Fusing Bolan with Blondie by way of the New York Dolls and Sex Pistols, the band scored hits including I Want Your Love, Baby I Don’t Care and Landslide of Love,
Baby I Don’t Care is really “Wild Thing” rewritten. So Transvision Vamp were a Troggs cover band.
I liked TV, they were a real laugh. I still play I Want Your Love in the car.
Wendy was gorgeous and glamorous. A similar band at the time was The Primitives with Tracy Tracy as the singer.
Andy Warhol is Dead is a funny and quite clever song.
I was surprised that Wendy didn’t go all out to be on telly as a presenter like Paula Yates or Jenny Powell – she had a lot more talent.
I had no idea that she had made that Costello album that the article mentions.
There were a load of similar bands with blonde lead singers. Like someone had produced a glut of hair dye. I used to listen to the first album by The Darling Buds.
They had some rather poor timing, releasing the big single off the album called Hit the Ground, unfortunately just before the first Gulf War, so it was considered in bad taste to play it.
Wendy James was hot AF. If she’d left her face alone she still would be. Alas she looks most peculiar. Smooth, but peculiar.
How does one get to read the full article now?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/01/transvision-vamp-wendy-james-reunion-interview
The BBC’s Frank Bough “came at me a few times”, she says, referring to his derisive tone. “It made me think: ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
Probably only asking where she bought her lingerie from.
He probably wanted to know what her backhand was like.
“I thought I was going to be bigger than Madonna,” she says, “and I was pretty sure I was going to win an Oscar.”
Yeah, pain in the arse when I met her a handful of times. Band members had had enough of continually apologising for her behaviour. Pretty sure she got barred from a couple of places. Didn’t strike me as a nice person.
Never thought she was that hot. Looked like she had about an inch of make-up caked on.
From the Graudian article, it still sounds like she thinks she should have been something big when she was a flash-in-a-pan.
As for influencing others with much more successful careers (Stefani/Cyrus), I’d love to hear their view. I imagine it’s be “Who said that?”.
From the era when fronting crumpet actually sang. Don’t see that much now. Video I watched recently. It would be physically impossible for the totty to be doing the dance routine & singing. She wouldn’t be able to get the breathing right. So she had to be lip syncing into the mike. Which then begs the question, is she actually doing her own vocals or is she just cheesecake?
Thanks to modern digital processing she probably did her own vocals on the recordings. Remove the processing and you’d probably rather listen to a tomcat having its bollocks off.
Me, I’m old enough to have worked with One-Take Tessa and other singers who could nail it in one, usually on the first take.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessa_Niles
And Tessa was hot, too. So was a Jap called Epo, and, er, Olivia Neutron-Bomb. All first-take wonders.
Or what was described to me as “listening to a mouse singing from 3 streets away”.
As the great Bobbi Flekman, observed, ‘Money talks, and bullshit walks.’
Hot singers? This one works for me…
Wouldn’t ride a bike in flip flops though
A titbit I picked up from the SoM tour which every tourist in Salzburg does. Christopher Plummer who played The Captain was a good actor and singer but duetting with Julie Andrews it was obvious from early takes that he was inferior at the singing part. To such an extent the director hired Bill Lee, a real singer who never went to Austria, to do the magnificent basso profundo parts which were edited in later.
Evidence of what a fabulous singer Julie was.