SURELY THE HARDEST WORKING SINGER IN 1981 WAS CLARE GROGAN. JUST AS ALTERED IMAGES WERE RELEASING THEIR DEBUT ALBUM, SHE BECAME A FILM STAR TOO. AGED JUST 19, HOW DID SHE COPE WITH THE WORKLOAD? AS CLARE SAYS, “I WAS SAVED FROM BEING OFF THE RAILS”

JOHN EARLS

On leaving school, seeing your band get signed to a major record label or getting your first huge role in a movie are usually the stuff of teenage fantasies. For Clare Grogan, both happened in the same summer as soon as she left Notre Dame High in Glasgow in 1980 – Altered Images were snapped up by Epic after some well-received John Peel sessions, and Clare’s acting at Scottish Youth Theatre led to her being cast as John Gordon Sinclair’s new infatuation Susan in Bill Forsyth’s coming-of-age classic Gregory’s Girl.

Naturally, Clare was unaware at the time of just how seismic her luck was. “I’ll never understand how I got that double whammy,” she says now. “I got really, really lucky that summer. But to me, it absolutely seemed the order of how life should have been. I just thought, ‘Well, this is good.’ I love the arrogance of youth, because it’s an incredibly useful tool.

“We took it in our stride in the band, because that’s what you do when you’re young. I had no life experience at all. I was a schoolgirl from the choir who was always interested in performance, then suddenly I was on Top Of The Pops and straight off to LA to promote a film. We thought everything else would fall into place too. And, for a long time, it did.”

As glamorous as Clare’s life sounds, such a huge break left its mark. “I constantly felt I had to prove myself,” she admits. “Because I didn’t have to work too hard for that initial break, once I’d got it, I felt I had to keep delivering. I did absolutely everything that was asked of me. I was always ‘Yeah, that’s fine. No problem, I’ll do that.’” In addition, Clare’s parents had instilled a strong work ethic, as she explains: “I was very conscientious. My mum and dad’s attitude was, ‘If you’re going to do this, do it properly.’