Espedair Street

was a simple idea, but the good ones usually are. It was also, again, as commercially good ideas tend to be, rather dubious morally.

The first single was, after all, going to be 'Frozen Gold'. 'Another Rainy Day', ARC decided, was too downbeat for a debut. It was the better song, but just not right for that vital first impression. 'Frozen Gold' it would be then; and that suited my desire for neatness, and my vanity; F, G. My clever idea.

I'd written the song for a male voice; it was for Dave Balfour to sing. Never even occurred to me to do it any other way. When I wrote the words, 'Why do you bite me on the shoulder, why do you scratch me on the back? Why do you always have to make love, like you're making an attack?' I was imagining a couple screwing, missionary position, him on top, her scratching his back, biting him when she came... and I stress imagining; I was still very much a virgin at the time, but I'd read a lot of my flatmates' Penthouses and Forums, so I reckoned I knew what I was talking about, and of course such physicality was shown to be just a metaphor for a particular relationship, as the song developed (oh, I thought I was very clever) ...

Then Big Sam said keep the backing, but re-record it with Christine singing lead. Dave wasn't sure at first, but Sam said he could lead on the next single, probably 'Another Rainy Day'; he just had a hunch about this one being right for Christine. Rick Tumber didn't think it would make much difference at first, but then became very enthusiastic. ARC's management came round to the idea too. We held up the single for a week, Big Sam got me to re-write the subsequent verses a little, to make the song more personal, less abstract, then Christine spent just one more day in the studio and we released 'Frozen Gold' at the end of September , with Christine singing lead. I still hadn't realised.

The single came out, and I experienced that unreal, dizzying feeling of listening, for the first time, to something I had written being played on the radio. That sense of unreality continued. The publicity had started; there were posters, interviews (though not for me, of course) ... and not all that many sales. I felt curiously unworried. Something would happen.

ARC got us onto Top Of The Pops. I wasn't sure whether to be appalled or delighted. The same programme as Barry White? Jumping Jesus. But at least my ma and my pals would finally be convinced it was all really happening.

It wasn't until we were rehearsing for the programme that I understood just how smart Big Sam was. Christine's voice had been improving anyway, under Milne's direction, and she'd been loosening up generally, moving better, looking more relaxed and comfortable on the stage, really starting to show that she was enjoying it, but Big Sam had obviously had a word with her, and in that rehearsal I saw what he was up to. I didn't say anything.

Then came the recording in the TOTP studio. We got it first time; nobody fluffed their mimes. God knows how; Christine was stunning. I felt my eyes staring, I don't know about anybody else.

All it was was that she sang that first verse as though she was living it there and then; it was sex. She started with her hair tied up, in a sort of bun. That was unusual for a start. She wore a black dress with (of course) gold trimmings; Dave wore black flares and a white tuxedo (almost drably low key and tasteful for the time). F, G: F F, E G. We set off.

Christine didn't just sing; she strutted and pouted her way through that first verse, seemed about to kiss the camera, and as she sang 'attack?' she used her free hand to take hold of the collar of the dress and pull. It ripped. Just a little, but it ripped. She threw her head back and marched to the other side of the stage and another camera while we slammed out the middle eight built around F and G. The torn dress flapped a little, exposing her shoulder. She shook her head, spilling long blonde hair out, and sang the rest of the song as though she was just about to either orgasm or kick the next male she saw in the balls. Or both.

The BBC producer was no fool. He made us do it again anyway, even though there was nothing wrong with the first time.

The floor manager asked Christine if she'd mind not ripping her dress on this take, and we wasted quarter of an hour while a little old lady from the costume department was located and escorted to the bopper-infested studio. It took her all of thirty seconds to mend Christine's dress.

The second run-through was lacklustre. They broadcast the first one, dress-tearing and all. It had been a close-run thing, we discovered later (there was a reaction against 'permissiveness' at the time and, dammit, it was sexy), but they did use it. If they hadn't, we'd still have made it, though perhaps not with that single (the song wasn't all that strong, like I say). But Christine sold it. That dress sold it. Sex did.

I used to have a video of that programme, and it all looks fairly tame now, but only relatively. This was pre- punk, remember, and even though one shoulder was hardly in the same league as Jim Morrison's dick, we are talking about a family show here. But even watching it five or six years later I remember I still felt my hair rise a little and a slight sweat prickle on my skin. There was energy there; Christine exuded it, and Milne had captured it on the record. Energy; excitement. You know it when you see it, and when kids see it, when they hear it, they go out and buy records.

All well and good. Yahoo for us. But we started out with a gesture of exploitation, of sex and violence, and of male-against-female violence at that; we took some stick from the women's movement, and I didn't blame them. Some bands earn their fame; we bought ours.

God, there were letters to the papers, there were headlines in the papers, people wrote in and phoned to the BBC, we must have come fairly close to having questions asked in the House of Commons. And a couple of million adolescent boys wanked to the memory of Christine that night, and then went out and bought the single on the following day. Well... not two million, not buying it, but a lot. We made number two, which around Christmas means a lot more copies sold than the majority of number ones throughout the rest of the year. The album suddenly became Eagerly Awaited the morning after the programme was shown, and when Frozen Gold and Liquid Ice did hit the shops, it sold out. Even most of the critics liked it, which really was extraordinary. Pressing plants went onto three shifts. Christine turned down vast sums to appear nude for the sort of magazines my flatmates used to buy and I used to borrow from them.

All those young boys had come, but we had arrived. It was Fame City, and we'd been given the key.

Weirdness. Years later I'd look at old papers, or at Mickey's scrapbook, and I'd see photos of us at some party or celebration, with really famous people; other musicians, popular comedians, politicians, minor royalty, and there they'd be, and there I'd be, in the background, and I couldn't remember anything about it at all. Nothing. Nada. Total blank. If you asked me, Have you met these people? I'd swear blind I hadn't. No memory of it whatsoever.

The whole next year after that first hit passed in a daze. It was exactly like getting steaming drunk and waking up the next morning not knowing what the hell you'd done, only this lasted for a year, not a night. I look back on it now and I wonder how the hell I didn't walk in front of a truck, or sign away the world rights to all future compositions, or say something outrageously slanderous, or just drink myself to death or start on heroin; I was on the same automatic pilot that somehow (usually) sees utter drunkards through their binges, stops them from falling out of windows or off kerbs or picking fights with entire gangs.

'Another Rainy Day' (sung by Dave, but if you watch the TOTP programme we played it on, the camera spends more time on Christine than it does on Dave) got to number three in February '75. Dave, who'd insisted as being credited as 'Davey' on the album, and was becoming known as that, was disappointed we hadn't had a number one single yet, but the album had been number one album for five weeks, so it wasn't too hard to bear. It was probably only because so many people had the song on the album that they didn't bother buying the single, even though they were different versions of the song.

I think the main reason Dave was worried was that he wanted to be the band's usual lead singer, and was worried ARC would favour Christine over him because the single she'd fronted had done better. And I'd thought he'd just wanted to be a guitar hero.

Two things: one; shortly after that first TV appearance, I mentioned to Dave how much better Christine's singing was; not so much technically, but in the way it came across, and how much looser she seemed to be, moving about the stage, confident, in control. She had seemed almost prim when I first saw the band at Paisley Tech, and now she was, well, I don't think I actually used the word 'raunchy', but that was what I was getting at. I put it down to the influences of Mike Milne and Big Sam, and just the fact of being in the big time now. Dave grinned and said, 'Na, all she needed was a good fuck,' winked at me and walked off.