26 Sep 2008
INTERVIEWING CYNDI
I jumped at the chance of
interviewing Cyndi Lauper for the current issue of GCN, but a few minutes after
saying yes, I began to have doubts.
Cyndi was the stuff of my gay childhood.
The music video was new, beamed all the way to dull, rain-sodden Sligo every
Sunday afternoon on an RTE programmed called MTUSA, and Cyndi’s ‘Girls Just
Wanna Have Fun’ was the star video of the show – you could be guaranteed to see
her giving her sad, conservative parents hell, in dayglo colours, hell week in,
week out.
That video informed the onset of my
adolescence. Cyndi had the right idea, girls did indeed want to have fun, and I
was just one of the girls. In fact I wanted to be Cyndi. So, no wonder I jumped
at the chance to interview her.
But then I couldn’t help thinking, am I
just bringing her to the GCN readershiop because she was a gay icon from my childhood,
or am I doing it because she’s relevant now? Once an icon, always an icon? Or
is there a statute of limitations on inconography?
I'm not sure what the answer to this is. I'll only say that, because I was a huge Grease fan when I was still knee-high to a grasshopper, I've only just jumped at a chance to interview Olivia Newton John.