I’ve always been disappointed by clubbing. Now, I’m not instinctively a club person - I mostly like music with guitars in, I prefer beer to class A’s, and I start to flag at about three on the usual night out. The club world swam into my consciousness in around 1994, via my brother’s obsession with jungle; but no sooner had I become aware of this strange world, than Britpop broke and carried me along with it. Life became a blur of collarless shirts, sideburns and Sovereigns, middle-class parents suddenly bemused by their violin-playing darlings’ newfound interest in pool and darts.When I escaped suburbia and went away to University, I had a bona fide dance phenomenon on my doorstep - Gatecrasher - but crap finances, blind fear of some sort of accidental drug consumption causing my premature death, and the nagging awareness that £15 was a lot of money to spend when I’d probably get tired and go home at 2.30, kept me away. Since then, I’ve had my moments - I’ve spent Christmas morning at Pacha in Buenos Aires, danced like a gibbon on my own for an hour in Newcastle fuelled by nothing but WKD, seen hip-hop pioneer Kool Herc, and been told off for walking into a Carl Cox set at 10.30pm and immediately starting to jump up and down and punch the air. I’ve even had the strange experience of being the only person in a dancefloor of two thousand people to recognise the latest slice of house loveliness queued up by John Carter as a remix of U2’s “Mothers of the Disappeared” - only to blow my advantage, and my cool, by excitedly screaming to my friends, “it’s U2! It’s fucking U2!!” at the top of my voice. I, in short, have clubbed - a respectable amount for someone who has every Bob Dylan record up to 1980.

And yet, I’ve always had a sense that the really exciting parts of clubworld have eluded me. When I was giving it the full Pulp, in 1995 and ‘96, I sometimes found myself daydreaming enviously about the ideas and images streaming out of the club scene. While Britpop prized world-weary cynicism, dance seemed hugely idealistic, even cod-spiritual - always aiming for that transcendent moment on the dancefloor, or at sunrise in Ibiza. While indie had vague undertones of violence, dance was quite literally “loved up.” And while Britpop was obsessed with the ordinary - songs about making the tea, millionaire musicians pointedly being photographed playing pool and getting into fights - dance seemed full of fantasy, of performance, of costume. Looking back now, Keith Flint’s “Firestarter” costume seems like a poor imitation of American punk. But in the drabness of 1996, with football taking over the nation, the simple fact of a man in eyeliner on Top of the Pops seemed viscerally exciting.

And as I became aware of the history of New York’s club scene, first with Studio 54 and later with Michael Alig and the club kids, clubland just seemed more thrilling, challenging, and expressive - particularly as I was just realising the contradictions between lad culture and my homosexuality. The fact that the club kids scene ended with Alig’s conviction for murder only made it more fascinating.

As time went on, my occasional forays into clubworld always came tinged with a sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found this fantastical aspect of the scene. At Pacha, people spend a lot of money to look beautiful, but no-one could be seriously accused of expressing themselves. In recent years, I’ve let theatre fulfil my need for performance and costume as a means of escape and self-expression - and i’ve become more aware of the prevalence of such things on the gay scene, at nights like Duckie. Nevertheless, a defined performance seems dead compared to the images of fast-moving, young, androgynous clublife that still rattled around in my head.

Until I encountered Leigh Bowery.

I’d heard of Bowery, mostly as a character in Boy George’s musical Taboo and as the operator of the London club night of the same name. I also dimly remembered reading in around 1994 about Minty, the band/performance art collective Bowery spent what turned out to be his last months working with. I had a vague sense that he may have worn interesting clothes. I had no idea of just how he encapsulated everything I’d sought from nightlife, until I saw The Legend of Leigh Bowery. A nil-budget documentary by the amusingly-named Charles Atlas, Legend provides a compassionate peek at the fashion designer/club promoter/performance artist/queer icon. More importantly, it contains hundreds of pictures of his clothes.

There are too many incredible Bowery images to present more than a first impression here (plus, none of the best ones come up on a Google Image Search). But the spattering here should give you the general idea. Throughout the late 1980’s and early 90’s, Bowery was the dark heart of the club scene.

It’s important to emphasise that: he wore these clothes in clubs. Despite the label “fashion designer,” he never expressed any interest in designing for anyone else but himself, and though towards the end of his career he made moves towards performance art, it remained heavily club-based. Mostly, though, he just got dressed up to go out.

And go out he did. Sometimes unable to drink or piss for hours because of the mask and fake vagina he often wore; sometimes in excruciating pain, and usually fuelled by nothing more than a few vodkas; he would go out and dance for hours and hours. And by dance, I don’t mean anything remotely composed or prepared. My favourite image of the film is of Bowery, fully gimp-masked, waving his hands out in front of him like an ecstatic zombie, and spinning wildly around. Given his considerable bulk, that must have been scary to see (and I suppose his transcendence of his size is another aspect of what attracts me to him. It takes a unique type of body confidence to use a corset to turn your belly into a pair of breasts).That lack of drugtaking is very important. For what’s so striking about Bowery is his seriousness - purely from the testimony of his friends, it’s clear he thought carefully about his outfits, and endured considerable discomfort to wear them. Contrast that to the New York scene, where extremes of costume and behaviour were always inseparably tied up with extremes of drug use. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. But I found myself more attracted to Bowery’s thoughtful, deliberate creativity - he never collapsed into self-parody or self-destructiveness. And his intense, lumbering maleness, which contrasts so effectively with the androgyny of his costumes, is so much more complex and attractive than the New York kids’ adolescent queening.Had it just been for Bowery’s spectacular club career, I’d have found him fascinating and inspiring. But it turned out there was a whole other chapter of Bowery’s extraordinary story that resonated with me even more.

