Amanda Lear

Biography

Amanda Lear first surfaced in the early 1970s as a fetishistically clothed album-cover model for Roxy Music. She was said to be a transsexual but, as she told Interview magazine, that was just a ruse dreamed up by her sponsor David Bowie, to draw attention. Her importance to disco fans, however, began in 1977, when she recorded "I Am A Photograph" in Germany with production help from Tony Monn. "I Am A Photograph" is the first of six sleazy, hard-to-find albums in which she flaunts a voice so heavy with low notes it makes one wonder if she really isn't a man after all. But Lear's slow notes are simply an exaggeration of the whiskey-voiced sultriness created by Marlene Dietrich. That isn't to say, however, that Lear's lyrics - or the music's inverted proportions - don't exploit her mythology as a kinky concoction to the bursting point.

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