Amanda Lear

Amanda Lear

Amanda Lear (allegedly born Amanda Tapp or Alain Tapp in Hong Kong on November 18, 1939) is a French singer, composer, lyricist, actress, painter, TV presenter and novelist.

Lear started her career as a fashion model in the mid 1960s and was also the muse of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. She first came to the public's attention as the fetish clad model on the cover of Roxy Music's album For Your Pleasure in 1973. She was a multimillion selling Disco Queen in Continental Europe, Scandinavia, South America, Japan, the Eastern Bloc and most other parts of the world in the mid 1970s to the early 1980s with hits like "Blood and Honey", "Queen of Chinatown", "Follow Me", "Enigma (Give A Bit of Mmmmh to Me)", "Fashion Pack (Studio 54)" and "Diamond". Lear has recorded 15 studio albums and has released some 60 singles to date and has so far sold approximately 15 million albums and 25-30 million singles worldwide.

In the mid 1980s she positioned herself as one of the leading media personalities in mainland Europe, especially in Italy and in France where she has hosted many long-running TV shows. Since the 1990s her time has been divided between music, television, writing and movies as well as pursuing her career as a painter.

She currently resides in Saint-Étienne-du-Grès near Avignon in the south of France.

Early life

Much of Lear's early life has always been and remains unclear. According to recent interviews, she was born to a British marine on leave in Hong Kong and a mother of Russian-Mongolian origin. Soon after her birth, her parents separated and she was raised by her mother in Nice, in the south of France.

The truth about Lear's date of birth, the names and nationalities of her parents, and the location of her upbringing has however been a matter of speculation and debate in France, Germany and Italy ever since the early 1980s. All through her career, Lear has deliberately made a point of providing the media with different, contradictory accounts of her early life, her mother's origin has previously been English, French, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Russian and/or Chinese. Her father has been at times English, Russian, French and Indonesian, sometimes serving in the Royal Navy, other times the French Foreign Legion in Indochina. Her place of birth has been reported as Switzerland, Hanoi, Saigon as well as Hong Kong and her date of birth from 1939 to 1948.

In addition to having two mother tongues by birth, French and English, she showed a talent for languages at an early age and also learned German, Spanish and Italian in her teens, which she used later in her professional life. According to Lear's official biography she relocated to Paris having finished elementary school, to study at L'Académie des Beaux Arts, before joining St. Martins School of Art in London in 1964.

Career

Early career; modelling, The Swinging London and life with Dalì

In early 1965, Lear was spotted by Cathérine Harlé, head of a model agency, who offered Lear a contract. Lear spoke about her early life and her subsequent discovery as a model in a interview with Isabelle Morizet for Radio Europe 1 in 2003:

I'd grown up thinking I was ugly, ugly, ugly. I was much too tall, I was much too skinny, I was flatchested, I had my mother's Asian eyes and cheekbones so I looked foreign compared to all my girlfriends, my mouth was too big and my teeth were too big so I never smiled. And then Françoise Hardy had her breakthrough in France and everything suddenly changed. Before her you were supposed to look like Brigitte Bardot, blonde, curvy and busty. But I was about twenty when people started telling me "You know what, you look a little like Françoise Hardy, you could be a model" and then out of the blue this famous woman, the great Cathérine Harlé turns up. By sheer accident she happened to see me in the street in Paris and asked me if I wanted to be a fashion model and I thought she was joking! And she said "No, no, no, you're exactly the type of girl we're looking for" and all of a sudden all of these flaws, all the things I'd been so ashamed of, became my greatest assets. By sheer accident, as most things in my career.

As a means to finance her art studies, Lear returned to Paris for her first modelling assignment; to catwalk for rising star Paco Rabanne. Just as Cathérine Harlé had predicted, a girl with Lear's looks was very much in demand; soon thereafter, she found herself being photographed by Helmut Newton, Charles Paul Wilp and Antoine Giacomoni for magazines like Elle, Marie France, and Vogue and modelling for fashion designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel in Paris and Mary Quant, Ossie Clark and Antony Price in London. After some time, she dropped out of art school, began modelling full-time and went on to lead a bohemian and flamboyant life in the Swinging London of the Sixties, hobnobbing with the rich and famous like The Beatles and fellow top models like Twiggy. She became a "stalwart of London's demimonde", an exotic name on the nightclub circuit and a regular fixture in the gossip columns, and would later in the 1970s occasionally moonlight as a reporter herself, covering both the London social scene and international celebrities and party animals in David Bailey and David Litchfield's glossy in-crowd magazine Ritz.

While clubbing with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and her then boyfriend, the Guinness heir Tara Browne, in a Parisian nightspot named Le Castel in late 1965, she was, again according to her official biography, introduced to a man that was to change her life, on many levels according to some. The man was none other than the eccentric Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, the self-proclaimed enfant terrible in the world of art, at the time some forty years her senior. Dalí was not only struck by Lear's looks but also saw a kindred spirit in her; Lear has since described their close and unconventional relationship as a "spiritual marriage". Her biography My Life With Dalí which was first published in French in 1984 (original title: Le Dalì d'Amanda), and had Dalí's approval, gives a detailed insight into the lives of both the artist and his muse. She accompanied him and his wife on trips to Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Paris and over a period of some fifteen years spent every summer with Dalí at his home at Port Lligat, near Cadaqués in Catalonia. Lear posed for some of Dali's works such as Venus to the Furs and Vogué, took part in several of his film projects and could be seen by his side during press conferences and meetings with the media, events that in the age of flower power characteristically for its time and at this stage of Dali's life often turned into happenings, as spectacular as the art itself, and then frequently with Lear as the central figure. Joining the court of the Dalí's she now also regularly socialized with celebrities. Dalí served as a mentor to Lear; travelling with him, she discovered the great museums of Europe, Parisian salons and restaurants, New York bohemia and his homeland, Spain, and especially the Catalan culture, while she, in return, introduced him to the younger generation of the counterculture in art, fashion, photography and music in London. "I knew nothing when I first met him. He taught me to see things through his eyes. Dali was my teacher. He let me use his brushes, his paint and his canvas, so that I could play around while he was painting for hours and hours in the same studio. Surrealism was a good school for me. Listening to Dali talk was better than going to any art school". The factual accuracy of My Life With Dalí, and most specifically the dates, is disputed by several researchers of Dalí's life and work (see section Another Life with Dali below).

