When I drop in that I wrote a novel with her in mind (come on, you’d drop it in, too), she positively vibrates.
“I’m a big fan of the Guardian, I’m so glad you guys have a branch in Australia, congratulations,” she says energetically as our call is connected. It’s not hard to imagine Currie in the role of counsellor – she’s basically your one-woman cheerleader, quite the opposite of the reticent Joan Jett. “I was only 25 and a lot of these kids were the age I was when I was in the Runaways when I was introduced to drugs, so it was a good fit for me.” When she graduated to drug and alcohol counsellor it was “to be able to share my experience, strength and hope with other kids. It was in the 1980s – having surrendered a nascent movie career to freebase cocaine – that Currie turned her life around and became a tech at Coldwater, working in both the drug and psych facilities. Two years later, she says, she was kidnapped and raped by a stalker who had previously murdered six women in Texas. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Imagesīy 17, Currie was burned out on cocaine and quaaludes, and quit. In countless interviews since, Currie has given her version of events: that she did not witness anything that looked like rape.Ĭherie Currie, Sandy West, Jackie Fox, Joan Jett and Lita Ford of the Runaways pose for a portrait in April 1976. Fuchs maintains – very eloquently – that this happened in front of Currie and Jett.
Last year, Huffington Post broke the story of the alleged rape of the then-16-year-old Jackie “Fox” Fuchs by Fowley after a New Year’s Eve gig, while she was incapacitated by quaaludes. They were making a lot of money off of us.”Įxhaustion wasn’t all the Runaways had to deal with. “Either we were touring, rehearsing or in the studio, and we were making no money at all. “We just never had a break,” Currie recalls, of her stint with Joan Jett, Lita Ford, Sandy West and Jackie Fox.
Either we were touring, rehearsing or in the studio, and we were making no money at all Cherie Currie To maintain that edge, she says, he pitted the bandmates against each other. He thought her tough facade made her the perfect frontwoman for a band shaped by his comic-schlock lyrics and bubblegum bravado. Trussed up in a corset, and snarling about being your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb over fierce riffs, Currie was pregnant by one manager and allegedly emotionally abused by another.Ĭurrie had been the original Valley girl, a surfie chick living in her more popular twin sister’s shadow, and trying to contend with the sudden absence of her mother, who had moved to Indonesia to follow a new romance.Īt 15, following an alleged rape and having hacked off all her hair, Bowie-style – to escape, like him, into an alter ego – Currie was recruited by Svengali manager Kim Fowley. At 16, Cherie Currie had prowled world stages in the Runaways, the 70s all-girl rock band that bowled out of the Sunset Strip, toppling tired teenage groupies in their wake.
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