Bedsit Disco Queen: How I grew up and tried to be a pop star by Thorn Tracey

Author:Thorn, Tracey [Thorn, Tracey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405513982
Publisher: Virago
Published: 2013-02-06T23:00:00+00:00

In the end, against all the odds, it sounded just fine and a little bit of history was made. Halfway through Everything But The Girl’s set, the British contingent in the audience leave their seats and start dancing, to the astonishment of the staid, but appreciative, Russians present. The security guards scratch their heads, Ben and Tracey exchange a relieved grin and Nick Hobbs, who knows about these things, claims that this is the first time an audience in Russia has danced in the aisles …

But it was downhill after this show. The next ‘gig’ we played was at the Olympic Village complex, up in the Moscow hills, where we performed alongside a German pomp-rock group called Enno and a Russian group, Zemliana (People Who Inhabit The Earth!). In between the band performances, two men sat on the stage and had a debate about ‘music and the state’. Then we played at the Sovin Centre. Before we went onstage a magician performed, in top hat and tails, pulling doves out of thin air. Then a woman in a pink evening gown came on to introduce us, her long speech in Russian referring to two famous names of English pop: John Rotten and Tracey Thorn.

We all got extremely drunk every night, as did the entire population, apparently, because there was simply nothing else to do; and when even that palled, we set up our equipment in the foyer of the Hotel Cosmos one night and played an impromptu gig for anyone around. As it turned out, it was the best show of the whole trip, the only one remotely resembling what you might call a gig, with people smoking and drinking and actually enjoying themselves.

The last show was supposed to be a triumphant appearance in front of 12,000 people in Gorky Park, and we hoped it would make up for the preceding non-events. But it was not to be. Our set seemed to start out all right, and for once the equipment was of quite good quality and the audience could actually hear us at normal volume. Then fate dealt a cruel hand as the heavens opened and a torrential downpour began to soak the PA, which had been set up right at the front of the stage, unprotected by the overhead canopy. We’d only done four songs when we were told that we would have to leave the stage immediately or risk electrocution. It was a bitter blow.

That final failure was emblematic, really, of the yawning gulf between East and West at the time; the unpreparedness of the Russian organisers for the realities of staging the kind of pop events with which they simply had no familiarity. And our own unpreparedness for the true state of what was in reality a crumbling, hollow edifice of a society. We hadn’t anticipated that, and didn’t really know what to do with the information.

All in all, it was a dispiriting experience. Sure, there were some rowdy nights in the foyer of the Hotel

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