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Lear on the cover of Roxy Music's 1973 album For Your Pleasure.

Although she remained Dalí's confidante, protegée and mistress all through the Sixties and Seventies, Lear was also romantically linked to Brian Jones, which resulted in the ironic Rolling Stones track "Miss Amanda Jones", included on 1967 album Between the Buttons . In 1973 Lear was also briefly engaged to Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, and was that same year famously depicted posing in a skintight leather dress leading a black panther on a leash on the cover of the band's classic rock album For Your Pleasure, an image that has been described as "as famous as the album itself" and which brought Lear plenty of exposure in the world of rock 'n roll. She went on to have a year-long affair with the married David Bowie, with whom she appeared in the live performance of his 1973 hit song "Sorrow" at the 1980 Floor Show stage production which was televised in the United States by NBC for TV series Midnight Special on 16 November 1973, an appearance often referred to as the official launch of Lear's career in music. She also acted as the mistress of ceremonies for the show. On March 13 1979 she however married French aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle who, in fact, was the former lover turned adopted son of diplomate and controversial gay novelist Roger Peyrefitte. The marriage ceremony took place in Las Vegas, Nevada while Lear was promoting her disco album Sweet Revenge in North America, just three weeks after the couple first met in Paris at fashionable discothèque Le Palace, the French equivalent of Studio 54. Malagnac's career, often financed by Peyrefitte, included proprietor of Le Bronx, one of the first openly gay night clubs in Paris, and briefly managing French singer Sylvie Vartan, a less than successful undertaking which almost bankrupted Peyrefitte, who was forced to sell artworks and antiquities to pay the resulting debts.

Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala both strongly disapproved of the relationship with Malagnac, whose reputation in Parisian high society they were well aware of, and even attempted to persuade Lear to have the marriage annulled. As a consequence of this, and also as Lear's successful career in music and television now was beginning to take up most of her time, she and her mentor began drifting apart. While they still sporadically kept in touch via letters and telephone through the early and mid-Eighties, especially after his wife died in 1982, Lear only very briefly visited Dalí in Spain one more time in the second half of the decade, at Púbol in 1988 and then without her husband, shortly before Dalí himself died. Malagnac would go on to establish himself as a successful art dealer and antiques collector and, despite the misgivings of the Dalí's and others, was married to Lear for twenty-one years, until his untimely passing in 2000.

Alter egos; another life with Dalí - rumours of transsexuality

Despite modelling nude for Playboy in 1977 and Lear saying "and they could see I was a woman like everybody else" , she was and still is widely rumoured to be either a transsexual or an intersexual because of her height (6 ft/183 cm) , her masculine facial features and, most of all, her exceptionally low baritone-like vocal timbre. That Lear was born male is considered an open secret in Continental Europe although Lear herself has since the early 1980s insisted that these rumours are the result of a planned succès de scandale, a clever publicity stunt thought up by herself and Salvador Dalí to get her career in music started, just like her contradictory statements about her childhood and the origin of her parents; during her disco career Lear even went as far as telling the press that she was born in Transsylvania. " - Everything Dalí said, I just listened to. He was the genius, who was I? When it came to launching my career, he told me I was a lousy singer and if I wanted to sell records, I'd have to find something other than the music to attract people to buy them. So we built the Amanda Lear persona into something very intriguing and very ambiguous and it worked."

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1986 biography My Life With Dali.

However, Britain's first publicly confessed transsexual April Ashley (b. 1935) has gone on record in her autobiography April Ashley's Odyssey to say that she worked with Lear in legendary Parisian transvestite revue Le Carrousel de Paris in the late 1950s. According to Ashley, Lear was then a man in his early twenties, called Alain Tapp, performing in drag shows using the stage name Péki d'Oslo and a regular member of the Carrousel ensemble as they toured Italy, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia and South America. This early alter ego could in fact be a reference to Lear's Eurasian descent; Peking/Oslo.

Coccinelle (b. 1931, d. 2006), France's most celebrated transsexual entertainer and Le Carrousel's leading star, has also revealed that she met and befriended Lear in the late Fifties: Péki was then still called Alain Tapp and was a teenage boy with a remarkable talent for sketching and painting. Coccinelle's 1987 autobiography Coccinelle Par Coccinelle even contains photographic evidence from the era, picturing her both in the company of a teenaged Alain Tapp and later with the Caroussel ensemble's new member Péki D'Oslo, with her exotic Eurasian features, and then also dressed as a woman offstage.

These claims were also confirmed by famous Dutch transsexual singer, actress and nightclub owner Romy Haag (b. 1951) in her 1999 autobiography Eine Frau und mehr (translated as A Woman And More). Just like Ashley and Coccinelle, Haag describes that she first met Lear under the name Péki d'Oslo at Le Carrousel in Paris and that the two also worked together at Haag's own nightclub Chez Romy in Berlin, in the early Seventies. Coincidentally, Haag - just like Lear - had a year-long affair with David Bowie in the mid-seventies, while he was still married to Angela Bowie.

In March 2007, renowned British music manager Simon Napier-Bell was the next eyewitness to come forward, saying that "...my publishers sent me off to Paris to make a record with Amanda Lear, someone I’d known years before as a young Asian-looking guy called Péki who hung out in the Gigolo, a gay bar in London in the 60's. Now that Péki had become Amanda, I wasn't interested anymore, but other people were - Amanda's new companion was Salvador Dalí."

Furthermore, in her autobiography April Ashley claims that Alain Tapp/Péki D'Oslo had already changed her stage name to Amanda when she persuaded a 20-year-old architecture student, Morgan Paul Lear, to marry her on December 11, 1965 at Chelsea Register Office, London for £50 in order for her to obtain British citizenship - all through her autobiography My Life With Dalì Lear refers to herself as being "English" or "British". Ashley also specifies that Lear and Dalí did not meet in Paris in 1965 in the company of Brian Jones and Tara Browne, but in 1959 when the Carrousel ensemble, with the at the time twenty-year-old Péki D'Oslo included, were guesting at various transvestite clubs in Barcelona, establishments often frequented by Dalí. As Lear herself points out in My Life With Dali: "Dalí explained that in his dreams there was always a confusion of the sexes. He loved effeminate boys and would always come back to the Greek ideal, the hermaphrodite".

