FROM TRAD WIFE TO ROCK CHICK: how I moved from KitchenAid to the Geneva underground music scene in the Eighties.

When I was young, I was a trad wife. Well, a trad girlfriend; because I realised the error of my ways before I dug myself any deeper into KitchenAid territory.

Like most young people who have lived a privileged, sheltered life, I was extremely naïve. I’d never been popular at school, I was shy and insecure, and craved masculine attention. I’d had a lovely American boyfriend in 11th or 12th grade, but he dumped me for a girl I kept pointing out to him, telling him how gorgeous she was. Yep, shy, insecure and a twit to boot.

Me, on the left, in 13th grade

During 13th grade, which was my last year in high school, while out in Geneva old town with a couple of friends, I met a boy a few years older than me who was very good looking, and – initially at least – really nice. He had green eyes and chestnut hair with that floppy Bryan Ferry type fringe (Ferry was his idol) and was studying computer science at Geneva university. Sadly, he soon turned into a bit of a macho dictator, telling me what to wear, what perfume to use, what music to like, and when I didn’t agree, or said something he didn’t approve of, he’d squish me with a giant blob of sarcasm. Looking back, one of the things that I most regret is allowing him to talk me out of going to my high school graduation prom; I had a fabulous outfit, and had spent five hours and a small fortune having my hair done in the Bo Derek afro-style that was popular at the time. Why didn’t I just tell him to shove it? I remember being very sad that night, and really confused, as we lay in bed in my studio apartment.

Anyway, soon we moved in together and turned into an old boring couple within two and half seconds. I did the cooking and the ironing and the shopping and went on holiday to Portugal to stay with his family, and his mother was mean to me and made me cry. We’d go there for about three weeks, and it seemed never-ending. We’d also have to go for Christmas and New Year, and I had to eat dried cod and it put me off fish for the rest of my life.

And then at work one day I met a girl called Victoria who seemed to be living the most exciting, wonderful, crazy life ever. She was two years older than me, and had run away from home at sixteen, lived in a squat in London, been travelling in Guatemala where she eventually ran out of money, stayed in one village and made money by baking apple crumble that she sold to villagers. Now she was working as the personal assistant to one of the hot shots in a bank. I was at university at the time studying translation, but worked part time answering the bank’s very important phone calls.

Incidentally, I must tell you the incredible epilogue to the apple crumble saga! Years later Victoria, who now lives in Ibiza, met a woman who had also been travelling in Guatemala. This person had stopped in a place where the villagers told her about a young woman who’d lived there decades ago and had baked the most delicious apple crumble. Whereupon Victoria nearly fell off her perch and told her that the young apple crumble whizz was her! How small is the world? Another crazy story regarding Victoria is that when I was sixteen, I had a pen pal who lived in Singapore but who spent her summers at her parents place in Ibiza. Victoria told me that she spent most of her holidays in Ibiza in her parents’ villa, so I asked her whether she happened to know S, my pen pal. Well, S was one of her best friends! Many years later, soon after Victoria moved to Ibiza, I finally met S at her 40th birthday party!

Anyway. Back to my story.

Worried about our (then utterly inexistent) wobbly bits, Victoria and I signed up to the very first fitness club to open in Geneva. It was called The John Valentine Fitness Club, and we thought it sounded ever so cool and glamorous, and the guy at reception was blonde and tanned and in his late twenties and super-hot. In fact, the hot guy at reception is probably what cinched the deal the very first time we wandered in there to have a look around. Of course, we never went even once went there to work out, although I remember using the pool and the jacuzzi. I also recall using the tanning booth quite a bit, because Mr. Super-Hot - whose name was Jacques - would come in and make sure all was well, and adjust my little glasses, and press the button to make the tanning lights come on and sit there for ages asking me all sorts of questions about myself. He was excellent for my ego.

Also, melanoma didn’t exist in the early Eighties…

One evening after work Victoria and I decided to finally go and firm our wobbles at John Valentine, but we got distracted during our bus ride and missed the stop, so we ended up back at her flat in a funky part of Geneva. It was a gorgeous little duplex on the top floor of an old building in a funky part of Geneva decorated in that colourful, bohemian vibe that Victoria has always been brilliant at. We flopped on her big cushions covered in Guatemalan fabrics, and ate avocado on toast, and lit incense, and listened to Level 42 super loud, and she told me all sorts of fun and wild and naughty stories, and I told her all about which washing powder I used to wash Serge’s knickers, and we giggled and I smoked my first joint ever, and time went by and it got later and later and suddenly it was almost midnight and I knew that my jealous, controlling boyfriend must be prowling up and down our crappy little flat in that boring area outside of town listening to Roxy Music, or Madness maybe, and he’d be worried, furious and jealous because not only had I not come home to make his dinner and do the ironing and watch rubbish TV, I hadn’t even phoned.

And then it dawned on me that I had absolutely no desire to go home, nor did I want to have anything more to do with him. I wanted to experience crazy stuff, go dancing, go to cool bars and have fun. I was done with the KitchenAid and the vacuum cleaner and his dirty knickers.

My heart beating so hard in my chest I thought it might come through my solar plexus, I called him and when he picked up, I told him that I was at Victoria’s, and that I wasn’t coming home. As in not ever again. And he just said OK, and I hung up and probably had a little cry whereupon we smoked another joint and told more funny stories and called in sick at work the next day and went for a wander around the flea market and for coffee and croissants in cool bars where she knew all the cute boys who worked there. And I felt wonderful and excited about life and ever so pleased with myself. I dutifully informed my parents that I had left my controlling boyfriend, and a few days later they came with me to pick up my things at the flat where I’d lived with him for a very short while, and that was that.

