Crush – Fucket List- The Teenage Years

By popular demand, it’s time for an update on my imaginary boyfriends list. This time I’m going back to the deep past and will divulge my teenage celebrity crushes.

David Cassidy
Partridge Family star and a singer in his own right, he had both clean-cut cuteness and hidden devilry.  He had the hair, the winning grin and the irresistible dimples.

Les McKeown

Lead singer of the tartan tearaways- the Bay City Rollers. Dark-haired and handsome, Les pushed all my 13-year-old buttons. My room was a tartan boudoir, and my joy was complete when I saw them in concert twice. Years later, Les toured Australian pubs and I persuaded a long-suffering friend to accompany me. A strange night with a room full of
middle-aged women in tight-fitting roller strollers.

Photo: Erica Murdoch

Chris Knight
Peter, Peter, Peter Brady. The middle Brady, the handsome Brady. The somewhat overlooked Brady never really had much of a storyline. At least he was there. The cute dimpled grin, the middle child who got all the Brady looks.

Garth Porter played the second string to Daryl Braithwaite. Garth was blonde, spunky and played keyboards in the various iterations of Sherbet. Everyone loved Daryl, yet it seemed cooler to fixate on Garth, who was after all one of the songwriters of the band and perhaps produced that memorable line- “Summer love is like no other love”

Photo Erica Murdoch
David Essex
If he hadn’t been a pop star maybe he could have been a model. Either way, he was the blue-eyed Gypsy from the east end of London who starred in a couple of films and pop starred with great panache. If he came to Australia. I missed the tour. Something I do regret. And he’s aged into a silver fox- a slight resemblance to Daniel Craig (the eyes)

Photo Erica Murdoch

The Sporting Types

Then there was sport. Many teenage girls had crushes on entire AFL football teams – the glory years of Essendon when Tim Watson, Merv Neagle and Neale Danaher dominated. When girls lusted after the St Kilda blondes. When Collingwood had Rene Kink as their star pin-up attraction. But footy players weren’t for me- not then anyway. I’ve come to that in my later years with a huge crush on Nathan Brown. My sporting pinups were a man nicknamed Super Fish -Steve Holland (Olympic swimmer in 1976) a blonde tennis player Brad Drewett and a sandy-haired cricketer called Jeff Thomson. I forgot about Thommo when Geoff Lawson joined the Australian team. I wasn’t the only cricket groupie. Years later, a friend snogged Wasim Akram in a Hong Kong bar and I was somewhat jealous – I’d never taken it to that level.

Photo Patrick Bryon

Prince Andrew

My last crush is somewhat problematical but I have to be honest. Remember, I’m talking about 17-year-old Erica. He seemed the least stuffy of a very stuffy family; was handsome and charming. At one point, I wrote him a drunken letter egged on by a friend. Months later I got a reply beginning with “Prince Andrew asked me to thank you for your kind letter”. The letter is long gone as is any affection I had for him. 

The Rest

The remainder I’ll clump together as the male starlets the ones who looked good, could act a bit and were typecast usually as the high school jock- unattainable, arrogant and usually Not Nice.  Grant Goodeve (David from Eight is Enough), Anson Williams (Potsie from Happy Days). Willie Ames – all the good time boys.

On reflection

To be honest, I look at this list and there’s disbelief that I was in love with any of them. You do grow apart from people, even if they are just your imaginary boyfriends. 

Who were your crushes when you were 14, hot and bothered and felt let down by everyone except for the guy (or girl) on that poster on the wall above the bed?