Facing up to your past - by Lu Hersey

 Memoir writing really isn't one of my things. I totally get why other people enjoy it, and I'm happy to read other people's. It's just I prefer to write fiction and not think too much about my dubious past and all the spectacular mistakes I've made. 

But sometimes I can't avoid it.

An old friend asked me to write a piece for a book he's compiling, already contracted by a publisher, about band logos. In case you're wondering, I used to work for a band. I'd put off writing the piece for a while, but his deadline for copy was fast approaching, and I had to bite the bullet. Revisiting a part of my life filled with heartbreaks and a lot of spectacularly dumb behaviour. 

I was being ridiculous. The piece wasn't about me. I needed to detach my emotions and stick to the brief, writing about a logo designed for the Beat, a 2-Tone ska band probably few people under 40 have even heard of. But most people still recognise the logo. She's become a universal symbol of ska music, part of pop folklore.

I dug out a box from the attic, rarely opened in decades, which has moved with me from place to place. Unable to throw it away, because I always knew it was part of a bigger picture. 

The Beat had risen to fame fast, and soon needed to establish their own identity. A logo that fitted with the 2 Tone movement (mixing cultures, blending Caribbean ska music with British punk to create a new sound), but also something that made them stand out from the other 2 Tone bands. The genius behind their new graphic and logo was Birmingham based comix artist, Hunt Emerson. 

 Hunt was a big music fan, and dug out an archive picture of Prince Buster dancing with a young woman in a nightclub. The photo was old and grainy, and it was hard to tell if the woman was black, white or Asian, which made her perfect. And so the Beat Girl logo was born. Here's a page from Issue 1 of the Beat Club fanzine, where Hunt explains her origins...

And that's where I fit in. I'd known a couple of the band members since school days, and started running their fan club for them as the fan mail piled up, working under the pseudonym Marilyn Hebrides (yes, adapted from part of the shipping forecast). 

Hunt helped me design and illustrate a quarterly news fanzine, (hand written because I couldn't type fast enough), filled with photos, competitions and fan club news. Long before the days of laptops and publishing programmes, it was all done cut and paste. Then the fanzine was printed and I sent out to all the fans. I kept an archive of all the paraphernalia because it was useful. It's been with me ever since.

To cut a long story a bit shorter, from time to time die-hard Beat fans still track me down, decades later. An American fan recently sent me a story he'd uncovered about the unknown woman in the original photo, dancing in the nightclub with Prince Buster. Turns out she was was a ska singer, dancer and cabaret artiste called Brigitte Bond, also known as Brigitte St John. She was also a trans woman. I reckon that makes her even more perfect. Not just a symbol of black and white culture fusion, but gender diversity too.  

Anyway, the point of all this rambling - your past is part of who you are. You can box it away, but maybe it's worth taking another look. Stop cringing about all the mistakes you made, because the person you were then was the fledgling for who you are now. 

I'd almost forgotten the positives of that part of my life. The emotional intensity, the amazing opportunities, the fun. Like the logo, time passing simply gives you more to say about it. And that can be useful for any writer, whether you write memoir or not.

By Lu Hersey

twitter: @LuWrites