Number 1 on my 4th birthday was
Fame - Irene Cara
This is the summer before I first went to school, and also the summer I first went to Spain (I want to live forever!) on a plane (I want to learn how to fly! High!), though I associate Prince Charming by Adam and the Ants with that trip, not this.
Nevertheless, this song, Fame, was, as a child, as entirely engrained in me as Happy Birthday or Old McDonald Has a Farm. There was no chorus I was more familiar with in my early years. For, though I have ended up having quite mundanely male taste in all things, I was the younger brother of sisters, sisters who had friends, and so I experience an awful lot of dance routines to Flashdance, Dancing Queen, and Fame.
Fame has been a lot of things, a few actual places, a film, a TV show, a stage show, a concept, but the best of them still might be the bit where Irene Cara sings "Remember my name, fame! - I want to live forever". Though I think, weirdly, I have never actually seen the film 'Fame' or even more than a few minutes of the TV show. I think when I watched it at the time, I found it weirdly downbeat and not as fun as the song.
It is hard for me to know how influential "Fame" was as I don't remember what came before, Clearly, there was fame. There was Andy Warhol talking about fame and David Bowie singing about fame. But it does feel like "fame" as the aspirational be all and end all for talented young people, with clear pathways to achieving that, is something that has grown and grown since 'Fame'. It feels a bit like it set the template for the prevailing, genre and medium-unspecific, youth movement for the next 40 years.
Perhaps that's gibberish.
In any case, Irene Cara died, not particularly famous, last year, and Gene Anthony Ray, who played Leroy in fame, was rumoured to have died several times when I was at school, but was still alive, but did actually die in 2003.
Fame, fame, fatal fame, can play hideous tricks on the brain. Is that the right song?
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