Teenage dreams so hard to beat ...

 

When she was young, Clare Grogan would fly around the world first class. She would stay in Beverly Hills, turn up on Top Of The Pops, and hang around with fellow pop stars, some of whom had a huge crush on her.

She would appear on the cover of Smash Hits (under the legend "The Best of 1981") as the face of her band Altered Images, and music journalists would swoon at her feet. She was living a dream of a life.

And then she'd come back home to Glasgow and her parents would send her straight into the kitchen and tell her to do her own washing.

We are all of us older now. Grogan is not a girl any more. But she does have a girl of her own. Ellie, adopted after Grogan had suffered horribly through a number of miscarriages and four failed IVF attempts. Ellie is 10. Soon it will be her turn to be a teenager and Grogan's turn to be the mum. Maybe Ellie won't do what her mother did. But she'll have her own adventures. And if she wants to know what her mum did she can go back to the now torn and fading cuttings from the music press. Or she can read the books her mother has written. Children's books. Two of them, with a third to come. The first, Tallulah & The Teen Stars, was published a few years ago. The second, Tallulah On Tour, comes out in April, a month after the reissue of the first book. Together, they tell the story of a teenage girl called Tallulah (though she's still Theresa to her family) who joins a band just like Grogan did and who, by the end of the second book, gets the chance to appear in a movie, just like Grogan did. (Gregory's Girl, but you knew that didn't you?)

It's not hard, then, to project Grogan's past onto Tallulah's present. "I didn't realise how personal it was," Grogan admits. "I wrote it and then there was a bit of a gap and, when I reread it, it suddenly struck me just how personal it was."

The gap was down to publishing politics and "just life getting in the way". As it will. That's one of the messages Grogan hopes to get across in the books. "I didn't want to be preachy about it or negative about stuff but I think you have to understand as you grow up that things don't necessarily go as you expect them to, but that that's not necessarily a disaster. It's about dealing with it. I just think that's an important message to get. Because I noticed with Ellie and her friends everything is so dramatic. Ellie is 10 so she's not quite a teenager, but it's all or nothing from one day to the next. And I just think there's something about going, 'See tomorrow? You're going to feel a little differently about this.' Which is basically what my mum told me. It's such a valuable thing to know - that everything changes and they change quickly when you're young."

What is this? This is a story about being a teenager. Then and now. About being young and growing up and the space in between.

Clare Grogan is on Chesil Beach when we speak. It's half-term. She's staying in a manor surrounded by "weans and irate parents on mobile phones, me included". Things are good. Her husband Stephen Lironi has opened a tapas restaurant in their north London neighbourhood - Bar Estaban - and it's been a big success, "which we didn't really expect". She's just recorded a radio drama - a political thriller - opposite Andrew Scott (Moriarty in Sherlock). She did a pilot last year that she's not allowed to talk about. There is the odd live gig and then there are the books. Download only to begin with, "because one of the things I noticed about my daughter is she engaged more with a book if it's on a device. So we decided to do that with a Soundcloud with all the tunes".

Writing the books, Grogan has said, was a form of therapy after her own mother died. They are full of a sweet and really rather tame teenage wildlife. Friends fall out. Tallulah gets a big head when people praise her. There's a party in the house where the parents are away for the weekend. Grogan remembers those weekends from her own teen years. "Most of them were quite innocent." Was drink taken? "Well, you know, I think you do hit your vodka years when you're 14, 15 ..." She laughs. "I haven't got over my vodka years."

Did she, like Tallulah, get big-headed when she became a star? "Probably yes. I was 17, 18, 19 and quite young for my age. And suddenly from being pretty much a nonentity I was being told I was fabulous by everyone. It's not that I believed it but I went along with it. I think Scottish and Irish people are quite similar. You're brought up to be told that no-one likes a show-off. And then you suddenly find yourself in this position where you realise you are a world-class show-off. And it puts you in a really tricky spot."

How do you square the circle of ambition and upbringing? That's the challenge. "I think you can be ambitious and motivated and passionate about what you do and you don't have to be a total nightmare with it. I don't want to be a diva. I think we're all allowed a diva moment in life, I really do. But the people who play on that I've no interest in."

Then again, she says: "I read a brilliant quote by Lena Durham's mum. 'The talent is always allowed to be flaky'. I think that sums it up. I say that to my sisters now."

