Chapter 12

Polly Tarantella hadn’t always been the great custodian of Crystal Passion’s legacy nor always the music’s greatest champion. In fact, I first heard of her when Olivia—one of the few original band-members I still keep in touch with—e-mailed me a link to a Rock Music website I’d never have discovered otherwise in which Polly Tarantella lambasted Crystal Passion with a vehemence that was bizarre given the many years since the band had broken up. In those days she was known as Sally Tyrant and was a famous or, perhaps, notorious Rock Music critic, celebrated for her acerbic and scathing prose and for her withering assaults on everything and anything that triggered her dissatisfaction.

What amazed me most of all was that a Rock Music Critic had even heard of Crystal Passion. By then the band was almost entirely forgotten. If our music was likely to be heard anywhere it would be on obscure late-night music shows on BBC Radio 6 or X-FM. It wasn’t old enough to profit from the Prog revival and not contemporary enough to be considered alt-folk or electro-acoustic art music. But here was Sally Tyrant laying into those musicians and bands she deemed traitors to the cause of Rock Culture as she judged it. In her eyes, Crystal Passion represented the very worst deviation from Rock Music’s sacred mission. The eponymous lead singer and her band were being too clever by half. The music was trying to be both pop and art and had failed as both. Crystal Passion belonged to the same tradition as Sufjan Stevens, the Unthanks and Badly Drawn Boy. The band was striving towards something ambitious, something epic and something deep, but succeeded only in being trite, hackneyed and unconvincing. Rock Music was best represented by bands like the Foo Fighters, Muse and Stiff Little Fingers who fashioned a no-nonsense style that said all that was needed to be said without complicating the message with mystical nonsense and fanciful analogies. The best song was less than three minutes long and expressed in a few glorious chords, plenty of energy and unfussy lyrics everything it had to say. The cause of Rock Music was best achieved by dumping the pretentious crap, cranking up the amp and just getting on with it. And in Sally’s opinion nobody had ever done this better than the Clash, the Strokes and Metallica.

This article really hurt and upset me. What had Crystal Passion ever done to deserve such scorn? What was so offensive about her music? And any criticism of the Crystal Passion band—on all but the first album—was also criticism of me of course.

And it wasn’t as if I’d made such a great success of my career since Crystal Passion disbanded that I could easily rise above it all.

Bizarrely enough, Sally Tyrant’s tirade led to a short-lived spike in iTunes downloads and Amazon record sales as her readers tried to find out what was so very bad about Crystal Passion’s music.

On the other hand, much as I felt crushed by this attack on the woman who even today remains the only true love of my life, I partly sympathised with Sally Tyrant’s sentiments. And in a sense, I almost prefer Sally Tyrant’s earlier ascetic attitude to Polly Tarantella’s current attitude whereby anyone who criticises Crystal Passion, however mildly, is immediately beneath contempt. Nothing can now be said about Crystal Passion that isn’t uncritically positive. And as someone who likes her House, Techno or Bass unadorned and on point, I understand the thesis that Crystal Passion had diluted the impact of her music by trying to be so many different things at the same time.

But Sally Tyrant’s earlier appraisal also doesn’t make much sense. Even those musicians she disparaged have released music that’s basic and raw while many of those she celebrates so highly (in particular the Clash) have recorded songs that were experimental and even gratuitously complex. And, speaking for what I most believe, the quality of Crystal Passion’s music is such that someone like me, who wouldn’t normally listen to Folk Music or Prog Rock or even the Rock Music that both Sally and Polly claim to be the Zenith of the Evolution of Music, can be so won over that I could give up everything (literally) just to be with her.

And it wasn’t just the music, of course.

The next I heard of Polly Tarantella (as Sally Tyrant not much later re-christened herself) was when she started writing articles about Crystal Passion (and, incidentally, Sufjan Stevens and the Unthanks) in which she was as admiring and eulogising as she’d once been cruel and contemptuous.

So, why the sudden change of attitude?

It’s not something that Polly’s ever explained to me nor, as far as I know, to anyone else. Polly is so convinced in the absolute correctness of her opinions at the time of expressing them that she’ll deny she’s ever changed them. She’d probably say her earlier remarks were meant ironically or were misunderstood. (Not that there seems much scope for ambiguity or misunderstanding in a Sally Tyrant tirade).

