PATSY KENSIT:
Love her or hate her, she has been half of one of the most unexpected and analysed relationships of the decade. She (and Liam Gallagher) finally break their silence and talk to Richard Benson about their year of living dangerously.
Ono, it's Patsy! "All the Yoko stuff is crap," she says. "I don't tell him what to do." "It's just that we're just the same kind of people, man," say Liam.
OUR PATSY
All year she's seen herself portrayed as a fickle, scheming, underachieving bimbo intent on cowing Liam Gallagher and breaking up Oasis. And neither she nor Liam feels this is entirely fair. "We want to tell THE FACE our side of the story," she said. "Can you come round?"
"On the one hand I get called a scheming, calculating bitch, and on the other they say I'm a brainless bimbo. I just wish they'd make their minds up."
The first time I enter the lounge of the Kensit-Gallagher household in London's St. John's Wood, Liam Gallagher sits on a sofa watching Football Focus, Patsy Kensit makes pleasant, chatty conversation, and Liam's mother, Peggy, who is visiting, talks to me about how her brother used to work as a miner in Yorkshire, and then about how her son will this afternoon be taking her to Bond Street to buy shoes. There is very little there that is rock'n'roll, except for the two framed black-and-white photographs of John Lennon that hang above the fireplace. These pictures - together with a few magazines (Hello!, the Mr. Men comic) on the coffee table, and some videos (Sixties music; Lennon) in the corner-are the only things in the room that belong to Liam and Patsy; their stuff is being kept in storage while they search for a new home.
They still haven't found anywhere, says Patsy. They did see a nice place last week...
Most of Patsy's London friends were appalled, "They said 'He'll drag you down! Don't do it. He'll bring you down!'"
"If I was 14 now and I was going to see Oasis, then I would have Liam's picture on my wall."
..."but there was this problem with the garden. The house itself was a million - which would have been all right - but when we talked to them about it we found the gardens were another 600,000(pounds), because the deeds were separage or something. And we were like 600,000(pounds)?"
"Six hundred grand for a bit of grass!" says the flop-haired voice of a generation from somewhere down in the cushions, clearly disgusted at the sharp practices of the London property market. "Six hundred grand?"
I shake my head in sympathy. All three of us shake our heads. Then Peggy says: "But Liam. That did include a tennis court, didn't it?"
Worlds collide, and the past creeps up in varied and interesting ways round Liam'n'Patsy's; although it doesn't usually cause problems, Patsy sometimes has to be careful. Earlier in the week she and Peggy had been talking about Eighth Wonder, the much lampooned band of which Patsy was lead singer in the Eighties. Peggy hadn't nown her intended daughter-in-law had been a singer until she heard "I'm Not Scared", the band's lone hit from 1988, Patsy, would have none of it. "She said, 'There's a lot worse then that, Patsy, I tell you," the ex-singer tells me later. "She said she had a copy at home, and Liam was going, 'Mum, send it down!' He's been trying to get a copy of it since he started going out with me, because he knows I don't want to talk about it. I'm going to have to sift through the post."
The past, of course, is relatively easy to sift through and hide. It's the present that Patsy's having problems with, and with these difficulties her betrothed proves a good deal more helpful. She's learned a lot from him over the past year, she says later that day in her local restaurant, staring into a flat buck's fizz; she just wishes she shared his indifference to bad press.
She thinks it unfair that she's portrayed as "someone's girlfriend", when she had an acting career and a life - "a busy life" -before she met Liam Gallagher. She doesn't like the personal insults- "On the one hand I get called a scheming, calculating bitch, and on the other they say I'm a brainless bimbo. I just wish they'd make their minds up"-and she's mystified as to why, when she tries to be pleasant to journalists, they don't respond. "I just think," she pleads at the end of one speech defending herself, "that if you sit down with me and then you go away and there's not something that you've found of some worth in that girl, then I thing that your blood must be running cold. Because even if you dislike someone, if you have a chat with them there might be one thing in them you connect with."
