Читать книгу Being Davina - Nigel Goodall - Страница 11

By the time Davina was 16, she had left school with nine O levels, two A levels and she could speak French fluently – certainly enough qualifications to follow her classmates into university. But, rather than do that, she decided she only wanted to think about finding fame as a rock singer. Of course, as she would soon discover, that wasn’t so easy. It wasn’t easy then, and it certainly isn’t any easier now; if it was, then there would be no need for television talent shows like Pop Stars or The X-Factor. She may have been singing with a band while she was at school, but perhaps she now wondered whether that would bring her the kind of fame and fortune she so desired. Instead, she decided a good alternative would be a stint as a singing waitress at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, although Hello magazine reported that according to some sources she failed her audition.

The Moulin Rouge is still the most famous of all cabarets in the world. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been one of the most legendary monuments of Paris. Edith Piaf, Yves Montand, Ginger Rogers, Lisa Minnelli and Frank Sinatra are just a few of the names to have played cabaret at the venue. It is also where topless dancers take audiences on a travelogue across the ages and continents with performances of folklore histories from all over the world. And of course it is the only place on earth where one can see the real French Can-Can.

Whether Davina failed her audition or not, by the time she returned home to London, she had already tried her hand at modelling, which still appears to be an almost traditional route chosen by many pretty young girls in their bid for fame and fortune. At first, it appeared to be a good way for her to get noticed, and there seemed no reason why she shouldn’t succeed. She did, after all, have all the right criteria for what she thought was needed to become a successful model. What she hadn’t counted on, perhaps, was that, strangely enough, she considered herself to be too short and fat for the catwalk. As she herself admits, ‘I was the world’s most unsuccessful model at 16.’

Perhaps she felt that, if she couldn’t become a model herself, then she could help others who could. And so what would be better than to go and work as a booker for Models One, an agency in Covent Garden that had started up in 1968 with just three models on their books. Today, it is a very different story. Models One is one of the largest and most successful model agencies in Europe, and also one of the most respected in the world. And, as if to prove the point, they boast of being responsible for helping to build the careers of such models as Yasmin Le Bon, Jerry Hall, Greta Scacchi, Twiggy, Karen Elson, Gerard Smith, Charley Speed and Giles Curties – and they are probably right.

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 design, could be frequently seen in Taboo, the same nightclub in Leicester Square that Davina was to haunt. A large man, he used his costumes to exaggerate his size, and the effects were frequently overpowering for those who encountered him, and more so because of his confrontational style.

In the late 1980s, when Davina would have known him, Bowery collaborated as a dancer with the post-punk ballet dancer Michael Clark, having been the costume-designer for a number of years. He also participated in multi-media events like I Am Curious, Orange and the play Hey, Luciani, with Mark E. Smith and The Fall. In 1993, he formed Raw Sewage with Sheila Tequila and Stella Stein, and performed in 18-inch platforms at the Love Ball in Amsterdam, but the collaboration ended in dramas. Bowery went on to appear as Madame Garbo in The Homosexual or The Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself by Copi at Bagleys Warehouse in London’s King’s Cross. In May 1994, he married his long-term female companion, Nicola Batemanin, just seven months before his death from an AIDS-related illness at University College Hospital in London on New Year’s Eve.

Despite the fact that it has been reported elsewhere that it wasn’t until 1997 that Davina was able to rid herself of the destructive legacy of addiction to vodka and any class A drug she could get her hands on through counselling, it was actually six years before. In 1991, her half-sister Millie came home and caught her under a duvet in the middle of the afternoon. At the time, Millie was 11 years old, and, according to Davina, could see right through her. ‘She just looked at me and said, “Davina, you look awful!” And I thought, “God, you’re right. What am I doing to myself?” I realised then I wasn’t just harming myself, but I was letting other people down a lot.’ Part of that ‘letting other people down’, Davina explained, was when ‘I would tell Millie I would pick her up from school and just wouldn’t turn up. She would have to make her own way home. I’m deeply ashamed of the way I treated my family.’

Not that she has any regrets today, or is about to apologise or be ashamed about what some may consider irresponsible behaviour. In fact, she is glad of the experience because of what it taught her. ‘Without wanting to say, “Hey everybody, go and get a drug problem!” – which is definitely not what I am trying to say – I’d say to anyone thinking of taking drugs, “It’s not cool, and it can ruin lives.” I am grateful that I have been where I have been because it has definitely made me a more grounded person. It has given me gratitude. When you get clean, you get so grateful for the smallest bit of good news, and people’s attitudes towards you change: you get asked to people’s houses again, and you are asked out to dinner because you are no longer a pain in the arse.’

But now, as patron of Focus, a treatment centre for addicts in Suffolk run by Chip Somers, the person who gave Davina the most help when she needed it, she has – she says – been able to give something back: ‘They treat people irrespective of income, which is really important because by the time someone is ready to ask for help they are not going to have the money – they will have spent it all on drugs.’

