David Cassidy on the Web
LIZ JONES: I don't care if it was dodgy, I loved David Cassidy, so get your hands off my 70s!
November 25, 2012
By Liz Jones
www.dailymail.co.uk
It's very hard to explain the impact Top Of The Pops once had on the nation's psyche to anyone born after 1970. The show was the focal point of my week. It was where I discovered and fell in love with Marc Bolan – as an homage, I fashioned a copycat feather boa by performing liposuction on one of my mum's cushions.
From the Jethro Tull at the start of the Seventies to 1980's performance of Ant Music by Adam and the Ants, it was a cornucopia of delights for a corkscrew-curled adolescent girl.
Seeing David Cassidy, pictured, perform in Daydreamer again brought all the old feelings back
The snake-hipped Rod Stewart singing Maggie May inspired my first feather cut. Platform-booted Dave Hill of Slade led to a blunt fringe and many a twisted ankle. It was exotic and otherworldly.
I wanted to be Cherry, the dark-haired one in Pan's People, so much that I formed my own dance troupe at school.
We would enter contests doing a routine to 10CC's I'm Not In Love, miming 'So don't forget it', by pointing to our brains, then waggling our fingers.
Last week, it was mooted that the BBC might desist from showing reruns of Seventies TOTPs, due to the Jimmy Savile scandal. Were there signs in the programme, way back then, that all was not as we loon-clad fans thought it was?
Of course there were. I've just watched again David Cassidy's 1973 performance of Daydreamer, filmed on the tarmac at Heathrow. He wears a white trouser suit and a black shirt with the collar worn outside his jacket, a style that started a craze at my school in Essex.
Seeing it, all the old feelings of desire come flooding back: whoosh! You can see why: the breathlessness of his singing, the hooded eyes, the almost trancelike state he is in are so blatantly sexual as to be almost obscene.
As a child, I didn't realise I was being manipulated, as those long lashes and coquettish smirks groomed me into buying his records, the only part of him I could get my hands on. I had wanted to grab him, once, at White City in 1972, but his white spangled jumpsuit remained a distant speck.
As an adult, having read his autobiographies, it irks me that he was not, as I thought, waiting patiently for me in his psychedelic minibus, but enjoying sexual favours from groupies.
That the DJs, lesser, uglier men in every way, were doing pretty much the same thing should not come as a surprise. I imagine any man in that environment would have wanted a slice of the action.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, as well as looking out of his mind back on that 1970 edition of the show, wore pyjama-striped trousers that clearly showed the contours of his penis.
But because all this was on BBC1, my parents thought nothing of it (ITV was banned in my house and only my older brothers were allowed to watch the Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC2).
Pop stars have always preyed on young girls. This 'we didn't believe it' stance by executives who were warned about Savile doesn't wash, not in that hotbed.
Adolescent girls are so desperate to get near their idols, they'll use anything or anyone as a stepping stone. I once went on tour with Adam Ant's all-black backing dance troupe, Masaai, just to get on the same train as my piratical idol.
Some pre-teenage girls will do anything. That's precisely why they need protecting. That is why men like Savile should not be forgiven, but they can be understood. The temptation was probably overwhelming.
But please, new DG of the BBC, hands off my Seventies. What will you do next, delete, Stalin-fashion, any song produced by Phil Spector from the airwaves? Excise O?J Simpson's cameo from the inevitable Christmas screening of The Towering Inferno? Oh my God. Paul Newman in a suede safari jacket. Restrain me now.