Her big problem, she says, is that she's "always trying to please people"-which is of course another way of saying that she would like people to like her. Liam, as she points out, and you may have already deduced, is less concerned, which is why he "has been really good for me. Because he doesn't give a fuck. He's like, 'Tell them to fuck off! Don't fucking talk to them, they're all cunts.' Whether it's broadsheet, tabloid or whatever. He really doesn't give a fuck. and I admire that, because it means you can't get hurt."
Patsy and Liam, back on the couch a week later. Peggy has gone home with two pairs of shoes and five cardigans. Patsy, beaming and very gal-about-St. John's Wood in black polo-neck jersey, shorts and tights, has just been to collect James, her four-year-old son by ex-husband Jim Kerr, from school. Liam, who despite the dim lighting and warmth of the room is wearing sunglasses and a vast blue Henri Lloyd yachting jacket, has been finishing recording what he says will be the new Oasis single (It's Getting Better Man; "Rawer... a bit 'Street Fighting Man', with maracas"). It seems well to start at the beginning.
The papers say it won't last; you say it'll be forever. When did you fall in love with each other?
Patsy: About three months after Oasis played Maine Road, we went on holiday to Anguilla. It was just like him and I on this island, and we stayed on the beach talking and laughing all day. Then one afternoon he went off to a bar to see this mad rasta who used to play with Bob Dylan. I wasn't into it at all so I went back to the hotel and I missed him. I'd said I'd come back for him in an hour, but I set off early, and I came across this figure walking down the road, shimmering in the heat waves, like Lawrence of Arabia. And I'm like 'What are you doing?' and he said 'I missed you and I wanted to come back.' I know it sounds soft, but...
Liam: It sounds double soft, man.
Patsy: But it was love, wasn't it?
Liam: Yeah...(slightly stuck for words)Mad for it.
It was widely reported that you, Patsy, were in some way to blame when Oasis cancelled their tour of America in the summer. How do you plead?
Liam: We should never have gone to America then-we should have had time off after Knebworth. The band didn't fall out; it was just that we got sick of touring. We'd been on a bus for the last two or three years, and we just woke up. It was nothing to do with Patsy. We were in a hotel near Atlanta and Noel came down one morning and said he was going home.
We all want to go home before, and I was like (jumps up and bounces across room to indicated remembered joy; Patsy laughs)fucking top one man! It's been ages! When's the flight!
Patsy: The papers said I was by your side at the summit meeting in Atlanta, but I was actually i LA promoting a film, and I hadn't seen him for four days. I don't have anything to do with the band.
Laim: (taking hold of Patsy's hand) So Noel got off, and then I went and told you, didn't I...
Patsy: No you didn't fucking ring and tell me. I found out from my office. I called you and you said you had ten minutes before you were getting the plane home.
Liam: Oh yeah...
Patsy: And I was just aobut to go and do a junket where I had to face all these British journalists, so I was like, thanks for telling me. I thought fine, I've had weeks of being called the evil-est woman in Britain, I've been blamed for him coming back from the airport to find a house, and now the band's cancelled the tour. I couldn't deal with it; I didn't want my kid on the news. So I said I'd pick up James and go to Ireland with him, because I could disappear there. And (turns to Liam) you took it the wrong way, and said, 'Right, well fuck you. my head's up my arse and I want you with me." So I cancelled all my LA work for the week and I came back and we went to the cottage in Sussex for four days.
Liam: And it wasn't getting sorted out. We couldn't go out; we couldn't do statements. And the management were like, "Just do it this way" and I was like no, because Patsy's getting slated. If it was any other band member's girlfriend, if it was Noel or Meg...
Patsy: We don't know that, Liam.
Liam: ...it would have been sorted out.
Patsy: We were like in limbo waiting for a statement to be put out, and of course everyone was assuming it was Patsy's fault.
Why didn't they put out a statement?
Liam: I don't really know...
Patsy: I don't know...(pauses) It's just easy to find a scapegoat, and.. I'm sure that any girl Liam was with would have got it. But it was me... At the time it was sad, but obviously we're double close now because of it. You can't go through something like that together and not be. It's either going to split you up or you're going to spend the rest of your life together.
Before all that there were those rather amusing pictures of you kicking the car containing Liam, reportedly because he had spent the night with Kate Moss.
Patsy: That was because his mum had come down to see him, and he didn't show up. It's got nothing to do with Kate Moss.
