John Murphy
It was 1986, and I was a teenager. If I’d been cool, I’d have been buying The Queen Is Dead, Licensed To Ill and Lifes Rich Pageant. But I wasn’t cool. I was 14 years old and, at that time, I genuinely believed Curiosity Killed The Cat to be the best pop group that had ever existed.
The lead singer was named Ben Volpierre-Pierrot (memorably renamed by Smash Hits as Ben Vol-au-Vent-Parrot). He wore a ridiculous fisherman’s hat, and performed a strange, bendy-legged dance at any opportunity. His band played a bland hybrid of white boy soul/jazz/pop. They had possibly the worst name in the history of pop music. None of this mattered to me.
The video for the band’s first single, ‘Misfit’, was shot in New York, and featured Andy Warhol paying sly homage to Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. Not that I knew this at the time – I just wondered who the strange old man dropping paper cards on the floor was.
When the band produced another pop gem in ‘Down To Earth’, I was hooked. I bought their album (sadly, these days, they’re the only tracks from it I can recall without recourse to Google) and even bought tickets to see them at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre.
This may have been the point where my infatuation with Curiosity came to a shuddering halt. For that gig was one of the most frightening evenings of my young life. Myself and three other boys from school turned up to be confronted with a theatre full of hormonal, screaming, out of control teenage girls. While to some 14-year-old boys, this may be nirvana; the truth is that it was unnervingly horrifyingly.
We sat, glued to our chairs, while all around us girls screamed at ear-splitting volume. We tried to act cool, shuffle along with Curiosity’s smooth jazzy rhythms, but it was no use. I’ll level with you, we were scared. And this was only my third ever gig – following on from Suzanne Vega and Howard Jones. It’s fair to say that neither the Greenwich Village folkie or earnest synth-popper inspired the same level of devotion among the youth of Liverpool than the four guys of CKTC. Would this be what all gigs would be like? Will my ears ever regain the gift of hearing? Can my mum come and pick me up earlier than planned? This was all the sound of my internal monologue at the time.
Curiosity’s star burnt out shortly after (although Mr. Vol-au-Vent Parrot can still be found on the Eighties nostalgia circuit) and I moved onto slightly ‘cooler’ stuff. Yet whenever I visit New York, that urge to do a strange bendy-legged dance down an alleyway while a white-haired man scatters paper cards still grabs me.
