Ugly Megan - Bobby Orlandisco
"I failed as a hippy because I was too much of a capitalist." says Bobby, swivelling in his chair to view the mirrored building that is now partly his. "I mean I had a chequebook, no hippy ever had a chequebook, so I was a total failure. But glitter rock, oh I was a real glitter boy. I had very long hair - you just wouldn’t believe. I was very pretty, exceedingly like real very pretty. And with glitter rock you didn’t have to take drugs and it was OK to be a captialist. I mean platform shoes are expensive, right?". He didn’t have the balls to wear make-up but the romance with the high camp has yet to end. New York Dolls, Divine, same difference. The fast talking, intensively macho exhibitionist is also a voyeur. A homophobe who once pulled out of buying an apartment after discovering that the previous owner was gay, he has built a career on making music for a predominantly gay audience.
Bobby O’s history of working relationships reads like a Bel Air alimony lawyers’s casebook. One of his most successful associations ended understandably abruptly when he claimed he could "cure" the artist of his homosexuality, but men continue to be mesmerized by the electric vitality of this irresistible, impossible character. Women, too, are oddly tantalized by a man fixes his dark eyes to theirs over dinner, tells them just how he likes to make love, and what a great lover he is, and then kisses them goodnight on the cheek only to call at midnight to ask if they are naked.
The technical skill involved in such heavyweight flirting requires not only a core of pure narcissim but an ability to use the power of sexuality without feeling the surge of any real lust.
His most enduring partnership has been with The Flirts, a sort female Menudo, the three girl line-up changes with almost every release and on the new, their second album, "Questions Of The Heart" - a deliciously crass concoction of Euro pop, Janet Jackson and Sixties girl groups - they’re looking, frankly, a little old. The models won’t mind if they‘re dropped; the group exists only as an LP sleeve. Apart from a brace of session singers, Bobby O is The Flirts. Songs about sex, not lust. Sex on the phone, sex on the mind, everything but the real kind.
"I'm a sinner and a scumbag. I know it," he confesses. "but that's where salvation comes in. My real citizenship is in heaven, I'm just an ambassador right now. The Bible clearly states 'be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth' and that's what I do, I'm being fruitful, I'm multilplying - I put out more records than anybody in the world, there's nobody puts out more records than me. If a producer has the ability to put out that many records and he doesn't then he is disobeying God's command."
(Interview by Kimberley Leston from the Face, 1987: read the full interview here)
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Bobby O - I'm So Hot For You
