Hannah Jane Archive

About His Person

Five pounds fifty in change, exactly,
a library card on its date of expiry.

A postcard stamped,
unwritten, but franked,

a pocket size diary slashed with a pencil
from March twenty-fourth to the first of April.

A brace of keys for a mortise lock,
an analogue watch, self winding, stopped.

A final demand
in his own hand,

a rolled up note of explanation
planted there like a spray carnation

but beheaded, in his fist.
A shopping list.

A givaway photograph stashed in his wallet,
a keepsake banked in the heart of a locket.

no gold or silver,
but crowning one finger

a ring of white unweathered skin.
That was everything.

*

am very bothered when I think
of the bad things that I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.
O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn't shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.
Don't believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you to marry me.

The original girl power ambassadors (and I personally feel they did a lot better); Girl Power by Shampoo. "I don't wanna be a boy/I wanna be a girl/and I wanna do things/that'll make your hair curl" - genius lyric. "I wanna play with knives/I wanna play with guns/I wanna smash your place up/just for fun", "I don't want to college/don't wanna get a job/wanna sit round the house/and act like a slob". The lyric: "I want to drive the next door neighbours mad" I always thought was: "I wanna jump the next door neighbour's man", which would have better, a mon avis.

Trouble by Shampoo. This was like on a loop throughout my juvenile brain. I just remember the fate suffered by bubblegum bubbles all through England. "We couldn't get a cab cos we ain't got no money/we missed the last train but we thought/don't worry!/we'll get the night bus/but the night bus never came/we're eight miles from home/and it started to...[thunder & rain sound]" I love the rain interlude! It's great to put a pretentious soundbite in the most basic of pop songs! "We tried to drive a car but we soon realised/got on the road and none of us could drive/police car came along and they took us for a ride/and when we get home we're gonna get fried!"

Below is an article by a man called David Campbell, on the story of Shampo:

Forget Ginger Spice, Geri Halliwell's, idle twitterings about female empowerment. The reality of the effect of the Girl Power movement has not been to tell girls that they can be as good as boys. It's not been about equality, raising the standards for both genders with equal opportunity's coming to both sexes. It's sent the dubious message: girls can be as bad as boys can. All the worst traits associated with boys have been adopted by the fairer sex (who supposedly don't like rude words or getting drunk - something euphemistically termed "laddism" by trash mags). Acts of violence, crime and assault by girls are all on a sharp increase, but because the Police and the Courts still don't regard girls as being as inherently threatening as boys, they are less likely to be seriously punished. The average girl in a modern playground is more likely to be living in fear of a hard-as-nails girl gang, than a bunch of leering boys. Before the Spice Girls arrived with their tabloid-friendly version of Girl Power, there was a bubblegum rock and pop band that released a song and album entitled Girl Power. This is why the Spicies had to make do with adopting the slogan for their No 1 best-selling book, but never an album title as you might expect. The band adopted a far more aggressive stance, and in their lyrics and their style they reflected the less than charming reality of the Girl Power movement. Yet ironically the average girl never took the band to their heart. The Spice Girls, who never really challenged any gender stereotypes and became the Essex girls of Pop with their trashy, minimalist dress sense were Fleet Street's darlings for awhile and have maintained massive loyal support among pre-adolescent girls. They have made the record books and probably pop immortality also, but the band that showed the supposed Girl Power "movement" in its true light have already been all but forgotten. Their name was Shampoo, and their legacy is suitably entitled "Trouble".

Next time you see Ginger Spice talking on some cosy chat show say: "Well basically, its about Girl Power…" you might want to bear the following lyrics in mind:

"I don't wanna be a boy, I Wanna be a girl

But I wanna do things that'll make your hair curl

I wanna play with knives, I wanna play with guns

I wanna smash the place up just for fun…

'Cause we got,'cause she's got

Girl power, we glower

Coming home drunk in the midnight hour…"

While Shampoo went largely unnoticed in this country, Trouble not actually making it into the Top 10, they were a sensation in kitsch Japan. With fairly liberal parents anyway, maybe the rebellious girls from Plumstead just looked plain daft to British kids who thought that the lyrics of their records were patronising. They supposedly embodied the ideal of what twenty-something music journalists believed being young was all about, and it was easier to praise them, than credless and insipid singers like Mariah Carey. Live, Shampoo was essentially a punk band with an attitude problem, which reasoned that, as they had never been in love why sing about it?

