I’m Utterly Breathless For Brett Smiley

The Young Beauty Who Could Have Taken Down T.Rex, Until The Rolling Stones’ Svengali Betrayed Him.

TW: The following article contains mentions of suicide, substance abuse, and, unfortunately, Gary Glitter.

After an eleven-year search, around three weeks ago I found myself, finally, in the possession of my white whale. A book from 2005, The Prettiest Star: Whatever Happened to Brett Smiley? By music writer and journalist Nina Antonia. I, like Nina Antonia, was fourteen when I first became aware of Brett Smiley. Finding anything about this “star who never was” is near-impossible, with this book, one YouTube clip taped from weekly-bouffant-and-Valium favourite Russell Harty’s ITV programme, an interesting adaptation of Cinderella, and a few obituaries published by friends after his untimely death in January 2016 being all I have been able to dig up across eleven years, and I am a seasoned media sleuth.

The Russell Harty clip is indeed an oddity. Harty’s bluntness, which I have always interpreted as plain rudeness, is on full display, after an, admittedly, slightly dodgy performance of the B-side to Smiley’s debut, and only single, Va Va Va Voom, entitled Space Ace. It’s been suggested that this was due to a mix-up, but if this were the case, why did ITV prepare a backing track for Space Ace and not Va Va Va Voom? In fact, until writing this article, I was under the impression that Space Ace was the A-Side, and not the other way around. Space Ace, a truly beautiful song, though, has been completely butchered in comparison to the recorded version; Smiley’s shy vocals, not helped by his already troubling drinking, cocaine and pill habits - he was warned of the dangers of mixing Valium with alcohol before his appearance - are hindered further by a few vocal cracks, are barely audible above the sub-Phil Spector grandeur of the orchestra. The then eighteen-year-old singer hasn’t quite learned how to hold himself properly onstage, though it is important to note that throughout the performance and subsequent interview, the young singer was utterly out of his mind on sleeping pills. When he awkwardly sits up from the reclined position he finished singing in, you can’t help but find it incredibly endearing. He really is barely more than a kid in a world a little too mature for him.

The interview, however, is wonderful. Harty interviews both Brett, and his manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, best known for his work managing and producing The Rolling Stones. Brett is simply a delight, asking if he can put his sunglasses on whilst Harty speaks to Andrew, slumping down in his chair and pulling out a cigarette without lighting it; the very image of the rockstar with their aviators on in the control room, like a little boy playing pretend. He spins around in his swivel chair, in the way that those not yet worn down by years of sitting at a desk have. Brett has an incredibly sharp wit. Harty asks him if he is aware of the weight that’s been placed upon his shoulders by Oldham, to which he dryly responds, with a wry smile, “I’m not that heavy,”, and “I don’t think he’s ever been on my shoulders.”

Like Antonia’s mission to discover what happened to the beautiful boy resplendent in a pink suit and black shirt suggestively unbuttoned to the ribs on The Russell Harty Show, the book continuously eluded me. The majority of copies appear to be situated in the United States, and, until fairly recently, I simply did not have the disposable income to ship a book in from halfway across the world. I would periodically check Ebay, to no result. I checked every online book outlet every couple of weeks for eleven years. Sometimes a copy would be within reach, but it would usually be around seventy of your Great British Pounds. I would huff, roll my eyes and forget about it for a few weeks.

Finally, I made a plea on my Instagram page. My friend pointed me to a couple of “completed” auctions, those being auctions that have expired with no winning bidder, and found a copy from a Los Angeles-based seller I’d missed by mere hours. I contacted the seller, trying not to sound too desperate, and expected her to put it up for instant sale - she’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to flog it for a while, it would seem, and she could have squeezed a few more dollars out of me - but she relisted it as another auction. I chucked in a lowball offer of $20, and the week-long waiting game began. I checked the eBay app on my phone hourly, eventually by the minute as the auction drew to a close to check for sniper bids. Of course, there were none. The book was mine, and for only £30 including shipping. I would have been willing to pay up to £50 excluding shipping. Anyway, I told the seller they were an absolute star and, again, tried not to sound too desperate, and about a month later, the book landed on my doorstep. The copy is signed, too, made out to a person named Bruce. I found myself wondering who Bruce is, or was, and how the book ended up in the possession of the eBay seller. Presumably he lived in the Los Angeles area. What struck me was that the book had clearly never been opened. The pages still pristine as the day it was printed, and still with a new book smell despite being twenty years old. It had to make the journey across the Atlantic just to be read. The book itself is beautifully written dual narrative, of both Brett and Nina’s lives, and the parallels between them. Two gentle and tortured souls, both wronged by the people in their lives and the world at large, eventually brought together.

This article isn’t about the book, though I will use it as a point of reference at times.

