Download: Won’t Somebody Dance With Me – Lynsey De Paul (mp3)

Raquel was my very first celebrity crush, going all the way back to that innocent time in my life when I had no idea what you were supposed to do with girls but was just starting to notice the effect they had on me. My first encounter with her was in One Million Years B.C. which my dad took me to see at the ABC Cinema in Hammersmith (I can’t believe I still remember what cinema it was) but at the time I was too young to appreciate the girl running around in a fur bikini and just thought of it as a dinosaur movie — I’m sure my dad didn’t though. But a couple of years later I watched her 1970 TV extravaganza Raquel! (love that exclamation mark) and for the first time I remember, looked at a woman and thought Cor!!! which is an important moment in the life of a boy. I didn’t quite understand why, but I was so discombobulated by the sight of this fabulous creature I thought I was going to spontaneously combust into a little smoking pile of hormonal ash. Subsequent viewings of Fantastic Voyage and Bedazzled only cemented her legend in my impressionable mind and even now I can’t look at her without turning into that awkward, red-faced kid who hoped his mother hadn’t noticed how silently transfixed he was by the television.

While she might as well have been a goddess from another galaxy as far I was concerned, with her big hair, teeth, outrageous curves, and rocket-powered va-va-voom Raquel was definitively, quintessentially American. That might not seem very exotic now but very few of us had been to the States back in the 60s and 70s so she seemed as unreal and impossibly glamourous as the country itself, a far-away fantasy land that we only knew from television and the movies where everything was bigger, better and shinier. Gorgeous though they obviously were, British sex symbols like Jenny Agutter and Caroline Munro were girls you could almost imagine knowing or at least seeing in real life but they didn’t make them like Raquel ’round our way who looked as if she’d been designed by Boeing and custom-built by General Motors. She could only be a product of the country that gave us the Cadillac, the Big Mac, and the atom bomb.

So on this 4th of July I’d like so say thank you America, and happy birthday.

Download: State Of Independence – Donna Summer (mp3)

I know she wasn’t Scottish but this song seems to fit.

Download: Hoots Mon – Lord Rockingham’s XI (mp3)

I actually did have a sexy Scottish school teacher, her name was Miss McWhirter and she taught German. This being the 70s she often wore tight, high-waisted flares and her bum would wiggle when she wrote things on the blackboard which would reduce the class to rapt, sweaty-palmed silence. I don’t remember a word of German but I do remember that.

Download: Valerie – Steve Winwood (mp3)

Download: Once I Had a Love — Blondie

This is the original 1975 version of a song you might know by another name.

The one that really reminds me of that era and stuck with me ever since (not just for the reasons you might think) was Betty Blue from 1986 which is about the Frenchiest French movie I’ve ever seen. The plot is the classic Gallic cinema story of l’amour fou or “crazy love” with everything turned up to 11: a man living in a state of existential ennui falls for a wild, emotionally-unstable girl given to burning down houses and stabbing people with forks, they spend most of the film bonking the merde out of each other and the affair leads to madness and death — Fin. It was something of a succés de scandale at the time because of the amount of naked flesh on display and the lusty nature of their rumpy-pumpy — as a friend of mine said at the time about it’s notorious opening scene: “that’s not making love, that’s fucking” — but it was also memorable for the explosive performance of the astonishing-looking Beatrice Dalle as Betty.



Betty had to be played by an actress who could make you believe a man would happily follow her to Paris even after she had attacked his boss and set fire to his house and Dalle was the sort of girl who could make you kill your own mother if she asked you to. I used to wonder if there was a factory in France somewhere that did nothing but turn out pouty nymphettes for their movies as there seemed to be a never-ending stream of them from Bardot onwards and Dalle was like the model they produced the day they had an excess of parts to use up, giving her the most swollen bee-stung lips and biggest gap-toothed Gallic overbite you’ve ever seen. She looked like she’d just been punched in the face but also almost obscenely sensual as if she was permanently quivering with sex and just one look could melt you to a puddle on the spot.

I was a little obsessed with the film for a while, buying the video, poster, soundtrack album, and the (excellent) novel it was based on. If they made Betty Blue underpants I probably would have bought those too. Several years later I had a fling with a “Betty” of my own too, a dark-haired girl with the same voluptuous lips and big wonky overbite together with the same volcanic emotional ups and downs. Girls like that can be addictive, like Betty’s lover Zorg I put up with all sorts of crazy behaviour and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t worth it. Men, we’re such idiots sometimes.

Aside from it’s luscious cinematography the other part of the movie that was as gorgeous as Dalle was the soundtrack by Gabriel Yared, one of the few scores I can listen to on it’s own as a piece of music, with the best saxaphone theme in a movie since Taxi Driver.

Download: Betty et Zorg – Gabriel Yared (mp3)
Download: C’Est Le Vent, Betty – Gabriel Yared (mp3)
Buy: Betty Blue (DVD)