TEH SEX SUSPECT

IS TEH SEX SUSPECT A NOIZE DUDE?

Daily Record
Tuesday, July 26 1994

RUNAWAYS WED IN FEAR!

A SCOTS musician and his teenage bride are living on the run.

After she fled her family in Bangladesh to escape an arranged marriage.

For Nick Currie and Shazna Nessa are terrified that her angry relatives will try to kidnap her.

Nick, 34, and 17 year-old Shazna opened their hearts from their honeymoon hideaway in Paris.

Shazna's dad, a wealthy restauranteur, dragged her to Bangladesh from London after she met Nick when she was just 14.

He took her passport then got her engaged to a stranger.

He didn't even tell her until after he'd done it.

Shazna says she was a virtual prisoner in the remote family home.

But she managed to flee back to Nick in Scotland. They were wed last week in Glasgow.

Shazna said: "My parents couldn't understand that the only man I could ever love was Nick.

"He is my life. The idea of being without him was destroying me."

Guitarist Nick, who records under the name Momus, hugged Shazna proudly as he added: "I told her dad my love was irreversible, but it simply didn't register.

"Now we have to keep on the move. But so long as we have each other we will survive."

NEWLYWEDS ON THE RUN

Forbidden love forced them to marry in secret

FORBIDDEN love has turned Scots musician Nick Currie and his new, teenage wife, Shazna into fugitives.

The Daily Record tracked them down to France after their secret wedding in Glasgow. The newlyweds are in hiding in Paris, terrified that Shazna's family may find them and try to steal her back.

For it was just three weeks ago that schoolgirl Shazna Nessa, 17, escaped from the Bangladesh home that had become her prison. Broken-hearted, she was wasting away as potential husbands were paraded by her parents anxious for a traditional arranged marriage.

But, to be with Nick - the man she fell for at just 14 - Shazna had to leave her family behind without so much as a backward glance. And, when we caught up with them on a balmy night in Paris, they told a story of a love that survived against all odds.

Hand in hand, oblivious to the rest of the world, Shazna told how she first met 34-year old guitarist Nick - who records as Momus - in London after hearing his album.

Shazna said: "I was only 14 and I had a crush on a boy who was a fan of Nick's music.

"But the relationship never got off the ground and I wrote a letter to Nick telling him. It was a kind of agony aunt letter.

"He wrote a very nice letter back to me and said that we should meet some time and talk.

"Months later we met and got on really well."

STOLEN

Nick, an English literature graduate said:

"It was just an innocent friendship. We both liked the same books and could really talk and make each other laugh. For a long time we were only friends."

But, as the relationship grew into romance, trouble brewed for Shazna, daughter of a wealthy, London-based Bangladeshi restaurant and factory owner.

Her father is well-respected in the community - and one of the prime marriage arrangers.

Aged 16 and still at private school studying for A levels, Shazna had to meet Nick in secret, stolen moments as she skipped school.

But, when the whispers reached her parents ears, they moved swiftly:

"They began pressurising me into getting engaged," Shazna recalls.

"A 21-year-old boy from Bangladesh, whose family are very wealthy, was very keen on me, but I didn't want to know.

"But, suddenly, people were arriving at our house for a party and I was engaged."

However, Shazna continued to meet Nick in secret, and when her fiancé found out he flew into a rage.

When it boiled over into violence she fled barefoot from
the house to Nick.

Said Shazna: "He pulled me by the hair, but I managed to get away and made my mind up I wasn't coming back."

She and Nick fled to Scotland, where his parents and brother and sister live.

"I phoned home to tell my parents that I was safe. But they were wailing and howling. They said they were going to die. It was emotional blackmail," said Shazna.

Nick said: "I had even converted to Islam and I phoned Shazna's dad to ask if I could marry her.

"He agreed and gave me his blessing... but I had to bring her back to London first."

But, once back in London, Shazna was forbidden to see Nick. Plans were well in hand for her marriage to the 21 year-old who had hit her.

MISERABLE

Shazna said: "It was like the whole community was ganging up on me. Relatives and friends of the family were visiting me and trying to talk me round, but I wasn't interested."

But, by December, that marriage was off; Shazna's parents had other plans.

Said Shazna: "I was told that my grandfather was dying in Bangladesh and that he was really upset because he had heard rumours that I had pink hair and was dancing in strip clubs in London.

