Gene Loves Jezebel taps the root of the problem;
teenage girls waiting to be filled up with life, wanting to be passionate every waking moment. 

Gene Loves Jezebel. Close your eyes and imagine it: An Elvis Presley Western co-starring Ann-Margaret. Lipstick graffiti on the bathroom wall of a Times Square Puerto Rican drag bar. The newest Southern California wine cooler. A lonely-hearts plea in the back pages of the Weekly World News. A vicious lie. The latest bad

Gene Loves Jezebel is a secret code word uttered between classes by high-school girls with haircuts that blur their vision, girls who are preoccupied with mastering the bass guitar, and inventing their own fashion style. It’s a code word that this year’s trendies won’t be able to decipher until next year. 

Actually, Gene Loves Jezebel is this year’s great rock ‘n’ roll confusion, a Teen Heartthrob Band for the ‘80s composed of two beautiful Welsh twins, Michael and Jay Aston, who share lead vocals and, possessed of all the class and savoir faire handed down to them by every great Welshman before them, have tailored their music and style to captivate the brooding hearts and emotionally confused hormones of the teenage women of the world. 

Their charm is in their elegant androgyny – long flowing locks, lipstick, Way Bandyish makeup, flamboyant, regal fashions that make them more attractive than your average American woman – and a brooding, aloof sound. The package is complete; style, elegance, and wistful emotions. Shit I know nothing about. 

That’s why I enlist the aid of two more knowledgeable souls than myself, Paige and Jean Sutton, aged 18 and 16, respectively. A normal pair of hipster American girls who are well-versed students of rock ‘n’ roll androgyny, they seem like they have the correct haircuts, know every note of Gene Loves Jezebel’s songs by heart, and, more importantly, know the ultra-secret of the confusing new code of cool. 

The concert at the Celebrity Theater in Phoenix, Arizona, is a formal apology from Gene Loves Jezebel to their fans for walking off the stage at the local Metro Club a couple of months earlier. The band had almost collapsed onstage from heat prostration that might have been the direct result of the promoters only providing a couple of warm six-packs for the entire band and road crew to quench their thirst. After the incident, the Phoenix rock press dubbed Michael and Jay Aston “The Twinkie Twins” and generally slagged the band off for their unprofessional behavior. But the fans were undaunted. 

“It was like, really, just too totally hot”, Paige, the elder, more outgoing Sutton sister, explains to me as we drive to the show. Jean, the shy one sitting next to her, pops in a tape of her favorite Gene Loves Jezebel song. “I mean, on one hand, it was kind of like, if the fans could take it then so should the band, but then, we didn’t have to be, on stage in the lights or anything.” 

Somehow, the music coming out of the tape player doesn’t fit the landscape. Gorgeous pink and orange bands of a setting desert sun lie on top of majestic bright blue mountains. The music seems like it should be some broad, sweeping Wagnerian opera score. 

Coming from their beautiful home in Paradise Valley, Paige and Jean could catch brilliant sunsets anytime. But meeting and interviewing their favorite band – who looked and dressed as well as they did and, more important, spoke to and for them, all their joys and disappointments – well, that was something that didn’t happen very often. 

“Jay and I are from Wales,” Michael says proudly as if that’s enough to explain it all. “We’ve always felt like outcasts, even in London. We don’t really identify with any London ‘wave’ or ‘scene’. We were never really part of anything there, though we lived in London a long time and enjoyed it.” 

Born into a large, working class Catholic family in Porthcawl, Wales, Michael and Jay developed a love / hate relationship with their upbringing. Loathing the strict dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church that instilled in them feelings of guilt, shame and frustration, they cloaked themselves in the dark, ancient mysticism and pageantry of their Druid forefathers. The Saxon conquest obliterated much of Eastern Britain, but because Wales is a much wilder, mountainous country and the people are much more stubborn, the invaders left it alone, allowing the lore of the ancient gods of the old race to remain. 

