The Mystery Girls, 1983-86

I once had a band called The Mystery Girls. The specific aim of the project was to do something which would embarrass me in later years and prevent me from becoming pompous. The project succeeded in that aim. I also felt that if one has a David Bowie complex it is probably healthier to wear make-up, get up on stage and sing than to sit in your bedroom crying softly to yourself. We had a contract with A&M records and appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test. We were loathed by the critics, but to some people we were just what the doctor ordered, and we had fans who had the name of the band tattooed on their arms.

We wore a lot of make-up but, in true Bowie style, never actually wore ladies' clothing. Every item was male attire, albeit glammed up to the point of madness. There were no false tits or lashes. But I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Straight blokes would watch the band and hallucinate drag, often to their great excitement. Guys would say, Man, you were so great, with the fake tits and the lashes and all...! And I would say, There were no false tits. And they'd say, You big fibber! We saw them!

I had a theory at the time that thoughtlessness could lead to enlightenment. Subsequent metaphysical research has revealed to me that I was in fact right. It can.

Of course, one finds one's own style. Here I differ from Bowie in that I adopt the punk-rock aesthetic of allowing my make-up to slide off my face in the course of a performnace. This pic shows me at The Beat Route, 1983. An extremely bad gig but one that set the record companies aflame. My guitarist Simon would spend many minutes in between songs turning his instrument (we had no roadie) and so I had to tell impromptu jokes to the audience. We have it on tape to this day and I'm quite funny.

And this is what I looked like before the make-up ran. I always did it myself. It started out quite subtle (late '83) but by February '84 I had signed to A&M and was thinking, why hold back? A callow young trick recently spotted this photo lying round my office and said, "Is that Boy George?" Of course I was horrified. At the time I considered myself to as different from Boy George as chalk from cheese, but I see now that it's all relative.

Looking back, this photo session was exactly the only good thing to come out of our deal with A&M, who remixed the excellent demo of my song Ash In Drag, made a pig's ear of it and released it as a single. When it bombed, they wrote us off, and, on the release of our second and final A&M single, instructed chart shops to key in all Mystery Girls sales as Joe Jackson sales, a common practise at the time. That's rock 'n' roll for you.

Another of my naiveties of youth was the belief that pop music was a suitable arena for metaphysical enquiry. The lyrics to Ash In Drag went as follows:

"Red rose and salvage brother briar
Knew not the pain of our desire
Rose burns, but when the fire's over
Ash claims her elemental lover..."

The chorus had no main verb, but consisted just of four floating existential concepts:

"What I am. What I want. What I do. What I say."

It was a blast from the solar plexus, a national anthem for mystically-inclined drag-queen ego-monsters, and could quite easily have been a hit had A&M not put their oar in.

The Fridge, 1984. Behind us, our logo on a banner. My point was, better a female symbol than a swastika. Plus, it was my curious fate to be simultaneously channeling both Christopher Isherwood AND Sally Bowles, and I needed a backdrop.

Sketched by Beryl Sanders at the height of the madness. Beryl was a lady from a good family who lodged with my mother at the time, an illustrator. The sketch seems to catch the meaning of glam-punk-rock to a non-rock-n-roll person. I'm a satyr and an imp. I'm Byron and Oscar. How flattering!

By '86, I had come to the end of the line as far as tawdry glamour was concerned. I spent the next five years winding the band down and going back, gradually, to writing. In '89 I wrote my novella Watch That Man, which was eventually to become The Man Who Knew Too Little. Here I am in 1986 wondering whether to become a proper writer or just sit around wearing nice clothes for the rest of my life. I eventually decided on the former. But it was to take me till about 2004 to even begin to become a proper writer. Let that be a lesson to all you talented, lazy kids who think those books and plays will just write themselves...