Lobotomy Room DJ Set List at Fontaine's 30 November 2018

/ Early line-up of the glorious bad girls of rhythm and blues, the Ikettes from the Ike and Tina Turner Revue: Jessie Smith, Robbie Montgomery and Venetta Fields. I played the Ikettes' song "I'm Blue" in my set / 

From the Facebook event page:

Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly bizarre dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 30 November!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Bad Music for Bad People! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Punk cretin hops! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell. Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! 

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

It’s sleazy. It’s grubby. It’s trashy - you’ll love it!

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

/ “There’s no stoppin’ the cretins from hoppin’ / You gotta keep it beatin’ for all the hoppin’ cretins …” /

Following our insane, triumphant and vomit-splattered Halloween spectacular in October, incredibly bizarre dance party Lobotomy Room returned to the Polynesian splendor of Fontaine’s basement Bamboo Lounge on Friday 30 November 2018. Could we maintain that urgent, desperately frantic momentum? Oh, hell yeah! Mainly thanks to birthday girl Kit and her group of friends!  Wild, uninhibited, hungry-for-kicks – they were the ideal Lobotomy Room crowd! 

And for once we have documentary evidence! Justyna did double-duty on the night as bartender and nightclub photographer!

Here's what I played ...

Mau Mau - The Fabulous Wailers
Exotic - The Sentinels
Katanga - Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Kismiaz - The Cramps
I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramonetures
I'm Blue (The Gong-Gong Song) - The Ikettes
Party Lights - Claudine Clark
I Don't Need You No More - The Rumblers
Drive Daddy Drive - Little Sylvia
I Live the Life I Love - Esquerita
I'm Comin' Over - X
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
Chicken Rock - Fat Daddy Holmes
Run Chicken Run - Link Wray
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins
Chicken - The Cramps
Jukebox Babe - Alan Vega
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
Media Blitz - The Germs
Teenage Lobotomy - The Ramones
Riding with a Movie Star - L7
Woo-Hoo - The Rock-A-Teens
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6.7.8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
Wiped-Out - The Escorts
Pedro Pistolas Twist - Los Twisters
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Bombora - The Original Surfaris
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
Jane in the Jungle - The 5.6.7.8s
Road Runner - The Fabulous Wailers
Vampira - The Misfits
Forming - The Germs
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Be Bop a Lula - Alan Vega
Breathless - X
Let's Have a Party - Wanda Jackson
Wild, Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Jailhouse Rock - Masaaki Hirao
My Baby Does the Hanky Panky - Rita Chao and The Quests
Bang Bang - Betty Chung
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep, Mountain High) - Wanderlea
Harley Davidson - Brigitte Bardot
Touch the Leather - The Fat White Family
Somethin' Else - Sid Vicious
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Jim Dandy - Sara Lee and The Spades
Juvenile Delinquent - Ronnie Allen
Garbage Man - The Cramps
Rockin' Bones - Ronnie Dawson
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On - Big Maybelle
Let's Go Baby - Billy Eldridge
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
He's the One - Ike and Tina Turner
You're Driving Me Crazy - Dorothy Berry
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
The Pussycat Song - Connie Vannett
Scorpion - The Carnations
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Pass the Hatchet - Roger and The Gypsies
Year 1 - X
Boss - The Rumblers
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Batman Theme - Link Wray
Love Me - The Phantoms
I Stubbed My Toe - Bryan "Legs" Walker
Revelion - The Revels
Steel Pier - The Impacts
Black Tarantula - Jody Reynolds
Margaya - The Fender Four
Tina's Dilemma - Ike and Tina Turner
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Intoxica - The Revels
Ultra Twist - The Cramps
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
Cretin Hop - The Ramones
C'mon Everybody - Sid Vicious
Blitzkreig Bop - The Ramonetures
Nothing Matters Anymore - The Alley Cats
Heartbreak Hotel - Buddy Love
Ring of Fire - The Earls of Suave
Comin' Home, Baby - The Delmonas
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
Treat Me Right - Mae West
Roll with Me Henry - Etta James
Shake Appeal - Iggy and The Stooges
Nausea - X
Your Phone's Off the Hook - The Ramonetures
Steppin' Stone - The Sex Pistols
Jim Dandy - Ann-Margret
Woman - Peggy Lee
These Boots Are Made for Walkin' - Mrs Miller
How Does That Grab You Darlin'? Nancy Sinatra
Aphrodisiac - Bow Wow Wow
Let's Go Sexin' - James Intveld
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley
Don't Be Cruel - Bill Black Combo
Cry-baby - The Honey Sisters
Johnny Are You Queer? Josie Cotton
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
My Way - Nina Hagen
One Night of Sin - Elvis Presley

/ Booze party! Wild! Wild! Wild! /

Listen to the strange’n’sleazy sounds of Lobotomy Room from the safety of your own home! I’ve knocked together a Spotify playlist based on what I played at the November dance party.  (For accuracy, disable the shuffle function!). It’s only approximate because some tracks were unavailable on Spotify: The Revels are barely represented on there at all! Other missing songs include Betty Chung’s Mandarin language cover of “Bang Bang”, Josie Cotton’s immortal “Johnny Are You Queer?” Nina Hagen’s berserk rendition of “My Way” and Bryan “Legs” Walker’s drunken hillbilly rant “I Stubbed My Toe.” Spotify – sort out these glaring omissions! Anyway, explore the Wild, Wild World of Lobotomy Room here. 