Although Millie was the initial trigger in Davina cleaning up her act, another turning point came when her best friend Sarah threatened never to talk to her again unless she turned over a new leaf. ‘She gave me a real rollicking and told me I was a loser. I burst into tears and that’s when my life started, when I stopped taking the drugs.’

Today, she still attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings: ‘I have to be vigilant because I’ll never stop being an addict even though I have been clean for [15] years. Different people do different things and that’s what I do, and I love it. I feel very safe there because, if I get wellied, my willpower goes out the window. If I was drunk and someone went, “Do you want a line?” I can’t guarantee that I would have the wherewithal to say no. In the summer I’m like, “Please, please, I’m desperate for a chilled rosé” or in the winter a mulled wine.’

She says the reason she couldn’t allow herself to have even one glass of wine – although her husband, Matthew Robertson, is a ‘wine nut, who spends a lot of time doing that lovely ritual of decanting and sniffing, and swooshing, and sometimes, you think, “You know, it looks fun”’ – is that she knows she’s not the sort of person who can do ‘one’ of anything. Not that she was ever a double-whisky-first-thing-in-the-morning type of person: ‘But it was doing my head in. Every day I felt like I’d been run over by a 10-ton truck. I’m an addictive person; I’m very driven but I can also be focused in a negative way, which was how I was to drinking. It took me a day to give up. It was affecting my life, so I just stopped.’

But, she continues, ‘I would trust my life to an addict, an ex-addict who’s working some kind of programme in their life, like a 12-step programme. I would trust them with my biggest secret, my life, because there’s an unwritten code that makes them the most trustworthy person in the world. However, if an addict has used for one day, if I’d used for one day, I’d be the most manipulative untrustworthy person you could ever meet. Give me one drug and I’ll just be your worst nightmare, and that’s why I know I can’t do it. In my mad heady days when I was younger – clubbing and all that – I was having a really good time and then it all got out of control. And the older I get, the more accepting I am that I’m going to change all the time but my core – my morals and my manners – will stay the same. Even when I was using drugs I was quite a moral person; I had good manners, like “Please could I have the class A drugs?” and I was quite a loving person.’ But, of course, it could have turned out very differently indeed, if it was not also for the cautious counsel of one of her father’s closest friends.

Andrew, who by now, in Davina’s words, was ‘a gorgeous graphic designer’, was mates with Eric Clapton, who was also an old friend of Davina’s aunt, and who better to help than someone who had actually had the same problem. No stranger to alcohol and drug addiction, it was Clapton who convinced Davina to check into a rehab centre in East Anglia. She did that as well.

Clapton’s close friendship with Andrew was perhaps not the only reason why he wanted to help. Some years before her drug problem came out into the open, he and Davina had been romantically involved with each other for nine months. She was 18 and he was 41. Had she been as famous then as she is now, one can only imagine what the tabloids would have made of it. No doubt it would have been a relationship made in tabloid heaven. And had Clapton gone public about his mixed-up feelings about sex back then, announcing how he had in the past often used sex to bolster his low self-esteem, it would have been headline news. Although today he has changed his attitude towards women, there was a time, he says, when ‘girlfriends became a way of avoiding being with myself. I’d see a woman in a room and I’d be magnetised, and usually that would be dangerous because I don’t think you can be any good to anybody unless you’re OK on your own.’

Similarly to Davina, Clapton was also raised by grandparents in Surrey. If, like her, the secret formula for success is an unconventional childhood, then again it is no surprise that Clapton – born out of wedlock and abandoned by his parents – would go on to become one of the most respected and influential artists from the 1960s rock era, and one of the very few to be a three-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Still widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential guitarists in pop music history, his musical style has gone through multiple changes during a career that now spans more than 40 years. Although always faithful to his love of the blues, Clapton is perhaps also now seen as an innovator of the different musical genres that have taken his career from the blues to psychedelic rock, pop and reggae with such bands as John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, Cream, and of course as a solo artist.

He first ran into trouble with drugs in the early seventies at a time when he was emotionally and professionally distraught with an unsuccessful solo album and an infatuation with Patti Harrison, the wife of his friend Beatle George Harrison. Although he would at one point even pawn his guitars to feed his heroin habit, Clapton eventually bounced back in the early eighties with a couple of hit albums and singles after a two-year hiatus. He finally won the heart of Patti Harrison – and not so happily ended up with a new addiction, this time to alcohol.

Bearing in mind that he probably came closer to a more fatal end than just another drink or another bout of drugs he was very well placed indeed to help counsel Davina about the same addictions with which he himself had battled. And with his music-biz background, he seemed the perfect mentor to help Davina in her bid to launch herself as a singer, and cut some demos with her at the Townhouse Studios in London during the summer of 1988. Although not much studio paperwork exists for the sessions, only one of the three tracks – ‘I’m Too Good For You’, recorded during a 10-day period and co-produced with Rob Fraboni – has since surfaced. But not on an official album: a bootleg titled The Best Unreleased Session Album In The World Ever, and it also appears on another five-disc collection called Rare Unreleased Trax.

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.