Monster obsessions

• Last Updated: November 25. 2009 10:21PM UAE / November 25. 2009 6:21PM GMT

Very occasionally, a phenomenon sweeps through popular culture, enveloping its more ardent fans – almost always teenagers – in its weird little world. The Twilight Saga, the second instalment of which, New Moon, is released in UAE cinemas today, is just such an anomaly. The story of a vegetarian vampire who falls for the pale girl-next-door, it has just the right balance of stewing hormones, shady underworld and tortuous romance. Throw in its two hottie leads, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, and it’s got teenage obsession written all over it.

But while the Twi-hards with their Team Edward T-shirts and cardboard cut-out Jacobs may consider their love of all things Twilight to be the ultimate infatuation, it has, through the decades, been preceded by many others. Every generation has its Edward. And every teenager has an all-consuming fascination, be it with an actor, film, book or singer.

Today, we celebrate the changing but familiar face of teenage obsession, in all its irrational glory.

Leonardo DiCaprio

He was the first boy to break my heart, when I realised that, on balance, our paths in life probably were not destined to cross and that my wistful hopes of marriage were shot to dust. He was Leonardo DiCaprio, and I was 11.

How belittling, how derogatory, to refer to it as a mere “crush”. No. It was a full-blown, choking kind of love, which sparked upon seeing his mouth swoop down to kiss the lucky hand of Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Romeo + Juliet. There he was, all floppy haired and romantic. He was even wearing a suit of armour. The effects on an unseasoned 11-year-old were overwhelming.

The pinboard area above my dormitory bed at school became a shrine. Pages carefully cut from magazines and posters were stuck up so that I slept underneath dozens of DiCaprios, all peering out over me. So too did he stare out from other girls’ pinboards. Dormitory after dormitory fell to the DiCaprio effect. We were all going to marry him.

The fact that he was a Hollywood actor, thousands of miles away in the United States and 11 years older mattered not one jot. He was The One. I was even willing to overlook the small chickenpox scar on his forehead. Feelings deepened and hormones soared further when Titanic was released the following year. Oh had there ever been a passion like it? He was the common hero, rescuing Kate Winslet from an unhappy engagement and sacrificing his life for hers. Every night for a month or so after the film’s release, I and three others in my dorm lulled ourselves to sleep with Celine Dion’s Titanic theme tune on repeat, the version that was spliced with lines from the film.

Our matron finally cottoned on to this illicit, late-night music listening and confiscated my CD player – the witch – but our love for Leo remained undiminished.

Sadly, this love was not requited. At all. DiCaprio struggled with the fame. He tried to shift away from the matinee idol role in films such as The Man in the Iron Mask and The Beach. He put on weight and cut his blonde hair. It was a dark period in my life, but after much moping I knew I had to move on. And like all young hearts, mine took at least three or four days to mend.

* Sophia Money-Coutts

Juliette Gréco

Looking back, I feel sure the boy was just trying to impress me by taking me to an art house cinema to see Bonjour Tristesse. I can’t even remember his name, but I remember her. Juliette Gréco played herself and sang the title song. I was transfixed.

Maybe it was because I was just 18 and had a nice happy childhood. No divorced parents, no tragedies or angry poverty to make me more interesting. I was just too suburban, a wee girl from Northern Ireland who had done nothing remotely rebellious apart from writing “Trinity College Dublin” as her first, second and third choices of universities on her UCCA application form. I didn’t want there to be any doubt about where I wanted to study.

Gréco was the coolest thing I had ever seen and I instantly decided that was the image I wanted to adopt in my fresher year at college. I had the thick black hair, but it was curly and unruly in the days before straighteners. So every day I got out the ironing board and a sheet of brown paper, to prevent my hair from burning, and would iron my curls Gréco straight.

The make-up would have been perfect for Twilight: pale matte foundation, thick black eyeliner and lips that were almost white. I probably resembled a corpse.

I dressed in black, lacy tights, a tight polo-neck sweater over a short leather skirt and knee-length boots all topped by a big black oilskin jacket. A black baker boy cap completed the look.

One problem was the smile. There wasn’t one. Gréco didn’t smile, so neither did I for a while. I even smoked horrible French cigarettes. Gitanes mostly, but even cooler was a brand called Disque Bleu. I thought it would make my voice husky.

I would listen to Miles Davis and carry around French books – André Gide, Jean Cocteau – even if I struggled to read them.

It didn’t last long. I fell in love with a rugby player and Gréco had to go, but that’s another story.

