Been Teen - A Dolly Mixture Story

I was clearing the clutter around my desk yesterday, when I came across a book I'd meant to post about as soon as I'd read it. Since I finished it sometime in December you can imagine how much kipple had accumulated everywhere within arm's reach of where I sit. Not, of course, that I'm saying the book was kipple. Very far from it. It was just buried under several layers of the stuff, which is how I came to forget to write the post.

Well, we're here now. So what was the book? 

I'm glad you asked me that! It was Teenage Daydream by Debsey Wykes. Still is, in fact. (Tenses are slippery little buggers, aren't they?)

Debsey was the bassist and one of the singers and songwriters in my favorite band of all time, Dolly Mixture. Favorite bands is an interesting concept, isn't it? A lot different from best bands, although in this case I'd be willing to make an argument for them being the same thing.

I'm not much of a one for sticking with favorites just because they got to me first. I could make a fair go of listing all the bands and solo acts I'd have said were my "favorite" at various times over the more than half a century I've been listening to music and while I still like most of them, there aren't many I still listen to with any sort of regularity, let alone the same thrill. The new pushes out the old, which is how it should be.

Dolly Mixture, though, are always with me. Is always with me. Damn. Case agreements are slippery, too. I know it should always be a singular for a collective noun, which is what the name of a pop group is, but it never sounds right.

 

They've been with me for a long time, too, the three girls in the band. Debsey, Rachel and Hester. I first saw them when I was at University, although even after reading the book, full of detail about specific gigs and dates as it is, I still can't be sure exactly when that first time might have been. 

I think it was when they were third on the bill at the Cambridge Corn Exchange to the Fall, with the Users sandwiched in-between. There's no doubt that I was at that gig. I remember it about as well as I remember anything from that long ago. The only question is whether that was the first time I saw them play live.

It sure wasn't the last. We went to see them as often as we could. Everyone liked the Dollies. There was also one of those degrees of separation things going on, the kind that happens all the time, when you're young. A college friend of mine knew some people who knew some people who knew the Dollies, so we ended up at a couple of the same parties. 

I particularly remember going to one given by a guy called Lance Chainsaw, who had a fanzine called Chainsaw. (Probably not a co-incidence.). The Dollies were definitely at that one. I think they might even have played a few songs but I went to a lot of parties back then.Very, very few of them was I in a state to remember much about afterwards.

Anyway, old history. (Is there any other kind?) Not going over all that again or not right now. I came here to talk about the book.

For anyone who was in Cambridge as the seventies turned into the eighties, it's a time capsule. Reading the first half felt like stepping back in time. All the places, the bands, the way everyone thought and behaved. It's not always a good feeling, your past turning up like it wants to get back inside you, somehow. But it can be. This was.

As the narrative winds on it starts to fray and lose its cheer. Not the writing, which is fluent and friendly and lovely to read, all the way to the end. No, it's the way all those hopes and dreams begin to dessicate, drying out before they eventually turn to dust and blow away. It's heartbreaking, in a way, even though in another, just the life that was in them while they lasted ought to be enough to sustain anyone forever.

If you want a casebook example of how just being talented is never enough, read this book. More, being talented and having the breaks doesn't guarantee anything much of anything, either. Dolly Mixture had plenty of truly great songs. They had a unique look and sound. They had charisma and elan. They had people with influence pulling for them. 

They played a lot of gigs. Made a lot of demos. Released some singles and EPs. Got played on the radio. Made the covers of the music papers. Important, influential people loved them. Famous people. Stars.

They got chances many bands would kill for and they didn't waste them. They made it all the way to Top of the Pops. On a Number One record, even. It just wasn't theirs.

With all of that, they never convinced a record company to let them make an album. They had to do it themselves, by which time they were all but done. It's quite possibly the best album ever made by anyone but then I may be biased. It's certainly my favorite.  

So, all of that and much more is in the book. If you want the whole story, I suggest you buy it. You can get it in Hardback, as an Audiobook or for your Kindle. In September there'll be a paperback, which suggests it must have sold well enough. 

And so it should have because even if you've never heard of, let alone heard, Dolly Mixture, Teenage Daydream is a great coming-of-age tale. Anyone could read it and have a good time. The subtitle is "We are the girls who play in a band" and if you want to know how that goes, you can't do better. Unless, of course, you happen to have been in a band when you were a girl. In which case, where's your book about how that went?

Two odd things struck me as I was reading it. No, actually, one didn't strike me until later, when I was reading Amy Rigby's Girl To City. I wrote all about that in a post that turned out to be one of my least-viewed ever. Seems not many people care what I think about autobiographies of musicians they never heard of, which doesn't bode well for this post but what the hell...

Dolly Mixture, for reasons Debsey never really seems to understand, did not get on well with some of the other all-female bands of the time, one in particular. There seem to have been ideological issues at the heart of it. The Dollies always looked like they were having fun even when the songs were bleak when you thought about them. The post-punk years weren't generally a great time for that kind of nuance. You weren't just supposed to take yourselves seriously, you had to let everyone know about it.

The same bands turn up in Amy Rigby's story as incredibly helpful and supportive. Which goes to show... something. That people have shapes that fit together or don't, I guess. Anyway, it was weird, reading about two versions of the same people so close together.

Not nearly as weird as the other thing, though. Dotted here and there throughout Debsey's book are letters from fans. She must have kept all the fan mail. They give a charming and occasionally disturbing insight into what it means to be even a little bit famous. 

And one of them might have been written by me.

You'd think if it was I'd remember writing it. But then, as I said, there's plenty from back then I don't really remember. And I did sometimes write letters to people I didn't know. It was a thing you did.  Well, you had to. It's not like now. We didn't have social media. We had the mail.

When I first read it I thought bloody hell! That's me! It's not just that it reads exactly like something I'd have written. It's the details. The date is right for when I was back home after graduating from Cambridge. The city the letter was sent from is where I was living then.

I was in a band that I always wanted to cover the Dollies' "Side Street Walker" (We never did.). I used to go see The Blue Aeroplanes as often as I once went to see Dolly Mixture and Rodney Allen was often on the bill. (He eventually joined them.) Everything fits.

I don't entirely remember our bass player being in hospital or the drummer going back to Portsmouth, but all sorts of things like that happened all the time to make being in a band as awkward as possible. And come to think of it, I do remember the bass player hurting his hand and us having to cancel a gig because of it... 

The only thing that throws me is the bit about the singer not making rehearsals...  I thought I was the singer. But there was a short time when I wasn't...

Maybe I didn't write it. Only, Debsey has included the first names of all the people who wrote the letters in the book and this one was written by someone with the same name as me. (I've cut it from the picture above because we don't use our real names around here but you can find out what it is if you buy the book! Not that it'll do you much good. I have a very common first name.)

It does seem like an awful lot of co-incidences if it wasn't me. Maybe I have a twin I never knew about. I hope they're not evil.

Anyway, another little mystery to add to the pile. You think you know your own past but you never do, not really. What I do know is that I loved Dolly Mixture then and I love them still and this book brings all of it back, not that most of it ever went very far. 

It won't do that for you because you weren't there but maybe you'll find something that I didn't. Something you wanted or needed or would be glad to have, at least. 

Books can do that. Good Ones. 

This is a good one.