London Calling (70 page)

James first met Gilbert and George at the Blitz Club, where they were regulars, and when they heard he was taking a Bacon
show to Moscow they asked if he could do the same for them. James: ‘So the day after the Francis Bacon show opened I proposed
a Gilbert and George show and said “They’re very good artists” and they said “Yes, of course they are.’”
²¹
The British Council was horrified and one of its representatives asked the Russians: ‘Why are you interested in showing the
work of two homosexual fascists?’ But the Russians trusted James, and certainly didn’t trust the British Council, which had
only recently been allowed back into Moscow after being banned for many years for spying, and so preparations for the show
went ahead. It took two years of Russian red tape but in April 1990 the enormous show opened, sponsored by Gilbert and George
themselves and their gallery, Anthony d’Offay. Though none of the works were for sale, the exhibition helped establish their
international reputation. For the Russians, it was a revelation and a great triumph. James made sure that the show had lasting
impact by insisting on lots of souvenirs. James: ‘I was saying to Gilbert and George, “We’ve got to give these people badges,
we got to give them T-shirts, posters, we’ve got to give them out.” Three years later I go to a rave party in the Sputnik
Terminal Pavilion of Economic Achievements and there are people wearing these Gilbert and George T-shirts.’
²²

‘Where would you like to show now?’ James asked Gilbert and George when they returned from Russia. ‘China!’ they said. And
so, in September 1993, a large Gilbert and George exhibition opened in Peking, then travelled on to Shanghai that October.
James wrote in the catalogue: ‘The new pictures suitably have the warmth and vigour to break down barriers speaking as they
do the universal language of truth and beauty, they hold out the hand of friendship to viewers of all nations.’
²³

Leigh didn’t have the same size prejudices as the rest of us. He celebrated his fleshy proportions and turned them into a
gorgeous fashion statement. I think that’s what I loved about him most; he pushed it in your face. Like the night he swanned
into Daisy Chain in a puff-ball face mask, sequined boots with a matching push-up bra. Except for those garish trimmings,
he was butt naked.

BOY GEORGE
¹

The area of performance art worked in by Throbbing Gristle and the Neo-Naturists had a third, even more extravagantly transgressive
act. Born into the sleepy backwater of Sunshine, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, Leigh Bowery studied fashion
design for a year at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where he saw copies of the London street fashion magazine
i-D
. It was a classic case of ‘London calling’. Leigh: ‘England seemed the only place to go. I considered New York but that just
seemed full of cheap copies of London.’
²
In October 1980, aged nineteen, he left for London armed with his portable sewing machine, determined to see for himself
the New Romantics, the punks, the clothes shops and the clubs.

He went to ChaCha’s, the ‘alternative’ club run by a nineteen-year-old girl called Scarlet and held every Tuesday night in
the back room of Richard Branson’s Heaven. It had its own entrance from Hungerford Lane and for a time in the early eighties
it was the in-club, filled with celebrities: I walked in one day to see the footballer George Best snorting lines of coke
from his table, making no effort to hide what he was doing, while the rest of his party waited anxiously for their turn. But
mostly ChaCha’s was a gay club and it was there, in November 1981, that Leigh met Guy Barnes, later known as Trojan. He and
Trojan became lovers and together with a mutual friend, David Walls, they took a flat together, first in Ladbroke Grove, then
in the East End. Leigh designed costumes for them all, and in the West End clubs they became known as the Three Kings. Inspired
by the fabrics and jewellery on sale in Brick Lane, Leigh came up with his ‘Pakis from Outer Space’ look. With chains looping
from their nostrils to their ears, blue faces and rings on every
finger, they combined Hindu iconography, Ruritanian court dress and even high modernism: Leigh painted a nose on Trojan’s
cheek and used lipstick to give him an off centre mouth, like Picasso’s cubist portraits. Leigh Bowery: ‘Wearing platforms,
red and green faces and these high hats we looked so frightening, and the same time too theatrical to be taken seriously.
But we did get some abuse from the boys on the estate.’ ‘Pakis from Outer Space’ was presented at the Camden Palace for London
Fashion Week, 1982–3, as his second collection (the first being ‘Hobo’ shown as part of New York Fashion Week, 1982). In 1984
he did his ‘Pakis’ act with the Neo-Naturists at one of their shows in Great Portland Street, which involved Leigh drinking
Trojan’s piss and also using it to put out a fire they started onstage. The audience liked them, they fitted right in.