As I’ve been absorbing every word of this book from my sickbed, Smiley’s album, Breathlessly Brett has entered back into my daily listening rotation, which at the moment consists almost exclusively of the new Sparks album, Mad!,Sparks' 1994 foray into eurodance and techno, and possibly my favourite album of all time, Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins, which is an article for another day, and the new Suede single, Disintegrate.

Breathlessly Brett, however, appears to have the greatest hold on my heart at the moment.

It’s always been in the background of my life. I’ve gone back to Va Va Va Voom and April In Paris weekly for my entire adult life. April In Paris, a surprisingly upbeat song about a lost love, used to be my signature “dance around your room and lip sync into your hairbrush/curling tongs whilst getting ready for a night out” routine. It’s so incredibly fey in the most wonderful way possible. It’s the kind of femininity I can actually connect with, as a woman who is honestly, pretty fucking bad at being a woman. I’d hold my mouth open, rest my hand on my jaw, roll my eyes back into my head. By the second verse, I would recline on my bed, writhing in a pile of rejected outfits, and usually catch my meticulously arranged curls on the lethal, sharp edge of an eyeshadow palette. Despite my tipsy getting ready performances of April In Paris, it’d been around ten years since I sat and listened to the full album front to back, and the feeling of injustice that Brett Smiley faced grows ever stronger with each listen.

Breathlessly Brett was recorded in 1974, but shelved by Andrew Oldham, fearing it would sell poorly. This was primarily down to a poor choice of lead single, and despite all the money put into ferrying the young American Brett Smiley to and from the United Kingdom, I can only suppose that Oldham felt a failure would be an embarrassment to him, rather than much to do with finances. It was finally released in 2003, after years of campaigning from a small cult following amassed primarily from playing shows around New York, when RPM records included it as part of their, rather embarrassingly titled, Lipsmackin’ 70s collection. To put it in the bluntest of terms, I feel that Brett Smiley was a victim of Andrew Oldham’s ego. Oldham’s side of the story is that the record company pulled the plug, but I am not entirely convinced this is the whole truth.

The album may not be anything earth-shattering, but, as much as it pains me to say this, Smiley, even at the tender age of seventeen or eighteen, had deeper lyricism than a contemporary such as Marc Bolan. I could see young girls in the 1970s going completely mad for him, with his looks, and his high-pitched, breathy vocals, punctuated by gasps of pleasure. For someone so young, perhaps with the exception of Highty Tighty, which is incredibly fun but comes across as a rather immature response to unrequited love, his lyrics are surprisingly mature. Highty Tighty is, certainly what I’d call in casual conversation, “a right fucking banger”, though it cannot be divorced from the fact it was written about a real girl he was besotted with, and would even repeatedly fly across the US in search of, and rather than being a song of longing like many of his other tracks, as its title implies, Highty Tighty insinuates its subject won’t sleep with him because she’s too arrogant. This is what we may call, in 2025, incel-y. Highty Tighty aside, though, Smiley has an outlook almost frighteningly mature for a man of his age.

Space Ace, the B-side to Smiley’s debut single, and, oddly, the track chosen for promotional purposes over the A-Side, is ultimately what tanked his career before it began, is an absolutely beautiful, tragic love song, using space imagery as a metaphor for the self-doubt and shyness that comes with courtship. The issue lies not with the song, but with its choice as a single. With his androgynous looks, Andrew Oldham was seemingly trying to set up Smiley as the next David Bowie, by promoting Space Ace, title-wise, just a little bit too close to Space Oddity; though the two songs could not be more different. This was a fate befallen too by fellow American glam singer Jobriath, with Space Clown. Bowie himself even called out Jobriath for trying to copy his schtick. Unfairly. Have we ever considered that dreams of space travel were common for those who grew up during the space race? In 1974, the Moon Landing was as recent as the COVID-19 lockdowns are to us now. Bowie copyist allegations followed, whilst a slew of Sweet and Slade copyists were more than allowed to jump on the bandwagon. David Bowie was a sacred cow. If you showed any passing resemblance, your career was dead, and this is how Oldham killed Brett Smiley’s career before it even began. It was a complete fumble to promote Smiley’s career with Space Ace, no matter the quality of the song. Va Va Va Voom, the A-Side, on the other hand, is a lighter take on The New York Dolls’ sound, and is a look right inside the brain of Brett Smiley, and addresses the neurosis of the pressures of living up to Oldham’s expectations, even making direct reference to David Bowie, the artist he was most consistently compared to: “Hey you, with your red boots on, you’re mad / I assume”, and the deliberate styling and makeover Oldham subjected him to, presumably the clothes bought for him not fitting due to his small stature: “oh, what a lovely jacket, but the sleeves are far too long!” he laments, like a disappointed mother.