“They’re not very hospitable people, the Welsh,” Michael explains. 

But if you’re in a rock ‘n’ roll band, London is still where it’s happening. So armed with their obscure notions of what it means to be Welsh, the blood of mad kings and priests coursing through their veins, a fierce resolve to do things their own way that borders on arrogance, the twins found success on the English independent record scene. 

“When we first came to London,” says Michael, “we were always looking for musicians that would work. We tried a lot of bassists and guitarists.” He pauses, pondering the long line of sidemen: “Steve Garvey from Roxy Music, John Murphy from the Associates. . . .” 

In 1983, they released the singles “Screaming for Emmalene,” “Bruises,” “Punch Drunk,” “Influenza,” “Shame,” and “Cow,” which all did well on the British charts. By 1985 their two independent LPs, Promise and Immigrant, had propelled them into stardom across the U.K., Immigrant reaching number two in the first week of release. 

Before the success of Immigrant, Michael and Jay had had a brief association with the most wicked Welshman of rock ‘n’ roll, John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground. 

“It sounds very romantic really, but his legendary status was secondary to the fact that he was Welsh,” Jay was quoted as saying after the working relationship with Cale ended. But it was an exaggerated understatement. 

“We got on well with him, but, God,” says Michael, “he’s so erratic, almost psychotic. One minute he was really involved, the next he’d be screaming at us to get out. The whole affair was a bit of a fiasco. It could have been great, but Cale was pressed for time, he was rehearsing for his tour, and in the end it was futile. We learned two valuable things, though: To improvise more and push ourselves. We also learned that if something isn’t recorded properly no amount of mixing can salvage it.” 

Returning to Britain after the failed Cale sessions in New York, Michael and Jay threw themselves into rebuilding the band. 

“Our current incarnation has been together in a very serious way, with all the chemistry together, for 18 months,” says Jay. 

“It’s not just ‘The Twins,’” Michael adds, “which was the initial idea, but then we ran into James Stevenson (guitar), Peter Rizzo (bass), and Marcus Gilvear (drums) and we discovered this group chemistry. We didn’t expect any of that. That was just a massive bonus and that’s what gives us the strength to do such long tours and do what we do, because we believe in it.” 

With confidence this infectious it wasn’t long before the major labels came around. Eventually Gene Loves Jezebel signed with Geffen Records and released their third album, Discover. 

The Celebrity Theater is one of those theater-in-the-round deals where Joan Rivers used to make a living before she got her own show. Tonight, the revolving round stage is unplugged and the theater is cut in half. There’s a sort of quiet cool in the air as the teenage girls swarm in small circles, checking out each other’s clothes. 

Paige and Jean are alert to the Trendies, those insincere young women who show up at any concert without doing their homework; months of memorising every chord progression and analyzing every song lyric while waiting for a particular band to make a live appearance. I couldn’t tell them apart; all the girls just reminded me of hundreds of Mallory Keatons. 

“Don’t call me thaaat; everyone tells me I look just like her!” a girl cries out when it’s mentioned that she looks like Michael J. Fox’s younger sister on Family Ties. Inside the men’s room, some out-of-place rich kid feels threatened enough to proclaim, “Man, this is fucking homo city!” as he barges through the door, glaring at all the new-wave guys pissing in the urinals. 

“Whatta dick,” everyone thinks as they escape back to the lobby. 

Just outside the lobby door, the real Twinkie Twins, two gender-confused fashion victims named, James and Will, confide that it’s been a rough evening so far. 

“And we’re not even in drag. I mean, some people think this is drag, but come on, if we were going to get into drag, we’d really get dressed up,” Will explains, standing there in a silver tunic with his jet black, shoulder length hair moussed out to the far reaches of the galaxy. 

Paige and Jean have been alternating between talking with friends inside the theater and flaunting their backstage passes in the lobby. They collect me when it’s showtime and the lobby clears out as Gene Loves Jezebel hits the stage. 

