- The Guardian
Tuesday 30 July 2019 11
How we made
Tiff any Darwish
Singer, 1987 version
When I was a kid I used to sing everywhere
– the bathroom, the grocery store. When some
musician friends of my parents had a party,
my dad suggested I get up and sing. People
went: “Wow. That voice. She sounds like
a 30-year-old woman.” Before I knew it, I was
singing on bills with people like Little Richard
and Jerry Lee Lewis.
When I was 15, someone told a producer,
George Tobin, about this “girl with a great
voice”. George helped me get a record deal
and things started to roll pretty quickly.
I Think We’re Alone Now had been a hit for
Tommy James and the Shondells in the 60s.
I didn’t know the song, and it didn’t sound
so modern. When I came back the next
day, they’d remade it as a dance track. I didn’t
want to record it, but I took the song home
and my girlfriends were dancing around the
room. My producer said: “Trust me on this.”
I went back to the studio and did the
vocals in maybe four takes. I don’t think
I realised that the song was about the
prohibition of teenage sex, but we got
away with it. The lyrics are what teenagers
think about : going behind a bush and
kissing and whatever. People have since
told me: “Oh me and my husband were in
the car listening to it and ...” And I think,
“Way too much information!”
The song took off when I sang it live.
Because I was too young for clubs, we
did a tour of shopping malls and shot
some of it for the video. At fi rst, I could
go and have a pizza afterwards, but soon
there were so many people that I could
barely even get into the mall.
Having a No 1 hit at 15 was a wild ride. I met
Michael Jackson. Girls copied my earrings
and my crimped hair. I still have “Children
behave” – the fi rst words of I Think We’re
Alone Now – on my T-shirts. I love the song
now and never tire of singing it.Tommy James
Singer, 1967 version
I Think We’re Alone Now was presented to me
as a slow ballad by my producers, Richie Cordell
and Bo Gentry. I was 19, but I heard the hook
and thought it sounded like a hit. We did a quick
demo, souping it up and making it much faster.
When we played it to Morris Levy , the head of
Roulette Records, he loved it. I recorded the
vocal on Christmas Eve in 1966, so we could get
it on the street for the new year.
Morris was right out of the movies. At fi rst
we had no idea that his Roulette label was a
front for the Genovese crime family. He was
a mob associate and these mafi a guys would
hang around Roulette like it was a social club.
We soon learned to tiptoe around and not
eavesdrop on too many conversations. But
Morris could hear hits.
I Think We’re Alone Now was the fi rst of what
became known as our bubblegum hits. Richie
and Bo would come to me with these really
simple, almost nursery rhyme-type songs. I’d
say, “I’m not singing that!” and half an hour
later I couldn’t get the tune out of my head. I
learned how to make records with I Think We’re
Alone Now. We did the bass and drums fi rst and
then layered the rest – which we’d never done
before – and made the choruses quieter so that
the verses would explode out of a radio speaker.
Twenty years later, I watched in disbelief as
Tiff any’s version of I Think We’re Alone Now
and Billy Idol’s version of Mony Mony – another
of our songs – fl ew up the charts together like
they were holding hands. Neither of them knew
about the other before they were released.
Tiff any came up to me at a convention to
apologise for covering us. I said: “Are you nuts? I
should be thanking you.” She did a great job and
she’s a real sweet girl.
Interviews by Dave Simpson. Tiff any plays
Rewind Festival South on 17 August. Her album
Pieces of Me is out now. Tommy James has
recorded a new version of I Think We’re Alone
Now for the biopic Me, the Mob and the Music.I Think We’re Alone Now
‘Having a No 1 hit at 15 was a wild ride.
I didn’t realise it was about the prohibition of
teenage sex – but we got away with it’
ageless. You’d go to the Coleherne
Arms [a former gay pub in west
London] and you’d see a duke of 70
chatting to a plumber of 25 and then
they’d go off to spank each other.”
Still, the dearth of acting roles is
what led him to write the screenplay
for The Happy Prince , a biopic of
the elderly Oscar Wilde, which he
also directed and starred in. It was
a labour of love, he worked on it for
over a decade, and it should have
won the Oscars it was predicted
to scoop. He has starred as Wilde
on stage, too, in a revival of Hare’s
The Judas Kiss , for which he brought
back the padding of his youth.
“I always imagined Wilde was
revoltingly well hung. So I wore a
padded cock and the front fi ve rows,
I could see, were thinking, ‘My God,
I had no idea Rupert Everett was so
well hung!’ I had to go down a few
sizes because it was taking over.”
That was four years ago. “Maybe
I should put it back in for Vanya!”
The writing also became more
necessary because of the growth of
ageism, as he sees it, which means
even male actors now must present
eternal youth on screen. Men , he
says, had it very easy for a long time.
“You could be a man aged 73 and
have a 22-year-old girlfriend. That’s
all changed. The result for us is that
we haven’t got roles going off into
the grey distance.”
The prospects for gay actors have
changed in Hollywood, he thinks,
but only because the industry has
been forced to accept it. Ironically,
he has observed the erosion of gay
rights in the real world. “It seems to
me that there’s no ‘live and let live’
any more,” he says. “Last year I wasopening my fi lm in Italy, and you’d
go to a place like Genoa, where the
state withdrew funding for its gay
pride march, and there would be
other horrible things you’d hear,
about families who’d locked up their
lesbian daughter ...”
He is particularly despairing
of British politics. “The end of it
was Ann Widdecombe’s speech
in Brussels. The most alarming,
repulsive, depressing, shaming
thing that I’ve ever seen. More
shaming than Nigel Farage
somehow, right down to the old
cockney rolling of the Rs,” he says,
and demonstrates the sound.
Despair is a central theme of
Chekhov’s play; Vanya’s midlife
crisis is fi lled with disappointment
as he refl ects on the past. I wonder
about Everett’s mid life audit.
There is regret at losing friends, he
says, but he won’t be drawn on his
famous falling-out with Madonna.
“I think people who say they have
no regrets are a bit wacky. There
are so many things to regret. The
way one treats people; the way one
writes off relationships; the way one,
looking back, backstabs. Middle age
is a reckoning. You need nerves of
steel to get through it.”
There is disappointment, too. The
reality of his life did not meet the
totality of his ambitions as a young
man. “I wanted to be that big
Hollywood movie star as a kid. I was
so blindly ambitious I would have
done anything to get along. I mean,
I wouldn’t have killed .”
But doesn’t he see through that
kind of fame now? “Yes, but still ...
Everybody wants to have more.”
So what is the ambition now? He is
working on another autobiography
about the 10 years it took to make
his Wilde fi lm. He has also written
the screenplay for a fi lm about Paris
in the 1970s, which he is trying to
get fi nanced, and a TV series about
a boy band. He swings between
doubt, despair and hope as he
lists the projects. “I don’t know if
I can write any more,” he says in
one breath, and then in the next:
“I’ve got ton s of things I’d like to try
and do.”
“Of course,” he says, “you’ve got
to know the time to stop trying so
hard. But I’d love to direct another
fi lm. I would love to write for TV. I’m
keeping going. The ambition is still
blind. That’s the weird thing.”
Uncle Vanya is at Theatre Royal Bath
until 3 August.‘I was too young
to play clubs’
... Tiff any in 1987PHOTOGRAPH: PICTORIAL PRESS/ALAMYIncandescent ...
with Colin Firth
in Another
Country;
below, with
Julia Roberts
in My Best
Friend’s
Wedding
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