* Philippa Kennedy

Neil Diamond ... and others

One should never be embarrassed or apologise for one’s cultural tastes. I make no bones about avoiding the celluloid dreck shown at our megaplexes, but if someone’s a diehard fan of Bruce Willis or whoever the hunk-de-jour is right now, more power to ’em.

The high-culture/low-culture paradigm divide extends to books and music. I pretty much avoid mass-market paperbacks. When I expressed frustration that I couldn’t find a publisher for my novels, a friend suggested I write mysteries. But I don’t read them, I said. Why would I write them?

As for music, I am decidedly and unashamedly promiscuous. From classic rock to classical, country to jazz, blues, soul and gospel, I will give anything a fair listen. The point is the marriage of lyrics and music and how that marriage works.

This is one of the reasons why Robbie Robertson and Rick Rubin chose to work with Neil Diamond while supposed rock critics rolled their eyes wondering what the former leader of The Band and the producer of such hard-rock groups as Metallica and Danzig heard in the Tin Pan Alley schmaltzer responsible for Sweet Caroline.

Diamond was a favourite of mine growing up. For my 13th birthday party, I requested those albums of his I didn’t yet have in my collection. He spoke to the core of me then and still does. There are few songs that expressed existential angst better than I Am I Said. I admit I got ribbed quite a bit by my friends, but perhaps not as much as I would have had I not also been a fan of Aerosmith, Queen, Foghat, Skynyrd, Springsteen and Seger. I never let on, however, that I just loved Olivia Newton-John. Such a voice.

But she might have been one pop star too many for my rock ’n’ roll teenage friends.

* Raymond Beauchemin

Pretty in Pink

I wish I could say that it was all down to the Psychedelic Furs, but I think it was the names that got me at first. Andie and Blane. Sigh. My world was populated with Carolines and Victorias, Jonathans and Matthews. Exotically androgynous Andies, Blanes, Steffs and Bennys didn’t tend to thrive in Formby.

Neither did sixth form boys with impeccable cheekbones, BMWs and statement-shoulder jackets. Not that that really mattered, when a trip to Blockbuster to hire Pretty in Pink was enough to take me away from the reality of spots and Sun-In, teen scene nights and the L23 bus.

John Hughes’s tale of Andie (Molly Ringwald) and Blane (Andrew McCarthy) offers wrong side of the tracks romance with enough quirks thrown in to create a perfect storm for adolescent obsession.

Firstly, Andie is not only the girl, and the supposedly bad ’un, she’s also the grown-up. This may be because her father is unemployed and broken, but who cares? She gets to tell him off – and wins. She has a job, in an independent record store, no less, where she is friends with a glamorous, if ancient, woman (of 30).

At the height of my Pretty in Pink obsession I spent a fair bit of time in Quirks Records in the village hoping for something exciting to happen. It didn’t. Also – no Chelsea Girl for her – she makes her own clothes.

This may have led to the most revolting dress ever to take the lead in a film (Not Really That Pretty in Pepto-Bismol would have been an more accurate title), but by whipping up her own prom dress she proves that she is that most coveted of things to a teenager: an individual.

She is on first-name terms with the bouncer at her local club (an impossibly fabulous achievement) and adored by Duckie (slightly less fabulous – he still rides a bike). And then, of course, there’s McCarthy. The ultimate teen hero, he was (is) ludicrously pretty, tortured and utterly unthreatening. Team Edward? Team Blaine. Always...

* Katherine Spenley

Christian Slater

My obsession with Christian Slater had an unlikely birth when he played Adso of Melk, a young monk, in The Name of the Rose in 1986.

Despite the fact that I was 10 years old, my parents didn’t seem perturbed by my viewing of the complex story about a radical monk investigating mysterious deaths in an isolated Benedictine monastery, complete with a terrifying climax featuring burnings at the stake.

Adso’s involvement with a village girl replaced Charles and Di’s wedding as the most romantic thing I’d ever seen and I was officially hooked on Christian. I would watch The Name of the Rose whenever it was on TV and, as a pretentious 15-year-old, I tried to read Umberto Eco’s turgid, Latin- laced book – although I never got past the first chapter.

Just as well Christian’s star was in the ascendant during my dorky teenage years, otherwise I’d still be trying to finish that darn book.