Some sources such as Dalì biographers Ian Gibson, Carlos Lozano and Meredith Etherington-Smith not only corroborate the accounts of Ashley, Coccinelle and Haag but go even further, saying that the person now known under the name Amanda Lear was the greatest artistic creation of Dalí's whole surrealist career, suggesting that he was the one who financed a sex reassignment that was to have taken place in Casablanca, Morocco in 1963, (see Georges Burou) and Lear has consequently at times, somewhat unflatteringly, been referred to as Dalí's "Frankenstein".

After his return to Catalonia after World War II, Dalí became close to the Franco regime, met the dictator in person on several occasions and publicly expressed his admiration and support of the government's actions. In 2006 General Franco's granddaughter María del Carmen Martínez-Bordiú y Franco confirmed in her autobiography A Mi Manera, also published in Spanish magazine Hola!, that she as a child and young teenager had met Lear in the company of her grandfather and Salvador Dalì in the late 1950s and early 1960s - both before and after Lear's sex change took place.

However it should be added that Salvador Dalí, David Bowie, Carmen Martínez-Bordiú, Simon Napier-Bell, April Ashley, Romy Haag, Coccinelle, Ian Gibson, Carlos Lozano and Meredith Etherington-Smith all have stated that Lear is transsexual and rumours of her transsexuality predates her meeting with Dalí. She appears to have attempted to go into stealth mode after moving to London and finding her modelling career hampered by her past, with rumours flourishing concerning her true identity even at that stage in her professional life. Writer Ian Gibson has remarked: "With her atypical and ahistorical self-invention Lear became the prototype of the postmodern celebrity age, erasing and reinventing herself as she went along."

British actress and comedienne Joanna Lumley, who not only bears a striking physical resemblance to Lear but who also was a fashion model in London in the mid-Sixties herself, has in several interviews confirmed that her glamourous but notoriously foul-mouthed Absolutely Fabulous character Patsy Stone was loosely based on the mysterious life story of a certain A. Lear. (see Absolutely Fabulous, Series 2, Episode 3: Morocco) In 2001 Lear was even offered the part of Patsy Stone in the French film adaptation of the series, Absolument fabuleux, but she declined by saying that she had "already lived it". Interestingly, Amanda Lear’s MySpace page says her current record label is called Edina, the name of the other main Ab Fab character.

While Lear never has commented on any of these details publicly, she has admitted she was happy to trade on the notoriety that these rumours generated when she started her career as a disco diva in the mid-seventies. She then once famously said: " - It makes me mysterious and interesting. There is nothing the pop world loves more than a way-out freak." Some thirty years later, and while still maintaining that she is a natural-born woman, she has developped a more philosophical perspective on the matter: " - I know full well that in twenty years time people will say ' - Amanda Lear? Who was she?' ' - Oh you know, the one they thought was a man.' ' - Oh, that one...' They'll remember that because it touches sexual identity. It touches something we've all got inside us. They won't remember any of my songs, books or paintings. Fine by me - but at least they will remember me."

1975-1978: First unsuccessful songs and debut album

In 1975, disillusioned by a shallow but surprisingly conservative fashion industry and encouraged by boyfriend Bowie, who paid for singing and dancing lessons, Lear decided to launch a career in music.

Her debut single "Trouble", a pop-rock cover of Elvis Presley's 1958 classic from the King Creole soundtrack, was released by minor label Creole Records in the United Kingdom, but without success. Lear however recorded a French language version of the track, "La Bagarre", which was released on Polydor in France and while equally unsuccessful there, it surprisingly became a minor disco hit in West Germany in early 1976, catching the attention of singer, composer and producer Anthony Monn and label Ariola-Eurodisc, who offered her a seven year and six albums recording contract for a sum of money that Lear since has described as "astronomic".

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Performing Queen of Chinatown in 1978.

Her debut album I Am a Photograph, released in December 1976, was recorded in Munich, with most songs composed by Monn and arrangers Rainer Pietsch and Charly Ricanek and Lear writing all the English lyrics. The musical backing was provided by the same international session musicians as on contemporaneous recordings by best-selling Germany-based disco acts like Boney M. and Silver Convention, among them drummers Martin Harrison and Curt Cress, bassists Gary Unwin, Dave King and Les Hurdle and guitarists Geoff Bastow and Mats Björklund.

The title track "I Am a Photograph" was a reference to her days with the Zoli Modelling Agency, but Lear's selfpenned, witty, provocative and sometimes even slightly disturbing lyrics signalled that there was more to this former glam model than meets the eye. In Allmusic's biography on Lear reviewer Michael Freedberg writes: "I Am a Photograph is the first of six sleazy, hard-to-find albums in which she flaunts a voice so heavy with low notes it makes one wonder if she really isn't a man after all. But Lear's slow notes are simply an exaggeration of the whiskey-voiced sultriness created by Marlene Dietrich. That isn't to say, however, that Lear's lyrics — or the music's inverted proportions — don't exploit her mythology as a kinky concoction to the bursting point".

The album included Lear's first european hit "Blood And Honey", lyrically paraphrasing Dalí's 1941 painting La Miel Es Más Dulce Que La Sangre (Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood), follow-up single "Tomorrow" and a cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" and Leroy Anderson's "Blue Tango", all of which became repertoire standards. I Am a Photograph's mixture of lush disco, schlager, kitsch and camp, topped with Lear's deep half-spoken, half-sung vocals and her characteristic Franglais accent was a winning combination; the album spun off four Top 10 singles in Italy and stayed on the West German albums chart for thirty-three weeks alone. The second edition of "I Am a Photograph", which also contained German Top 5 hit "Queen Of Chinatown", sported a free pin-up poster picturing a topless Lear smiling towards the camera, a photo originally featured in her Playboy spread.