"I was to go and visit him, for three weeks at the most. But I should have seen the signs that it was all a trap."

Said Nick: "I was miserable when I knew Shazna was going away and I felt it was a trick, but I knew that we would be together somehow."

Once in the remote northern Bangladesh town of Sylhet, however, the trap closed and there seemed no way back.

Her father had her passport, and, although Shazna lived in relative splendour, with her own servant, in the family bungalow, she couldn't leave the country.

She was the prize capture for any man - young, beautiful, educated and mature beyond her years.

But best of all, she had a British passport.

Suitors of all kinds - old men, young men, the widowed and divorced, were all paraded before her.

She would peek through curtains as another man arrived trying to win her hand.

LONELINESS

But she was miserable and finally physically ill because she was so depressed.

Pages she tore from her diary at the time reveal her deepest feelings...

"...I'm sick, sick, sickly. Physically sick and mentally sick. I don't know what words can sum up the acute pain I've been experiencing; the bitter scummy loneliness, the oppression...

"Didn't our Prophet preach 'do not oppress and do not be oppressed'...

"And here I am, far from any light which can touch upon my life..."

And another entry says:

"Auntie is trying to make me fall in love with her doctor cousin whom she wants me to marry - he's short, stout, dark and has a moustache..."

As the months ticked by, and Nick desperately tried to find a solution in London, Shazna became resigned.

She would have to marry to go back to England - then run off with Nick.

"I felt as though I was slowly drowning," she said.

"EVERYTHING I HAD HOPED FOR WAS FALLING APART AND THERE WAS NOTHING I COULD DO."

TOMORROW

How Shazna escaped from the prison of her own home in Bangladesh

Daily Record, Wednesday, July 27, 1994

My escape from a life of hell on earth!

How Shazna fled from the prison of her own home in Bangladesh!

By Anna Smith

IN THE stupefying heat of a remote Bangladesh town, heartbroken Shazna Nessa slowly began to succumb.

She would have to marry a husband chosen for her by her parents who wrenched her from the man she adored.

She would be rich, and she may even find some happiness... but her heart would always belong to Edinburgh-born musician Nick Currie.

But while 17 year-old Shazna dreamed of the day she and Nick would be together, she had no idea he was working behind the scenes in London to help her escape.

For Nick, depressed and lonely, the fight to reunite him with Shazna became a daily crusade.

Yesterday, in Paris, Nick said: "Every day I worked for hours, running up phone bills, writing to everyone from the British High Commission in Bangladesh to social services in London.

"I told them of our delicate situation and I was amazed at the great support I got from all quarters. Everyone was on our side.

"I even got in touch with a human rights organisation in Bangladesh, run by women, who sent people on spying missions to Shazna's home to make sure she was okay.

"I also had the help of a very good woman Bangladeshi lawyer.

"At one point I was given information that a wedding had taken place at Shazna's home and my heart sank. But it was a servant."

TICKETS

His clandestine work only became apparent to Shazna when her father took her to the capital city of Dhaka to renew her passport.
Shazna said: "I was quietly taken to the side and given a sealed letter from Nick.

"Inside he told me he was doing everything to get me back home.

"He had made arrangements for tickets valid every day for one year, and said that emergency travel documents could be issued by the British High Commission to get me home.

"That day I was so happy I was walking on air. But I knew then that it was now up to me to make an escape plan."

For two days in Dhaka she sweated as she worked out a scheme, and worried about the consequences of being caught.

During the six months she had been imprisoned in the country, letters she had posted to Nick were somehow intercepted and ended up in her father's hands. She was slapped by her furious dad.

BOOKS

But on a sweltering day on June 26 , while still in Dhaka, she decided to run for it.

She told her father she was going to deliver library books to a friend so she could get out of the flat.

Shazna said: "I just decided it's now or never. I was suddenly standing in the street with only the clothes I stood up in and my purse.

"I hailed a rickshaw, but I was terrified, as all the neighbours were out on their verandas and may have seen me.

"I got the rickshaw to drop me off a few hundred yards down the road and then jumped into one of the tiny three wheeled taxis you see in Asian countries.

"The taxi driver didn't know the way to the British High Commission and I was panicking as he kept asking other drivers for directions. I was terrified someone would spot me.

