Sleeping beauty
August 1st, 2002
written by Aidan Smith

At the height of BritPop, a million teenage boys lay on their beds and leered longingly at Louise Wener while the music of her band Sleeper blasted out of their stereos. By each bedside was a box of tissues. For those moments when this unrequited love became too much, presumably.

Those boys have grown up a bit and will now have new fantasies, which is probably just as well. Because if you believed all you read about their former fave pin-up - and Loaded magazine’s "63rd most shaggable girl on the planet" - you might have thought she should have been born a man. A caveman.

When Wener was wowing the boys with hits like Inbetweener, just about the nicest thing the opposite sex said about her was that she was, in their eyes, "not a woman’s woman".

Many of them said much worse after she declared that all feminists should shut up and shave their armpits.

Eventually, even some of the male of the species started to cool on her. She decided that, when it came right down to it, women were just as "shitty and vindictive" as men. For that, one or two called for her to be burned at the stake.

Little wonder, perhaps, that Sleeper didn’t last. Pop, Wener says, was too restrictive a medium to allow her to get across all she wanted to say about men, women and inbetween-ness. So now she writes novels.

In a hotel near London’s Oxford Circus, she’s sporting a new look to go with the new career. In place of the regulation-issue rockwear of head-to-toe black, there’s a summery lilac blouse, faded jeans and sandals - and she’s also gone blonde.

"I was being ironic when I said those things," insists Wener, now 35, whose debut novel Goodnight Steve McQueen follows the fortunes of a young band not unlike Sleeper. "When we started out there were lots of other female-fronted guitar-groups and I knew we had to try and stand out from the rest. So I’d turn up for interviews with these ready-made quotes in my back pocket."

Wener always gave good quote; maybe too good. "I was playful in those interviews. OK, I was provocative. But the humour didn’t come across in print, the irony didn’t translate. The armpits remark, for instance, was an Alan Partridge joke and I was just being flippant. Political correctness was big at the time and I didn’t like it, still don’t, and I was certainly having a go at the all-women-are-good, all-men-are-bad school of feminism and stand by that."

Goodnight Steve McQueen is written in the first person, and that voice is male. Wener knows this will be jumped on by her critics, if they’re still out there, but she doesn’t care. "I made my hero a lad to challenge myself as a writer," she says, "but also because I’ve spent a long time in male company and I really love the way men make friends with each other.

"Male friendships are sometimes belittled and it’s a truism to say men are emotionally stunted. Men are great at being friends - much better than women. They’re so relaxed about it. I find it hard to make new girlfriends in that way - you know, casual, happy to while away a whole afternoon making lists and being completely trivial."

Can’t women be trivial then? "Yes, they can chat about make-up ... " She checks herself and laughs; maybe she shouldn’t go there again.

Perhaps men’s boyishness would have lost its appeal if she knew men when they were boys. She didn’t. "When I was growing up I longed to know a boy who played the guitar," she says wistfully.

Wener was born the youngest of three in Gants Hill, Essex - "I usually say Ilford because no-one’s ever heard of Gants Hill; it’s right at the end of the Central Line and the main cultural attraction is its roundabout."

In her book, Wener slags off those who romanticise suburbia. "If you watched any of those 1970s retrospectives on TV," she writes, "you’d imagine it was a place where everyone was forever listening to Slade and riding around on spacehoppers and where the worst thing that could possibly happen to you was burning your tongue on the mince in your Findus Crispy Pancake."

This doesn’t chime with her own childhood. "I was shy, short-sighted and chronically asthmatic. My dad was a civil servant who desperately wanted to be a lawyer. My mum had to give up her job in nursing to have children and I think she always regretted that. There was a real air of thwarted ambition in our house."

But Wener’s parents indulged her, and were eccentric with it. "Mad, crazy liberals who grew pot in the back garden," she laughs. On a pivotal, teenaged afternoon, she burned her National Health specs and donned a ra-ra skirt and white stilettos to hit the Hippodrome nightclub in London’s West End. Then she went to Manchester University, studied politics, and met the guitar boys she dreamed about, falling in love with one of them, Jon Stewart, and forming Sleeper with him.

BritPop was happening and record companies were fighting over just about every runny-nosed combo who could make a jingly-jangly racket reminiscent of the Swinging Sixties. In 1993, Sleeper signed to Indolent Records, a subsidiary of the super-label BMG. "After we’d done the deal, a girl from the company gave me my first line of cocaine. It was an induction, and a total cliché, but at the time I loved it."

And, in the beginning, Wener loved the pop life. Between the summers of 1994 and 1996, Sleeper racked up six hit singles, including Inbetweener and Sale Of The Century. "I couldn’t get enough of the adulation," she says, and neither could the boys in the band. "On tour, they got all the groupies they wanted, girls of 17 and 18 who were totally up for sex. Me, I got given poetry by all these blushing boys."

Wener has never worn contact lenses and remains "half-blind", but she quickly started seeing through the music business. "I don’t think the industry liked the fact I could speak in sentences.

"There’s also a misogyny about the music press. It was OK for Shaun Ryder to be laddish and drunk all the time, and when one of the Manic Street Preachers said he hoped Michael Stipe would die of Aids, the reaction was: ‘Naughty!’ But when I wrote a song like Delicious [sample lyric: ‘We should both go to bed till we make each other sore’] I was painted as a whore."

Sleeper broke up four years ago; their time was up. "Some of our stuff wasn’t as good as I thought it was," she admits. At first, she struggled to cope with being an ex-pop star. "There should be a help-group for when the fame goes. You’re completely cosseted. There’s someone to wake you up, someone else books your haircut and this other guy will buy you all the drugs you want. Best of all, 40,000 fans scream at you. But it all goes … "

By then, Wener had split from Stewart and was seeing Andy Maclure - Sleeper’s drummer. That was tricky for a while, but the three of them sorted it out, like men. And Wener, the woman who finds female company difficult, says Stewart, the ex, has remained her best friend.

She toyed with a solo career in music but her bosses wanted to turn her into the new Natalie Imbruglia, so she quit the business, happy to have been a part of it for a while, but just as glad to be trying something new. "You can write a pop song in under two hours, or I could, anyway."

Wener is still with Maclure and is keen to have children, and her debut novel - a second is on the way - is a sweet, optimistic tale reflecting her new, sunnier outlook on life. Her hero talks openly about his feelings, and when you question whether this really happens in the male world, she says: "Well, it does in mine."

Louise Wener, she’s not a witch. She’s not ideologically opposed to the compiling of lists and likes pop music - probably football, too. Sounds like the perfect girlfriend.

# Goodnight Steve McQueen is published by Flame today.