I Was a Junior Rock Star

Just ask my Barbie dolls!

When we are very young, we tend to fall into the category of delusionists. We will genuinely believe that we’re married to some Hollywood hunk, we’ll act like we’re movie stars, supermodels, rock stars, ballerinas — hell, we even wait up endlessly every Christmas Eve for some bearded fat man in a red suit who rides a sleigh led by eight tiny reindeer. But, regardless of the likelihood of the events ever occurring in real life, we truly see that glimmer of hope.

Back in my younger years, when a child’s mind can conjure up the most bizarre scenarios, my sister Katherine and I had our own band, Mrs Yankee and the Rocketettes. You won’t have heard of us, but believe me, we had many smash hit singles in the mid-80s; songs such as ‘Medium Sized Elephants’, ‘I Hate Spinach’, ‘Me (Do You Like Me?)’, and ‘Rosie (Time for Milking Now)’ — a touching tribute to a forlorn cow.

Having received from the jolly fat man one Christmas a tape recorder and some blank cassettes, we spent most of our free time recording ourselves, and during an enthusiastic jam session, our band’s sound just came together. We discovered, too, that we were rather prolific songwriters, not quite Elton and Bernie, but getting there.

During the recording of our first album, “Blast Off”, we ran into some technical difficulties when Katherine, our highly talented lead singer, junior Casio keyboard player and drummer, destroyed one of her drumsticks (more commonly known as Mum’s wooden spoon) during a particularly thunderous solo on her set of snare drums (i.e. an arrangement of multi-coloured ice cream containers).

As recording time was quite costly- Monopoly money doesn’t grow on trees, you know! — and our record company, Barbies Inc. had us working to a tight schedule, we had to think fast. After a brief panic session we turned to the nine-year old’s best friend, sticky tape.

“What an ingenious idea,” we chorused delightedly and, having reassembled the two snapped halves of the wooden spoon and wrapped them around with lashings of scotch tape, we resumed our “recording session”, i.e., pressed the play and record buttons simultaneously on the little tape recorder.

Once our album was recorded and we had listened back proudly to our completed work, we set about dismantling our equipment. Our state of the art synthesiser (courtesy of Mattel toys) was switched off, the rubber bands were removed from our tissue-box guitars, and the drum kit was stacked neatly back into the kitchen cupboard. Now came the tricky part; replacing and disguising our damaged drumstick before Mum set about cooking dinner.

While one of us handled the reconnaissance operation, the other hid around the corner with the offending instrument, awaiting the all-clear. When we finally heard the wire door slam, signalling Mum’s journey out to the washing line, we made our move. With one final inspection of our reparative handiwork, we raced into the kitchen and replaced the disabled drumstick back amongst its fellow spoons.

Only two primary school pop-stars could have genuinely believed that half a roll of scotch tape wrapped around a cooking utensil would go unnoticed, and our attempt at espionage was quickly rumbled (not least because my sister and I couldn’t stop giggling when Mum reappeared). However, this unfortunate incident did not prevent “Blast Off” from debuting at Number One on ‘Barbie’s Hottest 100' and staying there a further twenty-two months! So what if we liked to exaggerate our popularity? We were, quite naturally, our own biggest fans.

Believing as we did that we were a highly-in-demand commodity, we decided that we should go on tour. On Friday evening, we booked ourselves into numerous venues around the backyard, and early Saturday morning we loaded up our Barbie camper-van with all the necessary equipment, including the essential factor -our very own portable audience made up of Barbies, Kens, Sindys and Skippers (remember them?).

After all the hype and hard work that went into our performance, we were disappointed by the somewhat inanimate response we received from our audience, so in a daring act of defiance and self-delusion worthy of Kanye West, we took to recording our own audience responses as back-up. These enthusiastic cheers were expertly provided by Katherine and I recording ourselves screaming and applauding onto another cassette, and playing it back intermittently throughout our live gigs. This provided a realistic background ambience for our live recordings, which were released later that week on a Special Edition three cassette Box Set of our greatest hits, which we planned to package with a free t-shirt and a complementary bottle of our trademark fragrance, Eau de Yankee.

In the weeks following our successful live album’s release, we held our own pretend rock festival — “Yankee Stock ‘85”- a free-love concert where rampant nudist Barbie dolls with plaits and flowers in their hair mud-wrestled to the joyously melodic (?!) strains of “Medium Sized Elephants — The Remix”. The triumphant occasion, however, played a significant role in the demise of our legendary band. A well publicised sherbert addiction saw Katherine’s alter-ego ‘Mrs Yankee’ admitted to the infamous Barbie Ford Clinic, where she stayed for a year.

At that point, the retro fad was coming into vogue, and it was suggested that we re-record our “Blast Off” l.p. However, by this time the audience that had once enjoyed our truly groundbreaking sound were now packed in cardboard boxes and collecting dust in the garage, and any possibility of the band reforming was put permanently to rest when we encountered the trials, tribulations and masses of time-consuming homework of the teenage years.

However laughable the whole junior rock and roll fantasy is now, it is still great fun to recall it, and to reminisce that for a brief moment we joined the ranks of the best faux-bands of all time- Spinal Tap, The Rutles, Milli Vanilli. In fact, a few years ago the “Blast Off” tape resurfaced when our mother was clearing out some old boxes, and Katherine and I sat down together to listen. We were in tears of laughter throughout, and could remember every line, every giggle, every moment of hilarious caterwauling. Her husband’s reaction, meanwhile, was one of puzzled bemusement.

The thing is, Mrs Yankee and the Rocketettes were just so far ahead of their time that actual human adults simply didn’t “dig their sound”. But in the minds of two pre-teen sisters (and their now grown-up counterparts) however, they were the greatest rock and roll band of all time.

Jupiter Grant is a self-published author, blogger, narrator and audiobook producer.

Inquiries and comments are always welcome. You can also find me on Twitter @GrantJupiter

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