“I stepped forward to shake hands, I always shake hands. And I slipped, skidded on a discarded piece of lemon from a gin and tonic, and my face ended up in his crotch.”
She also tells the story behind T’Pau’s best loved song China In Your Hand and reveals that it was never originally intended for release on their first album.
“I wrote it about that, about her [Mary Shelley] writing the story of Frankenstein. And then it becomes a parable for be careful what you wish for.”
“It wasn’t part of the song list that got us a record deal. So when we were outside Chicago recording, one song wasn’t working on the album. And Roy Thomas Baker said, ‘we’re wasting time on this, we’ve got to dump it’. And he said, ‘have you got anything else?’ And I said, well, I’ve got this but it’s not finished yet.”
A Side
Which came first for you, acting or music?
Oh, music, definitely. Yeah, I started singing quite late in life for the pop world, so I’m told. I was 22 when I decided to go for it. And that sort of led on to a marvellous career, which thankfully is still going. And then I was lucky enough to get approached to act in a few little bits and bobs when I was in my forties.
So what happened up to 22 then? What were you doing at that point?
Wondering lonely as a cloud really, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I’d gone to a very strait-laced girls grammar school. So when I did my A-levels, I didn’t really know what to do with myself. And I was just in and out of dead-end jobs. I didn’t go to uni and went back to art school at the age of 22 and started going to parties, hanging out with people who were photographers, they wanted to do poetry, they all dressed really weirdly. I painted my Doc Martens different colors. One was green, one was red.
That was really rebellious. And I was always singing along to the radio in the studio and someone said, you should do something with your voice. I’m going to a party at the weekend. Friend of mine Julian will be there. He’s a guitarist in a local band. They’re looking for a singer. You should have a go at this, and so I met Julian and then I went and auditioned in a garage in Ludlow and got the job and I took to it like a duck to water. I absolutely loved it and I was just natural show off, you know, it sort of fitted me really. That was it, I was off.
And how did T’Pau form then from that?
Well, so I’m in a local band. And we were just playing Working Men’s Clubs and pubs and you do a combination of covers and then try and slot in a couple of your own songs and hope they don’t all pee off to the bar, you know? And there was another band called The Catz and they were very popular, talented, funny. And the lead singer, front man Ronnie Rogers was funny and incredibly handsome. So I went to see him and his band, heard all about them. They were kind of like the local competition, you know? And as they say, I set my cap for him. I thought, yeah, I’ll have a bit of that. So I poached him out of the band and he was my boyfriend for the next 14 years. And we started to write for what was the Lazers, which is what we called ourselves. And then we decided we were gonna take a risk and Ronnie left his job as a telephone engineer. And I signed on the dole and we borrowed some money off my dad. And we just started writing and sending tapes away to record companies. Got a tiny little publishing deal from MCA. But it was a hard slog, trying to get a record deal. And then finally, we got a showcase in a studio called Nomis in Shepherd’s Bush. So Virgin put us in there for an afternoon to see what we were all about. And we got our break.
So where did the name T’Pau come from?
I was back home in Shrewsbury, pottering around in the flat, and the telly was burbling away in the corner. And it was the old TV show of Star Trek, you know, with Captain James T. Kirk. And I kept hearing this, T’Pau, T’Pau. I just liked the word. And I turned around and paid attention to the show for a minute and she was this Vulcan high priestess, you know, and I thought, yeah, there’s a bird with a bit of moxie, I like her, you know. And I put it to the band and it was the one they hated the least.
So it was actually a character in Star Trek?
She is, yeah, she is. The only female on the intergalactic council, Leona.
So tell us the story behind China In Your Hand.
Again, the telly is involved. And there was this documentary that I watched, and it was all about Mary Shelley writing the book of Frankenstein. So she was 19, and she writes this incredible piece of pulp fiction that’s massively successful. And she’s married to Percy Bysshe Shelly, and they’re big friends with Lord Byron and this whole crowd of intellectuals. And all of a sudden, she’s like number one everywhere with this book. And they’re all super jealous and they’re arguing amongst themselves about its validity, its intellectualism, there was real sort of infighting amongst them all. And I was fascinated by that story.
I’d never heard it before. And we all probably know the story of Frankenstein, which is man playing God and creating this tragic monster and everything that goes wrong. And the book was a monster in itself and caused lots of problems within their set of friends. And so I wrote it about that, about her writing the story of Frankenstein. And then it becomes a parable for be careful what you wish for. And that was it. And it was half finished. It wasn’t part of the song list that got us a record deal. So when we were outside Chicago recording, one song wasn’t working on the album. And Roy Thomas Baker said, ‘we’re wasting time on this, we’ve got to dump it’. And he said, ‘have you got anything else?’ And I said, ‘well, I’ve got this but it’s not finished yet’. And played him the sort of first verse and chorus and he said ‘that’s a brilliant song,’ and so I just took myself off for a couple of hours finished writing it and Roy made it what it is really and you know obviously he’s the master of the big ballads as Bohemian Rhapsody would tell you so it was in safe hands and it just became this huge song massive song.
It’s mad that it wasn’t originally included and you just like there was a bit of an afterthought, that’s incredible.
Listen to the full B side and all episodes of The Leona Graham Podcast which are available to stream now free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