Liam: I was pissed in a hotel somewhere with about ten people, and then suddenly it's all me and Kate Moss. I didn't speak to her all night.
Patsy: I pulled over at the side of the road, because I didn't want to talk to him about it in the house because his mum was there. (Laughing) It was a great photograph, you've got to admit. But it was a horrible contest. And it wasn't a street normally frequented by the paparazzi...
Liam: It was a fucking normal street. Somebody's rung them up. It was down to somebody in the load of snidey people in the so-called circle of Oasis. That's why I'm not knocking about with them any more. That's why it's just me and Patsy doing our own thing.
It was also reported in May that you said you were pregnant.
Patsy: I don't want to talk about that...
Liam: That was me being a dickhead when we were coming home from a gig in Cardiff. I rang Chris Evens up on the radio, and he asked how Patsy was, and I said "pregnant". He said "Who by?" and I said "Meg", and then he went "Oh, Patsy's pregnant..." We were both pissed.
Patsy: (sighs) It was a nightmare...
Neither says anything more about this.
They didn't meet properly for the first time till December, when Patsy went to film Pyjama Party in Manchester. Her friend, Lisa Moorish, who was then having an on-off relationship with Liam, gave Patsy his number and suggested that she should call him if she wanted to go out. Patsy packed packed her manager Steve Dagger and her friend Jacqui Hamilton-Smith, and set off. "We thought we'd go out for a night in Madchester," Patsy says, with a slight trace of embarrassment "You know, seven years too late, but we thought, 'Fucking hell! Let's goto Madchester!"
At first things went slowly; Patsy was bemused by the way the wild man of rock kept coming to sit next to her and then not saying anything. The evening would warm up slightly when they retired to the bar of Liam's hotel, and Liam received a phone call from Lisa. Having been to see the Stone Roses that night, she informed him that she had "just seen the second Coming." This for reasons to which both of them now struggle to attach rational explanination, prompted Liam to shout "Fuck that!" and turn the glass table holding the party's drinks upside down.
Steve told Patsy she should leave, because he thought -this seems some what ironic now, of course- the incident could end up in the papers. She said she was enjoying herself too much, and so they compromised by taking the whole party back to Patsy's room in the Holiday Inn, where they all stayed drinking and talking. As the Londoners were leaving in the morning, Liam gave her a quick kiss, said, "Are you gonna give me you phone number or what?", and wnet back to his hotel.
Liam woke up the next morning turned to his friends and said "Patsy Fucking Kensit! I've got her number. She's mad for it!"
When he first woke, fully-clothed, upside down on the bed, he blinked, jumped up, turned to his friends in the room and said "Fucking hell! Patsy Fucking Kensit! I've got her fucking number. And she's mad for it!"
Patsy's friends in London were less impressed then Liam's. When she started seeing him most of them were appalled (Patsy never mentions Lisa Moorish by name, but gossip suggests that she was none too delighted either). "The said, 'He'll drag you down Patsy! Don't do it! He'll bring you down,'" she says, gleefully. They are all still saying it; many of her Eighties acquaintances on the London ligging circuit will tell you, behind her back, that she should leave him alone, because without his popstardom, he's nothing but a Manchester oik(that's a quote) and no good for her(so't that). But she found she just got on with him. "The first two or three dates we just talked and talked," she says "And he listened to me. We talked about what he wanted from a relationship, and about music-he'd played loads of stuff-and a lot about John Lennon. I was never a big John Lennon fan until I met Liam."
As she is at pains to point out, Patsy Kensit does have an acting career, and it is about to recieve a bit of a boost with the release next year of her new film, Grace Of My Heart. Produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Allison Anders, it's a good, if slightly overlong, ensemble piece based on the life of the songwriter Carol King, starring John Turturro, Illeana Douglas, Eric Stoltz and Matt Dillon. Patsy-who turns in a highly convincing rendition of a bitchy British songwriter who at first competes with and then befriends the heroine-liked working with these people. So much so, in fact, that even on her days off she would go down and hang out on set, just talking to them. She talked to Scorsese, and in particular she mentions the first day acting with John Turturro as a "definitive moment".
