“Babe,” a mate said to me the other day, giving me a sidelong glance from the passenger seat of my car. “You got anything you need to talk about? Not being funny or owt, but are you like… having a personality crisis or what?”
“Mate,” I said, keeping my gaze locked on the dark road ahead. “Come on. Why you gotta read me like that?”
She levelled a long stare my way. At the lights, I looked over. There was a beat of who’s-gonna-break-first silence, then we both started cackling. Some mates don’t let you get away with anything. Because I hadn’t put it in those words until my friend said it, but… in a way, she was right.
Not really. But, y’know. I’m a writer, so. We exaggerate for dramatic effect. You know that, yeah? I’m trusting you to indulge me here. I’ll tell you more about my personality crisis, sure, but first: let me take you on a journey back in time.
It’s 1999. Queer as Folk is on Channel 4, scandalising everyone with its graphic gay sex scenes. Napster’s a thing, meaning we can download all the obscure scuzzy bootlegs we want. Pop-punk is back. But I’m a Cheerleader has those beautiful scenes of Natasha Lyonne making out with Clea DuVall that I definitely didn’t rewind over and over again. Baby One More Time is all over the airwaves, but so are Catatonia, the Manics and Placebo, and for those of us who've got MTV, it’s non-stop Korn, Silverchair, Limp Bizkit and Buckcherry.
It’s a Friday night in 1999, and I’m in the scabby Blockbuster Video round the side of Walkden precinct. Yeah, baby. We’re going back almost a quarter of a century, and shit’s about to get retro as fuck. Blue and yellow nightmare carpet. Bins full of family-size sacks of toffee popcorn, racks of strawberry twizzlers, freezers full of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food. I’m with my bezzie mates, scavenging the shelves for a slasher film we haven’t already seen. Gem doesn’t want owt too scary, and it’s her mam’s membership card, which means she’ll get the ultimate veto. Li, who’s the most boy-crazy of us, only cares about who gets to go up to the counter, because the lad working there is the older brother of someone she knows, and she reckons she can charm him into letting us have any 18-rated gore or filth we want.
Embedded among the endless racks of empty VHS cases, there are TV screens, showing an in-sync, infinite loop of trailers for the hottest new films now available for at-home viewing. The sound is muffled, but the song - when it comes on - still freezes my feet to the floor.
This is it, I say, pawing at Gem’s hand to make her look, dragging her over to the nearest TV. This is that one I was telling you about.
On screen, a rainbow kaleidoscope of clips. Ewan McGregor, bare-chested in silver PVC pants and eyeliner, panthering across a stage and growling like Iggy Pop, and a long-eyelashed, glitter-cheekboned Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, in tight pants and platform heels.
You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?
Velvet Goldmine, the cult classic from Todd Haynes - the one that was originally going to be a David Bowie biopic but then Bowie wouldn’t sign away the rights - had finally come to video.
In case it somehow passed you by, Velvet Goldmine is an absolutely ridiculous fever dream of a film. They claim Oscar Wilde was an alien. Ewan McGregor’s character’s origin story involves a Michigan trailer park, some vague innuendo about being raised by wolves, and electroshock conversion therapy that just sends him bonkers every time he hears electric guitar. There’s a farewell to glam rock spectacular called The Death of Glitter. Some of Oscar Wilde’s jewellery might have magical powers. Someone fakes a bloody, dramatic onstage assassination. Someone else searches for them, finds only more questions and then has a flashback about seeing a spaceship while getting fucked by fake Iggy Pop on a roof. Toni Collette - playing what’s essentially a fictionalised version of Angie Bowie - shags a lot of women and wears a truly incredible silky pink maribou-edged dressing gown. Eddie Izzard is in it. So is David Hoyle.
Way before I’d ever even seen it, this completely batshit piece of cinema had me in total thrall.
And the soundtrack. Amazing. It featured luminaries like Brian Eno, T-Rex, Roxy Music, Lou Reed, Pulp. But in Blockbuster that day, the song that lightning-bolted through my body and had me turning my head in recognition from the first few seconds alone was none other than Personality Crisis, by the New York Dolls.
The lead track from the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut album, Personality Crisis became an instant glitter rock anthem upon its 1973 release. My dubious taste for seventies and eighties glam rock and hair metal has been with me as long as I can remember, and anthemic New York Dolls stompers are one of many imprinted deep into my DNA. But the version in Velvet Goldmine, the version that had me scrambling towards the screen that day, isn’t even the original. It’s a cover, with howling vocals from Elastica guitarist Donna Matthews, backed by Teenage Fanclub.
