In August 1990, before she was even out of her teens, Alison Clarkson found herself fronting a top 10 single, namely the Beatmasters’ Hey DJ / I Can’t Dance (To That Music You’re Playing). Formerly part of female hip hop group The She Rockers, at school she’d adopted a new crop hairdo that had friends comparing her to 1930s flapper-style cartoon character Betty Boop. Nicking the name wholesale might have been a copyright issue, but instead Clarkson started calling herself Betty Boo.

The success of Hey DJ enabled her to buy some recording equipment and became the springboard for a recording career.

“I thought, oh well, I’ll just make some tunes in my room,” Boo says. “I was still living at home with my mum and I didn’t really have an agenda as such. I didn’t want to be famous, I didn’t go to stage school or anything like that. It was more to do with learning the technology, actually. I just thought, I’d like to be involved in music somehow, even if it’s behind the scenes, I can at least be a sound engineer or something. So with that, I was able to record my own music in my room and find myself – and I found this little sound that I’ve got, this combination of where my roots are, which is hip hop, with sampling, creating all these sorts of soundscapes.”

She promptly conjured up the era-defining songs Doin’ the Do and Where Are You Baby? – still thrilling blasts of pure fizzy pop – and became a successful solo star. Iconic is a much overused word, but Betty Boo deserves it, as a copper-bottomed icon of the early 90s. By the middle of the decade, though, she walked away from stardom.

“Basically, my mum fell very ill and I looked after her. Then she passed away and it wasn’t really that important to be a pop star any more. I just had no interest in it whatsoever. I had to just look after my family. I thought, well, maybe I’ll come back to it one day when I’m feeling a bit better.”

Bringing Betty back

In fact, it would take 25 years before she reached a significant birthday and decided to reactivate Betty Boo. “I got to the big five-o and I thought, wow, where did all that time go? But it was a huge part of my life and who I was. I found my identity through my music and my alter ego, really.”

There was, she admits, “a little bit of unfinished business” to it all. So it was that 2022 saw the release of a comeback album, brilliantly titled Boomerang, followed in 2024 by another, Rip Up the Rulebook, described as “my response to stereotypical ideas about what women should be doing in their 50s”. Now Betty Boo is back playing live – in fact, her current UK tour is the first she’s ever done.

“I’ve been loving it,” she says. “When I did the first leg in June, it was amazing. I had no idea that there’s still so much love for my music. It was an emotional thing for me.”

It seems to be quite a stark contrast from her experiences back in the 90s, when she had a solo record deal at the tender age of 20.

“I think there was just great energy at the time, and it was from the right place. It wasn’t contrived, or ‘let’s make her into some sort of pop star’. The record label really let me do my own thing and come up with the 60s styling, which is what I really wanted – a spacey, sort of sci-fi thing. But labels weren’t very good at logistics in those days. Some days I’d have to go to Germany for the morning, then come back and do Top of the Pops or something. Working so many hours, it was quite unnatural for a young person.”

Nevertheless, she admits she was “a bit of a force, because I’d already quit my A-levels at 17, when I went off to New York with my group The She Rockers, without really telling my mum. We toured with Public Enemy and did some stuff in the studio. I think there’s a kind of fearlessness that you have when you’re really young. I mean, at 17, that’s crazy, jumping on a plane to go and stay in New York for two months. That is mad. But I went to a very, very bad comprehensive school where I was bullied and stuff, so I don’t know, I had this desire to just do something exciting with my life. But it wasn’t anything to do with fame. Fame is a very different thing. I mean, who’d want to be a celebrity? Urghh, it’s horrible, isn’t it?”

What was her experience of living in the pop star world, then? Did she meet many other stars that she liked?

“Do you know what, I was really the opposite of what a pop star should be,” she recalls. “Honestly, I really didn’t mix with anybody. I would pretty much just do my stuff and then not take numbers. Because I’m so shy, I think, really deep down, I wasn’t the kind of person that would want to mix. I mean, I think a lot of pop stars are mad. They’re bonkers. A lot of them have headed that way and got involved in lots of, you know, ‘extracurricular activities’, and I was just wasn’t interested in that at all. But I have to say, you can’t go wrong with Jason Donovan – he was lovely.”

Her reluctance to play the game could cause friction, though. “I wasn’t like a performing monkey, basically, so I think a lot of people were quite frustrated with me – labels and so on. I do remember, when I signed to a major, they complained that I didn’t behave more like a pop star. For instance, I’d just turn up in a tracksuit, a sweatshirt and trainers, and they used to say, ‘can you just look more like a pop star, please?’. I said, this is my off-duty look, what do you want?”

Even her heritage was slightly on the unconventional side for a pop star.

“I’m half Malaysian, half Scottish, so I was sort of breaking the rules. On paper, Scottish/Malaysian rapper from Shepherd’s Bush heads on to Top of the Pops and makes records…nobody would have believed that, really.”

Betty vs Alison

If she was fundamentally a shy person, then, did the Betty Boo persona prove useful? Could Betty do things that Alison couldn’t?

“Yeah, oh, totally. It was like a superpower. And it’s funny, because I watched that new RUN DMC documentary the other day [Kings From Queens: The RUN DMC Story], and Darryl McDaniels [aka DMC] was painfully shy. When he went out on stage, he used to pretend he was a comic book character. It was like his power, to perform and be somebody else. When he told that story, I really related to it. It was a way of stepping outside who you really are and overcoming being shy and withdrawn.”

Talent manager Chris Herbert, who was responsible for bringing together the Spice Girls, later confessed that his aim in doing so had been to find five Betty Boos – that is, strong, distinct personalities each with a style of their own. Boo predated the wave of 90s girl bands (and acts discovered via TV talent shows, though she did lend her songwriting talents to Hear’Say ‘s mega-selling Pure and Simple), but Betty Boo almost seemed to pave the way for them. For a time she performed with her backing singers The Booettes – real-life twins Louise and Jaqui Chantrell – but Betty Boo was a solo act rather than a group and at times she suffered for it. “It was quite a lonely life being me,” she says. “I used to be quite envious of people in groups where you can at least bounce off each other. The pressure was on me to write songs.”

Happily, the second coming of Betty Boo is evidently a much happier affair, conducted at her own pace and entirely on her own terms.

“Oh, I’m really enjoying it. I think it’s a privilege to do this. Back in the day, record labels were the ones that said that you were over the hill if at 23 or 24 as a pop star. They’re the ones that invented those rules. Why? They’ve also invented the label ‘heritage act’. Why? Why are you a heritage act? Why aren’t you just an artist? It’s just ridiculous.”

She bursts out laughing. “I can’t stand record labels, they’re just rubbish. Which is why I have my own label and make my own rules now.”

The tour reaches Blackpool on November 20, Manchester on the 26th, and it’s clear she’s relishing the whole live experience.

“It’s really good fun to meet everybody and perform. There’s just pure joy, everyone jumping up and down, loving my music. I mean, I had no idea that, 35 years later, people would be still rapping along. Coming back and writing the last two albums, I didn’t know what a 50 year-old Betty Boo would sound like now, but I just chipped away and suddenly it started coming. I was able to express myself and do music and and have fun with it. I’m glad I’ve got back and done it, because it gives me purpose. When you’re young you think, when I’m 55, I dunno, I’ll probably be retired, doing the gardening or something. But you know what? This is brilliant.”

By Andy Murray, Music Editor

Main image of Betty Boo provided by Sonic PR

 

For Betty Boo tour details, click here.