Amanda Lear – Follow Me

6th November 2022 · 1970s, 1978, Disco, Music

Like most music fans, I first set eyes on Amanda Lear in 1973 as the coquettish vamp on the cover of Roxy Music’s second album, For Your Pleasure, sheathed in black leather with a black panther on a leash.

She reappeared five years later as a solo singer with a smoky and deep Dietrich-like voice and a smouldering French accent set against an electronic backing.

The music was created in Giorgio Moroder’s Munich studio by Tony Monn, further forging the template for what would become Eurodisco.

The video for Follow Me portrayed Lear as a living breathing version of the character she had played in Karl Stoecker’s cover photo for Roxy, whose singer Bryan Ferry she had apparently been dating at that time.

The album this came from – Sweet Revenge – is an elaborate concept affair written by Amanda, whose principal purpose seems to be to seduce the listener; not least with this track (and another called The Stud).

Follow Me wasn’t a hit in the UK but was a big success in Europe and she went on to sell an astonishing 27 million records over the course of her career, mostly in Europe.

Lear began her professional career as a fashion model in the mid-1960s, moving to London where she became something of an It-Girl, befriending The Beatles and becoming Brian Jones’s girlfriend (inspiring a Rolling Stones song called Miss Amanda Jones on Between The Buttons).

After meeting Salvador Dalí in Paris she became his confidante, protégée, closest friend and muse, posing for several of his paintings and later wrote an autobiography called My Life With Dalí.

Some say he sponsored her sex reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1963 and even that he invented her stage name as a Catalan pun “L’Amant de Dalí” (‘Dalí’s lover’).

In the 1970s her boyfriend was David Bowie, who encouraged her to take singing lessons and even recorded a demo with her (she appeared with him when he sang Sorrow on American TV) and it’s probably his influence you can hear here.

Since the 1990s she has been a popular primetime TV presenter in Italy and France, with a parallel career as a successful painter, and reinvented herself again in the late 2000s as a theatre actress.

Over the years her background has remained a mystery, with Lear providing different information and keeping her birth year a secret.

She has variously claimed her mother was English or French, or Vietnamese or Chinese, and that her father was English, Russian, French or Indonesian. She may have been born in Hanoi in 1939, or Hong Kong in either 1941 or 1946. Once she said she was from Transylvania.

To this day, it remains a matter of conjecture as to whether she was born a boy or a girl, though there have been published photographs of documentation showing her birth name to be Alain Tapp. I used to know someone who could answer the question definitively (and did) – but honestly, who cares?