Interview: Cherie Cyrrie, musician

Published on Tuesday 7 September 2010 20:34

At 15, Cherie Currie was catapulted to stardom as frontwoman of America's first all-girl rock band. But, as captured in the biopic of the same name, the rock 'n' roll lifestyle soon took its toll.

• Dakota Fanning and Cherie Currie meet up

'Oh my god, how could I not remember it? I had a Bowie knife thrown at me on stage." Ah the charms of Glasgow, a word that rhymes with cow when delivered in Cherie Currie's Californian drawl. I've just asked Currie –who alongside Joan Jett, Sandy West, Lita Ford and Jackie Fox, made up the first all-girl rock band, The Runaways, who had hits including Cherry Bomb and Queens of Noise – if she recalled the night they played Glasgow Apollo.

It was the late 1970s, I'm going to take a wild guess that the air was filled with a pungent mix of spilled Tennent's, Embassy No 6 and sweat, the atmosphere charged and chaotic. As the five teenage girls from California's San Fernando Valley strode on to the stage of the legendary venue, sporting their shags, platform boots and leather trousers, Currie on vocals and Jett on lead guitar, someone thought there was no better way to show their appreciation than lob a knife at the 17-year-old Currie.

"The lights had gone out between songs and I heard this thud and felt this vibration in the stage right by my foot," says Currie. "When the lights came up again there was this huge knife. It came from the crowd. I just ran. I panicked and I took off."

But that wasn't the end of it – the "craziness" continued outside the venue as The Runaways were trying to make their getaway. "The fans attacked our car – they were rocking the car trying to turn it over," says Currie. "Our driver panicked, hit the gas and ended up running over a fan. It was pandemonium. It was insanity. Totally crazy."

Director and screenwriter Floria Sigismondi doesn't include the Glasgow

Apollo episode in her film The Runaways, starring Dakota Fanning as Currie and Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, but the film, loosely based on Currie's memoir Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story, does capture the energy and excess of the rock scene in the 1970s. It's a rollicking ride of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll documenting the rise of the band from disaffected girls smoking joints beneath the Hollywood sign to pioneering rock band touring the US, Europe and Japan, before drugs and the pressures of touring and recording finished them off.

The story of stardom and self-destruction might be one we know, but this time there is a difference. The Runaways were teenage girls in a man's world. Shaped and manipulated by manager Kim Fowley, the girls may have been told that what they were selling was sex not music, but even at the age of 16, they, and Jett in particular, knew that they wanted something more. If the history of rock is the history of testosterone-fuelled rock gods, The Runaways were the trailblazers who wanted to show that girls could rock too. It's recognition that Currie, now 50, says is long overdue.

"We were making history and we knew it," she says. "Until I rewrote my book in 2000 (the memoir was first published in 1989 for young adults] the saddest part for me was that nobody seemed to recognise what we had done. People were getting credit for things we had done. You know, Madonna comes out wearing a corset and everyone thinks she's the first and it's like, wait a minute I did that when I was 15 – are The Runaways ever going to get recognition for what we did?"

In 1975, Currie and Joan Larkin (Jett came later) were still in high school. Larkin wanted to wear leathers and play guitar like Chuck Berry. Currie worshipped David Bowie. A chance meeting with manager Kim Fowley sealed their fate, but the girls had their own ambitions.

"Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour was the first concert I'd been to," Currie says, explaining that that was the moment she realised that being a rock star was what she wanted. "It was like – my god – I'm supposed to do that. I walked out of that concert a different person. It was only weeks later that Joan and Kim approached me."

Jett had turned to Fowley to help her put the band together. An ambiguous character, he bullied the girls but he also understood the music business in a way that none of them even come close to and he understood their ambition too.

"Kim had a vision," says Currie. "He knew exactly what he was selling and he knew exactly how to do it. He was very disconnected emotionally. He was giving us a crash course in the realities of life in rock and roll."

Fowley's life lessons included hiring people to throw trash at the girls as they rehearsed to simulate the rough and tumble of the clubs they'd be playing when they finally got out on the road, and ruthlessly controlling the girls' image.

"He was to the point. He was brutal," says Currie, who until an apology two years ago, after finding out that Fowley had ripped off the band's royalties, refused to speak to their former manager. "But when we did get out on the road it was a much needed education. He had hardened us to the hecklers, he had prepared us for what might happen and those things did happen."

Having written a brutally honest memoir, detailing the drug abuse and the hardcore lifestyle, Currie knows what it's like to relive a painful part of her life, but what was it like seeing it on screen?

"Floria really captured that time period," she says. "Every time I see the movie I really do feel like I'm taken back to the Seventies. I think that's quite a feat, to give people a real sense of what it was like back then."

Sigismondi's background in music videos marks The Runaways. The pace is frenzied, the fashion iconic and although there is a lack of depth to some of the characterisation, the three main performances are gripping. Stewart growls and scowls as Jett, Michael Shannon as Fowley is by turns cajoling and sinister, while Fanning captures brilliantly the pressure of being a mixed-up kid catapulted into a very adult world.

"We weren't even close to being adults," says Currie, who is full of praise for Fanning's performance on screen and off. "We all came together right at the time we were trying to find ourselves. We were only 15. We had to be a whole lot to a whole lot of people and basically with very little guidance except for our friendship and us being a kind of family away from home. We were so insecure. None of us was a Dakota Fanning, let me tell you that."

Currie's son, Jake, is now 19. He's a talented musician but she says that it was when she saw him at the age that she was in The Runaways that she realised just how young they were, and how exposed they were to experiences that took a lasting toll.

"In the Seventies, those were the days when drugs were the thing to do and if you didn't do them there was something wrong with you. They were fed to us by everyone, everyone that we looked up to, that was supposed to protect us was feeding us drugs and doing what they wanted with us. How can you keep any kind of self-esteem under that deal?"

In 1977, Currie reached crisis point, addicted to pills and cocaine. The fun ride had quickly turned sour and Currie walked out. "Lita kicked the door in and then threatened me physically and I just said you know what, I'm done, that's it. I was tired. We hadn't had a break in two-and-a-half years. Nobody was talking, nobody was happy, I couldn't exist in that for one more moment. We needed a rest."

Currie realises now that what they should have done was take a few months off, rest and then come back, but it didn't happen. Jett took over lead vocals for a couple of years but then The Runaways were no more.

Currie might do things differently given another chance, but there's no tinge of regret. Now a successful artist (ever the rebel, she is one of a handful of successful female chainsaw sculptors in the US) her friendship with Jett rebuilt, she's just got a record deal and will be heading back into the studio next month. "I never thought I'd make another record but I opened for Joan at the Pacific Amphitheatre in August and that turned out so well I'm going to give this another shot and have some fun. And I'll have my son on stage with me. It's just the best thing that could ever happen. I'm very excited about it. It's a wonderful ride. Life begins at 50, that's all I can say." She laughs long and loud.

• The Runaways is in cinemas from Friday.