No Evil

I know dears, I know, it’s appalling the length of time since I’ve been on here. I’m so ashamed I can barely look in the mirror. Will it help if I say I haven’t been idle? I’ve been working on getting fit again, writing an article for Boyz (should be in this week’s edition – a FULL PAGE, if you please) and organising a fabulous show at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Me, pulling off a successful club night, can you imagine? What was I thinking?!

Most of the credit goes to the act I booked – David Benson with this marvellous show Think No Evil Of Us. I was just smart enough to realise it would work (pats self on back) and persuade other people to take the chance.

The show is part autobiographical and part David impersonating Kenneth Williams, you can read my review of when I first saw it at Bloomsbury Theatre two years ago. Parts of the text have always stayed with me and I thought it would be great to see it again in the intimate surrounds of the Tavern.

Thanks to the gift of Facebook we had booked half the space up before the doors even opened. The show was so powerful that, far from the rowdiness of the RVT’s two main busy nights – Duckie and SLAGS on Sunday – you could have heard a pin drop throughout the performance as everyone remained engrossed in the story.

I was DJing before, during and after the show and was slightly nervous because my old friend Mark Wood, an actual famous DJ from Readers Wifes was in the house (he's the blond one), and I got even more spooked when I looked across the room and saw Princess Julia. SCREAM!

The weird thing with Mark being there was that if I hadn’t met him all those years ago when I worked at Virgin, I might not be doing all this. He was the one who introduced me to the Retro Bar and Duckie and a whole new scene that I didn’t even know existed.

God knows why I had been too gormless to find it for myself, but there you have it. I can’t really remember what I used to do about 10 years ago. I think I just stayed at home and watched telly. I know I was constantly BORED.

Then it was two of the Readers Wifes pop group who persuaded me to have a go at DJing, something I’d never considered previously, and the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s weird to think that one person can have such a powerful effect on your destiny, and even though working at Virgin led to me being made redundant and later facing near bankruptcy, I’m still glad I did it to have made such a good friend and had the course of my life altered.

I dread to think would have become of me otherwise.

Hoops Upside Your Head

Hey kids, have you heard about the new craze that's sweepin' across town? Hula Hooping is BACK and EVERYONE is doin’ it ... well, um, that is to say, Toby got a Hula Hoop and I decided to copy him.

This morning I took receipt of what I can only describe as an enormous ring – fucking massive in fact, and much to the amusement of the postman. “Is it for dogs to jump through?” he asked me when I went to collect it from the Post Office. Hmm ... that sounded better than, “I’m going to swing it around in the sitting room and try not to bruise my kneecaps”, but I opted for a quick, “erm, no, I work in a theatre,” before heading sharply for the door.

Half an hour to rid the bugger of its four-deep layer of cellophane wrapping once I got it home and now, of course, I discover I can’t hula for toffee! I think 10 seconds is my new world record, I don’t think I’ll be making it to the 2012 Olympics.

What do you reckon ... ?

All the Fun of the Fair

With the day job threatening to drain me of the last remaining millilitres of my will to live, I am glad to have had a lively weekend of cabaret activity to act as hedonistic CPR and encourage my heart to carry on beating.

I can’t complain that this weekend was lacking in variety. It all started off on Thursday when I worked at Glitterous at the RVT - a new night hosted by Zak Black and my tranny de jour, Miss Kimberley. There was music, dancing, speciality acts ... and despite a slightly cunty crowd (posh people who drink champagne and then talk through the acts) it all went down pretty well.

Zak and Miss Kimberley put in great musical performances – the latter proving she’s not just a pretty face, she can also bang out a mean Billie Holiday number. There was a fab stilt walker / angle grinder / fire breather who breathed so much fire we had to send her outside or the whole place would have been turned to cinders, and my personal favourite - a fierce drag queen called Flame (who I’ve so far been unable to find online – boo!) who strutted and lip-synched to Whitney Houston and Lonnie Gordon. He reminded me a bit of my San Franciscan idol, Kiddie – the same sturdy male build with strong androgynous features. I gave him lots of extra lights and dry ice to make him look ultra fabby - I hope he comes back again soon.

They had told me there would be TV cameras at the show so had dyed my roots in preparation. This turned out to be a BIG FAT LIE, but I need to look my best for my next two appointments, the first of which was another Wizard of Oz night at the Royal Festival Hall.

This week Dickie Beau was left in charge of running the show and had assembled a cast of friends to appear with him. I loved Ingenue St John - a New York queen who performed to Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad, and A Man Da Pet driving round the auditorium in full drag in a motorised wheelchair throughout the interval was inspired, but some of the rest of it was a little bit shaky. Lisa Lee and Lavinia Co-op weren’t really able to show off their talents as the scarecrow and tin man, and I obviously don’t “get” Nando Messiah who I haven’t liked on any occasion I’ve seen him performing.