1978-1979: Sweet Revenge success

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Performing Follow Me in the 1978 controversial italian TV show Stryx.

In 1978, Lear continued her line of disco hits with Sweet Revenge, an album that opens with a side-long concept medley, a Faustian fairy tale of a girl who sells her soul to the devil for fame and fortune and her eventual revenge over the devil's offer - she finds true love.

The first single to be lifted off Sweet Revenge, the dark and seductive opening track "Follow Me", powered by Lear's characteristic deep and recitative voice and in fact the theme of the devil, was an instant smash hit, topped the West German singles chart and also went to #3 in The Netherlands, #4 in Belgium, #6 in Austria, #7 in Switzerland and was a Top 20 hit in most parts of Europe. The single is estimated to have sold some two million copies worldwide, and has served as Lear's signature tune ever since. The 12" mix of the track, mixed by Canadian DJ Wally MacDonald and originally only released in North America, also incorporates the finale of the concept medley, "Follow Me (Reprise)".

The Sweet Revenge album itself was certified gold in West Germany, Italy, France and Belgium and went on to sell in excess of four million copies and charted in forty-one countries, including Chile, South Africa, India and Thailand where it stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks, spawning further European hit singles like "Gold", "Mother Look What They've Done To Me", "Run Baby Run", all three from the concept medley, and "Enigma (Give A Bit Of Mmmh To Me)". Again, all of these tracks were co-written by Lear and this in combination with a larger-than-life image very much the creation of herself made her one of the few artists of the Eurodisco era whose star power and charisma even outshone the music itself - all according to plan - and the Amanda Lear persona left an impact on European pop culture that has lasted for three decades.

The front of the "Sweet Revenge" album cover shows Lear as a leather-clad S&M dominatrix cracking her whip, the sepia-toned back cover pic has her reclining on an old beer barrel with sequined curtains behind her, à la Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and the inner sleeve again pictured her posing topless. "Sweet Revenge is of course the album I'm most proud of. I put so much of myself into it. I wrote the lyrics, created the double cover, chose the pictures. I tried to tell a story. So, at least for me, it is the best one."

Salvador Dalì was not particularly impressed with Lear's musical career however: "Punk was in full swing in England. Dali was fascinated by this new trend, which he pronounced 'pounk'. He always loved anything extreme or revolutionary. Disco music left him cold. He pretended to be pleased about my success, yet he hardly listened to my second album before consigning it to the pile of records in quarantine beside the old gramophone."

1979-1980: US and URSS success

Later in 1978 Lear and Monn teamed up for Never Trust a Pretty Face, an album that includes a discofied reimagining of "Lili Marleen", a wartime classic that Lear managed to make her own and has since re-recorded in 1993 and 2001. "In Italy I'm big because they're all so sex-obsessed. In Germany I succeeded because they've been waiting for someone like Marlene Dietrich to come along ever since the war. I played on their need for a drunken, nightclubbing vamp. And I've won the gays, who are crucial because they have all the best discos, entirely because of the extraordinary legends about me."

While Lear may consider the best-selling Sweet Revenge her proudest moment, fans and critics alike usually rate Never Trust a Pretty Face as the artistic highpoint of her international career. It is often cited as a landmark in the history of "The sound of Munich", groundbreaking Giorgio Moroder/Donna Summer collaborations included, and it was in fact recorded in Moroder's renowned Musicland Studios with the assistance of keyboardist and composer Harold Faltermeyer and British drummer and arranger Keith Forsey, both later going on to become very successful record producers and hitmakers in their own right in the United States.

The album features a variety of genre exercises like the clever title track ballad "Never Trust a Pretty Face", shuffle rock track "Forget It", the cabaret-esque "Miroirs" with both music and French lyrics by Lear, futuristic electro disco like "Black Holes" and "Intellectually", and the hit single "Fashion Pack (Studio 54)".

The lyrics to this Eurodisco classic actually ridicule the superficial world of fashion and the decadent behaviour of the rich and famous and especially New York's disco glitterati of the era, offering some serious namedropping in the process: Liza (Minnelli), Francesco (Scavullo), Marisa (Berenson), (John) Travolta, Andy (Warhol), Loulou (de la Falaise), Margaux (Hemingway), Bianca (Jagger), (Yves) Saint Laurent, Paloma (Picasso) etc., according to her biography My Life With Dali all of them if not friends at least acquaintances of Lear's, but at this stage she herself had already left her days of jetsetting behind her, and had instead settled down for a quiet life with her husband in the French country side, near Avignon.

Another hit and standout track is the suggestive "The Sphinx" which Lear has since named as her personal favourite among her own recordings. The promotional campaign for Never Trust a Pretty Face very effectively continued to play on Lear's 'devil in disguise' persona, with the album cover, and with most European editions also a giant 24"x36" fold-out poster, portraying her as a mythological creature in the Egyptian desert, smiling innocently, with beautiful angel's wings - but also with a snake's tail.

Despite full-page ads by US licensee Chrysalis Records in Billboard magazine for Sweet Revenge, her personal connections with Bowie and Roxy Music, a feature in Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine with photos by Karl Stoecker, the same photographer who shot the cover of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure, and a two-month long promotional tour in the United States in early 1979, including appearances at discothèques and gay clubs like New York's Paradise Garage, The Saint and The Loft, Lear's commercial success in North America was moderate, and despite promotional gimmicks like red vinyl 12" singles and the Never Trust A Pretty Face album being released as a limited edition picture disc in the United Kingdom "the English remained immune to the effect of Amanda Lear", as she herself describes it in My Life With Dali.

Lear however succeded in establishing herself on another market, perhaps not as glamourous and prestigious but considering the vast population arguably more lucrative; the Soviet Union. Along with other artists she was one of the very few Western pop acts during the Cold War era to have her music officially released in the USSR by state-owned record label Melodiya. Both I Am a Photograph and Sweet Revenge had been released by Ariola Records in East Germany in 1978 and was then followed a by a series of singles and EPs issued by DDR record label Amiga in the late 1970s and early 1980s which found their way to other parts of Eastern Europe. An official visit to the USSR had been scheduled for 1982, but was ultimately cancelled due to the fact that Lear at that point in time was involved in a legal dispute with her record company.

