MY GOD, Berlin are one of the most underrated bands of the past 20 years! You learn a new thing every day, but little did I suspect, when I woke up this morning, that today’s great truth was the discovery that Berlin made Roxy Music look like a bunch of Mid-Western s***kickers in leggings.
But there it is — or rather, there they were, shown in all their glory on Bands Reunited (VH1, Mon-Fri, 10pm). The footage from 1986 was dynamite: the lead singer Terri Nunn, who had attained both an extraordinary beauty and an extraordinary looniness for one so young, was lying on the stage, wearing no knickers, and singing like her heart was burning from the centre out.
Just as Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels, it’s important to bear in mind that the Pete Townshend scissor-kick Nunn has just completed was done in a ra-ra skirt and white stilettos.
Meanwhile, as Nunn gives her hamstrings a well- deserved break, her paramour and Berlin’s former creative focus, John Crawford, is standing over her, handsome, impassive and tuxedoed, and clicking his fingers. The more she bites his leg — did I tell you she was biting his leg? She’s wearing no knickers and biting his leg — the harder he clicks and the more impassive he becomes. It’s an impressive double act.
But everything about Berlin at this point in their career looks brilliant — even the drummer looks like the kind of hot-rock maître d’ you dream about showing you to a “special table”. Berlin in 1986 make the Strokes look like Roxy Music in leggings.
I feel ashamed that I’ve spent the past 15 years thinking of them as merely the panda-haired band who did the Top Gun song.
So yes — VH1 has finally invented Bands Reunited, possibly a little late in the putative Friends Reunited day. After all, every man, woman and dog has, by now, been reunited with everything they’ve ever loved, known or walked past. A Flock of Seagulls probably are the only people in Britain who knew each other in the 1980s and haven’t met up yet. Hosted by the preternaturally enthusiastic Aamer Haleem (after the bass player from Berlin has agreed to appear on the show: “We’ve got Ric Olsen on board! Ric OLSEN!!! WHOO! Yeah! Gimme a HUG, Olsen!”), Bands Reunited takes much of its structure from the plot of The Blues Brothers.
Every week Haleem goes after former band members one by one, tracking them down to their new jobs and lives and persuading them to get the band back together “one last time”.
Discovering where on the beach of life the ebbing tide of rock has left various players is informative. Keith Wilkinson, the bass player from Squeeze, is now a children’s author. Paul Rutherford, the “sexy” dancer from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, is a deer farmer in New Zealand. The drummer from A Flock of Seagulls is a quality-control manager in a plastics factory in North Carolina, and the keyboard player from Berlin is now an aviation illustrator — possibly inspired by the video to Take My Breath Away, which had a lot of planes in it.
The moment when Haleem first confronts the former pop stars is always informative: confronted by someone bursting into their office and shouting “Ali? Ali Score from A Flock of Seagulls?” a good percentage of the “legends” deny their past selves outright— not surprising when your past self spent seven years wearing your hair to look like a spaniel standing over an air vent. Indeed, when VH1 did burst in on Ali Score, the scene was lent an extra poignancy because Score, now almost bald, was wearing a hairnet. A knife to the heart of Flockofseagullettes.
Of course, the success of the Friends Reunited phenomenon has been put down to many things — a reliving of carefree times, the irresistible sexual intrigue, community-building in a dislocated world — but what it’s really down to, of course, is seeing how fat people have got. How fat and bald people have got. How fat, bald and knackered these once luminous and untouchable people now look. When it comes to pop stars, this is amplified by a million. Indeed, the show might just as well be called Hahaha! Look How Rough Limahl Looks Now. After watching this week’s shows, featuring A Flock of Seagulls, Squeeze, Berlin and Kajagoogoo, I can now compile an unofficial guide to Eighties Pop Stars’ Roughness.
In reverse order: 3. Limahl, used to look like a bouffant, slightly cross-eyed Aryan god, now looks like Timmy Mallett from Wacaday; 2. John Crawford from Berlin, used to look like Dex Dexter, now looks as if squirrels are using him to store their nuts; 1. Mike Score, lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls, admittedly ugly to begin with, but now looks like the kind of rind-chewing redneck who mop s out the toilet at truck stops in Utah. He ain’t mellowed none, either — having originally driven his brother Ali, the drummer, out of the band by being thoroughly unpleasant (“It got so bad that Ali used to pretend the drums were Mike’s head”), Mike spends their first meeting in ten years fiddling with a keyboard, and ignoring his brother completely.
“People came to see me — the hairstyle, the voice — not him,” Mike explained. “But he never understood that. Mum keeps asking me to let him play with me again, but I’ve got another band now.”
Mike Score is 48.
As if to illustrate how perfectly VH1 understands our need to see how pop stars do slowly rot, like pears in a fruit bowl, the final scene — where the reformed band play a “special, one-off show” — has a masterstroke of editing: on the right-hand side of the screen, we see the reformed, fat, 2004 band, looking like cast members of Rentaghost. On the left hand we see t he band performing the same song on Top of the Pops in 1986. It’s like some weird kind of futuristic necroporn. On the left — the band! On the right — their parents! On the left — hope! On the right — disappointment! Often it’s like a spot-the-difference competition, where just little things, like hair and chins, have been added or removed.
Still, some of them do look better. I don’t think people would ask Paul Reynolds from A Flock of Seagulls where his carer is any more.
My favourite thing about Bands Reunited, however, is perspective. When Haleem first approaches the band members, he gets them to discuss what it was like being in a band, and they all cite the pressures, the impossible schedules, the madness, and vacuity of the whole thing, and how much they came to hate each other by the end of it.
“So, would you like to reform the band, then?” Haleem asks.
Fortysomething quality-control manager in a plastics factory in North Carolina: “Yeah!”