In 1983, Leigh met Michael Clark, who had just left the Ballet Rambert to start his own troop. They became good friends and
for a decade Leigh designed stunning costumes for him, some of which incorporated dildos and open crotches. (His later costumes,
which revealed the dancers’ bare bottoms, inspired the designer Alexander McQueen’s ‘bare bum’ look.) Clark even asked Leigh
to dance with them. Leigh: ‘Michael liked the idea of how some movements and shapes looked on an untrained body, I didn’t
have a classical dance background, and I was very open and eager. I began doing more performance rather than just the look
of things.’
³
Just as Michael sometimes danced in Doc Martens, Leigh, who was a trained pianist, would play a Chopin Nocturne wearing gardening
gloves and high platforms. One of their favoured hangouts those days was the Pink Panther, a rent boy bar in an upper floor
on Wardour Street that stayed open until 7 a.m.; none of them ever wanted to go home. Clubs were Leigh’s life and it was inevitable
that he would want to start one of his own. On 31 January 1985, Leigh Bowery, his business partner Tony Gordon and a girl
known as Angela Frankie, because she had danced with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, opened Taboo, held every Thursday night at
the Circus Maximus disco on Leicester Square. Leigh was the club’s public face. It was opened on a shoestring. They did not
even have enough money to print flyers so Leigh clipped photographs of naked men from his large collection of pornographic
magazines and stuck them on bits of cardboard. Then he stencilled the name Taboo over them in gold paint and, using a John
Bull printing set, rubber stamped the address and time on the back. He handed them out to friends and likely looking people
while doing his usual round of clubs.

Circus Maximus had seen better days. It was an old-fashioned West End nightclub with red velour banquettes and the walls lined
with mirrors.
A mirror ball threw moving spots of light around the room. A long flight of stairs led from the entrance lobby down to the
cloakroom and toilets, where most of the sex and drugs action took place. The doorman was Mark Vaultier, tall and thin, dressed
in Leigh Bowery clothes and known for his alarming wigs. It was hard to get in. Leigh announced the door policy as: ‘Dress
as though your life depends on it or don’t bother. We’ll only let in fabulous, over-the-top dressers and stars. We can sniff
out phoneys and weekend trendies a mile away.’ Mark had a mirror at the door and was prone to holding it in front of a frustrated
clubber’s face and asking: ‘Would you let yourself in?’ Taboo quickly became a financial success. The deal with Circus Maximus
was that they paid them £315 a night and after that the rest of the takings were theirs. Most of the staff received £50, which
was very good for a night’s wages. Angela left early on, leaving Leigh and Tony as sole owners.

Each week, Leigh wore a different, more outrageous ensemble: short skirts, polka dots on his face, frilly knickers, denim,
glitter, face paint and jewellery, but usually wearing his cheap plastic tourist policeman’s helmet, and always on outrageous
platforms that were so high that he was able to kick out the lights above the cocktail bar if he was feeling particularly
exuberant. The club opened around 10 p.m. but regulars like David Holah from Bodymap and the film-maker John Maybury arrived
between midnight and 2 a.m.. The club soon attracted the stars: Boy George and Marilyn, George Michael, Bryan Ferry and Paul
Young. John Galliano would circulate, handing out flyers for his latest fashion show, before hitting the dance floor. Many
of the designers who have since achieved world-wide success with London’s street fashions owed something to Leigh and his
utterly fearless creations, including Vivienne Westwood, who kept a close eye on the New Romantics and the Taboo scene. She
once said that Bowery and Yves Saint-Laurent were the two most important designers she knew.

It didn’t take long for the old glamour crowd to discover Taboo and Andrew Logan, Derek Jarman, Duggie Fields, Luciana Martinez
and all their friends soon became regulars. As is usual, the more famous the club became, the more it lost its initial exclusivity.
Depeche Mode, Marc Almond, Sade, New Order and the stars of the day made regular appearances. Leigh and Tony knew they were
still on the right track, however, when Paul Weller stamped out after only fifteen minutes. Even Mick Jagger buried the hatchet
and visited. He and Leigh had had a previous contretemps:

Jagger: ‘Freak!’

