London Calling (71 page)

Like Malcolm McLaren before him and Damien Hirst after him, he had always wanted to be ‘The Andy Warhol of London’. None of
them succeeded, of course, but Bowery’s attempt was the most spectacular. A receding hair-line had made him shave his head
so that no-one would know, and he copied Warhol by wearing obvious wigs, often askew, as part of his fabulous costumes. In
the mid-eighties the New York downtown underground art world nightclub Area changed its art display each month. The central
corridor leading to the dance floor had large display cases on either side, like Fifth
Avenue shop windows, and in one of them Andy Warhol presented himself as an artwork: sitting absolutely still, staring out
at the passing clubbers, with a little smile on his face. Many people thought it was a waxwork until he moved slightly. Leigh
loved the idea; he had been making an art object of himself for years with his costumes but had never taken it to its logical
conclusion.

Just such an opportunity was provided by Anthony d’Offay, the owner of one of London’s top contemporary galleries, who, after
seeing him perform, offered him a week at his Dering Street premises in the West End. The show opened in October 1988 and
every day, between 4 and 6 p.m., Leigh performed behind a two-way mirror that enabled the audience to see him, but he could
not see them.

Most of the time Leigh lolled about on a chaise-longue, modelling a different outfit each day. He had recorded a tape of random
traffic sounds which played for the duration and each day he scented the gallery with a different smell: one day marshmallow,
the next banana. He would get up and prowl around and sometimes do some high kicks. On the first day he wore a green suit
with tangerine coloured spots with makeup in the same colours and pattern. The next day he wore a black wig, green face makeup,
a fur coat, scarlet pants and enormous jewellery. This was followed by a disco ball crash helmet worn with a light blue frock,
then a bright green bodice and feather tutu complemented by a paint-dripped head. His final costume consisted of a fur cape
and head mask with the usual small openings for mouth and eyes. People returned every day and some stayed for the whole two
hours, mesmerized. The show was a great success. Every peformance was filmed by Cerith Wyn Evans and one day he brought along
his friend Lucian Freud. Leigh was first introduced to Freud by Angus Cook, who had taken Freud to visit Taboo. Now Freud
wondered whether he could paint this fabulous creature. It took him a year to decide that he would like to.

Freud invited him to lunch at Harry’s Bar and Bowery tactfully dressed in colours from Freud’s palette, grey brown trousers
and jumper worn with a mouse coloured wig. He was hoping that Freud would ask him to sit for a picture and wanted to please
him. They were both nervous, Bowery all the more so because he had arrived without a jacket and the restaurant refused to
let him in. They finally compromised by lending him a waiter’s jacket two sizes too small. He told
Modern Painters
magazine: ‘We talked about a show I’d done that week in Amsterdam which climaxed in me squirting an enema at the audience.
I described my costume and dance. Lucian finally
brought up the idea of painting me. I told him I loved the idea.’ According to his friend Sue Tilley, Bowery’s life made a
radical change from the moment he began working with Freud. He learned about the art world and began to meet Freud’s artistocratic
and high-flying friends. Freud told him stories about Picasso, Cecil Beaton, Greta Garbo and Judy Garland; all Leigh’s idols.
He changed his voice and began speaking very ‘proper’. His lifestyle had to change as Freud painted him in the mornings and
he was expected to arrive at 7 a.m. sharp. Sometimes Freud would take him in his Bentley to lunch at the River Café or some
other expensive restaurant. Each portrait took scores of sittings, sometimes as many as five a week, and Leigh became Freud’s
best-known model. ‘I find him perfectly beautiful,’ Freud said. A number of large pictures of Leigh were included in Freud’s
Whitechapel show in October 1993, but when the show travelled to New York, the prudish Americans left out one called
Parts of Leigh Bowery
, a close-up of Leigh’s cock and balls cut down from a larger painting that Freud had given up on. Freud also painted Leigh
and Nicola together naked.

