In the summer of 1982, when me and Dawn were walking hand-in-hand around Newcastle, it was quite routine for us to get whistled at by people in white vans who laboured under the impression that we were two girls. I had tight jeans and long hair, y’see, and in their minds that equalled female. This was no era for gender awareness or sensitivity.
I suppose it made us laugh at the time, especially when they realised their mistake when they passed us and saw that I had a beard. You’d think they’d learn but it happened all the time by men who behaved like this as part of a lifestyle of casually using women to entertain their libido.
Being misidentified became a thing. One time I was walking past the City Hall on my way back to the Poly and quite a crowd was milling around the stage door. I didn’t know who was on but it was quite usual and I thought nothing of it.
That is until people started to run across the road in front of me, some taking photos. It turned out they all thought I was Eric Stewart from 10CC who were at the City Hall. But I wasn’t. Not that some of them believed it. By the way, I look nothing like him but I had sunglasses on and I like to think I had a rock star air.
A year before I was mistaken in Stockton for Whitesnake’s Micky Moody who was at least local and looked nothing like Eric Stewart, an error I didn’t do much to prove wasn’t the case. I briefly entertained the idea of getting a hat like Mickey’s to pull it off more fully.
When we lived in California, hearing we were English often made people think we must be famous for something. I don’t know why it was so difficult to just assume we were two regular people and not members of Jethro Tull or Gentle Giant. In fact it would have been easy to say we were and scam our way into places.
Once people think they’ve recognised you as in a band, some are slow to be dissuaded of the fact and I’m sure there are people scamming a living doing it. It’d certainly be easy to do in California back in the day. I think its to do with attitude. If you’re somewhere where a rock star might be, if you hold yourself with enough confidence and are dressed appropriately, people will think you’re ‘someone’ even if it's the bass player from Van der Graaf Generator. I mean would you know what they look like?
