“It all started in 1991 when Neil Tenant wrote a letter to the NME. He wanted to know what happened to Jobriath. Nobody knew. And I thought, well I know what happened to him. He lives in the Chelsea Hotel…”
Jobriath…the name tends to elicit recognition according to one’s knowledge of glam rock or New York‘s gay scene of the early 1970s – if that’s you then you’re in the right place, Starchild, as to most people it means nothing at all. The piano prodigy whose satellite burned up on entry into pop’s atmosphere was the first openly gay rock musician to be signed to a
major record label – a bona fide landmark in the culture. It didn’t go well.
In an era when such figures as David Bowie and the New York Dolls were prudent enough to play fast and loose over their orientation, the Pennsylvanian’s mantra for the music biz – “you’re talking to the true fairy of rock & roll” – was to rebound on him. Times Square hoardings and promotional statues by LA freeways were to come to nothing in the end, as a forthcoming biography will disclose.
It’s perhaps fortunate that the Pet Shop Pensioner‘s enquiry drew the attention of the man on the other end of my phone line – Chorlton-based poet and publisher Robert Cochrane, who I’ve long suspected may be the world’s leading specialist in retrieving pale young geniuses from history’s makeup bin and Kleenexing their reputations.
“No detective work at that stage” he reports. “There was an Arena documentary on the telly in the late ‘70s about the hotel residents and he was on that.”
A speculative letter to the famous flophouse brought back only a return-to-sender, though, envelope marked DECEASED.
And so began another Cochrane quest.
Pet cat
It’s twenty-odd years, now, since the author was in my front room talking up a young poet called Alan Burke, whom the artists Gilbert & George had put him on to.
In the late ‘90s the Tyneside teenager conned all manner of famous people into being his pen-pal by writing spoof letters claiming to have terminal cancer – which was how I found myself on one occasion explaining to Dennis Nilsen that the lad who had corresponded with him for two years before flogging his letter cache to the News of the World had unfortunately contracted cancer for real and passed away.
The saw fiend wrote right back, thanking me for Burke’s posthumous poetry collection, philosophising upon youth and betrayal, quoting Walt Whitman (“A child said what is the grass…?”) while yet pondering the significance to himself.
“This may be of interest to future biographers.”
Before Burke it was the late artist David Robilliard (“he was Gilbert and George’s pet cat, basically,” says Cochrane, “his paintings sell for tens of
thousands now”); and more recently a Mancunian WWI poet called James Lyons (“I picked up this book in a Didsbury second hand shop and there was a letter in it from his aunt to the doctor who had delivered him into the world…”)
Cochrane researched, revived and published poetry collections by all three – a level of commitment to the doomed youth cause which was to be darkly reinforced when he accommodated Quentin Crisp on the Manchester leg of his speaking tour, upon which the nonagenarian civil servant promptly popped his clogs in the night, having evidently, finally – well, I’ve always thought this – come home.
End of the garden
If Cochrane’s trope trips my mordant sense of humour, his world is nonetheless distinguished by a cavernous cultural knowledge, a rare appetite for literary adventure and a talent for epistolary sleuthing of which Alan Burke himself would have been proud.
It was Morrissey who came to him upon learning of Cochrane’s bid to crack the Jobriath case, having sought to secure the singer as a support act on his Your Arsenal tour.
Now, with a covers album also in the works this latest escapade, thirty years in the works, has finally begun to snowball.
“I’m not going to publish this one myself,” he tells me, in reference to his long-standing Bad Press imprint (he is the publisher, among others, of Northern Quarter queen, Carol Batton). “It’s too big and I’m too long in the tooth. And the album I’m looking for a label for, there’s seventeen tracks so far.”
So I sit as he tells tales of dealings with Holly Johnson and John Bramwell and Momus and the fella from MONEY; and about how unstarrily lovely Marc Almond has been
helping him dig out content for a Facebook page.
I wish Marc Almond was helping me with my Facebook content, I think.
If you want to know what happened to Jobriath, then – the presses are ready to roll once finance is in place – flounce over to Unbound’s crowd-funder page where you can help gussy things along. “They’re about to get into gear in America,” says Rob.
We might not be able to repair history, but we can at least channel our inner Starchild in his memory.
https://unbound.com/books/jobriath/