The Hertfordshire Mercury is not a very good newspaper. With nothing to report except traffic alterations and the occasional robbery, it’s a thin read. But I always remember an article I read when I was about 12. It was an interview with an artist about his relationship with one of his regular models. He described how he “bends himself into incredible shapes for me.” It was accompanied by one of the portraits of the model, nude, sprawled across a chair, one foot cocked. The model was male, large, bald. I remember being transfixed by the portrait, and for the first time by the idea of the relationship between artist and model - that weird uneven intimacy, with the artist coolly analysing the model’s nude body and the model glimpsing the full passion of the artist’s inner thoughts. Contrasted with the staid, comic images in the popular imagination of models perched on stools in front of a class, this was intense and intoxicating. I’ve been slightly fascinated by the relationship between model and artist ever since.So when, towards the end of the film, Legend describes Leigh Bowery’s modelling for Lucien Freud, my ears pricked up. I’m a huge fan of Freud, and was interested at the thought of this king of costume baring himself for this most unfoolable of eyes. But I never expected what I saw - although those of you who know Bowery will no doubt have guessed. The sight of the first of the portraits shown in the film jolted me like an electric shock. It was, of course, the very painting I’d seen in the Mercury years ago.

The article had been an interview with Freud about the Bowery sitting. Leigh had me again. He’d been haunting me, like some nude Magwitch, for over 14 years.

Leigh died in 1994, just as I was beginning to become aware of the very scene he’d dominated. But even though I’ve only discovered him properly now, aged 26, I’ll always consider him one of my formative influences in life. He helped to inspire many of the aspects of the 90’s club scene that I was drawn to - and directly inspired my interest in the model-artist relationship, even though I didn’t know it was him. He was my Marc Bolan, my Bowie - my unknown teenage idol, the person who made my tiny smalltown world a little bigger, a little more diverse - even though I didn’t know his name.

Leigh Bowery, 1961-1994

Permalink | 2 comments | Print this post

Email this | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Share this on Facebook
See other content filed under: Culture & Media, Posts, Things Rav Likes

We live in an uber-digital age. 3.3 billion text messages were sent in the UK in the last month. Everyone from U2 to the Pope has commented at length on the never-ending sea of media messages that buzz, pop and bleep over us from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep at night – and even in between.

So it takes skill and inspiration to make a comment on on this brave new world that makes an impact. Which makes the work of New York mix artist Christian Marclay even more impressive. His 2003 piece Video Quartet, recently granted a proper room in the rehanging of Tate Modern, makes for a startling evocation of media overload: startling not for its technical skill or apparently sage commentary, as with so many pieces on similar themes, but for its humour and humanity.

Consisting of four adjacent screens, each with an independent soundtrack, showing clips from various musical films and TV shows and televised concerts, the work doesn’t differ in form from other media-collage. Its effect, at first, seems simply like a mash-up mix CD with video; 2 Many DJs TV, almost. However, the piece’s ebbs and flows generate a remarkably strong emotional reaction. Four co-ordinated bursts of energy- frenetic jazz solos, gunshot percussion and the combined vocals of Louis Armstrong and Julie Andrews, for example – will give sudden way to moments of calm, with fingers on tables and lone voices maintaining the flow. Yet there is never silence, until the end of the 13-minute piece; with the coming of each lull in activity begins a crescendo which will usher in the next movement. It’s these moments – impossible to explain, to be honest – that give the piece its power.

Unlike the Technicolor ad-fest portrayed in the likes of Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Minority Report, or Falk Richter’s Electronic City, our lives are not a constant stream of intrusive images and blaring noise. No, not even if you live in Manhattan, I’m informed. Rather, the pernicious influence of “always-on” comes not from its in-your-face brashness, but from its subtlety. It’s not the fifteen ringing mobile phones in the street that spoil your day; it’s the one that goes off in the gallery; the phone call when you’ve just got in the bath. It’s the squeeze placed on moments we used to reserve for quiet that makes technology an uncomfortable companion. The shifting pace of Video Quartet means that it mirrors our lives more truly than any frenetic Microsoft-advert speeded-up-video portrayal. But that trumpet, that hiss, that note, that sits quietly, but always getting louder, underneath every lull in the action, is what makes Video Quartet really relevant.

[ Video Quartet is at Tate Modern now]

Permalink | No comments yet | Print this post

Email this | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Share this on Facebook
See other content filed under: Culture & Media, Posts, Things Rav Likes

Permalink | No comments yet | Print this post

Email this | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Share this on Facebook
See other content filed under: Culture & Media