This is another thing the film’s creators did. The bands are all real bands, but remixed. Brian Molko from Placebo, the sexual confuser of much of my teen years, plays the singer of a group called the Flaming Creatures, in a top hat and feather boa, sequins on his cherubic cheeks. Placebo’s bassist Stefan, performed onstage with Donna Matthews’ onscreen persona, Polly Small. The band credited as Venus in Furs on the soundtrack included Bernard Butler and Thom Yorke. Covers of The Stooges hits were done by musicians including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. A musical personality crisis, making iconic tracks like Personality Crisis their own. There’s something pleasingly meta about that, right?
We rented Velvet Goldmine. I watched it multiple times that weekend, and I’ve probably seen it a thousand times over in the two decades plus since. For several years, it was the night out wind-down film for me and my friends: chaotic and messy after hours of boozy, amphetamine-fueled dancing, we’d crash through the door and cocoon ourselves in duvets in the front room, coming down and passing out in our grubby nests to the film’s psychedelic dream sequences, roused by the storming drums of Baby’s On Fire and then again by Steve Harley crooning come up and see me, make me smiiiiile as the closing credits rolled.
Things are different for me now, but the personality crystallised by my adoration of that film and the era it depicts is still a thread I can pull at and unravel all the way back. There are other influences, of course. But it was that one that came to my mind when my mate eyed me sideways and said, you having a personality crisis or what?
They asked because it’d been a week where I shaved my head, got a spontaneous septum piercing and started talking about changing my life in other, more radical ways. The changes so far have been aesthetic, and initially I used that to hand-wave them away as being unimportant. Superficial. But then my friend called me out and my initial reaction was oh shit, I’ve been rumbled. Hair and jewellery are details, and they aren’t always important. And then sometimes they are. And these recent changes represent something that feels almost teenage: a rebelliousness, and a permission. Permission to stake my claim on my body and my appearance. To claim identities like queer, and alternative, in these coded, semi-subtle but still visible ways. As a teenager in Blockbuster Video in the arse-end of the Salford suburbs, I had other ways of doing that, with my shoplifted pink eyeliner and penciled-on eyebrows and the insignia of my favourite bands permanent-markered all over my cheese-gratered jeans. But I didn’t have the same agency over my body and appearance then that I do now. So these recent things, they’re nothing, but they’re something too. A way to claim more space, to make changes based on what I want. It feels important to practise that. Is it a personality crisis? Nah. But it feels nostalgic, like some kind of return to that teenager who cared way more about music than flirting with boys, the one who had the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop fizzing through her bloodstream and heart, uncool and oblivious to anything more current or popular. The one who loved weird, hallucinatory films depicting the way identities and subcultures shapeshift over time, and the enduring mythologies of rock’n’roll.
One of the oft-quoted exchanges from Velvet Goldmine goes like this:
“We set out trying to change the world, and ended up just changing ourselves.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, if you don’t look at the world.”
The thing is, though: the personal is political, and cultural, and all our worlds are subjective and individual. Maybe we can change our worlds, and the world, by changing ourselves. And sometimes that involves personality crises, and retracing the threads of our personalities back to our earliest obsessions, and who we were when we still being formed. And maybe sometimes it involves impulsive piercings and digging out the hair clippers from under the kitchen sink. Maybe it involves giving ourselves permission to make changes, whether or not they go beyond skin-deep. Sometimes it’s about making weird art where you insinuate Oscar Wilde came from outer space. Sometimes it’s about sending love letters back to the past, to the Blockbuster in Walkden in 1999. Sometimes it’s about the opening text from a surreal cult classic, a line that comes up onscreen before anything else, reading although what you are about to see is a work of fiction, it should nevertheless be played at maximum volume.
So here’s to giving ourselves permission, and to celebrating our weird loves and our personality crises with the volume turned all the way up.
Some other things I’m into right now and thought you might be too:
This piece by
about when to push, when to pivot, when to coast and when to quit.For the anthology title alone: Hungry Shadow Press are looking for ‘too-short horror stories that nobody wants’ for a collection called Little Bastards.
The upcoming witch workshop series by my babes at For Books’ Sake. Now in its second year, this is a series of online workshops in October bringing together writing and magic for every phase of the moon, and this time, I’m getting in on the action! I’ll be leading a session about sex magick for sensory writing on October 6th, and here’s where you’ll find all the info.
Here's to permission! Here's to nostalgia. Here's to the evolutions of us.
Here's to the art that shapes us and never leaves us.
This piece is chef's kiss.
I've never heard of this film (sorry!) but I *need* to watch it.
May every person, young and old, have permission to figure out who they are, and live it to the best!
Excellent piece