Love You 'Til You're Sore

Tigger warning: depictions of sexual assault

I was fifteen when I fell for the lead singer in Bad Romance.

Lots of people said they were just a group of Duran Duran wannabes, but I didn’t care. Jake Phipps, their frontman, was beautiful: with finely chiselled cheekbones, hair that flopped over his eyes, and trousers so tight you wondered if they were his natural skin, he was every girl’s daydream and every mother’s nightmare.

I think it was partly the overt sexuality of the songs that had our parents worried. Sceptics claimed that ‘Love You ‘Til You’re Sore’ was cashing in on the success of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’: the BBC banned both records because of their ‘obscene’ lyrics, but we still bought them anyway. I’d spend hours singing along to the lyrics –

I’m gonna thrust and groan

Make you twist and moan

Baby, I’m gonna love you ‘til you’re sore –

at the time naïvely oblivious to what the words actually meant.

           When I finally managed to get a ticket to go and see them, I was ecstatic. By now, I was in the Upper Sixth, doing A level English, French and History. The concert was on a Saturday night in November and Sophie (my best friend from school) and I would be taking the train to Manchester, going to McDonald’s (the height of sophistication at the time, since the chain hadn’t reached our village yet) and then onto the gig. It all felt very glamorous.

           Sophie had dressed up for the occasion and sizzled in a black mini dress with matching knee-length boots and lashings of smoky black eyeliner. By comparison, I looked innocent and virginal in my long skirt and embroidered blouse. (I was desperate for a Bad Romance t-shirt, but I knew my parents would never allow me to wear one.)

I needn’t have worried, though: the crowd was an eclectic mixture of die-hard New Romantics, adoring teenage fans, and university students who were pretending to be bored; and with no set dress code, I could blend into the background.

As the band came on stage, I felt my heart flutter. Jake was just as moodily gorgeous as ever, and the guitarist and the drummer oozed good-looking nonchalance. When the first notes of ‘Up Against The Wall’ started, the atmosphere was electric.

Caught up in the heady excitement of the pounding beat and the throbbing synth, I lost myself in the lyrics, becoming one with the crowd as we swayed and stomped to the songs we knew. Perhaps I overdid it, because after a while, I realised I was feeling wobbly and lightheaded and knew I needed air.

Pushing my way through the crowd, I stumbled to a door marked ‘Fire Exit’, taking large, grateful gulps of air once I was on the other side.

“Aren’t you on the wrong side of the door?”

I looked up, startled. For a moment, I thought Jake had left the stage as I stared at chiselled cheekbones and floppy hair; then the stranger took another drag on his cigarette and I realised my mistake: Jake’s always been anti-smoking.

“Aren’t you on the wrong side too?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Nah. I’m one of the roadies. I can get you backstage to meet the band if you like.”

“Seriously?” I demanded, my faintness already forgotten. Sophie would be so jealous when she found out!

His eyes moved over my body slowly. “We could kill a bit of time until they’re ready to come off stage...”

I hesitated. I had always been a ‘good girl’, but I was momentarily intoxicated with the thrill of doing something I knew my parents would definitely disapprove of. Besides, deep down, every good girl secretly wants a bad boy.

I let him take me by the hand and lead me through another door and into a darkened room that smelled of cigarettes and beer. His first kiss took me by surprise. His lips were more forceful than I’d expected, his tongue almost stampeding into the innocence of my mouth as he pressed me back against the wall. When I think about it now, I can’t even remember how we came to be lying on the floor only a few moments later, the distant sound of ‘Love You ‘Til You’re Sore’ filtering through the corridor. I see only flashes of memory. Hands pushing me down... His knee forcing my legs apart... His weight on top of me. My tearful sobs were drowned by the rapturous applause as the song ended and the band left the stage.

I’m not sure how I managed to find my way back to the concert hall and Sophie, only know that she was on such a high from seeing her idols that she’d scarcely noticed my absence.

Going home on the train, she kept rambling on about how amazing it had all been, how it was the best night of her life, and so on. Every word twisted my gut a little tighter until I thought I was going to throw up.

Mum and Dad had already gone to bed by the time I got in. I crept up the stairs silently, heading straight for the bathroom, unable to believe what had happened. Hands pushing me down... His knee forcing my legs apart... His weight on top of me. I cried afterwards. Before, during and afterwards; but he didn’t stop. Silently, I washed my face – but I couldn’t wash away the memory.

Ten months later and I was off to Birmingham to study English, carrying my secret with me and hiding it in my room. I was still traumatised by what had happened. Back then, people didn’t talk about that sort of thing: there was no awareness of what we’d now call ‘date rape’, no internet, no #MeToo. Despite this, it was taken for granted that all students were sexually active. The discovery of AIDS was a fairly recent phenomenon in 1985 and we were all told to carry condoms. A few years later, they would be issued free to every Fresher as part of a welcome pack; for now, we had to buy our own.

The dissemination of information about STDs had me worried for a while. My nameless seducer definitely hadn’t practised safe sex. Hands pushing me down... His knee forcing my legs apart... His weight on top of me. I felt dirty for days afterwards. I wondered if I should see a doctor, just to check that I didn’t have any of the diseases mentioned in the helpful leaflet from the University Health Centre; but I was too ashamed to tell anyone about it.

As the year progressed, I found I still couldn’t talk about the incident. From time to time, when people played the drinking game ‘Did you ever...?’, I kept waiting for someone else to ask, “Did you ever get raped by a guy who pretended to be a roadie for Bad Romance?” but no one ever did.

Sometime in my second year, I was asked out by someone I’d been friends with for ages. We went for dinner at The American Food Factory and then walked back to Hall. When we reached my door, he looked at me enquiringly. Panic rose in my throat as the lyrics to ‘Love You ‘Til You’re Sore’ echoed in my mind.

“I can’t,” I told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand. “I’m sorry – I just can’t.”

He didn’t understand, but the next guy did. Steve was an old acquaintance from the sixth form, and we ran into each other by chance when I was home for the Easter holidays. A friendly drink together, ‘just to catch up on old times’, turned into something more when I realised our attraction to each other was mutual. Kissing in The Fox was okay – it was a public place after all; it was only when he talked about visiting me at university that I realised there might be a problem.

For the first time, I found myself confessing the events of the Bad Romance night, half expecting Steve to walk away in disgust as I narrated the sordid truth. Hands pushing me down... His knee forcing my legs apart... His weight on top of me. The look on his face – twisted and contorted like some ghastly gargoyle, while tears ran down my face.

By way of response, Steve kissed the top of my head. “We don’t need to do anything you don’t want to,” he told me; and for the next few months, we didn’t do anything. And then we did.

Steve and I were together for eighteen months before we finally drifted apart. I still think of him from time to time and how he restored my faith in men and in myself. The other day, I heard ‘Love You ‘Til You’re Sore’ on the radio and the words didn’t affect me at all. And, for the first time, I realised what a terrible song it is.