Music Lyric Sheets: The Mark I Popstar's Girlfriend

While the current generation of popstars' girlfriends are busy collapsing in public, detoxing or lifting up their shirts in front of royalty, their predecessors from the Sixties are quietly getting on with writing novels, holding art exhibitions and becoming critically acclaimed chanteuses

There she is in black and white

The universal rock star's girl

A daughter of a saxon earl

All sunsilk hair and daisy-eyed

Scooped up to be the faery bride

Of some pop atheling, refugee

Who nicks her from the gallery

And barely out of County High

Or convent school, she drinks the light

Actress/model/supermuse

But having got the clothing right

Emerges fun-furred, spaced out, skinny

Sparrow-legged from purple-mini

Her handbag full of boyfriend's pills

A PhD in shopping skills

She learns to sing a bit, she cooks

And fills the pop stars' pad with books

Is this week's Bardot up to scratch?

"Comme un ange," calls Paris Match

Before she falls. And how she falls.

Washed-up, dumped and hollow- eyed

Her boudoir littered with dead friends

And this is how the first part ends

Three decades on and back she comes

A slight rondeur, a tad more grey

But waking at her publisher's

She baked a cake, she wrote a play

She auctioned off her husband's things

The lithographs, Moroccan rings

Made albums, gave good interview

Her voice was fractured, way too blue

(Lilli Von Schtup, to me and you)

But girls today should learn from her

Those blonde bombsites we witness now.

Perhaps Mark I could teach Mark II

To come back from decline with grace

We'd save a lot of tabloid space.