The Second Serve: “What are you, from the ’90s? Ew.”

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“It’s a rarity but if I do go to the pub I’m more of a eight-pint guy than a one-pint guy” – Rag’n’Bone Man

A second serving of scandal and slander Subscribe
Email stories to us club@popbitch.com
* Pop stars are the real rock’n’roll
* When manufactured pop got dark
* Girls on top: green shoots of recovery

>> Fame Payne <<

Pop stars are the real rock’n’roll

We generally use the term “rock’n’roll” as the byword for hedonistic excess. In the 60s and 70s that was probably fair, but in more recent decades it’s the pop world that has churned out the hardest living stars and the wildest stories. Extreme fame brings extreme challenges, but it probably hasn’t helped that pop stars are routinely encouraged to lie about their lifestyle by the industry that makes so much money from them. 
Poor Liam Payne was just the latest casualty. Someone who knows what she is talking about is Sharon Osbourne, who this weekend said of the X Factor-era:
“It was kind of like the Wild West. You didn’t really know the importance and what it does to people’s lives and as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing needs to be changed. As well as giving people, a lot of people, opportunities with their careers it can also damage a lot of people too. You have to be very, very careful. You’re handling people’s lives, you’ve got their future in your hands and it’s not anything to laugh at.”

“We had a man who would come to visit us with a toolbox filled with every pill or substance you could imagine” – Andy Taylor, Duran Duran

>> The 80s <<

Megastars – Megadrugs

Duran Duran
Cursed with a teen girl/family friendly reputation, behind the scenes Duran were trying to out-rock’n’roll everyone. “Cocaine was literally given to me every day on a plate. I didn’t eat that much. I took drugs. That was my diet. I thought it was cool”, said John Taylor. One band member told us they got so bored with being able to have anyone and anything they sometimes used to get male groupies to blow them  – just to feel something different for a change.
Curiosity Killed The Gak
The 90s had Take That vs Boyzone; in the 80s it was hipster boyband Curiosity Killed the Cat vs the more mainstream Bros. Probably most famous for the fisherman’s beret he wore, lead singer Ben Volpeliere-Pierrot became a mainstay of the celeb scene for a while. There was a dalliance with Paula Yates, a smack habit and then eventual rehab – with Cerys Matthews. (FYI: Cerys’ record label’s statement on her heroin rehab? “Receiving treatment for exhaustion and a recurrent asthma complaint – both of which have been exacerbated by drinking and smoking”).
Culture Club
With the tabloids constantly on his back for wearing a dress and make-up, Boy George tried to head off complaints by saying he’d rather have a cup of tea than sex. Which, or course, turned out to be bollocks; he was having a wild affair with bandmate Jon Moss. Add in the arrest for heroin possession in late 80s. Then the cocaine arrest in 2005 in Manhattan. And the chaining a male escort to his wall in 2008. A multi-decade transgressive career that outlasted most of his 80s peers.

Old 80s Pop Stars Jokes Home
Q: What do you get if you cross Bananarama with a vibrator?
A: Wet, Wet, Wet

>> 80s Rock <<

You Gotta Have Faith

Ok… so it wasn’t just the pop stars of the 80s doing the rock’n’roll thing. 80s rock bands were definitely in on the action.
Faith No More
Singer Chuck Mosley had a bad 1987. First, he was sacked after pulling a gun on the rest of the band. Then he injected cocaine into his penis – leading to a  gangrenous episode. Still, having penis issues was the least of his worries in his next band, Cement, when a tour bus crash led to a broken back, a year in hospital and a long recovery.
Motley Crue
Even the Taylors of Duran would have had trouble keeping up with Crue. Somehow their nascent career survived Vince Neil killing the drummer of Hanoi Rocks (and severely injuring two others) in a drunken car crash. By the time of the 1987 Girls, Girls, Girls tour, their reputation for trouble was sky-high. Along with “endless cash”, the band had a notorious drug kingpin follow the tour bus in his Excalibur, that 80s car designed to look like a 1928 Mercedes-Benz, which bore the special licence plate – “DEALER”. Nikki Sixx said he ran off from the Asian leg of the tour with nothing but a packet of condoms, before ending the year with an overdose. An event he survived, prompting him to change his answer machine to “Hey, it’s Nikki. I’m not home because I’m dead.”
Ozzy Osbourne
Returning from a festival in Russia in 1989 Ozzy drank most of the case of vodka he brought back with him, which seemed to trip a switch in his head. He found Sharon at home, and began walking towards her saying “we’ve come to a decision that you’ve got to go”… and then started to strangle her. Sharon somehow hit the panic button on the house alarm and the police came and took Ozzy away. He woke up the next morning in jail, and found out he’d been arrested for attempted murder. “It’s not exactly one of my greatest fucking achievements,” he later said. Ozzy then cut off all his hair and sent it to Sharon in a shoebox, convinced this this was a suitable apology that would make everything alright again. Luckily it did.

