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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
But then again, as Davina admits, if her voice wasn’t distinctive enough, what chance did she have of making it as a singer? Her voice just wasn’t right, she says. ‘I can roughly sing in tune but, to be absolutely honest, my voice was by no means different enough to warrant being a singer. One of the great things about Celine Dion – love her or loathe her – is that you know who it is the minute you hear her – same with Mariah Carey or Joss Stone. They’ve got a really distinctive sound, and that’s what I didn’t have.’ And, with the other two tracks she recorded with Clapton, ‘The Very Last Time’ and ‘Sticky Situation’ still unreleased, not even on a bootleg, perhaps she was right.
So, if you were Davina, and had failed to launch yourself into a music career, wouldn’t you be over the moon if you were recruited as a dancer for the then latest Kylie Minogue video? Of course you would. And that was something Davina managed to pull off three years after she had cut her demos with Clapton. It was not surprising that she was excited. Kylie had burst on to the UK music scene in 1988, having scored the biggest-selling single ever in Australia the previous year with ‘Locomotion’, and, over the next five years, she would become one of the most successful female recording artists of all time, out-selling and out-surviving almost every one of her contemporaries in much the same way as she does today.
Like Davina, at the time Kylie was also a regular fixture in the London clubs, so it should not come as any surprise that it would only be a matter of time before the two met. For Kylie, though, what mattered most is what she wore and why it was suddenly being talked about when previously not many would have given it a second thought. It’s true, confirms Kylie. ‘I was immersing myself in clubland culture and would dance at Subterania, among other places, in my slashed John Galliano skirt, until the place closed. It was more than just going down to the local disco; I felt that I lived in London and was part of it, and being influenced by the music and fashion coming out of it.’ Certainly, it was a time when DJs, designers, photographers and stylists all assumed a new importance in the world of pop and fashion.
In fact, it was here, at Subterania in West London’s Ladbroke Grove, where, according to rumour, Kylie would dance the night away with a huge entourage and at one time even get her foot stuck in a toilet. But, more importantly, it was also where she first met Davina, who was the door girl at the club, and that, according to some, is how she ended up in the video alongside another one of Kylie’s then new friends, photographer Mario Sorrenti, also a regular at the club.
But not everyone would applaud her ‘Word Is Out’ single and the accompanying video. One of those was Kylie’s own record producer Pete Waterman, who, by August 1991 when the single was released, felt that Kylie was no longer interested in making pop records for her public but for herself instead. But, as far as Waterman was concerned, what illustrated this was this single and the video that went with it. In the video, shot outside the PWL studios in London late at night, Kylie, in her slashed John Galliano skirt, black stockings and suspenders, portrayed herself as a prostitute and Davina played one of her sidekicks. Waterman had only been involved with the videos Kylie made for her first five singles or so, after which it was completely up to her what she wanted to do, but, to this day, he makes no bones about the reservations he held about the video. ‘Dressing up as a prostitute wouldn’t have been my choice and the public seemed to understand that as well because, once they saw it, her popularity just fell away.’
That, however, was several years after Davina had landed herself a job with MTV Europe, the music-based cable channel launched in Britain almost five years before ‘Word Is Out’ was released. As if to confirm Waterman’s comments, ‘Word Is Out’ would become Kylie’s first single not to reach the Top 10. Although Davina was said to have been talent-spotted, Eric Clapton could be said to be partially responsible for her MTV job. It was literally six months after she had stopped all the drugs and drink that, with his guidance, she bombarded the channel with phone calls, letters and showreels until they relented and gave her a presenting job on the midnight to 2am graveyard shift.
But then again it probably helped that she was ambitious to get on TV in the first place. She was really proud of herself when she finally got her opening: ‘I spent three years just chewing at people’s heels and annoying people – tenacious, addict without the drugs. Because the minute I put down the drugs, I needed something else to get my teeth into.’ And not only that, she continues, ‘but if I work at something half as hard as I used to work on scoring drugs – and addicts spend a lot of time and effort trying to maintain their habit – then I’m going to be extremely successful.’ And that is exactly what she did.
By the time Davina joined MTV’s Most Wanted as a guest presenter in 1992, the Europe division of the American cable channel had firmly established itself as a full service network, and the biggest threat yet to terrestrial television. Offering news, sports, sitcoms, documentaries, cartoons, game shows and other traditional television fare, the channel was building on its own reputation of being by far the most important outlet for music video programming.
According to Robert Thompson, professor of media and popular culture, and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University in New York, MTV is ‘the only television entity of any kind that ever had a generation named after it. We don’t even have the CNN generation, but we have the MTV generation. This came out as the centre of the universe for the demographic of young people and it managed to bring together people who would have been very disparate in what radio stations they listened to. But they all came together in this one television hangout.’
Perhaps most impressive about MTV was just how quickly it caught hold of youthful psyches in the early 1980s. It seems that, as suddenly as the appearance of the Rubik’s Cube, a line was drawn in the schoolyard sand. Either you had seen the new Go-Go’s video on MTV, or you were one of those who didn’t have cable television. TV Guide journalist Jennifer Graham agrees: ‘I was really, really into it. It was such a huge event, everyone was talking about it. It defined pop culture for us at that time.’
Certainly, many in the entertainment industry refer to those younger than 20 as ‘MTV babies’, because the station had such a major impact and influence on the way television programmes were then produced, and still are today. If nothing else, MTV was the one network that pioneered and introduced the fast-paced ‘in your face’ style of programming and advertising with quick cuts, layered graphics, multiple messages, loud audios, high-impact visuals, frenetic bursts and random transitions. Not before or since has there been a style that has affected a generation so much and its programming of every media type.
So is it any wonder that it was Davina’s dream to work for the network while its success was still growing in Europe, or that she saw it as the perfect medium to launch herself into the world of television presenting? Not that she was in any rush to quit her job at Models One quite yet. She was only too aware that if everything was to go pear-shaped in her bid for fame, she would at least have a job to fall back on. The annals of television are littered with corpses of would-be star presenters who on any one day can wake up to the news that they have been dropped and replaced in favour of another new face. Even the lists of the ones who have in the past successfully moved from radio to television and then disappeared were endless.
Sixties DJ Simon Dee was perhaps the prime example of such success turned sour. Dee, one of the first voices of British offshore radio, joined Radio Caroline in 1964. One year later, he was the first pirate broadcaster to become a national star when the BBC offered him a show on the Light Programme. As well as his radio programme, he had a flourishing TV career and his Saturday-evening BBC chat show Dee