There is an odd dissonance that runs through Breathlessly Brett, that only becomes apparent upon listening once you hit somewhere in the region of your mid-twenties. Of course, 1974 was a rather different time, but there’s indeed a slight twinge of discomfort when you hear an eighteen-year old with a breathy voice making references to being “lubricated” (Highty Tighty), or near-moaning “ooh! You’re filthy!” (Run For The Sun) in a manner that, despite his adopted British accent, somehow comes across as more “pornographic” than “Carry On”. Though he sings with the experience and wisdom of one beyond his years, this discomfort is something I’ve found it a little hard to adjust to, listening back over a decade later. In fact, I even feel a little odd pointing out Smiley’s undeniable, stunning good looks. I’m too old to fancy him, but his androgyne grace is impossible to ignore. Oldham touted him as “the most beautiful boy in the world”, and it’s hard to disagree. There’s an aura around him that is truly captivating.

April In Paris, as well as being a favourite of mine when getting ready for nights out, is, to me, Brett Smiley’s defining track.The horn section and gleeful backing vocals set it aside from all the bandwagon-jumping glam junk coming out of the UK by 1974. Bricklayers dunking their head in a vat of glitter and donning some platform boots; resembling the Stars In Their Eyes scene of the brilliant and sadly forgotten mid-2000s sitcom Phoenix Nights, where a contestant attempts a rendition of (the by then disgraced) Gary Glitter’s Leader Of The Gang (I Am), wrapped in kitchen foil, to the abject horror of the audience, who cheer when he rolls his ankle on his platform boots and falls off the stage. This scene is a perfect metaphor for what glam had become by 1974. Blokes rolling their ankles on their platform heels and tumbling arse over tit off the stage. This era of British glam has a cult following, and is referred to by its lovers, affectionately, as “junkshop glam”.

April In Paris describes a lost love who’s “a million miles away”. Brett, somewhere between wistful and mopey, declares that “without her, I’m nothing” and how he “cries through the night”, but the gleeful backing vocals and horn section meld so oddly well with the heartbreak in his voice. The rest of the song is open to interpretation. His love told him she would see him in May. He either goes to visit her in May, or he daydreams about seeing her in May, “I know it was May, but it feels like Disneyland”, and we’re left on the image of “a candlelight dinner at seven, but the wax has no taste and the fire’s been lit.” The love has fizzled out, and she’s stood him up. There’s something I can’t help but love about happy-sounding music with heartbreaking lyrics.

Solitaire is a cover of a Neil Sedaka track, which uses the card game Solitaire as a metaphor for one man’s loneliness. Everywhere he goes, he plays Solitaire, sitting alone, as he watches the rest of the world go around and the lovers passing by. This is such an impressive song for Smiley to take on, and it suits his vulnerable, fragile voice perfectly. This track, though, is hampered by the same issue of the performance of Space Ace on The Russell Harty show; Oldham’s insistence on a Phil Spector-esque wall of sound grandiosity. You can barely hear him above the orchestra. A gorgeous track sadly ruined by the production.

Run For The Sun, is a melding of British glam and Americana, and if it weren’t for the bloopy sounds that pepper it, I would argue it’s a wonderful show of the interplay of vulnerability and sex appeal in Smiley’s voice. He’s singing in the rain for the object of his affection, a stereotypically romantic gesture, but this is given a touch of sleaze by his declarations of how “filthy” they are, delivered with a knowing camp sensibility, that would sound just as filthy as the object of his desire, if it weren’t for the goofy instrumental.

After two quite forgettable tracks, we reach a truly brilliant glam-tinged cover of The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand. I Want To Hold Your Hand has always been incredibly suggestive. There’s often memes online, when older generations complain about how suggestive modern music is, where it’s pointed out that The Beatles didn’t actually want to hold your hand. They wanted much more than that. What makes this cover so excellent, is that Smiley brings out that element so much more plainly, and, unlike Run For The Sun, the Beatles’ classic is turned into something genuinely quite filthy, but still kind of cheeky and fun and shy all at once. His voice is shy and vulnerable, but the gasps and moans bring out the true intent of the lyric.

