Fiona Russell Powell

Explore about the Famous Journalist Fiona Russell Powell, who was born in United Kingdom on April 2, 1962. Analyze Fiona Russell Powell’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Fiona Russell Powell dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Fiona Russell Powell?

Fiona Russell Powell Biography

Fiona Russell Powell (born 2 April 1962) is a British journalist. She is best known for her series of interviews throughout the 1980s in The Face magazine. For a brief period in the mid-1980s, she performed as a member of pop group ABC in videos and onstage to support their cartoon-synth album How to Be a … Zillionaire! (1985). She performed under the stage name “Eden”, so she could continue with her music and style journalism at the same time.

ABC’s Martin Fry and Mark White loved the 1970s super pimp/space tramp charity shop meets Comme des Garçons/Yohji Yamamoto look that Fiona and her friends were sporting in the spring of 1984 – they were the first to knowingly champion a retro image. Martin and Mark had written and produced the music for their third album but knew they wanted a completely new image for ABC so decided to ask Fiona to join the band and also brought in American David Yarritu. The choice of someone with such diminutive stature was deliberate: the first single ‘How To Be a Millionaire’ (inspired by Martin Amis’s seminal 1980s book Money) was accompanied by a cartoon video, modelled on The Jackson 5. The new-look ABC was pure cartoon fantasy and the two new members reflected that. Fiona was asked to dress as she had earlier that year, and while her personal image had since moved onto what became known as Sinéad O’Connor’s look, so she wore wigs, platform shoes and clothes made for her by Leigh Bowery, Bodymap and Mark Spy and Murray Blewitt, who went on to design for Vivienne Westwood. The name ‘Eden’ was dreamt up by Fiona, Leigh Bowery and Trojan one night over a bottle of vodka in their East London flat.

Two much-talked-about Eden incidents: Eden wore a dildobelt she made on The Tube, the 1980s Channel 4 live music show, which was a belt covered in ‘ladyfingers’ – very small white dildoes – to look like a bullet belt. The B-side of ‘How To Be a Millionaire’ has a track called ‘A to Z’ which introduces all the band members. When it gets to the girl, we hear “Hi, I’m Eden, and I want you to kiss my snatch” accompanied by suggestive kissing sounds. Fiona agreed that while it IS the sort of thing she would say, being well known for making provocative gestures, it’s actually Martin Fry’s voice speeded up and was recorded entirely without Fiona’s knowledge. The reason given was that there wasn’t enough time to get her into the studio. Fiona says she has since discovered that, as it was not her real voice, royalties did not have to be paid to her.

After running away from home and subsequently leaving Sheffield High School for Girls aged 15, Fiona moved to London when she was 17 and slept on Heaven 17 singer Glenn Gregory’s floor before moving into the notorious Carburton Street squat where she took over Boy George’s old room. Fellow squatters included 1980s singer Marilyn, DJ and Haysi Fantayzee frontman Jeremy Healy, and milliner Stephen Jones. In 1982, aged 20, she started writing for The Face as a features writer, concentrating mostly on music and became notorious for her irreverent mickey-taking interviews with leading pop stars of the day. Meanwhile, she moved into a three-bedroom council flat in Old Street with Richard Habberley, who moved out of Boy George’s St John’s Wood flat, and Amanda Metro, a backing singer for Mari Wilson.

Fiona Russell Powell has written for Loaded and Punch, The Face, BLITZ, i-D, Evening Standard, Daily Express, The Idler, Dazed and Confused, Interview, Penthouse, Time Out, Arena, Arena Homme Plus, New Humanist, Woman’s Journal and Fashion Weekly among others. She has also featured in the press on more than one occasion, having had various incidents and antics documented. In the mid to late 1990s, she frequently appeared on British television debates, such as the BBC’s peaktime You Decide discussing the decriminalisation and legalisation of drugs, having previously written extensively about her own battle with Class A drugs. In 2006, Fiona was co-director (along with Patrick Lilley, who was one of the original Carburton Street squatters and founder of the Queer Nation Club in London, and Christophe Demoulin, artist’s agent) of The Outsider festival, a ten-day-long arts festival curated by Angie Bowie that focussed on films, photography and club nights celebrating underground sub-culture in London and the UK since the early 1980s. The project was commissioned by Sony PSP, and was the world’s first downloadable arts festival. Fiona also co-wrote 40 Ans de Musique au Gibus, which chronicles four decades of seminal musical acts at the famous Paris nightclub.

Although many music journalists are said to be frustrated or failed rock stars, she says the reason she joined the band was because “I thought – incorrectly as it turned out – that it would be fun. Also, it was a great opportunity to experience the music industry from the inside. Unfortunately, I discovered all too quickly why the other band members had left and cut off contact with Martin and, to a lesser extent, Mark. As Martin was very ill -something I knew absolutely nothing about until the day he turned up at the airport when we flew to LA – after we did the US TV shows, I didn’t hear anything from either of them again although I was kept on the payroll for another four months. I was unceremoniously dumped when I was no longer useful. I understand that business is ruthless but we were supposed to be mates. They’d known me since the age of 14. They didn’t even have the courtesy to call me, I’d served my purpose and that was that. It was depressing. Occasionally, I would bump into Mark in a club or at a fashion show but I didn’t see or hear from Martin until ’97 or ’98 – 12 years later – when I wrote a piece for ‘The Times’ about the retro phenomenon and the Here and Now Tour that Martin, as ABC, was on.”

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