There was a time when the very sight of Peter Robinson in public could cause uproar. “I used to walk along Oxford Street on the way to the Embassy Club on an afternoon, because they used to do a cocktail thing there at four o’clock,” he says. “I’d have on an Anthony Price dress, fox fur, diamantes, the hair, the five-inch stilettos, fishnets, all of that. And the whole of fucking Oxford Street … cars would stop, people would crash into each other, guys would lean out of windows going, ‘All right, darlin!’”, builders on building sites would go fucking nuts and drop things, that kind of vibe. People didn’t look like me then; they just didn’t. Women didn’t look like that, let alone a man, a boy dressed up like that. People went fucking nuts.”
That was the best part of 40 years ago, when Robinson had already changed his name to Marilyn – turning a homophobic insult from his troubled youth into what would these days be called his brand – but some time before his brief brush with pop fame. If he doesn’t provoke quite such a stir today, he’s still adept at making a striking entrance. I’m sitting with my back to the door when he walks into the north London restaurant where the interview is taking place. He introduces himself by walking up behind me, covering my eyes and shouting: “Guess who?” (I’ve never met him before.)
He is wearing a torn tartan shirt, a clashing tartan kilt, boots, a bit of makeup around the eyes but “no underwear”, as he cheerfully informs me. He looks, it has to be said, fantastic: better than anyone who spent most of the last two decades secreted away taking heroin and crack has any right to; even someone who, by their own account, was “bloody gorgeous” to start off with.
He last had a hit single in 1984, the same year he appeared on Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? – you can see him in a yellow top pouting away between Bananarama and the drummer from Duran Duran in the famous photo, but he doesn’t exactly give off the aura of someone tentatively re-entering public life after decades of obscurity, addiction and penury. He has a new single out, and an album forthcoming, both produced by his old friend and sparring partner Boy George. “Nervous?” he frowns incredulously: you’d think I’d just asked him if he could levitate or perform neurosurgery. “Nah. I can sing. I can perform. I can stand in front of a band. And I want to let people know that it doesn’t matter what happens, if you decide to change it, it’s changeable.”
He is, by his own account, a tough cookie: “I’ve been trained for personal abuse since I was a young boy, so it’s kind of like water off a duck’s back.” The abuse started when he and his mother arrived in England from Jamaica, where he was born: his father had been working there as a yacht salesman, but his parents’ marriage broke up when he was five. He moved from school to school in Hertfordshire and was relentlessly bullied: on one occasion, he claims, people started shouting “poof” and “queer” at him before he’d even reached the classroom on his first day – he hadn’t even opened his mouth. “I just think I was different. I’d lived in Jamaica until I was five and I think the rhythms of life there had kind of seeped into me, subconsciously. I was a different species, a different breed.”
By 15, he’d abandoned school altogether, lured by London’s nightlife. He started wearing makeup and visiting the Sombrero, the celebrated gay club on Kensington High Street, in west London, where he found himself feted rather than mocked. “It was full of freaks. Rent boys and drag queens and old rich guys that wanted to pick up little young pretty boys. It was like a melange of oddness, so I liked that.”
By the time he discovered Billy’s and the Blitz, the groundbreaking clubs run by Steve Strange that gave birth to the new romantic movement, he’d transformed himself into Marilyn, with his mother’s inadvertent help. “My mum was stunningly beautiful, and she still had all her old clothes. I was going through her wardrobe, trying to get her to wear them: these pencil skirts and stilettos and low-cut dresses: ‘Mum, put your red dress on, you’re beautiful, you’re still young.’ But she’d be in a cardigan: ‘I’m not wearing that stuff to go to the bingo.’ So I was sort of doing it on behalf of my mum because she wouldn’t, and then it evolved into getting back at my dad, because I always felt he’d left me and I couldn’t understand why. I used to make up stories that he’d died in a fire when people asked about him. So I’d dress up and all these straight guys would want to fuck me. I’d let them think they could, let them buy me drinks all night, and then when they said: ‘We’re going home now.’ I’d go: ‘Me and you? Go home? How did you work that out? Have you seen me? Now, look at you. I’m not going home with you.’ It wasn’t really about them; it was about paying back my dad for leaving us.”
You can see why he attracted attention. In photos from the time, Marilyn looks extraordinary, even by the standards of the Blitz or the Embassy, a hedonistic gay disco that was “kind of like what the Blitz wanted to be but wasn’t”. He quickly achieved a kind of fame – being photographed by the burgeoning new style press that centred around iD and the Face – without really knowing what he wanted to be famous for. There was some vague talk of a cabaret act with his new pal, Boy George – their friendship flourished despite a deeply unpromising first meeting, at which George informed him that he looked less like Marilyn Monroe than he did a pig – and an offer to make music, which he turned down in favour of visiting America with his then boyfriend. “Um, no,” he concedes, when I ask him if he was driven to become a singer. “I just wanted to be wonderful. That was it. Very naive, but that’s the way it was.”
With his minor-but-blossoming celebrity came a certain notoriety. At one point, he says, he was banned from virtually every gay club in London. “We’d get in the car on a Saturday night and try to decide where we were going, and everywhere someone suggested, it was, ‘No, we can’t go there because Marilyn can’t get in.’ I never felt like the gay scene was my tribe, because they didn’t fucking accept me. It was like, ‘We hate you, you’re not coming our club, you look too good and you haven’t got a checked shirt and a moustache.’ I was even banned from the Black Cap, and that was a fucking drag club. You know, are you taking the piss? There was never any reason, it was just: ‘You’re banned.’ I can only put it down to … jealousy, it’s got to be.”