In the mid-eighties Never Trust a Pretty Face was however the first full-length album with Lear to be approved of the Soviet authorities and issued in the USSR itself, then under the title Poet Amanda Lear, with a less controversial album cover and three additional tracks from I Am a Photograph and Sweet Revenge. Lear has had a large fanbase in the entire Eastern Bloc ever since and in late November 1997 she finally had the opportunity to make her very first visit to Moscow since the opening of the Iron Curtain to meet her Russian audiences, appearing on a TV show broadcast during the Russian New Year's festivities with an audience of approximately fifty million viewers and performing some of her disco classics like "Fashion Pack (Studio 54)", "Queen of Chinatown" and "Blood and Honey".

1980-1981: New Wave style, promotional tour and Incognito

1980 album Diamonds for Breakfast with artwork by Pierre et Gilles.

In late 1979 Lear recorded Diamonds for Breakfast, which became her commercial breakthrough on the Scandinavian market (#4 Sweden, April 1980, #10 Norway, December 1980, producing hits like "Fabulous (Lover, Love Me)", "Diamonds", "When", "Japan" and the autoerotic "Ho Fatto L'Amore Con Me".

The album abandoned the Munich disco sound with its lush strings and brass arrangements in favour of an electronic New Wave rock style, with the guitar riff driven opening track "Rockin' Rollin' (I Hear You Nagging)" setting the tone, most likely in accordance with Lear's own taste in music. She declared: "I really wanted to be the new Tina Turner, a rough rock singer, she's still my all-time favourite rockstar" and Diamonds for Breakfast was a step in that direction.

The album cover portrait of Lear, with diamond tears designed by Tiffany's running down her cheek, is notable in the history of art and design as it was one of the first major assignments for French photographers, Pierre et Gilles.

Lear spent most of 1980 on promotional tours for the album and its many accompanying single releases all over Europe, from Greece in the south to Finland in the north, and she also made her first visit to Japan where both the single "Queen Of Chinatown" and Sweet Revenge had topped the charts and were awarded with Gold Discs. Lead single "Fabulous Lover, Lover Me" from Diamonds for Breakfast famously includes the lines "The surgeons built me so well/that nobody could tell/that I once was somebody else" which is as close to a confession of a former identity as Lear has come - before or since.

Two non-album singles followed the Diamonds for Breakfast album in late 1980, a pop cover of Eric "Monty" Morris early ska hit "Solomon Gundie", and the chanson-esque "Chat De Gouttière" ("Alley Cat"), again with both music and lyrics penned by Lear and specifically recorded for the francophone markets.

The Lear/Monn success saga neared its end with 1981's Incognito, at which point Lear herself had become increasingly uncomfortable with the expectations and pressures of the music business in general, and her own record label in particular. She wrote:

The Germans told me "We're going to conquer the world!" and I don't regret working with a German record company at all, because for my career it was great, but they wanted to control me, direct me and restrict me. They wanted absolute discipline and that's not the life for me, so after a few years of that I wanted out.

1981 album Incognito.

In 1980, at the artistic and commercial peak of her international career, but with the so called "anti-disco backlash" beginning to take its toll, she had also tentatively started recording tracks for a forthcoming album with producer Trevor Horn in London. Ariola did not approve of this and in no uncertain terms made it clear that Lear was to return to Munich and provide the company and the market with another Monn product.

The result of these sessions was Incognito, with material only partly co-written by Lear, and only generating minor European hits like "Nymphomania", "New York" and the French language ballad "Égal", but paradoxally turning out to be her breakthrough album in South America, with three tracks especially recorded in Spanish: "Égal", "Berlin Lady" and "Ninfomanía".

Another non-album single followed in early 1982, a synth pop take on Peggy Lee's 1958 pop classic "Fever", Lear's final collaboration with producer Anthony Monn. Shortly thereafter she took legal action against the Ariola-Eurodisc label in order to be released from her recording contract on the grounds of artistic differences. The lawsuit was unsuccessful and as a result the subsequent double A-side single "Love Your Body"/"Darkness And Light", released in the Spring of 1983, was produced by Monn's sound engineer Peter Lüdermann instead of Monn himself, it became Lear's final Munich recordings for Ariola and also marked her final promotional appearance on West Germany's most important music TV show at the time, Der Musikladen, in June 1983.

1982-1984: Italian promotion of Tam-Tam and Premiatissima

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Performing Tam-Tam in the italian TV show Premiatissima.

Lear's international career momentum was however slowing and effectively came to an end in December 1983 as she delivered her sixth and final album to the Ariola label, under contractual obligation.

Just like the preceding italian single "Incredibilmente donna" from the compilation "Ieri, Oggi", "Tam-Tam" was a collaboration with Italian composers and producers. While both "Incredibilmente Donna" and the B-side "Buon viaggio" were mainstream italian pop ballads, "Tam-Tam" was a production wise up-to-date and minimalistic early 1980s synth pop album, with a soundscape dominated by TR-808 drum machines and sequencer programmed synthesizers and again with all English lyrics penned by Lear.

Although she performed some of the songs from the album on the Italian TV show Premiatissima, she didn't promote "Tam-Tam" in West Germany or any other parts of Europe and unfortunately as a consequence neither did the record company. Besides the lead single "No Regrets" was released only in Italy.

"Tam-Tam" subsequently passed unnoticed by both the European and the international record buying public, which may very well have been a blessing in disguise for Lear, considering her frosty relationship with Ariola at the time and her changing music style. At this stage Lear publicly began denouncing her earlier musical output, and then in her characteristically undiplomatic manner: "The music was crap, but at least I tried to write some clever lyrics."

Instead she went on to launch a very successful and lucrative career as a TV presenter with future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, soon becoming something of household name in what has since turned out to be her second homeland, Italy.

