‘They’re young, female and they don’t care: they want their 15 minutes and they’re getting it now.’ In 1995, the Observer accompanied Shampoo – ‘two sulky girls from southeast London’ –on tour to Tokyo.
Jacqui (20) and Carrie (18) were big in Japan: they had sold more records that year than the Beatles or Stones, becoming the country’s biggest selling international artists. Their brand of girl-coded, exuberantly pink rebellion had captivated a generation of Japanese girls kicking against the expectation that they would dutifully ‘acquire a good education in order to be a perfect wife and wise mother’. Girls chased Shampoo down the streets of teen hotspot Harajuku, shyly shouted out the girls’ names at gigs and lip-synced lyrics that resonated: ‘Delicious running wild in the city late at night / Delicious powder pink / Don’t you think we’re outta sight?’
The Plumstead duo understood: they were fans before becoming pop stars. As schoolfriends, they bonded over a shared love of the Manic Street Preachers, starting a fanzine together. From fanzine writers they became a Smash Hits sensation through sheer chutzpah, cornering indie label boss Bob Stanley and telling him, ‘We’re brilliant pop stars with loads of songs.’ That wasn’t true, ‘but they looked great and oozed that most important pop star requisite: attitude’. The name Shampoo came from the brush-off they offered boys who asked them out: they were washing their hair.
Tokyo adored the girls, and Shampoo returned the favour: they loved the city’s high-kitsch, slogan-heavy fashion (‘The clothes in Europe are all boring’) and the love-bombing. ‘There are no bitchy girls here like there are in London,’ Carrie commented. ‘There we get them calling us slags. In Japan the girls dress like us and come and hug us, it’s really lovely.’
The reactions they got from men were less welcome. When they sneaked out to a club, ‘Boys were trying to hug us and stick their tongues down our throats,’ said Jacqui. ‘It was mad.’ Little wonder, perhaps, that the only words of Japanese they had learned were ‘a colloquial insult meaning “small dick”’.