Quite rightly Dickie was the highlight of the evening, turning in a couple of amazing performances in his psycho Judy Garland drag. The show climaxed with his superb Blackout - a lip-synch to Judy Garland talking about her life. It starts off chatty and self-deprecating then ends up manic with her ranting about the way the public has treated her as she falls of her chair and spits blood. It’s a mind-blowing performance that had me in tears the first time I saw it, and even had me a bit wobbly on this fourth occasion.

You might think that had been enough excitement but no, the best was yet to happen! On Saturday I went to the Miss Behave Variety Nighty at Roundhouse which, aside from giving you a crick in the neck from watching the aerialists, is a work of sheer ruddy brilliance.

The Roundhouse is the perfect venue for this mixture of old-time cabaret and circus. There was sword swallowing and weird tongue-twisty-ness from Miss Behave, music from Dusty Limits and Frank Sanazi, fire from Lucifire … and those weren’t even the best bits! There was a groovy hula-hooper, a buff young trapeze artist, a superbly pretentious young hoop aerialist by the name of Bret Pfister, and I think my favourite of all was a tiny woman called Marjo Nantel who did aerial stuff using ribbons. I’d never seen this kind of act before and I can’t believe that somebody would be content to hang upside down held only by two lengths of fabric wrapped round their ankles, much less flip themselves back up and then do the splits in mid-air. YIKES! It gives me the heebie geebies just thinking about it.

I urge you to get tickets before the end of the season. As the straight couple I heard on the way to the toilets were moved to comment, “Well, it’s certainly different.”

Culture and Cunts

On Friday evening Toblarina and I went to the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. It’s a collection of works where artists have created habitat-like structures, most of which you can actually climb into. I like huge installations that you can become a part of rather than just staring at a canvas on a wall.

The first exhibit was made out a sheer fabric a bit like nylon tights, and even though we got shouted at for touching the cloth (lighten up!) we were still proud that we managed to identify all the major components of the piece – there were tits that smelled of pepper, a clove “love” (read boy’s tinkle), stone lips and a fog-like roof area that was vaguely shaped like a frog.

After that we went round the corner to a big metal tunnel that you could walk through and halfway across, if you looked up, you could see a blinding light through a gap at the top. Of course we then ran upstairs like excited children to look down through the gap and wave, but nobody waved back at us, so that was a little disappointing.

My favourite bit was a room filled with 250 dolls houses, it seemed very isolated and had a very tranquil feel, but this leads me on to one of the two things I hate about the Hayward – they never quite do things properly. If this had been one of the top galleries in America then the room would have been isolated from the rest of the exhibition, huge black curtains would have hung over the exit to block out external light and noise so that you could go into the room and completely immerse yourself in the experience, but here you could still see people wandering by and were distracted from the drama of the piece by sound of their inane prattle.

The other thing I don’t like is their exhibits will usually have one main centrepiece, but to take part in it will require a good half hour of queuing. Thus, although we were able to get into the huge transparent dome that has been built on the roof of the building and feels like being trapped inside a giant beach ball, we didn’t get to go on the mini row boats on the other side as the queues were just too damn long and waiting would have put me in too bad a mood to enjoy it. Surely it couldn’t be too hard for them to adopt some kind of time-slot thing so that everybody gets a go, even if they are chronically impatient.

Anyway, our heads full of culture, we then made our way to the Clore Ballroom in the Festival Hall to await the arrival of David Hoyle and guests for their evening as part of the Wizard of Oz season. Nathan Evans introduced the show and warned the people who had just wandered out of the musical, perhaps with wee kiddies in tow, that, um, something naughty might be about to happen.

He placed an egg timer on the stage to allow those of a nervous disposition to leave the room and for the time being David was contained behind a camera - his image being projected onto a huge canvas in the role of Oz, the all seeing, all hearing and rather bad tempered ruler of the kingdom. Fred Bear, Fancy Chance, Thom Shaw and Dickie Beau appeared as the tin man, lion, scarecrow and what have you, as Oz bellowed at them looking nasty and green and menacing.



Just as the last grains of sand were draining away, David emerged in bowler hat and fright make-up to launch into his usual tirades and assaults on the senses of the audience. I doubt very much that the chambers of the Royal Festival Hall have echoed so much with the word “cunt” in their entire existence. The inappropriate nature of the venue just made it all the more amusing and really, who has the right to claim they are offended anyway? It’s not like we complain if they want to listen to classical music that we find boring.

So there were celebrations of “queer” and spirited social observations in among the occasional return to the Oz theme. David sang a song, threw interpretive dance shapes and then he and his assembled cast covered each other in paint and ran off outside to the fountains. I wish I had followed to see the faces on the passing tourists – a mad Northerner in green make-up, a tiny girl with tattoos and her tits out, a bear and a couple of fairies all screaming and running through the water.

And people say the British are too reserved.