Upcoming events: at Lobotomy Room, we have all your festive needs covered in December 2018! 

Next film club:

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! For the final cinema club of 2018 (on Wednesday 19 December), let’s wind things down with a crowd-pleaser – John Water’s delirious 1981 black comedy Polyester! A parody of 1950s “women’s pictures”, Polyester sees 300-pound drag monster / leading lady Divine cast against type (and giving one of his definitive performances) in a rare sympathetic role, as long-suffering suburban housewife Francine Fishpaw! It’s an apt choice for last film of 2018 for two reasons: 2018 represented the 100th anniversary of the birth of beloved punk granny Edith Massey (1918 –1984) and Polyester represents her last appearance in a John Waters film. And dreamboat leading man Tab Hunter (1931 – 2018) died earlier this year. 

Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. Arrive early to grab a seat and order a drink! We can accommodate 30 people maximum. First come, first serve! Note that Fontaine’s Christmas cocktail menu will be available, and the featured cocktail of the night is hot buttered rum!

Event page

Next Dance Party:

Feeling jaded after Christmas? Didn’t get those cha cha heels you wanted? Come head-bang away those post-Christmas blues at Lobotomy Room! Friday 28 December 2018!

Yes! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly bizarre dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! 

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Bad Music for Bad People! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Punk cretin hops! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell. Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! 

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

It’s sleazy. It’s grubby. It’s trashy - you’ll love it!

Let's end the year on a note of sleazy desperation!

Event page

Further reading: 

In August 2018 I spoke my brains to To Do List magazine about the wild, wild world of Lobotomy Room, the monthly cinema club – and my lonely one-man mission to return a bit of raunch, sleaze and “adult situations” to London’s nightlife! Read it - if you must - here. 

Follow me on twitter!

"Like" and follow the official Lobotomy Room page on Facebook if you dare!  

Reflections on ... Seven Sinners (1940)

From the Facebook events page:

This November, the Lobotomy Room film club turns three! (We debuted on 24 November 2015). To mark the occasion, we’re taking a sentimental journey and re-visiting the first film we ever screened: Seven Sinners (1940).

The seven films director Josef von Sternberg and his muse and leading lady Marlene Dietrich made together between 1930 and 1935 were dark, erotic, witty and sublime works of art. Together they honed Dietrich's complex, sultry and feline persona and brought a whiff of genuine Weimar decadence to mainstream Hollywood. By comparison Seven Sinners (made after Dietrich and Sternberg’s personal and professional relationship imploded) is pure trash - but campy, enjoyable fun trash of the highest order! It’s a romantic comedy starring Dietrich as good time girl nightclub chanteuse Bijou Blanche, set adrift and stirring up trouble in a South Seas port, while pursuing a hunky naval officer (played by a young and still relatively unknown John Wayne). Just wait until you see perennial Lobotomy Room favourite Dietrich crooning “The Man’s in the Navy” in full butch military drag king mode!

Come sink a few cocktails, surrender to the allure of Marlene Dietrich and celebrate the cinema club’s third birthday on Wednesday 21 November!

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. We can accommodate thirty people maximum on film nights. Arrive early to grab a seat and order a drink!

Firstly, one of the reasons I love showing this particular film at Fontaine’s is that most of the action in Seven Sinners takes place in a bamboo-covered Polynesian-style Tiki bar – which is essentially what the Bamboo Lounge is! It’s an immersive “you-are-there” cinema experience!

Some quick context: like her Golden Age Hollywood contemporaries Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Dietrich had an impressively long, decades-spanning career (she’d appeared in German silent films in the twenties, made her Hollywood debut in 1930 and retired from performing in the seventies) with ups and downs and peaks and troughs and a series of glorious “comebacks”. Alongside peers Crawford, Mae West, Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn Dietrich was declared “box office poison” in 1938 because her recent films had hemorrhaged money at the cinema.  (They’re rightly acclaimed as unassailable masterpieces now, but at the time Dietrich’s last few collaborations with Sternberg tanked commercially).

But Dietrich bounced back triumphantly as brassy saloon girl-with-a-heart-of-gold Frenchy in the hit Western Destry Rides Again (1939), and Seven Sinners captures her on the upswing. With these back-to-back roles, Dietrich proved herself a more durable and resilient performer than previously given credit for: she was skilled at adapting and updating her persona while keeping her ineffably world-weary and sultry essence intact. Man-hungry, trouble-making, fun-loving chanteuse Bijou Blanche (“I’m a bad influence”, she purrs), is clearly in the lineage of Dietrich’s “noble harlots” with a shady past (think of Amy Jolly in Morocco (1930) or Shanghai Lili in Shanghai Express (1932)) but this time played for laughs. In a relaxed, beguiling comedic performance, Dietrich displays warmer, earthier and more approachable facets than in the earlier Sternberg films.  