"Working with him the first time was really nerve-wracking. It was fantastic.. Before, I'd had a huge crush on him, and he was awesome, a brilliant actor."
"You fancied him," says Liam.
"John is married with kids and stuff, Liam. I just looked up to him," she says.
"No, no, no, you fancied him," says Liam, looking at me and raising his eyebrow. "You said you did."
"Well, I didn't mean it," says Patsy. "It came out wrong anyway."
Patsy's childhood was not so disimilar to Liam Gallagher's as you might think. She was born in 1968, and she grew up in a semi-detached house in the west London suburb of Hounslow, with her brother Jamie (31, founding member of Eighth Wonder; they don't talk anymore), her mother Margie(a charismatic, fashionable, woman who worked as a PA at Christian Dior) and, sometimes, her father. Her dad owned a Soho nighclub called Roaring 20s, but according to Patsy his enthusiasm for gambling together with a background in petty crime(known as Jimmy The Dip, he was on the fringes of the Kray empire; Reggie is, ahem, godfather to her brother Jamie) meant that he was in prison during much of her childhood. Her mother secured her daughter's break when Patsy was four, when a casting director friend mentioned that she was looking for a cute little girl to play the daughter of Mia Farrow and Robert Redford in the film of The Great Gatsby. By the mid-Eighties she was fronting Eighth Wonder and most notably starring as the female lead in Absolute Beginners, the over hyped and under achieving 1986 film version of the Colin McInnes novel. She made enemies for life during this early period of her career by adopting a sub-Madonna persona in interviews; one line in particular, about wanting nothing other than fame and praying to God for it every night, has dogged her ever since. A love-interest part in 1989's Lethal Weapon II edged her far enough on to the Hollywood circuit for her to make a career there. Much of it has been minor stuff, straight to video, made for TV, "butt-awful" as she puts it, but she also lays claim to some quality work. Cheifly, Silas Marner with Ben Kingsley, for the BBC; last year's Angels and Insects; and perhaps....
"The Eighties were so much about not being honest. Then along comes a bunch of lads who say, 'Yeah, that's our background, no pretending"
...Don Boyd's 21("When John Squire came to stay with us he said he loved the movie, and I was thrilled that someone like him had watched a piece of my work"). There have also been the two-rack-star marriages, of course to Dan Donovan of Big Audio Dynamite in 1988, and to Simple Minds' Jim Kerr in 1992, from whom she split in January 1995.
An entire life in a bitchy business has, she says, left her with just two close trustworthy friends: Grania Fletcher, a restauranteur who once worked for the plugging company that sericed Eighth Wonder; and Mariella Frostrup, who worked for the same company, and went on to become Patsy's PR person and godfather to James. ("She says: what do you expect? If you're going out with an icon, you'll be in the firing line.")
Patsy thought it was ironic when Here! ran the story about her making Liam see a therapist(the couple deny it ; it's the only story Liam's suing over) because she had often wanted to go to see one herself. Her mother had always been her closest friend, and when she died in 1993 she would tell her secrets to her friends, and then hear them back from someone else, which made her realise she was on her own. Now she's scared to tell her friends things in case it's too juicy not to repeat it."
You might laugh at Patsy and Liam -let's face it you have laughed at Patsy and Liam- but when she talks about things like this, you might wonder if the reason why their tabliod soap opera of a relationship holds such fascination for people doesn't run a little deeper than common pop prurience. It's just not that the papers can portray her as a fickle Soho Flo chasing Britpop's Andy Capp. It's also that what Liam and Patsy bring in their baggage is a contrast between an old and a new way of dealing with celebrity. In Patsy's Louis Vuitton: Eighties London, shallow glamour for shallow glamour's sake, looking after you contacts, aspiration over substance(s). In Liam's: being yourself and not being no one else, fuck them all, substance(s) over aspiration. She wouldn't be the first to abandon the former to seek salvation in the latter, and if you had friends who sold your secrets because they were "juicy", wouldn't you be tempted? Sitting on the sofa that afternoon, she says: "The Eighties were so much about hiding things and not being honest. And then along come a bunch of lads -and I'm not speaking for the band, I'm speaking as an outsider- who just say, 'Yeah that's our background, no pretending.' And who don't try to be fucking jetsetters. And it's just great. If I was 14 now and I was going to see Oasis, I'd have Liam's picture on my wall."