With the 1988 release of Heathers, I flattered myself into thinking that Winona Ryder as Veronica was just like me, minus the zits and troublesome fringe. If only there was a boy at school as cool as Slater’s rebellious JD, I was certain we could, like, hang out and mock the hockey girls. But his performance as Hard Harry, the pirate radio DJ in Pump Up the Volume was my favourite. “Here’s Hard Harry telling you to eat your cereal with a fork and do your homework in the dark” is still one of my favourite cinematic lines.

The soundtrack – one of the first things I ever bought on CD – introduced me to Leonard Cohen and The Pixies. Whenever I hear Wave of Mutilation, I still get nostalgic.

His career has slipped into TV mode lately but I’d gladly pay Dh30 to see him in a movie if he was to grace the big screens of the UAE in a new release. Heck, I even enjoyed his performance in Kuffs.

* Georgia Lewis

Judy Blume

Exactly how the transition occurred, I’m not sure, but one minute I was reading Sweet Valley High about a pair of sugar and spice twins and their efforts to make the cheerleading squad, and the next I was plunged into Judy Blume’s world of dysfunctional families, car accidents, race relations, bra technology and the mechanics of young love. I was 13. It started with Blubber, about an overweight young girl who gets bullied on the school bus – and I was hooked. Here was a girl who wasn’t blonde; she wasn’t beautiful; she wasn’t even a detective! Real life? How interesting.

My early teenage years then passed in a blur of Blume. One summer, on a six-week family holiday driving around Europe, I barely registered the cities flashing past, so busy was I learning about puberty from Aunt Judy. Then one night at dinner, I looked up from my book (sociable child, me) to find myself alone. My family was so amused by my obsession that the entire 15-strong party had decided to creep away from the table to see if I would notice. To this day, I have no idea how long I sat there alone in the restaurant, absorbed in my Judy Blume.

Of her many books, three are memorable: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – which was where the bras came in; Tiger Eyes, a heartbreaking story about a young girl whose father is killed suddenly; and Forever, about a young couple in love (even now, I cannot entertain the thought of naming my child Ralph).

I’m sure a reread of all of the above would today prove laughably tame. But to me, as a young, and perhaps rather innocent teenager, they were a brilliantly funny, sad, real glimpse of what was to come.

* Katie Boucher

Bob Dylan

Christmas Day, 1964. I was 11. By 4pm, the blue leatherette-covered Ekco record player in the living room had been belching out Andy Williams and carols from Guildford Cathedral for six hours and my father was semi-comatose in his armchair. He opened one eye. “Play Ross’s LP,” he ordered.

I knew it was a bad idea. My Christmas present – The Times They Are A-Changin’, by Bob Dylan – was for my ears only. But resistance was futile. Side one, track one, Ballad of Hollis Brown: a desperate South Dakota farmer spends his last dollar on seven shotgun shells, with which he kills his wife, their five children and himself. My father opened his other eye. “Agnes,” he said to my mother, “there’s something wrong with that boy.” But that was the point, as might have become apparent if we had got as far as the fourth verse of the title song: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticise what you can’t understand …”

You’re angry when you’re a teenage boy. You can whinge, like that Harry Enfield character; you can chuck bricks through windows; or you can listen to Bob and find out what you’re angry about. You can also discover what you didn’t know you didn’t know: as with Blood on the Tracks, the most angry, sad, bitter, tragic collection of songs ever written about the end of a marriage. “What,” I thought at 15, “is he on about?” I found out later, of course.

A kid who lived near us saw me walking home from school once with Blonde on Blonde tucked under my arm. “How cool is that?” he would have said, if people said such things in 1966. We became close friends. Still are. He married my sister. I think he would have married me if it had been legal; which, of course, it now would be. Bob was right about the times.

* Ross Anderson

The Stone Roses

One thing you can say for the play-count tally on iTunes: it proves how little I know myself. On the laptop I’ve used for the past year, my most-listened artists are Abdullah Ibrahim, Arthur Russell and Betty Davis, none of whom I would have guessed. If anything was at the top of my personal jukebox chart I’d have flattered myself that it was Gesualdo’s Luci Serene. But the numbers are in: it’s Davis’s He Was a Big Freak.

Take it with a pinch of salt, then, when I say that the record I’ve played more than any other – long before iTunes and documentary evidence – is The Second Coming by the Mancunian hometown heroes The Stone Roses. This, I have been assured, is not a very good album. It came out in 1994, five years after the Manchester band’s sparkling, sly folk-pop debut, a record that still regularly places near the top of best-ever lists.