Tay Garnett (1894 - 1977) - the director of Seven Sinners - was efficient and low-brow in comparison to intellectual and temperamental poet-of-film Josef von Sternberg. But Garnett clearly learned a thing or two about how to present his leading lady from Sternberg. She gets some dreamy close-ups with her face enigmatically half-concealed behind veils, one of Sternberg’s favourite techniques. (Bijou is ostensibly a down-on-her-luck nightclub singer – but has a dazzling wardrobe and seems to have a matching parasol for every outfit change).

Bijou is French (at one point she wistfully reminisces about her childhood in a Marseilles convent school). Interestingly, Dietrich - Germany’s most famous export - only occasionally portrayed German characters onscreen. She just as frequently played French, Austrian, Russian – even Spanish! In her films, she didn’t necessarily signify explicit German-ness but rather a conception of all-purpose European sophistication.

The partnership of Dietrich and John Wayne together might sound incongruous, but in fact her Continental elegance contrasts nicely with monosyllabic all-American cowboy types (by Seven Sinners she’d already starred opposite Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Interestingly, apparently Tyrone Power was the original choice for the role of Lieutenant Dan Brent - a much prettier and very different actor to Wayne. Dietrich and Power wouldn't feature together until Witness for the Prosecution in 1957).

This is Tay Garnett explaining how Wayne got cast in in the film (quoted in Flesh and Fantasy by Penny Stallings, 1978):

“We needed a tough he-man type who could use his fists and decided to borrow him from Republic. His name was John Wayne. Marlene had the choice of all of her leading men. I decided not to mention Wayne to her, but simply to place him in the Universal commissary where she couldn’t miss seeing him. He stood between us and our table as we walked in for lunch, chatting with a couple of actresses I had set up. She swept past him, then swiveled on her heel and looked him up and down like he were a prime rib at Chasen’s. As we sat down, she whispered right in my ear, “Daddy, buy me that!” I said, “Honey, it’s settled. You got him.”  Then, at a prearranged signal, Wayne came to the table. If you didn’t know what was gonna happen, you’d be as blind as a bit pony. Their relationship got off like a firework display. They were crazy about each other, but every man on the picture wanted her. I did, but she wouldn’t lay.” 

Tay Garnett - what a class act! Dietrich and Wayne would make two more films together: The Spoilers and Pittsburgh (both 1942) but neither is as anywhere as good as Seven Sinners. The difference was Seven Sinners is primarily a Marlene Dietrich film featuring John Wayne, and the later two are John Wayne films featuring (and wasting!) Marlene Dietrich.

Speaking of partnerships:  poker-faced Russia-born character actor Mischa Auer (1905 – 1967) steals every scene he appears in as Bijou’s sidekick, magician and pickpocket Sasha. He and Dietrich make a great comedy double-act. (They appeared onscreen together three times: Destry Rides Again (1939), Seven Sinners (1940) and The Flame of New Orleans (1941). Honourable mention must go to Oscar Homolka as a genuinely sleazy and threatening villain.

A convention of all of Dietrich’s best films is finding a pretext for her to wear male attire. It could be argued Dietrich is never sexier than in lesbian chic / “comme des garçons” mode. In Seven Sinners she memorably dons male drag to throatily warble “The Man’s in the Navy”. One of the fascinating things about Dietrich is how her coolly detached persona refuses to date or get old. She’s eternally modern! A lot of the hot topic buzzwords of 2018 like androgyny, unisex and being genderfluid, ambisexual or pansexual – Dietrich just effortlessly was all those things. And she was doing it over eighty years ago! She was a product of the Weimar Berlin cabaret milieu of the twenties, frequented drag bars and was openly bisexual off-screen. She brought that kind of nonchalant European kinkiness to mainstream Hollywood films. (And many of the looks she created all those decades ago are still being referenced in photo shoots and pop videos by the likes of Madonna, Grace Jones and Kate Moss today).

 

/ Above: Dietrich in Seven Sinners. Below: the cover of Grace Jones' 1978 single "Autumn Leaves"

/ Below: Raquel Welch in the film Myra Breckenridge (1970) /

No spoilers but for a film offering so much raunchy good-natured fun, Seven Sinners ends on a surprisingly bittersweet and melancholic note. Remember: the plot is loosely inspired by the opera Madam Butterfly, and in her films, Dietrich doesn’t always get her man. In the 1940s, once America’s involvement in World War II kicked-in, Hollywood films with messages about the nobility of self-sacrifice would abound.

I’ll give Dietrich’s definitive biographer Stephen Bach (author of Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992) the last word: “Marlene’s jaunty adventures in the South Seas had no higher ambition than amusement, and the picture is the most effortlessly entertaining movie-movie she ever made. Her glamour was never so accessible nor self-parody so cheerful … Bijou is the character that defined Marlene for the decade to come: tough but touchable, seductive but funny. She was a realist with scruples and a sense of humour. She never gave a more likable performance in her life.”

Further reading:

Read more about the Wild, Wild World of Lobotomy Room here.

What we showed in 2017.

What we showed in 2016.

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