Vronsky was a dark, squarely built man of medium height, with an exceptionally tranquil and firm expression on his good-natured, handsome face. Everything about his head and figure, from the closely cropped black hair and freshly shaven chin to the loosely fitting, brand-new uniform, was simple and at the same time elegant.
LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina
As I came to understand music as social currency, I realised that I needed to declare an allegiance. One day, I was watching television and saw the one for me. Donny Osmond was intriguingly poised between good boy and bad. His face was still chubby and his hair had been brushed firmly into place. On the other hand, it had been allowed to grow long enough to suggest trouble – the length at which my brother’s headmaster demanded hair be cut. He wore jeans. They looked pressed. He wore a cap, which was fashionable. It reminded me of the one my father wore to go sailing.
He was wholesome, but in that pumped-up American way which dazzled us then. His teeth and eyes were shiny, and as he loafed around a playground singing in his high brash voice, he sat down on a swing and sighed and suddenly looked capable of complication. He was singing about ‘puppy love’ but he was being ironic and I was pleased to have understood that. The lyrics were basic, really just a net for the force of the arrangement behind him – instead of the chirpy economies of bubble-gum pop, here was what sounded like several orchestras’ worth of violinists, grand pianos, choruses and harps adding up to a surge of generalised emotion.
I was impressed by such grandeur, and felt it matched the scale of the unformed feelings for which I badly needed an object. I had a crush on a boy at school and I looked at Donny Osmond and decided, quite consciously, that he would be my favourite pop star. Somehow I knew I needed one and as I’d never heard of him, I assumed no one else had either. I was looking for my first musical discovery and wanted it to be as private and singular as my feelings about the boy at school. One thing I grasped from the start was the cachet of obscurity. I told no one about the boy and no one about Donny. The next day someone mentioned Donny’s name and I dropped him. I turned ten and ‘Puppy Love’ was Number One.
There was another American boy – David Cassidy. He was older, more complicated, more fashionable and the star of a television series called The Partridge Family. These American boys were feminine and masculine in ways which did not ironise each other. Like the Spartans Herodotus describes combing their long hair before the battle of Thermopylae, these boys clearly knew how to handle a blow-dryer as well as a fight. But while I thought of those soldiers as being carved out of marble and bronze, the Americans looked as if they’d been made out of generic Boy Stuff, something bland and malleable, set in a regular mould. Their super-beauty was a triumph of proportion and symmetry. It impressed but it did not disturb and for a few months this was what I needed, the idea of Boy in its most benign and consistent form.
I assumed that the boys I knew would become like the men I knew – silent and bearded or silent and lipsticked. These cheery sensitive Americans, who would in actuality remain thousands of miles and an ocean away, were a safer place to start.