Freud and Leigh became friends and Leigh introduced him to Sue Tilley, affectionately known as Big Sue as she weighed twenty
stone. She, in turn, posed for him for four years though she never gave up her job as a benefits supervisor in a West End
Job Centre. His painting
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
sold for $33.64m at Christie’s New York in 2008, the highest price paid in auction for a work of art by a living artist.
⁸
Freud liked her as a model because he was ‘very aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing
craters and things one’s never seen before’.
⁹

In the late eighties the best gay club in London was the Daisy Chain, organized every Tuesday night by Jimmy Trindy at the
Fridge in Brixton, the club owned by Susan Carrington and Andrew Czezowski. Leigh never missed it. The designer Rifat Ozbek
wrote: ‘Every week I thought he couldn’t possibly surpass himself but he always did.’
¹⁰
Ozbek hired Leigh to work with him as an adviser. Leigh was businesslike during the day and was polite and conservatively
dressed, he would open doors for women and display old-fashioned Australian manners. He worked on two collections for Ozbek,
which took them on numerous fabric-buying trips to Italy during which Leigh behaved impeccably, charming all the Italians.
Ozbek: ‘I wanted someone from the outside who had a different sense of proportion, of body distortion.’
¹¹

In 1993, Leigh, Nicola, the guitarist Richard Torry and a group of friends formed the band Minty, designed to push performance
art rock to its the ultimate limits. Their first gig was in 1994, at Smashing Live’s Monsters of
Drag night, during which, after singing their first single, ‘Useless Man’, they launched into a pornographic version of the
Pepsi-Cola ‘Lip-smacking, thirst-quenching’ TV advertisement while Leigh simultaneously appeared to be going into labour.
He was now so large, and his clothing so oddly shaped, that he was able to strap Nicola upside down to his stomach, with her
feet up by his shoulders in a specially made cloth harness without anyone knowing she was there. Amid a frenzy of grinding
guitars and a heavy rock ’n’ roll beat, Leigh began screaming and yelling at the top of his voice. He threw himself back on
a trestle table, arms and legs flailing, and proceeded to give birth to Nicola, who emerged naked between his legs, smeared
in fake blood and petroleum jelly, trailing strings of sausages, while the audience stood, mouths agape in disbelief. Leigh
then pissed in a glass and gave it to ‘the child’ to drink as Minty blasted out the Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’. Nicola:
‘I was inside his costume in a harness and nobody knew I was there. Then he suddenly got up on the table and I popped. We
did it loads of times.’
¹²

Perhaps the ultimate Minty performance was in April 1994 at the Fort Asperen art festival in Holland. Minty were to play and
Leigh intended to hurl himself through a plate glass window as the climax of his act but the sheet of theatrical sugar glass
was too large to go through the door. Instead, the organizers rigged up a sheet of real glass, electronically wired in such
a way that it would shatter the moment he touched it, giving the illusion that he had broken it. Inspired by images of Fakir,
a well-known American masochist exhibitionist, Leigh had attached clothes pegs to his nipples and all down the length of his
penis. He then had himself suspended upside down wearing just black stockings and enormously high platforms as Richard Torry,
also naked, played guitar, and Nicola, wearing an exquisite tutu, sprayed air freshener over the milling crowds of children
and onlookers in the afternoon sunlight. Leigh sang his lyrics, upside down, then, when the moment came, threw himself with
all his force at the window. The electronics shattered it but he was showered with shards of glass, cutting him all over.
He ran to the dressing room, leaving a trail of blood as the audience stood speechless. Afterwards he commented: ‘That’s the
cheapest publicity gimmick I’ve ever done.’
¹³
Leigh’s last show with Minty was in November 1994, when they opened a two-week residency at the Freedom Café on Wardour Street.
Westminster City Council had been forewarned and to Leigh’s delight closed the show down after only one night, citing nudity
and indecency. Leigh was not well; he had been diagnosed HIV-positive some years before, but that November he suddenly fell
ill and was taken to Middlesex Hospital.
He did not want his friends to know where he was, telling Sue Tilley to say he had gone pig farming in Bolivia. Sue and his
wife Nicola were his only visitors for the first four weeks, then Lucian Freud was told and Leigh’s family. He died of AIDs-related
meningitis on New Year’s Eve. ‘He was my soulmate,’ said Nicola. ‘We just had a very unique relationship.’
¹⁴

SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY – TUBE – WORK – DINNER – WORK – TUBE – ARMCHAIR T.V. – SLEEP – TUBE – WORK – HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU
TAKE. ONE IN TEN GO MAD – ONE IN FIV E CRACKS UP

Graffiti on the tube between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park stations

In the eighties the underground began to fall apart. As Thatcherism kicked in during the early part of the decade, many of
the underground artists and writers fled the country. Of the editors of
International Times
, for instance, Jack Henry Moore left for Amsterdam, as did Bill Levy; David Mairowitz moved to Berkeley; Peter Stansill settled
in Portland, Oregon; Mick Farren spent years in New York before moving to Los Angeles; and Don Atyeo travelled around the
Far East. I spent the next two decades dividing my time between London and New York, Only Tom McGrath and Roger Hutchinson
remained in Britain, and they both moved to Scotland. At
Oz
Richard Neville returned to Sydney and Jim Anderson moved to Bolinas, California, leaving Felix Dennis to build up his magazine-publishing
empire. For some people a few years, or perhaps a decade, in London is enough.