"Eventually, we got there and when I said my name at the front door I got in straight away."

ECSTATIC

Once inside the safe haven of the British High Commission, Shazna was free at last.

She was able to make a call to a relieved and ecstatic Nick in London, to tell him she was flying out that afternoon.

But when she opened the door of the BHC, her father was standing on the steps as she hurried to a waiting car.

HAUNT

Still upset by the final parting, Shazna said: "I heard him call my name, but I didn't dare to look back.

"If I had looked back and seen him so upset I may have gone back and it would be all over.

"But I will never forget the sound of his voice as he called me. It will haunt me forever.

"I love my dad and my mum and I know they were only doing what they felt was best for me, but they couldn't understand that I love Nick.

"I didn't plan it that way... it just happened."

Shazna wrote her parents a letter once she arrived back in Britain, asking them to forgive her.

Once back home and reunited with Nick, they headed straight to Scotland where you don't need parental permission to marry at 17.

And in a poignant wedding ceremony last week at Glasgow registry office, Nick's family and friends were moved as a track from his latest album was played.

SECRET

The lyrics, written by Nick, whose singing name is Momus, sum up his feelings:

"I'll love you till they figure out the way that life began..."

Now Nick and Shazna plan to move to a secret hideaway somewhere in Europe after their Paris honeymoon.

Nick wants to pursue his music career, and Shazna will finish her A levels.

Nick said: "It doesn't matter where we live as long as we're together and nobody finds us. As long as we have each other we have enough."

But for Shazna there will always be the pain of the last goodbye.

She added: "I'm glad I went to Bangladesh, because I gave my parents the chance and my trust, but they cheated me.

"I don't feel any grudges against them and I forgive them.

"I am still a Muslim and our children will be Muslim.

"I only wish they would understand what I have done and that one day we can all be reconciled and be a family as one."

Select Magazine Interview
By Miranda Sawyer

Creation's in house pervert and surrogate Pet Shop Boy MOMUS dashes off a few bons mots...

What's your new house like?

I'm only a stone's throw from one of the major arteries of London. [St Martin's Lane]. It's very high tech, but I feel as though I'm living in the country. There's buildings all around though, so it's really quiet, and there's no neighbours, so you can play your music as loud as you want. I live with an architecture student from America who's just arrived and who thinks that castor sugar is the sugar you put in your tea. He nicks cutlery because we need it. He tries to get me to do it, but I'm pathologically honest.

Sometimes I regard places like Ilford as having a really exciting young multi-ethnic feeling. That scale of big spaces and bowling alleys and amusement arcades, it's utterly vibrant and alive and you never see it on TV, but it's happening, it's there and it's suburban. Whereas you could stick a sheet of glass over the whole of the centre of London and charge people £3.50 to get in. It's basically a museum. I love the 18th Century architecture and that almost Italian closeness, and I love the theatre of everyday life - people checking each other out and buying clothes - but it's somehow very synthetic.

Are you religious?

I've just started converting to Islam and I spent a strange day on Saturday being taken step by step by Muslims through all the things you have to do as a Muslim. I met Cat Stevens actually. He was fabulously well-dressed in a kind of Commes Des Garcons olive green suit, with a white turban and a long black beard. He said, you've got to give up pop music because it inflames the lower part of the personality.

I'm converting for the sake of my girlfriend, who's Asian. Giving up drinking is interesting... suddenly everywhere I look I see that alcohol completely underpins our whole culture - when they talk to one another it's two seconds before they start saying, Oh I got really smashed last night. It's funny because at the same time as reading all these Islamic text books I'm reading Freud's Future Of An Illusion, which says that culture has built itself on a complete repudiation and suppression of all the basic instincts that we have to fornicate and murder and all the rest of it, and that drinking is the only way that people can reconcile themselves to their instincts.

Will you be reading Thatcher's Memoirs?

No. I listen to Radio 4 and I listened to all the quotes but.. . I tried to ignore Margaret Thatcher for the 12 years she was around - to the extent of only reading French newspapers, because I hate seeing the Royal family and Margaret Thatcher. I hate thinking that the Tories have been in power all that long time. I can't deal with it. The Tories are not in power on Planet Momus.

Is football the new rock 'n' roll?

