Wendy James was the pouty, mouthy front woman of Transvision Vamp and, despite a decade-long hiatus from the charts, she's lost none of her energy, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.
It seems a lifetime ago - pop/punk starlet Wendy James pouting for England. She was a provocative little minx back then, almost 20 years ago, in a band called Transvision Vamp; petite, lithe, dressed to commit all manner of mortal sins as she performed trashy but proficient pop/punk songs in the company of male band members more than several years older than her.
These days, James still commands a certain degree of attention, but at the age of 41 you can clearly tell the starlet days are long gone. Still blonde (whether by nature or chemicals this guy can't figure out), still very smart, still unencumbered by mortgages and children, James cuts a figure that's equal parts idiosyncratic and ever so slightly frayed at the edges.
She's still living the dream of being a lead singer in a rock band, but as the days of Transvision Vamp are a distant memory you'd have to wonder if her second stab at mainstream success is worth the effort. We don't wish to be a party pooper, but from what we've heard of her new band Racine (a name influenced more by Al Capone and Damon Runyon than the 16th century French dramatist, but whose central theories of the blind folly of human passion might just apply to the ever-wishful, ever-hopeful James), it'll be some time before she graces the charts again.
And yet to her inestimable credit, James is still up for it, still game for a laugh and ready to take it on. With the stars aligned just so, she might do it. Back in the day, she was unfairly discredited as being little more than a hackette fronting a band made up of jobbing musicians. The blonde had ambitions, however, which made themselves known when the life of Transvision Vamp came to an abrupt halt in the early 1990s.
"It was the Elvis Costello thing that put a full stop behind me singing other people's songs," says James, sitting outside a coffee and cake shop in Dublin's Camden Street, sipping an americano, smoking a cigarette, wrapped up in a fur yoke, thin as a rake and shivering whenever a blast of summer wind finds her. The "Costello thing" is a noted episode in customised songwriting: at the fag end of an abortive US tour in Washington DC, James wrote a letter to Costello, outlining her frustrations as being a singer of songs that didn't suit her personality. On her return to London, she found a package at her home - a tape of demo songs that Costello and his then wife Cait O'Riordan had written specifically for her.
The resulting album ( Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears) was released in 1993. There were high hopes that it would not only kick-start a successful solo career for James, but would also resuscitate her standing with the critics. It nose-dived instead, forcing her record company to drop her within 15 months of signing her. Cue more than 10 years of trying to claw back a semblance of self.
"That episode very significantly showed me that I wasn't going to get complete satisfaction out of being a conduit for someone else's thoughts or emotions. The decision wasn't even a decision - it was a very clear signpost in the road to just taking time out for myself and learning the instruments, watching movies, reading books and listening to other people's records. Catching up with myself, really." More than a decade seems quite a long time to be catching up, doesn't it? "I did take my time, didn't I? It was spent very industriously, to be honest. There was no real deadline for me to release another record. It's not like I sat in West London for two years hanging out, though; I very quickly set about buying equipment. Then I built an eight-track studio in my home - I wanted to know how to work a console. And then I started to get to know how to write songs, which opened up a whole new journey of discovery - you write songs one week which you think are staggering only to discover the following week that they're horrific. So you have to go through all the embarrassing times of that until finally, seven or eight years later, you feel you've ended up with a full set of songs that pass criteria stringent enough for you to believe in them."
According to James, she got by financially with royalties from Transvision Vamp songs. "But this rite of passage would have had to happen, anyway, even if I had had to go back on the dole. I wasn't about to go and get a job and become distracted from the mission at hand." Life today, says James, is very good, if unstructured. She chooses to live without the security of the knowledge that a work cheque goes into her bank account at the end of every month.
"Of course, there is a certain luxury of having a day job, because you know where your next meal is coming from; whereas because I live a life without formatted security everything is pretty much an adventure, even on the bad days. If you wake up one morning and don't have any money to buy an evening meal, you just have to look around the apartment and see what you can sell. It keeps me sprightly and on my toes. I really don't know what is going to happen next, and I enjoy the experience. I have one very rock solid thing to focus on and that is music.
"Off there in the distance, there is the very easy to understand goal of playing huge venues to a sold-out crowd. But that isn't really the focus of my attention - the focus is to make great music."
Whether or not crossover success is achieved is hardly the point; James comes across as too philosophical a person to worry about gracing the covers of style magazines. There was a time, she recalls, when she thought saying no to an interview with Smash Hitsmeant it might never write about her again. She says she was never forced to do anything she didn't want to do - "but maybe I said yes to things because I didn't have the wisdom to say no". Does this include the infamous "nude with pearls" cover shot for The Facein 1991? "Do I regret that? No way. These days, it wouldn't be so outrageous. But the reality back then was that I woke up, walked down Portobello Road and there was the cover of the magazine billboarded down the street - me, basically topless. I had to grin and bear it that month. I don't regret, though - it's a good photo. It sells very well on eBay, I believe."
And what about some of the other promotional photography - the heavy-lidded, post-coital look that teased, pleased and made her something of a sex symbol? At the age of 41, what perspective does she have? A final drag on her cigarette, a last-minute adjustment of her mini skirt, a pout for old time's sake.
"I look at some photos and think I got it right; I look at others and wonder, what was I thinking? Yes, I agree there are some fashion mistakes, but some of them are staggeringly beautiful and I can't quite believe I managed to look that good. I sit there and go, who could I e-mail this to in order to prove to them that I look really good?"
• The albumRacine 2 is available to download through iTunes.
