Young And The Restless
Researching Clare was easy. Let’s see, there’s the repeated success with 80s pop band Altered Images. Check. Then there’s her part she played in the cult 80s coming-of-age Brit-flick; Gregory’s Girl (rated 30 in the BFI Top 100 British films). Check. Most currently, there’s her second children’s book to come out of the trilogy; Tallulah and the TeenStars. Check. And to mirror her original rise to fame, you can now catch her cameo in the latest series of Skins on E4; the gritty teen-ripening drama, she plays cheeky-stop-out anti-role model mum to the main character Mini. Check.
I get it. She’s one multi-talented lady. But this dainty doll before me barely seems to have aged from what I witnessed as I journeyed through YouTube interview clips and many a pop video from yesteryear. Everything about Clare is femme. Her voice, her pint-sized stature, her cheeky nods to her band-mate husband and anecdotes about trying to meet boys as a teen, with ladylike composure sitting on stage. Bound by youth, Clare let us in on her lottery-kismet to fame, and how she originally became the sylphlike quarter of Altered Images and falling into her first attempt as a singer: “I went to an all-girls school so meeting boys wasn’t easy. [On attending her first band audition] None of the boys were brave enough to sing, so I thought being in a band, well this could be the first step into meeting boys. We didn’t do very much other than pretend we were Siouxsie and the Banshees in the hope we would pull something off – which we did! Tony was the talent and I had the ambition, you could say.”