Polly’s change of heart coincides with the period of hospitalisation she doesn’t talk about much but which apparently took her within a heartbeat of death. I think it might have been a massive drug overdose that triggered Polly’s health crisis and the accompanying change of outlook, given that her drug habit also came to a very sudden and abrupt halt. Polly’s someone who likes to punish herself. She’s sometimes talked about her S&M sex sessions as some kind of a badge of honour and I’ve witnessed the perverse pleasure she gets from putting herself in harm’s way. Perhaps she’s decided that instead of being metaphorically beaten up by those who don’t like her championship of Rock Music orthodoxy, she’d rather be attacked for taking the radically opposed view that, after all’s said and done, the truest and purest manifestation of the Great Rock & Roll Dream is to be found in the much maligned and heroically unsuccessful Crystal Passion band. After all, what could be more perverse in the History of Rock than a band made up of a dozen British women whose music straddles so many genres of which Rock was but one (and only just), who sold hardly any records at all, and who spectacularly failed to crack the elusive American Rock Music market?

And then, of course, for a woman like Polly who’s drawn to pain and suffering, she must also have been attracted to the circumstances related to the Crystal Passion band’s demise.

And also of Crystal Passion herself.

But a worse situation than the one we’d already found ourselves in seemed highly unlikely while we were being chauffeured back in small groups by Chevrolet to the Paradise Hotel with as much equipment as possible resting on our knees or squeezed into the trunk. It was Judy and Crystal who took the responsibility of contacting Kai Pharrel and the various insurance companies regarding the vandalised Camper Van and of arranging alternative forms of travel for the rest of our tour. In fact, it was much more Judy than Crystal who was active. Crystal was more depressed and withdrawn than I’d ever seen her before. She clung to Judy with a limpet-like closeness that I’d never imagined possible before.

I was so sick of the disaster that was the American Tour that I just couldn’t be bothered any more. I no longer cared whether we played another gig in America and I openly speculated with Andrea, Jane and Jacquie whether I could be bothered to stick with the Crystal Passion band when we returned to England.

“Why not just call it the Crystal and Judy Band and be done with it,” I said bitterly.

“Don’t be so hard on Crystal,” said Andrea. “It’s not been an easy ride for her and Judy just happens to offer her the comfort she needs at the moment.”

“And just what is that?” I countered. “Unless Crystal’s become a late convert to Tijuana’s finest or a fan of Heavy Metal, all Judy can offer is love and...”

“And what’s so wrong with that?” countered Jacquie.

It was plain that the Crystal Passion band’s close proximity with one another during the series of disasters that was our American tour wasn’t healthy for our inter-tangled complex and libertine lesbian love life. I was spending more time with only Jane and Jacquie. Andrea had more or less renounced lesbian sex altogether. And amongst the others, now the once reliably indiscriminate Crystal was spending most of her time with Judy, only Tomiko and the Harlot could be trusted to maintain the sexual licence that had so recently acted as the band’s cohesive glue.

So, it was pretty well inevitable that the appearance of a couple of young men in our number during our stay at the Paradise Hotel would exacerbate the growing fractures in the band.

“There’s a fucking man in my room!” exclaimed Bertha as she burst in on Andrea and I while we were resting in our shared bedroom, slightly stoned from our cut of Judy’s Tijuana stash.

“Not just one man,” said Philippa who followed behind and was just as disgusted. “There’s two of them! Where do they come from?”

“Hey!” said Olivia who was chasing after them with Jenny Alpha. “Don’t be so uptight.”

Just behind Olivia and Jenny were two sheepish young men with unkempt long hair and well-worn baggy check shirts and jeans. One had the light-brown skin that in America was enough to qualify him as Black, while the other had a trace of Catawba Indian which, as with Elvis Presley, was somehow not enough for him to lose his White ethnic status.

“Hey guys,” said the young man with the paler skin.

“This is Matt,” said Olivia. “He and Joe belong to a local Rock Group. Both come from here in Rock Hill. Matt plays guitar and Joe plays drums.”

“Yeah,” said Joe. “We saw you guys at the Penitence. You were cool. You really rocked it...”

“And then we bought your records after the gig,” said Matt. “We could only afford the vinyl. But it was fucking amazing! Even better than the gig. That Crystal Passion is one fuck of a singer. And she wrote the songs and all.”

“We were fucking blown away so we asked Skull where you guys were staying and he told us it was at the Paradise,” continued Joe.

“So we came here to pay our respects...” said Matt.

“ ... And Jenny and I have been looking after them ever since,” continued Olivia.

“Fuck! They’re cute,” said Tomiko who poked her head in through the door.

“Gimme that ass!” echoed the Harlot whose head poked in from the other side.

“They’re both fucking men!” said Bertha in disgust and despair.

