Oakey’s U.K. preem of the Human League’s “The Lebanon.” Two colleagues present at the Drury Lane Theatre during yesterday’s video-making of same reported things were being played super-straight (aka dull) “because they seem to think it’s controversial.”
Something should be controversial when a lurvely young blonde obviously trying to shed a skin-tight, slit-to-the navel fake leather sheath dress stamps in her stilettoes and moans, “She dreams of 1969, before the soldiers came,” on MY TV screen. I quickly reconnoiter by phone with a photographer present at the video screen; He tells me Top Of The Pops’ appearance represented only a sartorial improvement over the film you poor schmucks are watching. (“He didn’t have that padded leather jacket for the video—just some appalling white trousers.”)
Other witnesses relay their cringing embarrassment at PO’s effusive thank-you to the patient video “audience” (shooting time for the single song: 4 hours straight). “It was the worst Best Man speech I’ve ever heard,” says one sorrowfully.
But did the crowd fall for it? “Sure. This is fandom.”