When asked how she would like to be remembered, she said: “Brilliant, witty, clever, beautiful, generous, sexy, wise. Well, that’s what I’d like...”
She was all of the above!
Another piece of my youth has ebbed away with the sad news that yet another iconic figure has passed too soon - the journalist and broadcaster and one of the "coolest women on the planet", Miss Magenta Devine is dead, aged only 61.
Magenta was one of those people who was just there. She was a stalwart of the Blitz Club and Billy's (birthplaces of the New Romantics) in the late '70s/early 80s, and no less a figure than one of its "founding fathers" Rusty Egan said she was "one of the first people in TV and Media who encouraged Steve Strange to pursue his vision"; her then-boyfriend was Tony James, latterly of punk-popsters Generation X (with Billy Idol), and she became the promoter for his new band Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
When both the relationship and the band split up, she was head-hunted by the estimable Janet Street-Porter in the late 80s for her new "youth broadcasting" segment on Channel 4, the utterly faboo Network 7; and, like her much more famous counterparts the late Mr Lagerfeld and Miss Wintour, she was rarely seen out of her trademark sunglasses...
It was when she (and her erstwhile - and sexy-as-fuck - co-presenter Sankha Guha) followed Miss Street-Porter over to the BBC in the early 90s, however, that she became a household name - for the Rough Guides to... series of travelogues (part of the DEF II youth programme segment on BBC2), as much as her quirky style of interviewing.
Speaking of which, here she is with the irrepressible Dame Edna:
RIP Magenta Devine (born Kim Taylor, 1957 – 6th March 2019)
She defined 'COOL' for an entire generation. RIP
ReplyDeleteCertainly inspired moi! Jx
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