A couple of days ago I went to see the Michael Clark Company’s mmm…. at the Barbican. Michael Clark is endlessly referred to as a “former enfant terrible of dance,” because his shows in the 1980’s used to have overtones of sex, and frequently nudity. And I was aware that Leigh designed many costumes for Clark in the 80’s, and even appeared on stage in a couple of shows.

mmm… is a two-part show, like its predecessor at the Barbican O. Both feature a first half set to punk music and second halves set to the music of Igor Stravinsky - Apollo for O, The Rite of Spring for mmm… . I’d never heard The Rite of Spring before, although endless repetition of the story of its riot-inducing premiere had given it almost legendary status in my head. And I was genuinely astonished by the jerking discordancy of it. But Clark, showing a contrariness that has stood him in good stead over the years, took the opportunity to spin a warm tale full of love and humour.

As much as I enjoyed the dance, though, I enjoyed the costumes more. A succession of simple bodystockings mingled with orange leather skirts and furry purple muffs - but far from the tacky campery that may conjure up, the results were thrilling. From the opening costumes - black lycra bodystockings with the sleeves and upper torsos replaced by cut-off white t-shirts - every costume teemed with internal contradictions. In the second half, several dancers wore beige bodystockings with green leaf patters on the chest. Doesn’t sound like much, but the effect was to achieve a sense of pastoral simplicity without interfering with the cleanly modern lines of the general look of the piece - a sort of modernist Puck image.

Then Michael Clark came on, dressed as a toilet.

OK, not dressed as a toilet. But in a costume that incorporated a toilet seat. In a horizontal orientation, around his neck, so that his head appeared to be rising out of a toilet. And the lycra of the outfit, skin-tight around the waist and legs, rose out to the rim of the seat, essentially making Clark a toilet on legs.

Hmmm, I thought to myself. I sniff a bit of Bowery.

And I was right! In fact, several of the costumes from the show were Bowery’s. The show was revived from its original incarnation from 1992, to which Bowery contributed (O premiered in 1994, just before Leigh’s death, and I don’t remember seeing anything in the revival that smacked of his style - but then, I didn’t know about him then). Both the toilet-thing, and a large white faceless blob-creature that ran around earlier, were, I’m sure, Bowery designs (it turns out Bowery “played” the blob-creature in the original).

Once the show was over and I delved into the programme, the connections started to become clear. There Leigh was, credited with “original costumes.” The show’s main costumes credit, however, went to Clark and to Stevie Stewart. Stewart, it turns out, was one-half of Bodymap, the highly influential 80’s fashion house that created most of Clark’s costumes and whose defining characteristic was the figure-hugging lycra the show featured. The other half of Bodymap, David Holah, was Clark’s lover for some time in the 80’s; apparently, they lived in a council flat in Camden, a jarring of that strange time, post-punk, when the country’s most creative individuals neither started, nor became, rich. That Holah’s name no longer appears anywhere near Clark’s work is, presumably, an indicator of some huge schism at some point in the past. A site that appears to belong to Holah does feature a page on Clark, which oddly shares its text with Clark’s entry in Wikipedia. Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, it’s impossible if the entry has copied the site, or the other way round.

So we have some sort of complex costume-triangle: Boy meets boy, boy and female friend design costumes for boy, boy and boy split up, female friend remains involved in costume making, when not dressing West End productions of Wilde. But the Rock Family Trees-style connections don’t end there. Jane, the dance aficionado with whom I attended the performance, mentioned how much she liked the show’s lighting. I looked at the programme: “Lighting by Charles Atlas.” Why was that name familiar? Jane looked through the programme and exclaimed, “look at this!” Atlas, it said, was a filmmaker and longstanding collaborator of Clark. He had also made a feature film - 2003’s The Legend of Leigh Bowery.

Talk about full circle! Quite unknowingly, without having thought about Leigh for a few weeks, I’d come to see a show featuring his costumes, lit by the man who made the very film which properly introduced me to him. As if that wasn’t enough, I exited the theatre and saw a poster featuring Anthony Hegarty of Anthony and the Johnsons. A fan, I picked up a leaflet to see when they were playing. It turned out that very week, the following Saturday - today - they were playing a gig at the Barbican indeed, they’re probably playing as I write this). But this was no normal gig - the band were to soundtrack a moving backdrop, live video of dancing women processed and edited by - go on, guess - Charles Atlas.

What’s it called when, quite unintentionally, you find yourself drawn to people who have long been drawn to each other? It’s a wonderful feeling, whatever it is. We’re so aware of “scenes” now - every time a handful of creative people get together, it’s labelled, considered and is old hat within months. It becomes impossible to consider the individual without considering the wider movement they’re perceived to be part of. How many people can honestly say they discovered Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin separately, and liked them both, before any sense developed of the “young british artists”? Now, we like a person or their art, and we are told they’re part of something larger, and we get into that too. It’s easy to forget that to really feel synergy or identity with a movement means to be drawn to the individuals before you even realise there is a movement - because the very thing that draws you to each individual is that thing which draws them together. Just as I came to realise that Leigh was at the forefront of much of what I found most exciting about urban British culture of the 1980’s and early 90’s, now I’m beginning to realise that many other artists whose work I’ve sensed the same colour and energy and wit in also sensed it in each other, and indeed, helped foster it in each other.

I wish this story ended with me attending the Anthony/Atlas gig, but it was totally sold out. However, the upcoming Charles Atlas season at Tate Modern should give me a chance to explore some more.

UPDATE: It turns out tonight’s gig isn’t Atlas’ first collaboration with Anthony and the Johnsons. He made the video (below) for “You Are My Sister”, the third single from their debut album I Am A Bird Now. The Song features Boy George, a friend of Anthony’s and the creator of Taboo, the musical about Leigh. The web grows ever more tangled.

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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

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