Which would be academic of course if the BBC Radio 1 hadn’t picked up one of my Klark Kent songs, “Don’t Care,” and started playing the hell out of it all over the country, thereby anointing me with a bona fide (though modest) hit single—my first ever. I’m twenty-six and had almost given up hope that real mojo would ever be mine. Curved Air was a good first step out of college, but it was like being the last man to climb aboard the sinking ship. The Police right now is just another scabrous London band, albeit one with a secret nuclear weapon hatching.
THE BBC TV PRODUCER has that same look of befuddled amusement on his face, but he’s much redder. We’re all in masks. Even Miles, who has identified himself as Melvin Miltoss, my manager. He’s sounding a bit nasal through his pig snout, but he’s trying to reason with the TV people—who swear they have never seen anything like this.
Top of the Pops is the national television opportunity in the UK. Appearing on this show is an automatic five-point bump in the charts. I figured that bands look cooler than solo performers on TV, so I brought a band to mime along with me, comprised of Sting, Andy, Florian, and Kim Turner. None of us has ever been on TV before, this is the big one, and we’re all in masks.
Behind his disguise, Miles is unhinged. Released by anonymity and unburdened by his sterling reputation he’s having the time of his life, alternately blubbering, exhorting, and suavely negotiating. The thing is that they have a problem with close-ups of a singer in a rubber mask. The whole show is mimed to playback, but miming behind a mask is pushing it. Miles wheedles them into a compromise, which is for me to wear some kind of camouflage makeup. They escape from our dressing room just as Miles is winding into a sobbing flood of histrionic, clutching gratitude.
Up on the tiny TV studio stage we’re all clutching guitars that aren’t plugged in, and Florian is checking out the plastic cymbals that they put on his kit. Looking at them, they are not remotely realistic, but the crew assure us that under the lights and through the cameras they look “better” than real ones. The point of them, however, is that they make no sound other than a damp thut.
With drums it’s hard to pretend that you are playing without making a fearful racket—which makes it hard for the other players to stay in sync with the playback. The television viewer can see if a cymbal is struck, so the drummer pretending to play must actually strike something—and if he actually strikes, thut is better than CLANG!
Considering the enormity of the show, the stage is tiny. The cameras like us all to be pressed up close to one another so the screen always has multiple players. We each have a little spot marked on the stage beneath our feet. Behind their masks my buddies—even Sting, who is usually so cool—are jigging about in their little spots. Each one must boogie in his own square foot.
Up front I’m staring into the big camera lens facing, for the first time, the world on national TV. In front of me is a tiny dance floor with twenty or thirty fake groovy teenagers waiting glumly for their cue. They are pushed over to one side while the cameras work out their positions. It’s all business for the moment. I’m just standing there under the intense light. Over there I can see a monitor that is flitting from close-up to wide-angle shots of me in the dumb makeup that they made me wear. In the makeup room it looked like pretty deep camouflage, but on camera you can see right through it.
“OK…let’s try one…everybody on one please…PLAYBACK!”
The crowd directors wave up the fake teenagers who are suddenly whooping with joyous teenage hysteria and dancing like fury as the crazy lights swirl and the cameras are sweeping overhead. After three loud pops my track starts, and I’m dancing around pretending to sing my song. I’m jitterbugging, I’m gyrating and gallivanting. I’m hollering, high-rolling, and Holy Moly! I am ON TV!
Well actually, not yet. That was just a run-through, a camera rehearsal. The fake teenagers immediately droop off back to the side, and I stand inert once more under the lights while they figure more shit out. This time, I’m soaking wet. It’s not just my first time on TV, it’s also the first time I’ve ever thought of myself as a singer let alone pretended to be one in front of people. I have decades of youthful experience with air guitar, but singing? It feels like cross-dressing.
Miles sidles over. For years we have both been exhorting artists to be more animated, but he’s coaching me now to calm down. My brother with his pig mask is a reassuring presence. Behind me Andy and Kimbo are goofing off, freed from inhibition by their masks, striking outrageous guitar poses. Sting is biding his time. Just standing there he looks cool, even with the monkey mask.
“OK, Quiet Please! Everybody on one…thank you…and…Cue Audience!”
“WROUAGH!” shout the fake teenagers as the crazy lights swirl and the cameras sweep.
This time I’m trying the stillness-is-movement concept. I’m rigid while singing, with occasional twitches for punctuation. This is still only the second time ever in my life that I have been a singer. First time was ten minutes ago. But this is going to become a pattern. Living and learning right in front of everybody, on TV.
In their homes around the nation people are hearing the real deal—a music soundscape entirely created by just one hard-workin’ fool. But they’re watching a fake performance on fake instruments in front of a fake audience. Even the mask—which doesn’t hide anything—is fake. But the ever humble feeling in my heart is real, as I pretend to shout out the lyric into the fake microphone:
“I am the coolest thing that ever hit town…”
AUGUST 5, 1978
A Sounds magazine reprint of one journalist’s impression of the young cipher.
WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?
Goddamit, I knew I should have worn my Bazooka Joe mask—confronting me across the table in the A&M interrogation room is Klark Kent, who in spite of his biography isn’t a church organist from Wales or a bank clerk from Tyneside, nor even a computer programmer from Brooklyn. What he definitely is: blond, six foot three, American, around twenty-five to thirty years of age (he has too much time perspective to be younger) wearing white projectionist’s gloves, a black greatcoat, and this goddamn Jimmy Carter mask, none of which he removed in the incognito ninety-minute conversation, playing the secret identity trip to the hilt. What you will know about him is that he has a hot single out called “Don’t Care” with “Thrills” and “Office Girls” gracing the B-Side of his green vinyl wonder. First issued on Kryptone Records (get it?), an offshoot of the small independent Faulty Products, it has been snapped up and rush-released for mass purchase by A&M because, according to Mr. Kent, “I threatened to snap Tom Noble’s neck if he didn’t.” After all, you don’t fool around with Superman, do you?
The possibility of the single becoming a hit is actually pretty good, it has received suitable airplay, and was even Paul Burnett’s pick of the week a while back. “Don’t Care” is an incredibly catchy satire about this guy who knows (not believes, you understand) that he is the greatest thing in the universe, and its main message is not that he doesn’t care, but that everybody is the star of their own life and should act accordingly. Kent also plays all the instruments himself, with such a remarkable ability that it leads us to the main question: who the hell is he really?
Now there are several possibilities—he could be an extremely famous American superstar trying to find out if he can cut it without the instant status and having a good laugh at the same time, but this Klark sternly denies. The story he would have you believe goes something like this:
Born of English and American parents, who were archaeologists, he spent many years in Lebanon, where he became involved with a local religious group by the name of the Druze. He says he was accepted by them because of his “high intuitive matrix.” The Druze, he claimed, are particularly interested in the development of emotion and believe that God is a manifestation