Old 80s rock star jokes’ home:
Q: Did you hear about the man with no penis?
A: He went home and gave his wife a good bollocking.

>> 90s <<

An 80s Hangover

Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston was another 80s star who found it hard to live up to her church-going image. The signs were there that she was taking a lot of drugs. She married Bobby Brown. Once turned up for a magazine shoot and insisted on playing an imaginary piano. Demanded a hotplate as part of her touring rider. Those kinds of things. Their marriage might be best remembered now for the scene in their TV reality show when Bobby explained how he had to help his wife go toilet. “I’ve had to dig a doodie bubble out of your butt”, he reminded her (and the cameras). “That turd was too big … and she couldn’t get it out and I had to help her.”
Depeche Mode
The shiny 80s TotP teenyboppers became stadium-filling global stars by the 90s, and singer Dave Gahan is one of pop’s most famous OD survivors. He says of the early 90s, “My whole life was Spinal Tap at that time”. He moved to Santa Monica and married his press officer/drug partner Teresa in the Graceland chapel, Las Vegas, took to hiding at home with the lights off and the curtains taped shut, and sleeping in a large, coffin-shaped bed. Whenever he went outside, he was so paranoid that he was never without a gun. “I had lots of guns, a 9mm, a .38 revolver, and a 12-gauge shotgun, too…I just thought they were out to get me. Yeah, it was like the bit at the end of Goodfellas with the helicopters. I mean, if there were actually helicopters overhead or cars going by, I’d freak.”
Brian Harvey
In 1997, Brian Harvey was sacked from East 17 for saying he liked ecstasy. Despite this being the view of hundreds of thousands of people his age at the time, the media went mental and the matter was even debated in Parliament, before the band and was taken off the playlist of 11 different radio stations. To be fair, it was probably a little off to claim he’d taken 12 tablets in one night and then got behind the wheel of a car. But getting behind the wheel of a car at all was a bad move for Harvey. A few years later he almost died by running over himself. Harvey said he fell under the car as he leant out of the driver’s door to be sick because he had just eaten three giant baked potatoes smothered in tuna mayonnaise and cheese. Harvey fractured his pelvis in seven places, broke his ribs and punctured his lungs. He lay unconscious for three weeks and had to endure 12 hours of surgery, but did get through it.

80s/90s teen idol Christian Slater was arrested at a movie premiere. Having turned up off his head, Slater went into the toilets, and began smashing mirrors. Police were called, to find Slater, writing “poop” on the wall with a piece of his own poo.

