However much I admired Crystal's song-writing skills when I was playing in her band, I didn't really dwell much on the meaning of her lyrics. Certainly not with the intense attention to detail as Polly Tarantella. She quotes from Crystal Passion's lyrics as if it was poetry and uncovered depths of meaning in them that had never occurred to me.
I suppose it's natural to think you might glean everything about Crystal's philosophy of life from her lyrics, especially since she never explicitly expressed her political, moral or religious views anywhere else. But what did she really mean in the lyrics of, for instance,
Bread for the Fisherman
with its chorus of 'Where there was nothing, there's plenty today. / The baker eats fish and the fishes eat hay.'? It takes the genius of Polly Tarantella to uncover some kind of a coherent statement of Crystal's philosophy in such lyrics. What I'd most liked about the song was how the harmony in the chorus sounds as much like the Beach Boys as it does sixteenth century polyphony.
Something Polly doesn't elaborate on much is what a Crystal Passion gig was like. That's partly because the written record of our gigs is restricted to a few brief and remarkably coy concert reviews featured in contemporary Rock Music journals like
NME
and
Melody Maker
and now defunct feminist and lesbian magazines like
Quim
and
Lesbian London
. Maybe that was because being an all-girl group, it just wasn't cool for a male rock critic to be too obvious about the nature of our stage show. These were also the days when a mobile phone was the size of a brick and had no facility to take photographs or videos. And most cameras were generally far too big to slip into your pocket and could only take still photographs. This wasn't like today when cameras and phones are taken to every gig in the world, for however big or small the band, and used to capture a permanent record which is then uploaded to YouTube. Consequently, there is no video or film recording of a Crystal Passion gig that I know of. The nearest is an appallingly amateurish video we made for the single
Travelling Light
that was lifted off the third album,
Seventy Doctors
. The video featured only our heads and bare shoulders over a backdrop of exotic holiday locations that was probably stolen from Michael Palin's TV series,
Around the World in 80 Days
.
What this means is that
Crystal Passion: Saviour of Rock
and every other book written about the group in the last few years omits to make clear the simple fact that at almost every gig where Crystal Passion performed—whether solo as in the early days or as part of her ever-expanding band—she appeared on stage absolutely naked.
In truth, this may not even have been obvious to everyone in her audience at the time given that her long hair obscured the subtly aureate nipples of her perky but medium-sized bosom. And, as the fashion for shaved or razor-sculpted pubes was nowhere nearly as ubiquitous as it is today, her crotch was hidden under a verdant, even hirsute, light brown mass of curly hair. But naked she was, even if she did always wear sandals or canvas shoes and very often a flowery broad-rimmed cloth hat.
Crystal Passion wasn't the only one in the band whose stage presence was less than entirely modest, but in Crystal's case her on-stage nudity was pretty much just an extension of the fact that she rarely wore clothes of any kind at other times anyway.
She wasn't a nudist as such. She never went to naturist resorts or subscribed to a philosophy of naturism but in practical terms she might as well have been one. And since honesty and integrity were very much part of her persona, either as a composer or as a performer, she probably thought it would be hypocritical to appear clothed even on a public stage.
Judy also hardly wore much in the way of clothes, but she used to stick black tape over her large nipples. And what she did wear was always black and made from either leather or rubber. However, with all her tattoos and the guitar strapped across her chest and waist, Judy's nudity was even less obvious than Crystal's. The rest of us also experimented (rather more self-consciously) with several degrees of undress. At one stage, I took the purity of my shaved head (along with my shaved pubes) to validate a statement of pure nakedness but I never felt comfortable being unclothed on stage, even behind a bank of keyboards. It was often unpleasantly cold while I waited to get on stage or even while performing.
There was rather a mix of expectations in our audience whenever we went on stage. There were those who knew exactly what to expect and these were mostly our lesbian and younger women followers. And there were those, mostly men, who didn't know at all, perhaps believing we were a UK version of Hole, L7, Bikini Kill or Huggy Bear, only to find that this Riot Grrrl group offered them a kind of guilty titillation and not very much of the kind of music Rock fans usually listen to.
I guess Polly Tarantella wants to maintain an untainted image of Crystal Passion as the natural successor in a line that can be traced back through the likes of the Beatles, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. And that this ideal vision might be somehow tarnished if it was associated with the image of nearly a dozen women on stage—far more than was ever strictly necessary—all in various degrees of undress. In any case, our repertoire sounded nothing like what you'd hear in a Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones gig. The music we made was sometimes reminiscent of Hawkwind or Sun Ra and sometimes of Sufjan Stevens or Neil Young. Occasionally, the music strayed into decidedly electronic, even dance floor, territory which Polly, like most fellow American Rock critics, regards as the antithesis of whatever she believes we represent. Polly's image of Crystal Passion is exemplified by her biography's cover page in which she sits almost romantically in the middle of a floral meadow adorned in a bizarre mix of Laura Ashley, ethnic chic and junk shop DIY. This doesn't exactly accord with my memory of a naked woman standing on stage with an acoustic guitar strapped over her shoulders equipped with a deceptively powerful voice for such a classically pretty girl.
It was actually through my sister, Andrea, that I was first introduced to Crystal while I was a University undergraduate. I didn't often go to live concerts even though Jane, Jacquie and I rehearsed together as a band in the futile hope of becoming the next Faithless or Portishead. We mostly only went to night clubs. Jane and Jacquie were my best friends and lovers, so I was closer to them than to anyone else. And that included my younger sister.
Andrea is different to me in more ways than we are alike. Her chief enthusiasm then and now is for folk music. She played an acoustic guitar as well as the kind of cheap violin that typically only folk fiddlers play. She was an avid fan of the River Bank and of course their lead singer and guitarist, John River. So, it was inevitable that she'd want to go and see Crystal Passion given her historical association with John River.
"I don't know a lot about the River Bank and I've never heard of Crystal Passion," I said when Andrea asked me whether I wanted to go with her to the gig at the smaller of the two live venues at our university, generally used for stage plays and classical recitals. "Isn't there someone else you can go with?"
"She used to perform as part of a duo with John River," continued Andrea, who can be fairly insistent when she wants to be. "So she must be good."
"That assumes the River Bank are good," said Jane who was lying naked under my bed sheets toking on the roach-end of a joint while my sister perched at the foot of the bed. I'd also have been naked if I'd not had the presence of mind to pull a baggy jumper over my head and shoulders. Despite a free and open sex life at college, I still wasn't ready to appear naked in front of my sister or anyone else from my family. "They're a kind of folk band, aren't they? Won't this Crystal Passion be the same? Simone would be surrounded by folkies with chunky jumpers and beards..."
