Music

Like that of singer Phil Oakey and blonde Susan Ann Sulley, Joanne Catherall’s destiny is inextricably tied to the English city of Sheffield, where she was born in 1962.

At the age of just 18, two very young girls only joined the mythical synth-pop group (a pop based on synthesizers) when Martyn Ware and Ian Craig slammed the door. The commercial orientation being pushed by singer Phil Oakey annoyed them to the point of jumping ship. The story goes that the singer then fell under the spell of the two childhood friends, still students at the time, during a party in a Sheffield nightclub - the Crazy Daisy if you want to know everything.

Even if they did not take part in the writing of "Dare!" in 1981 (which was an immediate hit), the girls’ light voices as well as their clumsily suggestive swaying of the hips defined the image of the group in the blink of an eye. More than four decades have passed and the two vestal virgins, now in their sixties, still wear slightly outrageous make-up and surround Phil in their long, loose dresses.

The band hasn't recorded any new songs since 2011 (the album "Credo" went largely unnoticed), but this is only of relative importance as concert audiences come to rediscover their young years by chanting "Don't You Want Me" at the top of their lungs. "You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar / When I met you / I picked you out, I shook up and turned you around / Turned you into someone new".  Not great literature and probably not very "me too" compatible these days but we can forgive almost everything for a shot of nostalgia!

(AK - Photo: Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Phil Oakey in the center with Joanne Catherall on the right on the stage of the Diamond Awards at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, in October 1990.