Looking back, I’m not very proud of how I ended that relationship, but he was such a bossy-boots and if I’d gone home and tried to explain he’d probably have talked me into staying, at least for a while. So, even if I hadn’t met Victoria, I like to think I’d have woken up one day and realized there was more to life in your late teens than playing at being a middle-aged couple, and I’d have walked away. I wish I’d been confident enough to handle the break-up with a little more elegance, but I was a little bit afraid of him.

So, I moved back in with my parents for a bit but spent a lot of time over at Victoria’s, having a wonderful time. We’d rent Goldie Hawn movies and listen to Grace Jones and Roxy Music and smoke elegantly rolled doobies. Within a couple of weeks, by some miracle, my father found me a duplex studio right next door to Victoria’s, which meant we now only had to walk about four metres to hang out together, and we often just left our front doors wide open and wandered back and forth. We were both popular at work with the younger guys (and with quite a few of the older ones too!), and there was one guy in particular that we both quite fancied, let’s call him Serge, and one day Victoria invited him over for dinner at her place, telling him to bring a friend.

So, he did.

Serge’s friend - let’s call him Blaze - although his name wasn’t anything as cool as that – was a rockstar. OK, so he was a little rockstar. But locally, in Geneva, he was a star. He had a band and wrote songs and sang and played guitar and keyboards. He was skinny and cute in a sort of effeminate, feline way, and wore a white leather, very smelly motorcycle jacket that he’d bought at the flea market, and skinny jeans and black tee-shirts, and drove a horrendously embarrassing and dilapidated red Deux-Chevaux van that always got him stopped by the police. I think I was probably more attracted to his enigmatic rock-star persona than to the guy himself, but as my very rock-solid, recently retired lawyer husband of thirty-five years always says, my choices in life always tend to be extreme!

Anyway, there I was, twenty-years old and eager to sample the wild side of life.

Blaze and I got together within a week or so, and I did a drastic Olivia Newton John at the end of Grease-type makeover. I ditched my beige and navy Benetton-goodie-goodie look for full-on rock-chick diva-de-luxe, developing the ultimate high-end Chrissie Hynde meets Debbie Harry wardrobe. I swathed myself in studded belts, wore studded dog collars around my expensive slouchy black suede boots. I bought vintage, embroidered black silk blouses and jackets that I’d wear with a dove grey, calf-length circular skirt, accessorized with my studded belts and dog collars, and skin-tight stretchy black jeans with baggy black crew-necked sweatshirts. I wore tight dresses, and trendy boiler suits. And always the studded belts. I cut my hair and gelled it spiky. I went to dodgy bars to watch my boyfriend and his band play, and once again put up with all kinds of bad boyfriend behaviour on the totally opposite end of the spectrum from that of my KitchenAid era. Blaze would disappear for days on end, wouldn’t call, and seemed to get off on making me feel insecure. I even wrote the lyrics of a song titled Insecure, which he later recorded, and which turned out to be one of the better songs he and his band ever did. The drug scene worried me, but in the spheres he moved in, illegal substances were apparently a way of life. But we did have a lot of fun, going dancing and staying up all night, and drinking too much, and going to concerts. Also, I enjoyed being Geneva’s prime rockstar’s girlfriend! Seeing him on stage, really was quite thrilling!

One day, about a year into our relationship, Blaze decided it would be a good idea to move to Canada. He sang in French and English, so if he wanted to make it big and become the next Sting, or Howard Jones, or front a band like Depeche Mode or Duran Duran, he had to leave Geneva. Seeing as Canada is bilingual, moving to Montreal seemed like a no-brainer.

By then I’d spent six months in Florence, Italy as part of my university course to study Italian, and had made a friend, Hélène, who lived in Montreal. So being an absolute idiot, I quit university a few months before my final exams, and off I went to Montreal via Milan on February 17, 1985. I remember the date because of the record snowfalls Geneva and many other European cities experienced. When our train from Geneva arrived in Milan and we took a taxi to the airport, we learned that our Air Canada flight had been unable to land because of the snow, so had been diverted to Genova, a city further down the Italian coast. So, after a long wait in Milan, the airline put all passengers on a bus and carted us off to Genova.

By the time we eventually landed in Montreal we were both exhausted. Geneva gets cold, but the Canadian winter was beyond anything I’d imagined. Thank goodness my very worried mother had bought me a long, sheepskin jacket, because had I ventured out into those arctic conditions wearing my regular black wool coat, as I’d initially planned, I would have turned into an icicle.

My girlfriend from Florence had agreed to house us for a little while, but not being able to stay with her more than a week or two, we did the dumbest thing ever and rented a small apartment. Meaning we blew all our money on a deposit and the first few months’ rent.

I don’t remember whether we ever even moved into that flat, because the next thing I knew Blaze had decided Montreal had been a terrible career move, that arctic temperatures were disastrous for his vocal cords, and his future as rockstar clearly lay in California.

Unfortunately, we had no more money. We couldn’t afford to fly to San Francisco.

No problem, Blaze decided. We would simply hop on a Greyhound Bus…

(to be continued)