Crush on you (and a few more)
My top ten teenage objects of affection
Who have you got a crush on? If you don’t have a crush, I think you should get one! They’re portals out of the mundane, an escape from the imprisonment of reality. As a teenager, a crush was a way to imagine a life beyond the bus journey into school, the dull teachers and even duller homework.
What’s in a crush? Not lust – though that can definitely be a part of it – it’s more about the entire fantastical vision. You can have a crush on either sex, no matter what your sexual leanings. In imagining a life where you are with the crush, or you are the crush, you project yourself into another world and even start to make it real. I learned a lot from my teenage crushes, they were responsible for dodgy real-life snogs, fun nights out, wrong/right career choices and maybe even the man I married….
And I used to be a magazine journalist, so I love a list. These are my top ten youthful crushes, and the one that’s never left my heart…
Adam Ant of Adam & the Ants
I’m seven years old when my first crush hits. I don’t know anything about boys, but I do know that I love dressing up as a pop punk pirate. White stripe across the nose, an eye patch, gold buttons on my jacket. I climb up on the window seat, shouting out pleasingly stomp-y lyrics. Best of all, my godmother’s son, two years older, and on whom I also have a crush, shares my adoration and we force our parents to watch us ‘Stand and Deliver!’ This crush is responsible for bringing out my love of performance. Also, looking at Adam Ant’s lipstick in the video, for my favourite shade of No.17 lipstick when I’m 13.
Morten Harket of A-ha
It’s 1984, I’m newly at senior school, and now I do know about boys. But they remain fairly abstract – I have no brothers, no male cousins. Most of my class in my all-girls school is crushing on Morten, and some of them form a fan club. I’m only allowed to join when I can prove my devotion: the purchase of two posters and accurate knowledge of the lyrics to ‘Take On Me.’ Harder than you’d think, if the record was sold without the lyrics printed on the sleeve. You had to listen very carefully on repeat to an illegal cassette recording off the radio, when the Top 40 came on.
One poster duly bought, the other carefully taken out of Smash Hit magazine – a free centrefold every week, so long as you were careful to prise the staples open first. The posters were pinned on my bedroom wall, above the fish tank which stood at the end of my bed. I remember feeling a bit performative about it all. I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to feel about Morten, though he was surely handsome (my mum agreed) and I very much liked the idea of someone taking my hand and plunging us into a comic book world. Was it weird to put posters on the wall, I asked my mum. No, she said, it’s to help you practice for the real thing.
Steve Davis, World Snooker Champion
Absolutely zero lustfulness in this one. I didn’t want Steve Davis to be my boyfriend. In 1985, I’m still feeling my way into this whole boys and fancying them business. But something I am certain about is that there is a snooker table in the pub in Ireland, where we spend our summers, and there are a lot of cool boys that play on the table and I would like to find a way to hang out with them when I’m older (and cooler, and prettier, and amazingly confident). I imagine rocking up the next summer and wiping the table clean in 12 shots. To achieve this aim, I watch a lot of snooker – it remains the only sport I watch on telly – and for my 12th birthday my parents buy me a second-hand snooker table top, which takes up pretty much all the available floor space in my bedroom (I have to use miniature cues). Even my birthday cake is iced to look like a snooker table. It’s a weird crush though – Steve Davis was known as the boring man of snooker even in 1985 when he was defending champion. (Not now though – now he’s a techno house DJ who has played at Glastonbury and supported Blur, so maybe I was onto something after all.) I’m still really hopeless at snooker.
Terence Trent d’Arby
I can pinpoint this one exactly – 1987 – because I can remember my mum shouting to me to get into the sitting-room, quick: ‘There’s a beautiful man singing on the television!’
This moment was Terence Trent d’Arby’s first ever appearance on Channel 4’s The Tube, singing ‘If You Let Me Stay.’ Paula Yates, ice-blonde rock chick, introduces him as having ‘a voice to KILL for’ and she’s right.
My mum and I share this crush for a long time – my 13th birthday cake is iced to look like his face. (You get the theme.) At 13, my hair goes overnight from lank to curly and my favourite outfit is a blue and white sailor’s suit from Mark One. Now I know what it means to fancy a boy and want to kiss them. With Terence’s album playing on repeat in the background, I spend hours and hours talking with my mum and her best friend about boys I fancy that I see at the bus stop on the way home from school, and how I want a boyfriend so much. I read Judy Blume’s Forever and think my heart will break from the desperate need to put all this love I can already feel somewhere. But until they appear, I make do with Terence on my wall.
