“I’m a Fujiyama Mama and I’m just about to blow my top.  And when I start erupting ain’t nobody gonna make me stop”.  When I heard those words again after ooh twenty odd years it felt so so strange.  I was with my team from work in the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, in the bowels of a hotel near Euston.  And it’s this really weird place, because they’ve gone to great lengths to make it seem like it’s a relic from the ‘50s.  And the music fits the feel, so whew when that song came on.

While it was playing one of the kids that works with me was sort of looking at me strangely, and quietly asked if I was alright.  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said, bless him.  If only he knew.  I had seen a ghost.  The ghost of a young girl.  And it was that song that started it all.  All over again.

Wanda Jackson singing Fujiyama Mama was a song I used to hear out all the time in the clubs we’d go to in London twenty or so years ago now.  The Electric Ballroom.  The WAG whatever.  There were three of us girls that were inseparable.  Bright provincial girls let loose on the Capital.  Studying Political History, English Literature, and something else.  It didn’t matter.  We were learning about life instead.  And somehow or other we ended up all dressing up in some weird hybrid of ‘50s stylings.  All bows and print dresses.  Bowling shirts and espadrilles.  Capri pants and ballet pumps.  Hawaiian shirts and dungarees.  Biker jackets and beehives.  Must have looked a fright.

What did we call ourselves?  Well, we called ourselves The Justified Sinners.  An in-joke.  One of the girls was from Edinburgh.  Called Gill Martin.  We kind of perpetrated this image of being a girl gang, and by inference a group.  A group of what though?  Well, we didn’t really want to fit in with anything else.  That was the strange thing about London back then.  There were so many scenes.  Cliques.  And everyone else viewed everyone else with suspicion and disdain.  Very grown-up!

There was a fantastic illustrator around at the time, who captured all of the different scenes’ intricacies and idiosyncracies.  Wigan he called himself.  He was brilliant.  We sort of knew of him as a friend of a friend of a friend.  He was a DJ too.  Mark Williams if I remember rightly.  He was like everyone else.  Doing a bit of everything.  But I loved his stuff.  I had a fanzine for years. with his work in.  Whipcrack Away.  And that was a big thing.  That film.  Doris Day.  Calamity Jane.  And Gloria Grahame.  Oklahoma.  Just A Girl Who Can’t Say No.  We were very dismissive of the real rockabilly crowd.  We were terrified of the psychobillies.  So we went out to see people like Helen and the Horns, Yip Yip Coyote, Boothill Foot Tappers, or whatever.  Cow punk.  Helen and the Horns in particular.  Helen McCookerybook was our idol.  She looked fantastic.  Like Rose Maddox.  Not that I knew much about Rose at the time.  But Hey Little Dreamboat was another song we went out dancing too.  We’d all dance together.  Knowing the boys with their beautiful quiffs were quivering.  Grrr …

God the people I work with would never believe it.  Those were different days.  I was a different person.  I feel like I’ve been sound asleep for 20 years.  Work.  Career.  Relationships.  Family.  Homes.  No more than anyone else.  But I seemed to take a perverse delight in cultivating this sense of distance and decorum.  And I felt comfortable with that.  Until I heard Wanda again.

I don’t know.  Maybe it connected with something restless within me.  Maybe there was too much going on.  But that song seemed to reawaken something in me.  I went to the ladies, readjusted my mask, and went out and bowled for Britain.  But that evening I went home, and logged onto Amazon, and took a chance on that Ace compilation of Wanda’s rock’n’roll years.  You couldn’t do that back then, when I was so young, but I played that CD for weeks.  I loved having it loud on my I-pod, knowing people would be expecting me to be listening to Amy Winehouse or Paul Weller.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Amy or Paul, but you know what I mean.  But I wanted some rawness.  Some roots.

And from there I stumbled onto a DVD called Women Of Rockabilly, purely by chance, which I knew I just had to have.  It’s only short, but it’s by the film maker Beth Harrington, who actually sang with Jonathan Richman, way back when.  She tells the story of some of the brave female rockabilly pioneers, who outraged the business with their fiery feistiness and pure courage, when it really was not the done thing to be an independent spirited sassy girl.  Wanda’s in there.  And there’s some amazing footage of her.  Janis Martin and Lorrie Collins of the Collins Kids.  I went out and tracked down CDs of them from the wonderful Bear Family Organisation.  They’ve got a fantastic Maddox Family And Rose set out too which is called Ugly and Slouchy.  I’ve been playing that to death.  So much so I’m terrified that I’m going to break into a Rose Maddox cackle in one of our board meetings.  Hmm maybe I should anyway.  That would make them sit up.

The Women Of Rockabilly film starts in a brilliant way with a mock up of Charline Arthur walking away from everything.  I don’t know about you, but I had never even heard of Charline Arthur before.  But she sounds like the first punk rocker.  A real renegade and outlaw.  Wild onstage and stubborn as hell off of it.  Fantastic.  And then you look around you now at the modern world.  So much for emancipation.  But these girls were consciously or not yelping and growling and purring for freedom.

Then everything is so clearly defined now.  But the great thing that comes across on this DVD is how these girls, and goodness some of them were so scarily young, was how they heard all this music around them, whether it was hillbilly, gospel, the blues, whatever, and it just made them want to jump up and react, and how they were totally dumbfounded by the reaction it stirred up.  Like Wanda not being able to bare her shoulders at the Grand Ole Opry.  Aww c’mon.  I loved their rebellious spirits, and it’s just made me so ashamed I’ve hidden myself away.  But I’ve survived.  And got by.  Which is part of the battle I guess.

At least now I have the freedom to enjoy listening to Margaret Lewis or Barbara Pittman, and to be true to myself.  I don’t need to go shopping in Flip or Robot to feel real.  I am as removed from those Justified Sinners as I am from the bombsite boudiccas in the amazing photos Ken Russell took of Teddy Girls back in the London of the 1950s.  But I’m me, and I can be enough of a hard headed woman for Wanda to approve.

© 2007 John Carney