Pre-Colombian Love, instrumentally, is a good, old-fashioned dirty rock song, and like all dirty rock songs, there’s a question running throughout, of whether the subject of the song is a person, or drugs. There isn’t much else to say on it. It’s a fun listen.Another cover, this time a sweet little mashup of Four Tops’ I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and Somewhere Over The Rainbow, is utterly delightful. Lulled into a false sense of security with a show-tune opening, a glam rock stomper is what follows, and Smiley’s breathy, suggestive vocals are their most suggestive. “I’m tied to your apron strings”, apron strings usually used in music as a metaphor for family ties; suggesting that his love is inaccessible to him due to their family, takes on a significantly more sordid tone. A glam rock cover of a Motown classic is a brave move, but this time, they’ve finally got the balance of American and British just right. It works better than it sounds on paper. The inclusion of the first few bars of Somewhere Over The Rainbow harks back to Smiley’s background in musical theatre. As a child, he was the youngest actor to play Oliver Twist on Broadway. A beautiful full-circle moment. Smiley’s acting career would later be revisited on the track Abstracted Billy, included on the posthumous release Sunset Tower (2023), where he declares his ambition to play Billy The Kid, an outlaw of the Wild West whose story has been adapted innumerable times.

The album closes on a gorgeous cover of Frank Sinatra’s Young At Heart, which opens on the line “fairy tales can come true / it can happen to you”, which is a piece of odd, unintentional foreshadowing of the direction his career would soon take.

There’s one song I have deliberately saved until last, and that’s Queen Of Hearts.

Whilst April In Paris may be my ride or die, Queen Of Hearts is undoubtedly the best track on Breathlessly Brett. It tells the tale of a young man, the self proclaimed Queen of Hearts; beloved by women, until he inevitably breaks their hearts, and the life of the party - who is sucked into vanity and, to put in modern terms, believing in one’s own hype, and this leads him down a road of self-destruction, substance abuse, and he eventually makes a spectacle of his own death, just before he is to make his debut, whether as a musical artist or an actor. “I’ll soar from Sunset Tower, what a way to go / the city’s shining so on with the show”. This would turn out to be a troubling premonition. You see, shortly after the recording of the album, and after a phone call with Andrew Oldham, and it had been decided Breathlessly Brett would be shelved, and never see the light of day; during a party in his suite in the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, a room filled with mirrors, and just as the last of the guests were lingering, in a drink-and-drug induced fit of anger, he smashed each and every mirror in the room. The guests believed he was going to jump out of the window, making a show of his death just like the Queen of Hearts. Paramedics were called, and Brett Smiley was strapped down, and carted away to the psychiatric unit at UCLA Hospital.

Aside from a role as Prince Charming in a pornographic adaptation of Cinderella, alongside his beau, Cheryl Smith - Smith, being the star of the show, was given a choice on who to cast as The Prince, and she, of course, chose Brett. Cinderella (1977) resembles a Confessions film than anything else - even the tagline “What The Prince Slipped Cinderella Was Not A Slipper” is oozing with bawdy end-of-the-pier humour. Lastly is the aforementioned posthumously released Sunset Tower, a better display than Breathlessly Brett of his sweet voice, comprising of his early recordings, with some Oldham-less versions of Highty Tighty, Space Ace and Queen Of Heart. Typically, this was released as a limited edition for Record Store Day 2023 as an attempt to make quick cash from the legacy of a deceased person, Brett Smiley faded away. Not theatrically, like the Queen Of Hearts, but more like a flash of lighting. One moment he was there, and the next he wasn’t.

Sadly succumbing to a nasty heroin addiction, sometimes even dealing cocaine in exchange for a place to live, Brett Smiley had become just another New York junkie. After his mother died, all ephemera relating to his glam period was destroyed. He would later come to embrace this somewhat upon its eventual release.

He continued to play shows around New York as late as 2015 and frequently communicated with fans on his Facebook page, still showing a wry wit and writing with the humble demeanour of just, well, a normal bloke. All of this whilst battling hepatitis and HIV. In addition, he recorded a cover of David Bowie’s Kooks for a tribute album at an unknown time. His adopted British accent is mostly gone, and his voice retains a pretty quality and still has hints of Sunset Tower and Breathlessly Brett, but all in all, he sounds like, again, a normal bloke, which I do find incredibly endearing. It ends on a delightfully camp, spoken: “Huh. You don’t say.” The last of Brett Smiley’s recorded output I could dig up was a recording for Not Alone, a collection of charity albums for Médecins Sans Frontières in their fight against the AIDS epidemic. There survives a clip of him playing a set in London in 2005 on YouTube, also. Brett Smiley passed away on the 8th January 2016, at the age of 60, just 48 hours before David Bowie, the man he had been compared to forty years earlier.

If there’s one thing I have learned from the obituaries I’ve read, it’s that Brett Smiley was a truly beautiful soul. He never had any hang-ups about his fifteen minutes of possible fame, his addiction, and treated everyone with the utmost kindness. I was going to end this on “fuck Andrew Loog Oldham”, but that isn’t what he would want. The “world’s most beautiful boy” created one of the world’s most beautiful albums, one to be truly cherished. I’ve decided I would like to be buried with a copy of Breathlessly Brett. Rest well.