With pop music in the early days, with Gerry And The Pacemakers, it was a very working-class thing and that's changed, as it's become poncified and art-rock and art school. It's all become post-modern quotations of the popular past. Football's getting a bit poncified now - people trying to make it literate and style culture appropriated.

But then I get on a tube train and suddenly it fills up with all these ugly people and I think, what are all these ugly people doing and then I realise it's a football crowd. And they all have an IQ of about 80. I hate to point this out, but the bulk of football fans are stupid . They can't help it. . . they're the spawn of the industrial revolution. . . I'm going to sound like an awful geneticist, but there's a lot of poor genetic stock around and we have to filter it and we have to interbreed so we get better and higher genetic stock. When you see people of mixed origin they're often more intelligent. They might have to learn two different languages and they have to live in two worlds and understand the cultural relativism that people just don't understand if they've grown up in one culture. People from different backgrounds should mix and their eyes would be opened.

When was the last time you hit someone?

I hit my girlfriend the other day, but only because she was telling me to do it as a kind of experiment to see if I could overcome my wimpy liberalism and become a manly, masterful type. I'm really not like that. I quite enjoyed it which is really sick. I enjoyed the feeling of leaving my civilised self behind a little bit. My girlfriend just laughed - it wasn't at all hard.

Have you heard and do you like the Teenage Fanclub LP?

I've got 'Bandwagonesque' which I like. I thought it sounded like my brother's Status Quo LP. You can tell they're nice people. What I love about Creation is that it's a Celtic label and I'm a Scot. I'm a bourgeois Edinburgh Scot whereas they're from East Kilbride (Bellshill, actually- Ed) and they've all done ( wildly suggests a list of potentially incriminating drugs), but there is something Scottish that we all have. Me and Primal Scream have a kind of rivalry, but basically everyone on Creation has a rivalry with Primal Scream. It's like Joseph And His Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat: Alan McGee gives them the coat and the money and the drugs and the promotion and absolutely everything else. Strangely enough I'm the second longest standing Creation artiste. The longest is Primal Scream.

Which is the best drug you've ever taken?

I've never taken any drugs. I love consciousness, I love reality. The brain's such a delicate mechanism, and I just love having one. Although I have always wanted to do coke. I feel there's this little narrow corridor with a lot of wilderness and scariness all around it, which is sanity, and if you do drugs you're going to get tugged into the screaming madness of the forest.

Who or what is a pervert?

Well, a pervert is just defined in relation to normality and I've always thought that normality should be expanded a bit and in the 80s I tried to recuperate certain things from this perverse territory. I've never met a real pervert, no. I read once that creative people are pathological on all the scales that they have in pathology, but they just have a strong enough character to master all their pathological tendencies; whereas criminals, say, just give in. I think that's true of me. I express my pathologies in my songs. All artists are perverts - well, the good ones anyway. The boring ones aren't. Paul Young isn't a pervert.

When I first came to London I thought everyone here was very avant garde and sophisticated - especially journalists - and that nothing shocked them, so I had to go to real lengths to get any attention. Then I was amazed to turn round and find that people thought I was completely corrupt and perverted. I'm really very romantic. There's a Momus album called 'Tender Pervert' and people always say you can't be both, but I think you can.

But I'm definitely becoming less perverted and more romantic as I get older: I've never been in love until the last couple of years - my early 30s - so I suppose the romantic thing hit me harder, coming later. Actually I was reading my diary recently, and it said, 'My fan mail arrives from Creation. A couple of girlish peans give me a stiffy as I sit on the loo reading it'. And one of those stiffies turned out to be the most devastatingly romantic thing in my life. That's how life works - you start out with lust and really bad intentions and then you learn to be civilised.

Have you got a stripy helmet (like The Pet Shop Boys)?

No I haven't. But I do keep bumping into Neil. In a post office once and in a Polish restaurant. Our lives seem to be on this strange parallel course. Actually I am, in myself, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant together. Cos I'm an aristocratic poncey guy who goes to the opera sometimes and I'm also someone who loves the brashness of techno and pop music. Even to the extent that some days I get up and I dress like Chris Lowe and sometimes I get up and dress like Neil Tennant. It's just one of those unfortunate coincidences, because they're much more famous than me. Also they're influenced by show songs and French chansons and having those chord structures over a techno backing is like me. It's like television - different people inventing it at the same time.

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