1987–1989: Music comeback and accident

After having worked four years as a TV entertainer for Italian Canale 5 and French La Cinq Lear returned to music. Secret Passion was an album made in Los Angeles and Rome for major French label Carrere, a post-disco Hi-NRG - New Wave affair produced by Christian De Walden, ready to be launched in January 1987. It wasn't only intended to be her comeback in Continental Europe, Scandinavia, South America, the Eastern Bloc and Japan, this time on her own terms, but also hopefully her breakthrough in anglophone territories like the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada and Australasia, which were more or less the only markets that she had not conquered during the Ariola years.

However tragedy struck, just as Lear was getting ready to start promoting the album she was seriously injured in a near fatal car accident and had to spend months in convalescence. Secret Passion's commercial success was consequently less than hoped for, and lead single "Wild Thing" was ultimately only released in a few countries like France, Italy and Greece, but this incident became the starting point of another phase in her career, this time as a writer.

While in hospital, Lear began writing her first novel "L'Immortelle" (The Immortal), a slightly surrealistic tale describing the torments of a woman doomed to eternal youth and beauty, watching everyone else growing older and eventually losing all her loved ones, still as beautiful, but unable to stop the merciless passage of time.

1989–2000: European albums, TV, movies and art

Lear sporadically returned to recording in the late eighties and nineties and released a series of singles and albums of new material in Italy, France and Germany, like mainstream pop albums Uomini Più Uomini in Italy and Tant Qu'il Y Aura Des Hommes in France, both released in 1989. She also returning to a more dancefloor-friendly repertoire on Eurodance albums Cadavrexquis in 1993 and Alter Ego in 1995, none of them however producing that elusive international comeback hit and though popular with her fanbase all also with varying degrees of commercial success in Europe itself.

Instead she focussed on her career in television and movies, also mainly in these countries, hosting popular TV shows like Cherchez La Femme in France, W Le Donne in Italy and Peep! in Germany. In 1989 on RAI 3, leads Ars Amanda (The Art of Loving) an Italian chat show conducted in bed, where she interviewing both Italian and international celebrities and politicians.

She also featured in a host of French films in various genres like Blanca Li's Le Défi (international title: Dance Challenge), about an eighteen year old boy who drops out of school, dreaming of becoming a star in break dancing, and the ensuing conflicts with his conservative mother, and with Lear co-starring as the mother's understanding and encouraging best friend - and fashion victim, giving her an opportunity to demonstrate her comedic talent.. In 1993 Lear surprised her audiences with her unglamourous and down-to-earth portrayal of the betrayed housewife Françoise in Arnaud Sélignac's TV-drama Une Femme Pour Moi (A Woman For Me), with Tom Novembre as her husband, going through a midlife crisis. In Bastian Schweitzer's drama Gigolo, she played a has-been star having an affair with the young Karim (Salim Kéchiouche), a gigolo trying to get his life back on track, trapped in a spiral of self-destruction in the artificial jet-set world of Paris. Lear has also appeared in several character roles in independent movies.

Mainly, she has however continued to pursue what she still describes as her greatest passion: art. From the mid-1980s, she has exhibited in major galleries all over Europe and also in the United States and during the last twenty-five years her time has been largely spent painting, exhibiting and lecturing on Dalì. Lear paints in oil, gouache and water colours on canvas or paper and has a certain penchant for portraying historical or mythological figures and the naked male body.

An exhibition in 2001 was entitled Not A. Lear, a reference to René Magritte's painting Ceci n'est pas un pipe (This Is Not a Pipe), and a collaboration with unestablished young artists in 2006 Never Mind The Bollocks: Here's Amanda Lear!, a paraphrase of the Sex Pistols' classic punk album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, but naturally also a self-ironic comment on Lear's own "ambiguous" mythology, which was the theme for the exhibition and in 2008 Sogni, Miti, Colori ("Dreams, Myths, Colours"). "People only know me as a celebrity in show business. They don’t know how much more important art is to me compared to makeup and set costumes. Show business pays the rent, but painting is my only true passion, so I define myself as a painter who works in show business."

With her status as one of Europe's leading gay icons Lear has been a strong advocate of LGBT rights in mainland Europe ever since the 1980s, she has regularly performed at Gay Pride festivals held in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands and Greece and has appeared on TV shows like Follement Gay and Pink TV. In 1996 Lear was one of the French celebrities to have a cameo role in the drama-comedy movie L'Amour Est À Réinventer: Dix Histories D'Amour Au Temps Du SIDA (translated: Love Reinvented: Ten Love Stories In The Age of AIDS), produced to promote awareness about HIV and AIDS and she has taken part in several charity projects to raise funds for AIDS research, such as the annual Life Ball fashion gala in Vienna, where she in the 90's made a temporary comeback on the catwalk to model for her longtime friend Paco Rabanne, some thirty years after their very first collaboration, and then in fact wearing the very same famous metal dress she first modelled in 1965.

2001–2002: Husband's death and Heart

In 2001, a year after having tragically lost her husband of twenty-one years in a much publicised accident, an explosive fire at their home, which was left in ruins, Lear threw herself back into work and released the aptly titled album Heart, dedicated to the late Alain-Philippe Malagnac. As many music critics commented, Heart was a serious effort with Lear's own heart and soul involved and both time and money invested in the project by French record company Le Marais Productions.

The album offered club-friendly tracks like "I Just Wanna Dance Again" and cult Seventies TV theme "The Love Boat", both issued as singles and featuring remixes by prominent names in the world of dance music like French electro-house DJ Laurent Wolf, Spanish production team Pumpin' Dolls and Junior Vasquez.

As a contrast, Heart also featured intimate and gently orchestrated interpretations of Charles Aznavour/Dusty Springfield's ballad "Hier Encore (Yesterday When I Was Young)" as well as Springfield/Burt Bacharach's 1967 classic "The Look of Love", along with a political reading of "Lili Marleen", provided with updated lyrics in German by original composer Norbert Schultze, written especially for Lear.

Heart was greeted as a long overdue return to form and turned out to be Lear's best-selling album since the late 1970s in both France and Germany and has since been re-released as Love Boat and Tendance, the latter taking its title from a televised fashion and trends magazine hosted by Lear on Paris Match TV.