It was inevitable of course that those in the Crystal Passion band whose sexual identity wasn’t solely lesbian should be tempted by male flesh. There was no denying that Matt and Joe were the kind of young men who’d be attractive to those in the band with no absolute preference. They were slim. They were young. They were refreshingly open-minded in a nation we now understood wasn’t naturally either liberal or tolerant. And they were a relatively rare phenomenon in a world where the greater proportion of the Crystal Passion fan base, at least in the UK, was feminist and female. Neither Matt nor Joes were female but neither did they seem bothered about the gender of the musicians in the band. They didn’t only listen to Grunge groups like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and the Pixies, but also to female musicians as varied as Joni Mitchell, Bikini Kill and P J Harvey. In fact, if it wasn’t for the complicating presence of Jane and Jacquie and (at a distance) Crystal, I might have been tempted myself.

Neither Crystal nor Judy were likely to agree with Bertha and Philippa that the presence of men in our company was to be avoided at all costs. Judy because her sexual preferences leaned more towards men than women and Crystal because she would never deign to take account of such trivial distinctions. So, while at the Paradise Hotel, our already substantial numbers were further swollen. And, by virtue of their gender alone, Matt and Joe could only be divisive in a band increasingly held together more by circumstance than choice.

And this, among other things, clearly upset Crystal.

“It’s the end, isn’t it Pebbles?” Crystal confided to me as we sat together in the Paradise Hotel’s scruffy garden near a scrawny chicken who was pecking at the bare sun-baked soil. “The band won’t survive the tour. The album we’ve already recorded will be our last.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said reassuringly, but in truth somewhat startled that Crystal should so echo my thoughts.

“Oh America!” Crystal pleaded. “What have I done to deserve this?”

“Don’t despair,” I said. “We’ll be OK. The Camper Van being vandalised is something we’ll survive. We’ll get over it. It’ll all work out. After the gig on Friday, everything will be absolutely fine. Three days after that we’ll forget all about it.”

“I hope so, Pebbles,” said Crystal. “I hope so.”

“It’s bloody hot here,” I said, glancing up at the sun beating down on us. “Do you want me to get you something to drink from the bar?”

“Don’t worry about that, Pebbles,” said Crystal picking up a can of soda from between her feet that she must have already purchased from the hotel vending machine. “This might taste vinegary and it’s probably got every chemical additive you can imagine, not to mention carbon monoxide and sugar, but it’s enough for me now.” She rubbed the can over her forehead and let the moisture drip down her nose. “What I’ve got to do and have to do right away is call my mother...”

“Marianne. You think she’ll be contactable?”

Crystal regarded the clock looming above the hotel reception desk. “My mother and I agreed to be near the phone about this time every day if we ever needed to get in touch. And I definitely want to talk with my mother now.”

“Let’s get into the foyer then and out of the sun.”

“You’re right, Pebbles,” said Crystal. “That’s exactly what I must do. I really need to talk to Mum.”

The way Polly Tarantella describes the conversation that followed between Crystal and Marianne it’s as if we were all in the same room. But of course we weren’t. Crystal was standing in the hotel phone booth with a cardboard phone credit card while I was hovering around within earshot but not part of the conversation. And at the other end of the telephone in San Francisco—almost as far away across the American continent as we were across the Atlantic Ocean from England—was Marianne and, somewhere in the background, was her new boyfriend, John Dimple, whose relationship with her mother Crystal was evidently eager to encourage.

“John’s good for you, Mum,” said Crystal. “From what you’ve told me about him, he’s exactly the kind of man you need in your life right now.”

Obviously I couldn’t hear Marianne’s reply but I could see Crystal nod her head and interject with the occasional “Yes” and “No”.

“Of course you must live together if that’s what you want, Mum,” said Crystal. “He’s a lot better than your last boyfriend. Not that he was bad exactly, but John is a better proposition altogether. That’s what you need at the moment.”

There was a muffled response from the other end of the line, presumably still about John.

I never met John Dimple, whatever impression you get from Polly Tarantella’s account, not then and not since. Perhaps he arrived too soon in Marianne’s life to feature in the following weeks and months. But Polly’s interviewed him and in her biography of Crystal Passion he poses as a real authority on Crystal Passion even though they’d never actually met. Nevertheless, given that he and Marianne maintained a relationship for more than a decade and a friendship that’s lasted to the present day I have to credit John with a lot more knowledge and understanding of Crystal’s mother than I ever had.

But it’s still not the same as knowing Crystal.

Perhaps it’s because of John, who sounds like a nice kind of guy, that Polly has given Marianne a prominent role in Crystal’s life that seems much greater now than it did when I knew Crystal and played in her band. It’s true that Crystal had a close healthy relationship with her mother. It was rather better than my relationship with my mother who still resents me for not being heterosexual and for not settling down as a suburban wife with two children and a husband with a job in the City. And better also than Polly’s relationship with her mother which must have been strained beyond breaking point every time Polly was admitted into rehab or when she appeared on her parents’ door smashed, wasted or wrecked.