We watch from the underground hallway that leads up to the stage and then move up to the soundboard for a broader view. Paige and Jean are delighted. The audience is enthusiastic and in love. Girls sit with their elbows parked on the edge of the arced stage, staring up at their heroes. Others maintain a more dignified pose in their seats as the sing along to the music: 
 

So pack up your ribbons and get out
Your pearls
And go along with me
I’ll see you there
Where the dark clouds meet
I’ll meet you there
Where our hearts can beat

Michael’s dressed in a long, flowing red tunic and dark leggings, while Jay struts and croons in a tight fitting Ziggy Stardust-meets-Boy George outfit. The glitz and glamour is given a soundtrack in such numbers as “Flame,” “Brand New Moon,” “Heartache,” and “Rhino Plasty” (the medical term for nose jobs) and the band proves its intelligence by dissecting every ambivalent adolescent emotion and wrapping it in such a loose, pretty package that the audience – clouds of confused, raw nerve endings floating around in fresh-scrubbed bodies, wondering if anyone else ever felt as alien as this before – can stare and listen to it all day without ever getting bored.

Gene Loves Jezebel taps the root of the problem – teenage girls waiting to be filled up with life – and provides them with a solid product of intangibles to take up the time while they are busy being passionate every waking moment.

Onstage, they breeze through their breezy numbers with subtle killer sex appeal; one minute denying the very idea of sex, as if it didn’t exist; and the next, flaunting themselves in front of their accepting fans.

“It really doesn’t matter if they’re gay,” says Paige. “Yeah, it doesn’t matter,” says Jean, “but they better not be.” 

The hotel room is packed with fans and friends as the Twins take their seats opposite the Sutton sisters. “Here we are in Phoenix, Arizona,” Michael announces, “the last day of the Gene Loves Jezebel American tour. We have Jean and Paige Sutton doing the interview with Michael and Jay Aston of Gene Loves Jezebel, and hopefully James Stevenson, our guitar player. Heroic!” 

The girls are a touch nervous, the twins in a fine form that crosses the border into cynicism, and the other fans in the room are hanging on every word out of Michael’s mouth. 

“How did you like touring America?” Paige asks, trying hard not to come off sounding uncool. 

“We enjoyed it because, as you know, we’re a very special group that deals in a lot of emotion and color and staying thin and getting up there and doing it. A band that can look this good and play this well has something to prove across America and we have a ready-made audience here so it’s been exhilarating!” 

Michael is electrifying as he pours out his insights in a rapid-fire delivery with a sharp Welsh accent that slices the room like a sabre. The Welsh seem to possess a brooding aloofness that has become the high standard of cool. Dylan Thomas committed it to the written word. Richard Burton made it seem like you were hearing the English language for the first time, and then Cale came along and with the help of Lou Reed (not a Welshman) put music behind it, transforming popular music from “She Loves You,” to “White Light / White Heat.” Now Gene Loves Jezebel has inherited the legacy. How far they can carry it depends on the fickle tastes of their predominantly teenage female audience and whether or not both the fans and the band can grow up at the same pace. 

“How would you describe your music?” asks Paige. 

“I don’t think you can put it in any category,” says Jay. “The character that we deal with love emotions like heartache, desire. . .take “Kick” off the new album, I mean most groups never cover that much ground on just one record.” 

As I nod out on the couch in the back of the room, Jean and Paige are continuing to ask the questions that Michael and Jay answer to the delight of the crowd in the room. It looks like Gene Loves Jezebel’s fans will never tire of this wicked band of gypsies that quiets their darkest fears, stirs their newly awakening emotions, and tempts them into coming into their own. Just then Jean, the quiet shy 16-year-old Sutton, finally musters the nerve to ask the big question. 

“Where do you guys get your clothes?” 

The audience is like a big cloud of confused, raw nerve endings floating around in fresh scrubbed bodies, wondering if anyone else ever felt as alien as this before. 


 

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