Bowery: ‘Fossil!’

For eighteen months Taboo was the coolest club in London, but even though he was making a lot of money, Bowery grew bored
with it. When his friend Peter-Paul Hartnett, known to the Taboo crowd as Powder-Puff Hairnet, suggested to Leigh that it
might be time to get the club closed down, Leigh, according to his friend and biographer Sue Tilley, ‘lifted a white begloved
finger to his lips as if to say “Don’t tell anyone” and Peter-Paul took this as a sign to put his plan into action.’
⁴
It was easy; all he had to do was invite reporters from the
Mail on Sunday
to visit the club. He showed them round and the next Sunday there was an article condemning Taboo and everything it stood
for. The Circus Maximus management contacted Leigh the next day, telling him the club was closed. By ending on a high point,
the club went into history alongside UFO, Blitz and all the other innovative venues in London’s club history. It had been
open for eighteen months.

In the course of Taboo, Leigh had established himself as one of the most innovative dressers on the London club scene, blurring
the lines between male and female, incorporating unusual materials, making sculptural exaggerations that distorted recognized
body lines and shapes, particularly that of his own overweight self. He was described by Boy George as ‘modern art on legs’.
⁵
He reinvented his look every few weeks, creating some of his most memorable looks such as the paint running down his bald
head as if someone had broken an egg on top. He particularly enjoyed the fact that the paint would pull off in one go at the
end of an evening. He found that some of his most beautiful garments, made from satin and velvet and specially printed fabrics,
were being ruined by the greasy marks from his face paint, which was very hard to clean. His solution was to create crewel
work cloaks with an attached head mask, with small holes for the eyes and mouth, made from the same material. This had the
same effect as the face paint, and he still made up his eyes and mouth, but at the worst it only ruined the head mask, not
the whole garment. He began to experiment with embroidery and beaded headdresses, semi-precious stones and lace, taking his
costumes into a whole new area.

If the New Romantics were the mannerist phase of punk, then Leigh Bowery was single-handedly its baroque phase. He had never
been slim, but as he put on more weight, he made his body a canvas for every form of cultural reference from circus clown
to the wildest excess of Hieronymus Bosch, all mixed together. Mark Simpson, writing in the
Independent
, described how he used to glimpse ‘in teenage terror – his enormous, corseted frame gliding and fluttering past like a hand-sewn
battleship, Copydex-spattered head glowing under the U V light, lime-green nylon ruffs bouncing, black-lipsticked
mouth pouting’. Leigh exaggerated his weight, frequently added more padding in unlikely places and adopted a difficult, confrontational
style which many people found overpowering and offputting. This was largely defensive; most of the men he felt attracted to
were put off by his bizarre looks and he defended himself by responding with a sharp tongue. Leigh was one of the few people
who didn’t have a lot of sex at Taboo. He and Trojan had broken up and he met most of his sex partners in public lavatories
or Hampstead Heath: he adored cottaging and would travel right across London if told about a particularly promising place.
His friend Sue Tilley wrote: ‘Any toilet, however grotty, was a temple for him.’ He claimed to have had ‘unsafe sex with 1,000
men’.

Though gay, he had close, often tempestuous, friendships with women, mostly of a ‘master–slave’ type. He had a series of subservient
‘slaves’ who would wash, clean and cook for him, and whom he treated badly, bullied and ordered to do outrageous things; one
was made to sit outside the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, topless, with a sign around her neck saying ‘Give me money’. Oddly,
in most instances, the relationship gave the women in question confidence and they went on to careers of their own; one became
a TV presenter. Nicola Bateman, whom he met at Taboo, eventually married him. Nicola: ‘I was the mum – I mothered him. We
did have a sexual liaison at the start. He said, “Let’s get the sex out of the way so we can be friends.”’
⁶

Bowery had a difficult time after the closure of Taboo, coping first with the death of Trojan, who overdosed on heroin in
August 1986, then the death four months later from a methadone overdose of his friend Mark Vaultier (Mark Golding), the doorman
at Taboo and a model in some of Leigh’s fashion shows. But he survived a deep depression by throwing himself into his design
work and his performance art, which became even more extreme. Leigh: ‘I try to have as much sex, violence and gore as possible
in the shows – pee drinking, vomiting, enemas and fake blood. It’s a formula which always seems to please.’
⁷