It was not all gloom. In 1983, Channel Four opened for business, dedicated to bringing art and culture to the masses. In the
early days it was fearless, standing up to complaints made in the House by Tory MPs and attacks from the tabloids. It took
eighteen months to bridle them. Then the tabloid
Daily
Star
attended a viewing at the Bijou Theatre of Jarman’s
Sebastiane
and devoted the whole of its New Year’s Eve front page to ‘The Films Which Should Never be Shown to Your Kids’. Channel 4
immediately wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
, of all newspapers, to explain that they had no intention of showing
Sebastiane
and it had been bought as part of a package. Jarman was the last independent British film-maker to have his work shown on
Channel 4, and that was when in 1985 David Robinson, film critic of the
Times
, was asked to programme a season of films and he included
The Tempest
,
Jubilee
and finally the shocking
Sebastiane
, which was shown late at night with a grim warning to the delicate audience. The screening of the films was met with a roar
of disapproval. During the early months of 1986 the debate surrounding the proposed video nasties bill revolved around Jarman’s
films. Jeremy Isaacs, then the head of Channel Four, defended them on two
Right to Reply
programmes, and when Michael Winner told the audience at B A F T A that Jarman was making pornography, Isaacs gave a wry
smile and replied that Jarman was a genius.

Derek did get his recognition in the end: in a ceremony held on Sunday, 22 September 1991, at his famous garden in Dungeness,
Kent, he was canonized as a saint by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a worldwide order of gay nuns whose mission is to
expiate homosexual guilt from all and to replace it with universal joy, for all his work for the lesbian and gay community,
and because ‘he has a very sexy nose.’
¹
The ritual included a procession, the hymns ‘Amazing Pride’ and ‘All Nuns Bright and Beautiful’, a laying on of hands and
a mass communion. Jarman was crowned with a saint’s halo, appropriately woven from movie film, and was given the title ‘Saint
Derek of Dungeness of the Order of Celluloid Knights’.

Musically, 1988 brought a second Summer of Love as the New Romantics were followed by hip hop and house music. The official
airwaves broadcast very little of it so fans started their own pirate radio stations. Not motivated by commerce they no longer
needed to moor a ship outside British territorial waters; they simply erected a cheap transmitter on the roof of a high-rise
council block and blasted out the good music until the police arrived. The next day they were on the air again from a new
location.

House music first took over in 1985 and all-night raves and late-night ‘raver’ clubs spread throughout London (as well as
other cities across the country). Sixties psychedelia was updated as young people danced the night away, not on L S D but
on ecstasy. The first club was Danny Rampling’s Shoom held in the Fitness Centre on Southwark Street, but it quickly outgrew
the premises and moved to the Y M C A on Tottenham Court Road, where it gained a reputation as being the easiest place in
London to buy ecstasy. The Limelight on Charing Cross Road was another popular venue and the biggest of them all was Richard
Branson’s Heaven, situated under the arches of Charing Cross railway station. Originally London’s biggest gay club, on Monday
nights Heaven became ‘Spectrum: Theatre of Madness’, where 3,000 young people on ecstasy danced the night away to the solid
four-on-four beat while spaceships and lasers filled the air. Unlike sixties psychedelic clubs, these dance clubs proliferated
immediately. Some were central, like
the Dial 9 Bar on Argyll Street or Delirium held at the Astoria on Charing Cross Road. Most were one-night-a-week affairs,
like Emergency on Rosebery Avenue or D M J B on Anhalt Road (both 1986). Some were held in warehouses, like Skat on Theed
Street off Stamford Street. Many were advertised with no venue and a telephone call to Clubline was needed. Raves were held
in empty warehouses, film studios and, in the case of Wetworld, at the Fulham Pools on Lillie Road – bring a swimsuit (1986–7).
During the summer months many of the raves were held in fields, abandoned factories and disused airstrips outside London where
no-one could complain about the noise.