Which untrue stories about you do you wish were true?
Patsy: Oh none. They're all horrible... I did a commerical for Miller and the Sun said my fee was double what it was, which was nice.
Liam: (uninterested)Mine are all true.
Patsy: (laughing) What, like you being a superstud?
Liam: Yeah, fucking...hunk, God, genius...(mutters) Mad for it.
Patsy: (absent-mindedly) Is that a Manchester expression, mad for it?
Liam: No, it's mine.
Patsy: Is it?
Liam: (shrugs, looks at me) Is it?
Patsy: I do remember him saying after we started seeing each other how he got girls going to the papers, and I think you were looking...
Liam: Yeah, I wanted a relationship. I just wanted to calm down and be myself. People think I should be having it all the time, but I have it when I'm up on stage. I just want to come home and put my feet up with somebody.
What annoys you about each other?
Liam: (to Patsy) Oh you piss me off when you do your mouth (sets mouth in a sharp, tense pout)and you just go(tersely)"Yes?", dead well-spoken and sharp. And when we go on holiday she always starts asking questions about the whole history of the fucking island...
Patsy: There's nothing wrong with that.
Liam: And then this geezer starts buzzing because he lives there and he starts going on about the great land he lives in, and she's going "How long will it take you to walk from Manchester to the Himalayas, and how many pairs of trainers will it take..."
Patsy: Mine's like, if I'm really stressed right out and flustered like...
Liam: Like every day.
Patsy: Like every day, and I'm late-I'm never late for work, but for social things I'm always really late, and Liam's really punctual. So, he'll be downstairs, and I'll be getting ready and I've got to say night to James one more time and check he's OK, and he[Liam] goes "Well, Patsy, what's this place going to be like?" And I'm like, "How the fuck do I know?" And (laughing)he calls me Trish. The other thing is Liam's got quite a short attention span, I'd say...
Liam: And Pats' non-stop farting, man. She always farts...
Patsy: We're not getting into that, Liam(looks at him sharply, possibly demonstrating the aforementioned mouth). You always say that about everyone anyway.
Liam: You know, we're just the same, man. Just the same kind of people.
What would you think if you met yourselves?
Liam: I hope I do someday. I'll be like(throwing his arms up into the air)someone who actually understands me.
Patsy: I wouldn't...I'd be like, 'She's a fucking lunatic'.
When we're done talking, her four year-old son James comes in and squirrels himself into the space between the couple. A hairdresser is coming to cut his hair later, and Patsy asks how he'd like his hair styled. "Not like Liam's," he pipes, upon which Liam begins play-boxing with his tiny torsorial critic. "Say 'Come on then Gallagher,'" says Patsy. "Come on Gallagher." says James.
As I get ready to leave, Patsy is bringing in coffee, while Mr Mad For It dances around the room holding hands with a four year-old, extolling to him the merits of the Cast album playing on the stereo.
To end, a brief story about Jesus Christ. One week later Patsy sits in a hotel room in Los Angeles(work meetings, there could be another big film in the pipeline), looks out over the city, and remembers a conversation she had with Liam the night before she left. "We were talking about Christ," she says over the phone. "And Liam was saying 'Can you imagine if he was to come back now? He'd have to be accepted by people.' Christ in both our opinions, was a great speaker, and that he had controversial ideas and he was showing that the downtrodden of that time had faith. yet if he came back now, he'd have to be accepted by fucking wankers like us, and we'd nail him to the cross again. We talked about how judgmental people are about people they don't even know, like the stuff you see in the tabloids. It's like John Lennon; he left behind this great body of art, speaking out for people, and he got crucified for it.
"I remember this time we were on holiday, and this old rasta guy came into the hotel bar, asking for a cigarette. There were loads of rich, stuck up people in there, and they all snubbed him, but Liam told him to come over and sit down and have a drink. Afterwards I said I thought that had been a great thing to do, and Liam said well, it could be Jesus, man. "And I just thought that was a beautiful thing."