A year from now, the teenage Grogan will start to turn up on the BBC4 repeats of Top Of The Pops. Watching old episodes, what strikes you now is how strong the women on the programme appear. Chrissie Hynde. Debbie Harry. Faye Fife of the Rezillos. Women with attitude and a style that did not depend on showing skin and boasting about their sex lives. "I think there was a much bigger celebration of individuality then," suggests Grogan. "Everyone wanted to be a bit different."

How different to the present day, when women in the pop mainstream seem to strip to their underwear as a matter of course. (Can you hear the concerned father of teenage daughters projecting here?)

"In a way I find the whole sexualisation is quite dull actually," Grogan suggests when I bring it up. "I find it old-fashioned almost. It's such an obvious route. And when I see people like Nicky Minaj reclaiming their bodies, I totally get that. I get the fact that it's their body and they have the power to be that person and you can take it or leave it. I mean I totally get all of it, but I also think it's just so overdone."

Maybe women in pop were more overtly feminist in their approach back when she was a teenager. "I went on The Old Grey Whistle Test wearing a second-hand pair of long johns," Grogan recalls. "Who in their right mind would buy second-hand long johns?"

Then again the only time the record company put any pressure on her was when they found out she was filming a video wearing a 1950s swimsuit and someone was dispatched to tell her to put more clothes on. "As far as I remember I didn't cover up. I could see this guy sweating thinking, 'I'm going to lose my job', but there was a bit of a fashion for 1950s swimsuits with raincoats over it.

"It's a different time and everyone has their team of stylists. I was making it up as I was going along. I was experimenting as you do at that age; experimenting with who I was and the way I looked and how I felt."

And that's what teenagers do, she says. "I used to walk about carrying a copy of Lolita with me. What was that? I don't even know."

That in itself is a sign of how the cultural context changes. Back in the eighties Nabokov's novel was a work of literature, with a perhaps racy side-order of illicit thrillseeking. Now it inevitably trails behind it all our culture's fears and concerns about abuse.

"I just think there's sometimes a danger of over-analysing things," Grogan continues. When you're young you try stuff out and that's to be celebrated and encouraged ... Within reason, obviously."

It's that knowledge, the memories of the girl she was trying to find her way in the world, that makes her less worried about teenagers today. "You've got to give them credit. A lot of that stuff is just about rebellion. In the same way punk rock was about rebellion. It's for effect. And sometimes as woman I find it depressing and predictable. I don't find it shocking though. I genuinely don't."

She reminds me that Siouxsie Sioux began her career wearing peekaboo bras and suspenders. "I understood that was her way of sticking two fingers up to her parents probably. Nothing more, nothing less.

"I think discovering your sexuality as a young man or a young woman is very powerful. And terrifying for parents. Because hormonally it does overwhelm you a bit. It just does and nobody talks about that a lot. But I think it's a very powerful influence that then subsides and you sort of get it. 'OK, I don't need to be that person all the time. It's an aspect of who I am'. And you have to be very careful who you share that with. That's what I'll be telling Ellie."

Clare Grogan is a grown-up now. She has loved and lost. She's known sickness and grief. It's been a while since she was a teenager. But she still knows how it feels. And now and again she gets the chance to act it out. Half a dozen times a year she'll climb on stage with a group of female Glaswegian musicians who probably weren't around when Altered Images were big and sing the old songs to people old enough to remember them from the first time around. "It's actually really good fun," she says.

"And in a weird way the audiences are up for it and it's pure escapism. We're all there having an afternoon or an evening where we are 18 again before all the shit happened. And I look out into the audience and I feel such a connection. Now much more than I did when I was young. Because I'm looking at them and I'm thinking, 'You know what it's like. You know how tough it is'. And yet we're still here and wanting to have a good time and still going, 'I'm that person somewhere inside of me. I'm still that teenager who thought it's all ahead of me.' And it isn't that bad and we're surviving it. It's a rejoicing in the fact that we do get over stuff. You know, Teddy, that I've been through a lot. It's the nature of life. We've all been through stuff and I just think for me being allowed to recreate those teenage moments it is a joyful thing."

We are older. But that doesn't mean we can't feel young now and then.

Get teenage kicks right through the night, alright.

Tallulah & The Teen Stars is released on Monday. Tallulah On Tour comes out on April 6.