Britain’s bores didn’t know what to do with Wendy James. As the frontwoman of Transvision Vamp, that Eighties collision of brash punk and commercial pop, she was smart and moody, sexy and confounding, cool and unflappable. Naturally, she had to be destroyed. “Wendy James, John Sessions, Jeremy Beadle and 97 more in our Hated 100,” went the cover of a 1989 issue of Time Out magazine, alongside a photo of James defaced by a smashed pie. Ah, the good old days. What else probably got their backs up? James really, really didn’t give a damn.
“It never occurred to me for a second that I wasn’t equal,” the 58-year-old says today, proudly. She’s wrapped in a pink coat in the living room of her home in the south of France, her blonde hair lacquered to her scalp, her eyes thick with black liner. “I was the f***ing leader,” she continues. “I was the engine. You could put me on a roster with 10 different acts and I’d go out there to win. Most pop stars worth their salt will have that same killer instinct. I was never a victim. If you were offensive, I’d be like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. ‘Are you f***ing talking to me?’” Her cut-glass English accent may be delicate, but she reels off that famous line with such quiet force that I feel like running and hiding.
That mix of soft and scary was always at the heart of James’s appeal. With her peroxide bob, powder-pink lipstick and performative snarl, James embodied the persona of the “teenage girl gone wild”. Shortly after meeting between London and James’s hometown of Brighton, she and her bandmates marched into EMI Records insisting they were going to be the biggest band in the world – then immediately got signed. Their most successful singles were similarly full-on, thrumming with sex and violence. Nothing else in British pop at that point sounded quite so anarchically fun, all scuzzy guitars and bratty shrieking.