The Second Coming doesn’t do that. If critics were in the habit of making lists of the most disappointing albums ever, it might rank quite highly – somewhere between Captain Beefheart’s Unconditionally Guaranteed and the later Violent Femmes LPs. It had mystic bongo excursions and twiddly guitar solos in the key of blooze. The band evidently couldn’t settle on a style: campfire strum-alongs rub shoulders with grainy techno workouts and slack-jawed jam sessions, and the influence of Led Zeppelin is both pervasive and poorly digested.

For the critics, this incoherence was proof that the band had lost it, frittering away their debut’s goodwill on half a decade’s rich living and bitter financial wrangles. The Roses broke up shortly after its release and half of them have said they don’t like it either. Still, I was 13 when it came out and for some reason it spoke to me in a way that no rock album has, before or since.

In time, other, more fashionable records arrived to claim my loyalty. Yet The Stone Roses, in their bloated and fractious mid-’90s incarnation, never quite lost their grip. In honour of their singer Ian Brown, I wore trailing bell-bottoms deep into university, until a friend took me aside and explained that this was quite embarrassing. I affected Brown’s walk, that loping, simian swagger. It stuck with me, furnishing this moral: you can change your trousers as little or as often as you like, but don’t mess with your legs. To this day I struggle to articulate what makes The Second Coming so good – or even just not as bad as everyone says. Part of me knows it is that bad. The rest just wants to put it on now.


* Ed Lake

The Outsiders

“Stay gold, Ponyboy ... stay gold.”

If those words mean nothing to you, then stop reading now, and go order yourself a copy of The Outsiders.

Written by Susan Eloise Hinton in 1966 when she was only 15, this brilliant novel was released a year later under the gender-scrambling moniker of “SE Hinton”, a ploy by the publishers designed to not discourage potential male readers. They needn’t have worried.

In 1982, my 12-year-old self was hooked halfway through the first page, the story a perfect introduction to teenage angst before I even knew what the term meant. It was my Catcher in the Rye. But unlike the dull, lone-gunman inspiring Catcher, this was blindingly exciting stuff, by the end of which you desperately cared for the characters.

Ponyboy. Sodapop. Two-bit. Johnnycake. Dally. Darry: The Greasers. The boys from the wrong side of the track who stood up to the rich, privileged Socs. A story as old as Hollywood itself.

And then in 1983, as if solely for my benefit, the film version of The Outsiders was released. The cast read like a who’s who of future Brat Packers long before more celebrated teen movies such as Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club assaulted the boundaries of good taste.

The protagonist, C Thomas Howell, the Karate Kid Ralph Macchio, the Dirty Dancer Patrick Swayze, the West Winger Rob Lowe, the Top Gun Tom Cruise, the Young Gun Emilio Estevez, plain young Diane Lane and an impossibly cool Matt Dillon all starred. Gloriously, it was directed by the Godfather legend Francis Ford Coppola merely four years after his bona fide classic Apocalypse Now.

Nostalgia often clouds our judgement when it comes to childhood memories. Some just don’t stand the test of time. Others, like The Outsiders, forever stay gold.

* Ali Khaled

The Lord of the Rings

Having grown up in Pakistan, where most teenage fiction was either banned or unavailable, it was hardly surprising my two years living in Lahore would be dominated by Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series. When we returned to Glasgow, however, I immediately found myself devouring Roald Dahl’s back catalogue. From there on, it was a short skip and a jump to JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books.

A friend at school lent me a dog-eared copy of The Hobbit. I was immediately hooked on the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf and his band of merry hobbits. A trip to the local library produced a single-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, a dauntingly heavy tome that required considerable strength to lift. No other work of teenage fiction would ever have the same effect again – Tolkien’s characters, his use of pre-British mythology as well as his natural flair for storytelling led me to read The Lord of the Rings twice that summer.

To be fair, the books do have their flaws – the Ents and Tom Bombadil are, without a doubt, the most annoying creations I have ever come across in literature. Similarly, those hobbits don’t half know some annoying songs. A hobbit sing-song around a campfire while being served lembas bread is no longer my idea of a good night out. Gandalf is obviously Tolkien’s idea of a mother-in-law from hell. But for a 14-year-old boy, stuck indoors during another wet Glaswegian summer, the lands of The Shire, Mordor and Rivendell were a welcome escape. In fact, for most of my teenage years all I really wanted to be was a hobbit. Or an elf. These days, I’d settle for astronaut.

* Burhan Wazir