I had not thought about it at the time, but in retrospect, we seemed to be following a similar trajectory to the Pistols, right down to their tour of the USA and finishing with a jaunt to Brazil....
We couldn’t wait to get into our first class seats on the plane, all the giant red flight cases with their Japanese lettering in a huge pile on the terminal floor at Heathrow shipped out too. Fuck America then, lets go Scarface style to South America. Fuck it, lets embrace the sun and the culture. The culture was available at the ridiculously low price of less than 10 dollars a gram too. Just have a look at the video and you’ll get the picture.
I’d also been temporarily sidelined by my own vanity project, managed by my friend Tom Watkins, with a one off single called the Bizet Boys, using a sample of Can Can over a sub Pet Shop Boys track. It even sounded like them and we played on that too. Tom swindled money out of EMI like only a proper manager can and we all had fun as usual, with me for once just being the singer, wearing a full face crash helmet to obscure my identity.
We’d released ‘Dress for Excess’ ahead of the European release in a special, simpler cover so it would be out for the Brazilian tour. I was expecting that we would be millionaires in Brazil, not realising that it was really hard to get the money out of the country with the Brazil/Pound exchange rate being completely ridiculous. They had something like two hundred percent inflation over there.