Shampoo weren't just a band; they were a way of life. With barely two brain cells to rub together the girls Jacqui and Carrie were inseparable, perplexing any journalist given the difficult task of interviewing them with their sullen silences and almost telepathic way of sharing every thought. They lived to buy Barbie dolls and cheap novelties. This was not as innocent as it sounds though: Kinky Ken and Bondage Barbie are unlikely to be seen on the shelves of Hamley's anytime soon. The terrible twosome equipped their innocent toys with thigh length boots, nipple rings and whips, and then wrote a song about them. There was no transparent attempt to intellectualise their music or release wibbling songs about how much they love their Mama's. Shallow interviews were usually centred on a shopping trip where the 'Poos headed for the makeup stands in every shop and, unbelievably considering their aggressive poses for the cameras, invariably bought Take That badges. Considering the braindead superficiality of their PVC and inflatable furniture filled existence, its surprising to note that Shampoo wrote all of their own material and were failed music journalists before they became minor pop deities in Japan. Meeting at an ultra strait-laced girls' school in Plumstead, South London, they discovered a mutual interest in music and The Manic Street Preachers, so they began writing a fanzine which revolved around their heroes. This got them noticed by a weekly music paper. Jacqui picks up the story:

"We never really wanted to be journalists. We hated it. It was just like

school. It was hard work, you had to use your brain and everything. We

got the sack because we just gave everything nought out of ten. They kept

changing it to four and five out of ten. But it was horrible. It was just

like having teachers again. People commenting on your work."

School was another thing Shampoo hated. Lo and behold, they wrote a song about it called School Is Boring, and it was adopted for awhile as a personal anthem by my friends at our dismally dull school:

"Should have stayed in bed all day today,

Watch Neighbours and Home And Away,

Instead we have to go to school,

It ain't fair, it ain't cool…"

The other girls at their middle class, suburban school hated the way Jacqui and Carrie powdered their faces a ghostly white and had their own trashy street style. The more the others hated them for being different, the more they bonded together, like an incitement to rebel. Speculation about their sexuality just made them laugh and hold hands in public:

"They called us lesbians because we were different. They hated us.

We used to go into London and walk around Soho for hours

just overwhelmed by the glamour."

Their songs were invariably about partying and coming home late after clubbing in London. What they could possibly find "glamorous" about Soho (I strongly doubt that they are talking about the more respectable parts) we may never know, but their catchphrase "Uh-oh, we're in trouble!" won them their fifteen minutes of fame anyway. Their first album We Are Shampoo yielded three Top 40 hits: Trouble, Delicious and Viva La Megababes. Undoubtedly their fourth single would have been Shiny Black Taxi Cab, the lyrics of which immortalised a typical night out in London perfectly (and confirmed the disturbing mixture of childishness and sleaze which made up Shampoo) in some of the catchiest lyrics they ever wrote:

Midnight, traffic light,

Green's for go-go,

Backseat joyride,

We love Soho!

Their launch in America prevented its release however. Trouble had been leant by their US record label to the Power Rangers Movie Soundtrack, and was re-released in the UK with a Power Rangers cover. Shiny Black Taxi Cab made it onto the disc unnoticed as a b-side. With this mistimed release Shampoo's fortunes in this country hit the skids - the single made number 38 and fell out of the Top 40 the following week. The same mix of Trouble was now present not only on this re-release, but the original single, the We Are Shampoo album and the single Delicious. Their definitive single, Girl Power, failed to make much of an impression on the charts so the follow up album of the same name was conspicuous by its absence from the shelves of major record shops. With their final single, a synthetic pop track called I Know What Boy's Like and the only non-guitar based song on the album, Shampoo sunk without trace. Their public profile has been subsequently non-existent, with very few people aware of what a successful export for the music industry to the lucrative Japanese market they have been. It was fun while it lasted though.

All quotes attributed to Shampoo taken from an interview in Select Magazine, August 1994, as transcribed on internet Shampoo fansite Viva La Megapage.

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