Fred Vermorel is a writer of some repute and, well, disrepute if you are a Kate Bush fan, renowned for his individual approach to pop biography (from the Sex Pistols to Kate Moss) and for his jagged ideas of celebrity and pop consumerism.<\/p>\n
Rock critic Simon Frith dubbed the biogs \u2018anti-biographies\u2019. Perhaps because their real subjects aren\u2019t the artists they profess to cover, but wider and deeper issues. There is always a twist to them \u2013 free-flowing but full of strangeness and multiplicity.<\/p>\n
Similarly, Vermorel\u2019s new book, , ostensibly an account of the 1954 murder of Jean Townsend is far from a standard true crime book.<\/p>\n
For fun, let\u2019s call it an anti-true crime book.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ha,\u2019 says Fred, when we meet in London\u2019s West End, Piccadilly\/Soho way. \u2018I didn\u2019t mean it to be!\u2019<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, not only is Dead Fashion Girl a successful investigation into the unsolved murder, it also offers, free of charge, thrown in for good measure, the lowdown on infamous early-60s \u2018Jack the Stripper\u2019 slayings.<\/p>\n
Moreover, the book uses the \u201854 crime as a useful prism via which to illuminate the \u2018dark\u2019 corners of the Fifties \u2013 violence, sex, nightclubs \u2013 all the cool stuff.<\/p>\n
And, it offers a psychogeographical tour of grimy, seductive 50s Soho \u2013 an un\/glamorous transgressive transmission form London\u2019s sexual and criminal underground.<\/p>\n
What is more, by inserting the author himself into the story, the book examines why someone might want to write \u2013 and perhaps read \u2013 about true crime in the first place.<\/p>\n
In September 1954, on her way home in South Ruislip, fashion designer Jean Mary Townsend was strangled. She wasn\u2019t raped but her underwear was removed and left neatly by her body. The case was never solved \u2013 the result, it seems, of both a police cover-up and cock-up.<\/p>\n
Eight-year-old Fred Vermorel, who lived just down the road at the time, cycled over to see the screened-off crime scene \u2013 \u2018Like an art brut installation with Freudian undertones\u2019. Later, he poured over the evening paper looking for clues. And decades later he still found himself looking.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, a certain fixation or obsession is a prerequisite to writing a true crime book of such intensity as this. Even though that can sometimes become problematic. For instance, writer Robert Graysmith\u2019s exhaustive obsession with the Zodiac murders drove him tottering on the verge of lunacy. Other true crime authors have ruined their marriages thanks to their infatuation.<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s like the guy who wrote the Jack the Stripper book, David Seabrook \u2013 he was definitely a bit peculiar. I found the book obnoxious because it was trivialising what had happened,\u2019 says Fred about the late Seabrook\u2019s Jack of Jumps \u2013 \u2018A manic trawl\u2026 Seabrook is a tart observer and knows that his obsession borders on the pointless,\u2019 wrote Chris Petit in his Guardian review.<\/p>\n
In Seabrook\u2019s defence, sometimes, the most interesting work is carried out not by well-balanced writers, but those with irregular edges who leave a more curious mark. Even so, Fred was careful not to fall down that same rabbit hole.<\/p>\n
\u2018I was obsessed with Townsend but I made myself obsessed. My obsession was a performance,\u2019 he says \u2018When I was 16, I was taught at art school by Theo Ramos that you don\u2019t get anywhere unless you become obsessed by whatever you\u2019re doing. But my obsession wasn\u2019t really an obsession. I could turn it off and on \u2013 while I was researching this, I wrote four or five other pieces of work.\u2019<\/p>\n
This sort of dissociative role-playing is a useful trick, and has been used by Fred to some effect in the past.<\/p>\n
He has written two (anti) biographies of Kate Bush, and in both, he plays a different role. In Princess of Suburbia he is a tabloid journo (the title Dead Fashion Girl is a pungent gutter press parody, of course \u2013 the tone is one of the macabre, voyeurism and sensationalism, of the sort that in its normal context precludes serious attention), and in the Secret History of Kate Bush, he is an obsessed, possibly deranged, stalker.<\/p>\n
This prompted some controversy, especially amongst Bush\u2019s fans. Comments on Kate Bush forums include: \u2018This guy is potentially dangerous\u2019, \u2018This Fred guy \u2026 he gives me the creeps… just a nasty thing\u2019, \u2018May Fred go to hell\u2019, \u2018Nutjob\u2019 and \u2018Over the edge (the edge of sane\/insane that is)\u2019. I could go on.<\/p>\n
Fred explained himself in Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices edited by Mark Duffett: \u2018All games I played while researching The Secret History of Kate Bush, an absurdist experiment to see how far the rock bio could be stretched without snapping\u2026 I also stalked the woman, as a phenomenological acting out of that uneasy and twisted boundary between fascination and obsession. I still find discussions on the Internet debating whether \u2018I\u2019 was \u2018really\u2019 obsessed with Kate Bush, as well as allegations I not only had an affair with her, but that while researching her life I ran over her cat.\u2019<\/p>\n
Fred further examined celebrity culture in the 2006 book Addicted to Love: The Kate Moss Story, wonderfully described in the Observer as : \u2018A strange hybrid, as if a copy of OK! magazine and an undergraduate textbook on postmodernism got into an argument, started fighting, rolled around on the floor and ended up kissing.\u2019<\/p>\n
As interesting and amusing as this avant-garde rhetoric and postmodern muscle-flexing undoubtedly is, what gives Dead Fashion Girl its sense of depth and perhaps gravity\/gravitas is the lingering feeling that, maybe for once, provocative prankster Fred cares a little.<\/p>\n
In the book he writes: \u2018This has its roots in frustration\u2026 anger that these people got away with it. Her ashes interred by her parents in a crematorium wall. Then her case buried by the Metropolitan Police, her short life extinguished, local reputation trashed, memory obliterated.\u2019<\/p>\n
During our conversation Fred affirms, with a hint of softly spoken sincerity,
\n\u2018When starting the book, there was the thought that a man did this to a woman. I thought I should address this.<\/p>\n
\u2018I also realised there was something very suspect about the case.\u2019<\/p>\n
Vermorel discovered that Jean Townsend\u2019s case file, kept in the National Archive, was embargoed until 2058 \u2013 revised after protests until 2031 \u2013 and that some witness statements had been leaked, others lost.<\/p>\n
The investigation into the reason for such extraordinary official secrecy\/shenanigans becomes almost as pressing as the one into the murder itself. Fred\u2019s line of inquiry quickly leads us to, \u2018A cesspit of vice and violence.\u2019 This is centred in \u201850s clubland with its gangsters, bohemians, showbiz celebs and perverts like Jean Townshend\u2019s boss Michael Whittaker, a fashion bigwig, who also organised society orgies \u2013 the type of debauched gatherings involving the highest echelons of society later exposed by the Profumo scandal. Take a bow Snowden, Sarah Churchill and the un\/usual array of libertines.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fascinating nocturnal exploration of the desperate and the damned, as it were.<\/p>\n
Fred also adopts a \u2018wildcard methodology\u2019 for further probing the wider 50s.<\/p>\n
Vermorel, whose day job is university professor, recounts: \u2018I went to a party and an academic asked me about what I was working on. When I told him I was researching the 50s, he reeled off this typical list, the sort you would find on the web. I thought, that\u2019s not the 50s \u2013 it\u2019s a 50s, a received version of the 50s \u2013 but it\u2019s not what I remember about the 50s.\u2019<\/p>\n