CHILD'S PLAY

Before he became a world-conquering songwriter/ producer, Desmond Child tore up New York for one glorious year at the end of the 70s with his rock-R&B-disco fusion group, Desmond Child & Rouge. Now, the Laura Nyro-adoring 70s Scissor Sisters™ tell Charles Donovan they're coming back to finish what they started.

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Few New York eras are as romanticised as the late-70s.

Pre-gentrification rents, a fertile arts scene, punk and disco explosions, the emboldening of the gay rights movement and a pre-AIDS, anything-goes day-and-nightlife.

Even the negatives - the danger, the shaky state of public finances, the decaying infrastructure - can seem glamorous to those of us who weren't there. Four-piece group, Desmond Child & Rouge, were right in the middle of it. Rouge vocalist Maria Vidal calls it a "Brigadoon moment... a time that only comes along every 100 years or so, but you don't realise it when you're living it." Desmond Child & Rouge were living it. They weren't part of the burgeoning CBGBs scene, but neither were they strictly a cabaret act. Instead, they bridged those two Manhattan microcosms, with albums of rock and ballads that bore traces of R&B and disco with intricate, decorous vocal arrangements reflecting their love of Laura Nyro, particularly her second album, Eli & The 13th Confession, and her fifth, the collaboration with Labelle, Gonna Take A Miracle. Child was also their songwriter and pianist.

Born John Charles Barrett in Florida, he'd already lived several lifetimes of drama and upheaval by the time he arrived in New York. His childhood, recently documented in a memoir, was a map-hopping whirlwind in which his intense, musical, impetuous-sounding mother dragged him from the US to Cuba and back again, while also not telling him that the man he knew as his father was not his father. There were periods of extreme financial deprivation and slum living while, at other times, his family mingled with politicians and high society. By young adulthood, he'd become something of a spiritual seeker, an admirable quality but one which would also render him vulnerable to an exploitative cult leader once the money rolled in.