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Being Davina. Nigel Goodall
Читать онлайн.Название Being Davina
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586845
Автор произведения Nigel Goodall
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Models One wasn’t the only job that Davina found herself. She was also taken on as a nightclub host and door greeter by a club in Notting Hill. Part of her job would include being at the club’s entrance dressed in provocative outfits. On one night, it might be a sexy nurse’s uniform, on another, a black leather basque with stockings and suspenders. The idea was to entice and select what the club owners considered the right type of risqué, but upmarket, clientele. With her day job at Models One then working at the club in the evenings, and later when she also had a spell as a disc jockey, it was very rare if her day ended much before three in the morning – and now, more often than not (and probably to keep herself going), in a drunken and drug-ravaged haze.
But, if that’s what it took to become famous, then perhaps it’s why she decided to also network her way around the London nightclub scene in the hope that she would get noticed. Although that is what eventually happened, according to some, it would – unbeknown to her father Andrew and Gaby – also introduce her to the cocaine, Ecstasy and heroin drug cults permeating 1980s London.
‘I was a drug addict, a complete mess,’ she openly confesses. Even though she admits to smoking cannabis when she was 14, ‘my real problems began when I was 22 – you name it, I took it, although I never injected. It was all or nothing with me. I was a bright girl, but I wasted what should have been my golden years. It was a long time to be hooked on drugs and alcohol, and I definitely killed off a few brain cells. From 18 to 24, I went out clubbing a lot and took things to keep going. I had a job so I looked like I was holding everything together but then the cracks started to show. I began letting people down and turning up late for work. I was also starting to feel physically drained. Although it felt like I was having a great time, the drugs were ruining my life. Perhaps, she continues, it was ‘just because everyone else was doing them, I thought I had to. It might have been fun at the beginning but it sure as hell wasn’t fun after a while.’
Nor was it fun for anyone around her. According to one source from those times, who remembers her as a loud and colourful character, there was certainly a dark side to it all. She had basically plunged herself into a misspent but by no means wasted period of partying. ‘She knew lots of people on the scene and was always out and about until late in the early hours. When she came into a room you immediately knew she was there. She used to wear very over-the-top clothes, fluffy coats and lots of red. She was very clubby. She had lots of energy and I think this is what attracted a lot of men to her – she certainly got a lot of attention from them. But I know she was very unhappy when she was doing drugs, even though she put on a great show that she was having a wonderful time, but even the brightest young things can’t burn the candle at both ends forever.’ With her hectic lifestyle of three hours’ sleep a night, while holding down a full-time job, was it any wonder that things began to take their toll?
No, says Davina, but it was the control aspect that was so exhausting. ‘It’s like a white-knuckle thing – you know, trying really hard not to do something you really want to do, and you’re constantly in your head thinking about the next time you can go and get some drugs.’ She left a boyfriend whom she’d blamed for getting her into heroin, but, while he was able to quit, her habit got even worse. ‘I realised, “Gosh, it’s not his fault – I’ve got to look at me.” And the last thing I wanted to do was stop taking everything. I just thought, “Am I still going to be a fun person to be around? And aren’t I going to turn into a really boring person? And I don’t want to be totally abstinent and I definitely can’t do it for the rest of my life. You know, forget it.” But I tried it every other way. I knew I had to cut things out, so I stopped taking heroin about two months before I got clean, but then I just had a major coke problem so I realised I’m obviously unable to take any drugs in moderation.’
Her relationships at the time weren’t that much better. One of them was with Formula One racing driver Roland Ratzenberger, who was tragically killed while qualifying for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, the very same race that took the life of three-times world champion Ayrton Senna. Born in 1960 in Salzburg, Austria, Ratzenberger first shot to prominence by winning the prestigious Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch in 1986. After a further run of successes, and showing great promise in the European Formula 3 and Touring Car Championships, he won himself a successful career in the Japanese Formula 3000 series.
Picked from Japan to drive in the 1994 Formula One season for Nick Wirth’s new Simtek team, he was perhaps an odd choice to many, even though he had already qualified in the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos. What may have made him an ‘odd choice’ was the fact that he still had to make his F1 Grand Prix debut. He did that two weeks later at the Pacific Grand Prix in Japan, but it was while he was attempting to qualify for the third race of the season, in April of the same year, at the ill-fated Imola circuit that tragedy would strike. With a front-wing failure to his car, he ploughed all but head on into a concrete wall at almost 200mph at the Villeneuve kink. In doing so, he was to become not only the first driver to perish at a Grand Prix since 1982, but also the first since the deaths of Riccardo Paletti and Gilles Villeneuve, both on the same circuit.
His relationship with Davina, according to one friend, ‘was very hush-hush at the time and I think initially it started out as an affair, but from what I can remember they may have even planned marriage eventually. She was devastated and it took her a long time to get over it.’
‘Certainly,’ said another of those ubiquitous ‘friends’, who always seem to be on hand to comment about showbiz affairs, ‘she was well known on the London club scene, but it went beyond taking recreational drugs on Saturday night. Davina got sucked into this dangerous lifestyle. I knew she was taking heroin – not injecting, just smoking it. I saw her going into a dealer’s house in Notting Hill on one occasion where she was going to get another fix. She was clearly hooked and had to fight very hard to pull herself out of it.’
Pulling herself out of it would be another matter entirely. For the time being she was quite happy to be seen at places like Taboo, the Camden Palace and Beetroot, which she used to haunt regularly and she knew most of the others who also frequented them, like Steve Strange, the late Leigh Bowery and, interestingly enough, Pete Burns, the former frontman and vocalist of new wave band Dead or Alive. He was most famous for their No. 1 single ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’ in 1985, and again when it was re-released in 2006, on the back of his newfound fame simply for being nasty on Celebrity Big Brother. ‘I’d always quite cherished his kind of brutal honesty,’ says Davina, describing the night when he started his bullying attack on Baywatch star Traci Bingham. ‘But I have to say that Pete should not drink because, when he has a drink inside him, he becomes vicious and he was drunk that night.’
Steve Strange was, according to one internet site, ‘the late 1980s seminal clubland king’. Perhaps more accurately, Strange would best be described as Newport’s first official punk rocker. After organising a few local punk gigs in Wales, one of which resulted in a night of passion with Stranglers’ bassist Jean Jacques Burnel, he moved to London in 1976, where he took speed and mingled with the likes of Billy Idol, Vivienne Westwood and Boy George.
Bored with punk, he and Rusty Egan set about creating their own more glamorous ‘New Romantic’ scene or, as he modestly calls it, the ‘leisure revolution’. An appearance in David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video was swiftly followed by hit records of his own with Visage. With ‘a lethal cocktail of success and drug abuse’, he soon became known for being both demanding and difficult, none more so than when Midge Ure walked out of the group after Strange insisted on riding down New York’s Fifth Avenue on a camel to promote their American tour. The hits and the money dried up, and Strange went from supping champagne and snorting cocaine with celebrities to a far less glamorous existence.
Leigh Bowery, on the other hand, was far more complex than Strange. Following his arrival in London from Melbourne, Australia in 1980, he had a colourful exhibitionist career. He first made a name for himself for being an extraordinarily gay performer. His dramatic performances of dance, music and simple exhibitionism, while wearing bizarre and very original outfits of his own