It’s hard to escape the feeling that it might have had something to do with the fact that Marilyn was, by his own admission, “vile”. Indeed, his reputation for withering bitchiness – “an absolute monster”, as Boy George once put it, “who would say all the things you never dared say” – is a bit hard to square with the man sitting across the table. He is about as delightful a lunch companion as you could wish for: funny and charismatic and self-aware.
“Oh, I was just … horrific,” he laughs. “Unbelievable. People would come up to me and go: ‘’Scuse me, can I just tell you, you look amazing?’ And I’d go: ‘Yes, I know, now fuck off.’ The clothes, the Marilyn thing, it was like a suit of armour, I would never drrrrr-eam of being like that ordinarily. Plus there was the whole getting back at Dad, doing it for Mum sub-plot, but the poor unfortunate who came into contact with this maelstrom of childhood tics and quirks would really get the treatment. I still get people saying to me, ‘I met you in 1979, do you remember when you said …’ And I think: oh God, what’s coming now? What did I do?”
He did some modelling, appeared in the video for Eurythmics’ Who’s That Girl? and eventually signed a record deal in 1983, by which time Boy George was the biggest pop star in the country. He had one hit, a great bit of ersatz Motown bubblegum called Calling Your Name, and a gospel-ish followup called Cry and Be Free, but apparently things went wrong from the start. “The record company wanted me to be the beautiful new Boy George. It was like, first off, the old one’s still alive, not exactly ugly, and doing quite well. And on top of that, it’s actually my best friend and you’re trying to play us off against each other. And my whole thing was different to George’s anyway. George was cute and cuddly, and grannies liked him and said he preferred a cup of tea to sex. Whereas, I was kind of like: ‘No, what is that? Is it a man? A woman? I dunno, but whatever it is, I wanna fuck it.’” He laughs. “At least that’s my interpretation.”
Whatever the reason, his pop stardom was fleeting. He made attempts to keep it going – heading to America, working with big-name producers such as Don Was, being photographed with Madonna and Diana Ross – but nothing quite worked. A few months after the Band Aid single, he appeared in Smash Hits. He was supposed to be launching a new single with an appearance at a star-filled nightclub in New York. Instead, there were technical problems, he fled the stage without singing a note, and in the accompanying interview, sounded remarkably like a man in the throes of some kind of breakdown. He protested that he was “only famous for being someone’s friend”, talked about killing himself, announced he’d lost all his money as a result of bad business deals and alluded to drug use. “Oh, everything went tits-up, I basically think I did have a nervous breakdown and instead of dealing with it in a healthy way, I just decided to get high all the time, which really put the cat among the pigeons. But at least I was keeping it real,” he smiles. “In Smash Hits.”
The following year, at the height of the tabloid frenzy around Boy George’s drug use, he was arrested for heroin possession, although the charge was later dismissed. He broke up with his boyfriend – a young Gavin Rossdale – which he now says was “the final straw”: “I just thought, ‘Fuck off, leave me alone, I’m not doing anything.’”
He retreated to his mother’s house in Hertfordshire and stayed there for 20 years, “without going out, unless it was to the hospital or a dealer, or a doctor. But in general I just sat in a room for 20 years. I didn’t want contact with people. The phone would ring and I just wouldn’t pick it up. The curtains were always drawn, I didn’t know whether it was night or day.”
What did he do all day? “You know the Alien movies? I had the box set of that. I had my laptop and my drug paraphernalia was all set up around me. And I’d watch the first Alien film, then the second, then the third, fourth, fifth. And when it got to the end of the fifth one, I’d put the first one back on again. So that was it. Over and over again. It was, like, my life has gone out of control, but I can control this, this tiny little bubble of behaviour: that was my safety, sitting in front of this computer screen with what I’m watching, and I know all the dialogue and I know what’s going to happen. I could control how I felt. ‘Oh, I’m bit tired, let me have some crack. Oh, I’m a bit depressed, let’s have some heroin. I need to go to sleep, I’ll take a downer.’ I just wanted to die, but I couldn’t do that, I think because I was brought up a Catholic, with that idea that if you kill yourself you go to purgatory. I kept thinking, ‘Well, it’ll be just my fucking luck, I’ll kill myself and wake up in exactly the situation I’m trying to get away from and it’ll be for eternity.’ At least I know this is going to end at some point.”
How did his mum cope? “It was hideous. You know mums, they live in hope, don’t they? That one day it will change.”
It ended when he contracted pneumonia. A doctor told him his system was so weak, he had only a 30% chance of survival. He spent so long in intensive care that he says it took him a year to learn to walk again. “I was fucked. Constant hospital visits with one thing or another, crying all the time. I just thought, well, there’s nowhere else to take this, except death, and I couldn’t do death. The drugs didn’t work the way I wanted them to work any more anyway. It was like, I was at the end of the line, there was nowhere else to go. So I had to back up.”
He spent five years in and out of rehab. He moved to Suffolk – a most un-Marilyn-ish location, but that’s where the clinic was. He finally got clean, returned to London and started making music again. “I played what I was doing to George and, because he’s a control freak, he kept going, ‘I think it should be this way, you should do it like this.’ I said: ‘Well, if you’ve got a better fucking idea, let’s have it.’”
An album is nearly finished and there is talk of touring, something he has never done before. I ask him if he worries about entering the spotlight again, given how it ended up last time, and he gives me another incredulous look. “Are you fucking nuts?” he snorts. “I’ve had the most amazing life! I’m not a victim! I had a great time! Of course! I mean, I didn’t have a great time sat in a room taking drugs …” Then he reconsiders. “I mean, a lot of the time I was sitting in the room I had a great time. Oh yeah, the drugs were fucking amazing at first – if they hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have stayed there. Oh, I’ve had me a good time, missy. Don’t worry about that.”
Marilyn’s new single Love or Money is out now; mistermarilyn.com
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