Dirty Dancing
Yes, I basically have a crush on an entire film. Fourteen years old, and sleepovers with friends involve poring over the problem pages of Mizz magazine (‘my boyfriend and I have been using crisp packets instead of condoms’ was a memorable agony) and re-enacting scenes from Dirty Dancing. We wanted Patrick Swayze, we wanted flat white plimsolls, we wanted to be ‘Baby in the Corner.’ This crush taught me – all of us – about dancing. It was romantic, rebellious, perfect. It’s responsible for thousands upon thousands of absolutely terrible first dances at weddings.
Patrick Bruel
This was the crush that made me want to be French. It was based entirely on the corner of his face on the cover of this album, discovered when I spent a week in 1989 with my French exchange in Nantes. She translated the lyrics for me and in exchange, I translated the lyrics (badly) of George Michael’s Faith album, with which she was obsessed. Bruel sounded sexy, he looked sexy, he surely was sexy…? The very fact of his Frenchness equated with the most pure, perfect sort of sexiness available. It led to me, a couple of years later, falling for a man who introduced himself to me in a Parisian nightclub as Michel Méchant-Garcon (Michel Naughty-Boy – yes, I actually believed this), and me unforgivably abandoning the girlfriend with whom I’d travelled there for the weekend. Years later, I finally saw a photograph of Bruel’s whole face and, dear reader, I did not fancy him AT ALL. This crush taught me that you really need to see the whole picture before you plunge in.
Nigel Havers in The Charmer, Clive Owen in Chancer and Trevor Eve in A Sense of Guilt
A trio of television series in the late ‘80s/early 90s featuring devastating older men, on whom I develop massive crushes. Trevor Eve especially, in an intense three-parter in which he has an affair with his best friend’s 18 year old daughter. I blame (thank) all three of these crushes for my marriage to a man sixteen years older than me. In spite of these somewhat dubious crushes, my husband – nor any man I have dated, I would like to point out – has never had a pudding bowl haircut.
Unknown female actress
I’ve tried so hard to track down who this might be but I can’t find her anywhere. This crush was on a character in a TV drama, around about 1988, featuring a female barrister in the lead role. I loved everything I could see about this woman’s job and life. She wore a wig, red lipstick and a black swishy cape, and she instructed judges exactly how long they were to lock the guilty culprit up for – and they’d do it, hammers quivering. This led to me wanting to be a barrister for a long time – at least a decade. I read all the books in the Rumpole of the Bailey series, I did two mini-pupillages (one of which involved shadowing a barrister called Ian Darling, I very much liked the idea of marrying him). I never took any drugs because if arrested, my career would be out the window. (This probably saved me from myself more than anything else.) I went out with a barrister for a while when I was about 19 – I didn’t fancy him but I loved talking to him about his job and meeting his barrister friends. Eventually, a barrister told me that you have to be really, really clever (like him) and be able to memorise hundreds of court cases and dates, and I realised I wasn’t up to it. I’ll still watch a courtroom drama though.
Exciting update! A clever friend worked out that this was Blind Justice in 1988, starring Jane Lapotaire. The series was co-devised by a female barrister, Helena Kennedy. I’m reminded by this website that it was a series about radical barristers – perfect for my right on 14 year old self.
K.D.Lang, A Constant Craving
The lesbian we all fancy. Well, all my friends in sixth form do. K.D.Lang has a voice that can melt butter, and her cropped hair cut and crisp white shirts are a cool drink of water in a world that is all about goths and grunge and hanging out in Camden Market. One of our class has an older sister who is a real lesbian, who has been on the Pride March (and who most of us kiss) and in 1992 she takes us on the first Wednesday of every month to the Fridge nightclub’s Women Only Night in Brixton. There we watch our German P.E. teacher snog various women on the dance floor while drinking Snakebite and black. At 2am, we catch three night buses back to our friend’s house in Plumstead and get through Thursdays on no sleep and Pro Plus.
Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story
I can’t remember when I first saw this film, although I remember it as having its greatest effect on me in my late 20s. My grandmother spent every Saturday with us, and we’d always watch an old movie on the television after lunch. For the longest time, I want nothing more in life than to be a chorus dancer in a Busby Berkeley film. But after this, I want to be Katherine Hepburn, with her witty one-liners and tailoring, in a snap, crackle, pop dialogue against Jimmy Stewart. He’s witty, self-deprecating and yet no one’s fool, unimpressed by BS, a man’s man without macho nonsense. I love him. He’s still my crush. It’s just a shame he’s been dead for nearly thirty years.
Tell me yours! I’m off to sit in the sun. If you liked this, please ‘heart’ it, because it’s so nice for me to know and it helps other readers find me. Thank you! xxx
I’m MUCH older than you, so first Davy Jones from The Monkees, then David Cassidy. Neither no longer with us, sadly.
Midge Ure, Ultravox, was the first. I was….11? I think it was obligatory at my all girls’ school to have SOMEONE, regardless. I mainly have crushes on types of cheese to be honest.