>> 2000s <<

Paparrazi-fuelled pop life

Manufactured pop and TV show talent dominated culture for a time. Celebrity media went into overdrive. The internet fuelled a thousand paparazzi-led sites and supermarket weeklies prompted a surge of semi-legal photography. From Britney to Robbie to Kerry Katona to Matt from Busted; a generation of pop acts struggled to maintain the ultra-PG images their bosses at the time demanded.Aaron Carter
Backstreet Boys Nick’s little brother made his first million selling album age 9. By 12 he was (almost) a household name. His second album Aaron’s Party sold three million, he was the opening act for the Backstreet Boys and had already acquired a cocaine habit and a groupie army around the world. Aaron died aged 24, another sad indictment on the pastoral care of the music industry (and his own, dysfunctional family).
Five  
Scott said this week how well he understood Liam Payne’s comments about being lonely on tour. Like Liam, he would just sit in his hotel room, crying, a little agoraphobic, with nothing to do but drink the minibar dry. His bandmate Abs ended up paying people to be his friend, just to have people to hang out with. His regular breakfast back then was lemon sorbet, a line of cocaine and weed.
Paris Hilton
In LA lore, Paris was the most accomplished partygoer the Sunset Strip saw that decade. No-one could keep up with her – even though for a time Britney and Lindsay Lohan really tried. Paris famously mixed her gak with strawberry nesquik for a better taste.

“Even famous strangers need your compassion… even if you don’t really think that celebrities or their families exist. They fucking do. Skin and bone and immensely sensitive” – Robbie Williams

 

>> 10s/20s<<

The Death and Rebirth of TV talent

The TV pop talent show is no more. The much-heralded “Simon Cowell – Midas Touch” creation of a new boyband series was dead and buried before birth. We’d say it’s a good thing; that kids no longer want to be exploited to make money for rich old music managers and record labels. But one thing we do see coming up is a new proliferation of these stories – but this time round it will be YouTubers and stars of TikTok who Gen Z and Gen A will find out are not the perfect paragons of virtue they appear.
Guy Chambers – probably best known as Robbie Williams’ producer – yesterday raised the idea that under 18s shouldn’t be allowed in pop bands. There’s a lot of sense in that, but the counter is the pop charts of the 2020s. Ruled by a generation of young women (from Taylor Swift to Sabrina Carpenter) who all started off as child stars – in music or TV – they seem to have found a way to be more comfortable in their own skins, so far.
Olivia Rodrigo
Teen Disney star but now a 21-year old with two mega-selling albums. Not sure there’s ever been a pop star who uses the word “fuck” or “fucking” so often – or so well – in lyrics. She dedicated her duet with Lily Allen at Glastonbury 2022 to the Supreme Court after they overturned Roe v Wade “they truly don’t give a shit about freedom… this song is Fuck You”. On her last US tour she got an NGO in to distribute contraception and abortion pill information. When asked in an interview how she gets away with this, with such a young fanbase, Rodrigo said. “I think kids yearn for things like this. We undersell how full of rage and angst young people are.”
Miley Cyrus
Famous at 14 as Hannah Montana and now at 31 an even bigger star, seemingly now at ease with who she is. Miley openly discusses her drug use and mental health. She told Rolling Stone she once smoked a joint with peyote in it, and saw a wolf howling at the moon. Now largely sober, she said she decided to cut down when Snoop Dogg told her she smoked more than anyone he knew. He obviously never smoked with Miley’s Mum, Tish. Miley says she can’t smoke Tish’s spliffs, “My mom gave Wiz Khalifa a panic attack ’cause her weed was too heavy.”

“I really don’t like coke. It’s so gross and so dark. It’s like what are you, from the ’90s? Ew.” – Miley Cyrus

>> Popbits <<

This week’s audio quizzes

We’ve now amassed a treasure chest of 700 audio rounds. Some good, some bad. Some difficult, some child’s play. We’re going to take a break from these daily audio rounds but come back with a new fun way to show off about your music knowledge and waste a bit of time.
[Get them here]

“George Michael’s battle with drugs is unlikely to be repeated by the new, health-obsessed generation,” – Tony Parsons, in GQ 2017.

>> Hmmms <<

A few quick things

How passive aggression took over the world
[The Economist]
Kim Wilde is having more fun than ever
[Yay!]
Nick Candy tries to turn us all into Kamala fans
[Nick [hearts) Trump]

Thanks to: anyone from the last two decades who sent any of these stories in
Apologies: this should have sent yesterday but we had a weird tech issue.

Old Jokes Home:
Man: Doctor! Doctor! I’ve got five penises
GP: My Goodness! How do your trousers fit?
Man: Like a glove!

Fancy Another?