The Tendance edition of Heart also includes the theme tune to her Italian TV series Cocktail d'amore, a top-rated nostalgic show celebrating music of the 1970s and early 1980s on which Lear interviewed some of Italy's most famous stars like Patty Pravo, Anna Oxa, Giuni Russo, Loredana Bertè and Ricchi e Poveri. The track "Cocktail d'amore" was originally written and recorded by Italian singer-songwriter Cristiano Malgioglio, who also composed Lear's hit single "Ho Fatto L'Amore Con Me" from her 1980 Ariola album Diamonds for Breakfast.

2002–2004: Italian and French TV success

In 2002, on the set of her Italia 1 TV series Il Brutto Anatroccolo a dating game show, Lear met Manuel Casella, thirty-nine years her junior. He has been her longtime companion ever since and the couple have been featured prominently in the pages of the tabloid press in both France and Italy. The theme of the show was a hip hop and rap influenced cover version of Melina Mercouri's 1960s recording "Never on Sunday" from the movie of the same name, called "Nuda", again performed by Lear but never commercially released.

Lear is renowned as much for her scathing wit as her reputation as a man magnet, which has made her an appreciated guest on various French talkshows for the past fifteen years. She is a regular member of the panel on French satirical radio show Les Grosses Têtes, hosted by well known radio celebrity Philippe Bouvard on RTL, where other guests sometimes refer comically to her former gender as male - which she usually ignores (as heard on the 13 September 2007 show), and TV show 20h10 Pétante on Canal+ hosted by Stéphane Bern. She is well-spoken, opinionated, provocative - drôlissime, and is just like her mentor and father figure Salvador Dalí known for having her very own take on concepts like truth and reality. She is equipped with a razorsharp tongue but luckily also with a disarmingly charming smile and a self-deprecating sense of humour.

She occasionally embarrasses or upsets other guests but rarely fails to entertain the audiences with her many anecdotes about other celebrities. For example, in 2002, Lear told New York's Paper Magazine about a run-in she had with German supermodel Claudia Schiffer a few years before. A Hollywood movie producer had optioned Lear's book My Life With Dali and wanted Schiffer to play Lear. "I ran into Claudia at a restaurant", Lear recalls. She said, 'I love your book! Who wrote it for you?' I said, 'I did, darling. Who read it to you?' So that was the end of that. They never made the movie."

2004 saw Lear's vocals used for an entirely different purpose; this time as a voice artist joining the international cast of Disney/Pixar's latest blockbuster of the time, The Incredibles. She played the role of fashion designer Edna Mode, originally voiced by Brad Bird, in both the French and Italian dubbings.

Since 2004 Lear has also been a regular member of the judging panel on popular TV show Ballando Con Le Stelle, the Italian version of Dancing with the Stars, broadcast on Rai Uno.

2005–2006: DJ Covers, Greatest Hits promotion and With Love

In 2005, Italian dance act The Housekeepers scored a European club hit with "Go Down", a reworking of Lear's 1977 hit "Queen of Chinatown" from her debut album I Am a Photograph. The original recording was also sampled and remixed that year by Hungarian DJ Sterbinzsky featuring Zola and in 2003 by German DJ collective Drag Desaster under the title "Queen of Drag" and the track, and most often its driving bassline, is now regularly being re-sampled in various dance, house and techno remixes. In 2006 the track was again remixed and re-issued as a single, then credited to DJEnetix feat. Amanda Lear, and prior to that "Blood And Honey", also from I Am a Photograph, for BMG-Ariola's compilation album Amanda '98 - Follow Me Back in My Arms. In 2004, another 1970s recording, "Enigma (Give A Bit Of Mmmh To Me)" from 1978's Sweet Revenge, was featured in TV ads for chocolate bar Kinder Bueno in Central Europe which resulted in it becoming something of a cult hit again and appearing on a number of European singles chart compilations, nearly three decades after its original release. Shortly thereafter, Spanish actor and singer Pedro Marín had a hit with a rock version of Lear's 1978 single "Run Baby Run", also originally from Sweet Revenge, which became the inspiration for a full-length tribute album entitled Diamonds - Pedro Marín canta Amanda Lear.

With the disco revival obviously still going strong and Lear celebrating thirty years in the music business, November 2005 saw the release of the first CD compilation to be both authorised and promoted by Lear; Forever Glam! - The Best of 1976-2005. In September 2006, the German subsidiary of Sony BMG followed suit with their comprehensive three disc box set The Sphinx - Das Beste Aus Den Jahren 1976-1983. This digitally remastered forty-two track collection was eagerly awaited by many fans since none of the six original Ariola albums, with the exception of the aforementioned Sweet Revenge and a pleuthora of Russian bootlegs transferred from vinyl, have been re-released in their entirety on compact disc. In the liner note interview Lear expresses a new-found acceptance and appreciation of her disco past. She declared: "It surprises me that the younger generations keep re-discovering this type of music, over and over again. They really seem to like these old recordings, still after such a long time. Perhaps they weren't so bad after all."

In the 2000s Lear also hosted several TV shows chronicling and celebrating the disco phenomenon, most recently France 3's two-hour special La Folle Histoire Du Disco in 2008.

In July 2006, Lear was decorated with the award Chevalier dans l'Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministre Of Culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres in recognition of her contributions to French arts and sciences, or more specifically for having "significantly contributed to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance", as the motivation reads. The occasion was slightly marred by the fact that the name appearing on the honour's list was 'Mme Amanda TAPP dite Amanda LEAR', marking the first time that the French authorities publicly confirmed that Lear's birth name indeed was Tapp, something she herself up until that point had denied.

On October 30, the album With Love was released in France by label Dance Street. This tribute is an extension of the ballads included on 2001's Heart as it exclusively covers evergreens and jazz standards by the diva's own favourite divas, among them "C'est Magnifique" (Eartha Kitt), "Is That All There Is?" (Peggy Lee), "Whatever Lola Wants" (Sarah Vaughan), "Love for Sale" (Hildegard Knef) and "My Baby Just Cares for Me" (Nina Simone). With Love was well received by the French music critics and was released in the rest of Europe by label ZYX Music in early 2007.

In 2008 the album was re-issued as a midprice release in Germany under the title My Baby Just Cares for Me. The Italian version of the album, Amour Toujours, also released in 2008, features two bonus tracks: an updated dance version of "Queen of Chinatown" and a salsa version of "Tomorrow", both originally from Lear's debut album I Am a Photograph.

2007–Present: Controversies and Brief Encounters

In 2007, Lear attracted media attention of a less favourable kind; she stunned the European LGBT communities and particularly her fans, by refusing to perform at an event held in Milan, Italy. Lear was booked for a performance in a gay club, but once there she refused to appear on stage with, be photographed with, or even be seen near a group of transsexual 'beauty queen' contestants, which caused a lot of bad feeling with the crowd and the annoyed organizers who even hinted at the "ambiguity" of her own past. Many of the Italian news reports about the incident cited the actual words uttered by Lear to the arrangers of the event, the Italian gay rights organization Arcigay, before leaving; "Tenete lontani i trans!" (translated: "Keep the trannies away from me!").

In the summer of 2008 Lear hosted several TV shows; one called Summer of the '70s on ARTE and another Battaglia fra sexy star on the E! channel in Italy.

Also, in November 2008 Amanda Lear announced on French television that she has recorded a brand new album, entitled Brief Encounters, due for release in spring 2009, with a mixture of disco originals, returning to her classic sound, as well as some classic covers from artists such as Lou Reed and David Bowie. One of the new songs recorded for the album is the Boney M.-esque disco number "Doin' Fine", co-written by disco writer/producer Frank Farian.

The song is essentially a whole new composition featuring the famous string arrangement from Boney M.'s 1976 #1 hit "Daddy Cool", and sees Lear teaming up with up and coming British producers Carl M Cox and Nathan Thomas, who between them have worked with the likes of Pete Waterman, Sinitta, Keane and Melanie C amongst others. The song was originally released by Australian singer Peter Wilson in 2007 on his album "Doin' Fine" (Klone Records UK). Wilson has also written 2 new original songs "Brand New Love Affair" and "C'est La Vie" for the album with fellow producer Chris Richards, and has produced a 3rd song, a cover of Elvis Presley/Willie Nelson/Pet Shop Boys "Always On My Mind"

Since March 2009 she's been touring France with the play Panique au Ministère.

Discography

Main article: Amanda Lear discography

Filmography

TV shows

• Stryx (1978)
• El Show de Amanda Lear (1981)
• Grey Street (1981)
• Premiatissima (1982-1983)
• Ma chi è Amanda? (1983)
• W Le Donne (1984/86)
• Cherchez La Femme (1986)
• Ars Amanda (1989)
• Peep! (Beware of the Blondes, 1995)
• Il Brutto Anatroccolo (2000)
• Cocktail d'amore (2001-2003)
• Tendance (2003)
• La Folle Histoire du Disco (2008)
• The Summer of the 70s (2008)
• Battaglia fra Sexy Stars (2008)

Movies

• Ne Jouez Pas Avec Les Martiens (1968)
• Follie Di Notte (Host and performer) (1978, Documentary)
• Zio Adolfo, in arte Führer (Singer) (1978)
• L'Amour Est A Réinventer - Dix Histoires D'Amour Au Temps Du SIDA (1996)
• Bimboland (Gina) (1998)
• Le Défi (Birgit) (Dance Challenge, 2002)
• Gigolo (The woman) (2005)
• Oliviero Rising (Antonietta) (2007)
• Starfuckers (2007)
• 8th Wonderland (Italian reporter) (2008)
• Bloody Flowers (Madame Charlotte, stilyst) (2008)

Dubbing

• The Incredibles (2004, voiced Edna Mode in the French and Italian versions)
• Chasseurs De Dragons (2008, voiced of Gildas in the French version)

TV series

• Der Kommissar (1969, episode "Keiner Hörte Den Schuß")
• Grottenolm (Dr. Ludmilla Nerovna) (1985)
• Marc Et Sophie (1988, episode "Astrochiens")
• Maggy (1989, episode "Doriana Wilding")
• Piazza di Spagna (1993)
• Une Femme Pour Moi (1993)
• Les Années Bleues (1998)
• Gala (Herself, co-host) (2003)
• Sous Le Soleil (Sonia Rio) (2005)
• Un Amour De Fantôme (Elizabeth) (2007)
• Avocats Et Associés (Herself) (2007)

Bibliography

• A Qui Fait Peur Amanda Lear? (1979)
• My Life With Dalì, also Persistence of Memory: A Personal Biography of Salvador Dalí; original French title: Le Dali D'Amanda, also Mon Dalì and L'Amant Dalì (1984)
• L'Immortelle (1987, novel)
• Mon Dalí (2004, updated and expanded re-issue)
• Between Dream And Reality (2006, Collected art)

References

General

• Lear, Amanda (1986). My Life With Dali. Beaufort Books. ISBN 0825303737
• Gibson, Ian (1997). The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. W.W. Norton co. ISBN 0393046249
• Lozano, Carlos (2000). Sex, Surrealism, Dalí, and Me. Razor Books Ltd. ISBN 0953820505
• Etherington-Smith, Meredith (1995). The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dalí. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306806622
• Ashley, April (1982). April Ashley's Odyssey. ISBN 0-224-01849-3
• Ashley, April. (2006) The First Lady. John Blake Publishing Ltd. ISBN 1-84454-231-9
• Haag, Romy. (1999) Eine Frau Und Mehr. Quadriga. ISBN 3886793281
• Millet, Catherine. (2005) Dali Et Moi. Gallimard. ISBN 2070771040
• Biography, Umelec magazine (2000)
• Interview with The Telegraph (2001)
• Interview with Night Magazine (2002)
• Interview with Zing Magazine (2002)
• Carla Antonelli: interview on Salvador Dalí and Amanda Lear (in Spanish)

External links

• Amanda Lear Official Website
• Amanda Lear new album Brief Encounters
• Official Myspace Page
• Official Facebook Page

Information-sites:

• Amanda Lear at IMDb
• Amanda Lear at AllMusic
• Template:Last.fm