Bitterness Personified

A Violetta Villas Valentine's Day!

2012-02-13T23:39:00.009-08:00

To everyone who finds themselves single on Valentine's Day -- Violetta Villas feels your pain! Listen to the late, great Polska diva (1938 - 2011) cast aside boring concepts like "nuance" and "restraint" and tear the weepy Barbra Streisand ballad "Free Again" a whole new *sshole on her ultra-campy 1970 TV special. She really RAMPAGES through the song for almost five whole minutes (I especially love how Violetta punctuates the song with bitter little laughs). This posting is timely in more ways than one: Violetta's last-ever public concert was on 14 February 2011 (exactly one year ago today), after which she retired from performing and was dead by the end of the year.

Happy Valentine's Day!

ArtWank! DJ Set List 9 February 2012

2012-02-11T12:23:00.000-08:00

Wanting it, wanting it, wanting it: 1960s pin-up of a cotton candy-haired Jayne Mansfield

I begged. I cajoled. I wheedled. I even pouted. And now finally I was able to shamelessly jump on Ophelia Bitz's bandwagon! It was my pleasure to DJ at the big finale of ArtWank!’s residency at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern. To anyone who’s not au fait, ArtWank! is vivacious cabaret starlet Ophelia Bitz’s brilliant and raunchy club night centring on screenings of her vast collection of mostly 1920s vintage stag films (think grainy, flickering black and white porn starring long-dead people).

Porno Diva Ophelia Bitz gets a grip on herself: She's a bad, BAD girl. Do not encourage her! (Photo by Tom Medwell)

In the early 1970s when porn flicks bubbled up from the warm, fetid squalor of the underground and started grossing serious money, it became a titillating, tantalising taboo-thrill for the chattering classes to go see the likes of Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat or Marilyn Chambers in Behind the Green Door at their local dirty movie sleaze pit. This pop culture phenomenon was called “porn chic” and was ultimately short-lived. Ophelia (who, of course, regularly emcees at Dr Sketchy – that’s how I know her in the first place) is on a one-woman mission to rehabilitate the porn chic concept and make porn-viewing a fun, communal, boozy, post-feminist and “sex positive” experience (as opposed to a solitary, furtive one in front of your lap top, PC or DVD player. With a box of Kleenex and some moisturiser. I assume). Assisted by her trusty assistant Le Porn Ferret on the laptop, Ophelia also frequently spices up proceedings with live onstage burlesque performances and musical acts. Anyway, trust me: ArtWank! is porn-tacular! It’s porn-tastic!

So I leapt at the opportunity to DJ on Ophelia's last night at The RVT (her ArtWank! residency this time was 19 January – 9 February). I was accompanied by my friends Mia (I call her Mayan Ruin; she was born in Guatemala) and Dan. The night was a blast, transporting you back to a decadent Jazz Age velvet-lined Parisian brothel (most of Ophelia’s erotica is French, but considering they’re silent movies anyway it doesn’t really matter).

A sampling of the cornucopia of filth you can expect to see at ArtWank! (How this escaped Youtube’s censors I’ll never know. Enjoy it while you can!).

The guest musical performer was crotch-thrusting, ass-shaking, spandex-clad cock rocker Damn Fluid. His back story is that he’s the former lead singer of the glam/Heavy Metal band Ramshaft who’s now hit hard times. Recall the full horror of 1980s hair metal or poodle metal, as it used to be called (Damn Fluid himself sports a crimped, exploding fright wig on his head, a symphony of split ends). His Facebook page says Damn Fluid’s act “captures the ambiance of a last-call rock band at a 1980s East Berlin brothel” and it’s not wrong. He had me from his explosive opening number “Daddy Fuck Machine”(in which he roars, “Slap my face / I’m super keen / I’m your daddy fuck machine!”), after which he announced solemnly in a Welsh accent, “I’d like to dedicate that song to me Gran.”

My set lasted about an hour, so it was a short intense burst (ejaculation?) of vintage sleaze. Gratifyingly, most of the crowd stuck around to continue drinking and listening to the music instead of getting their coats and splitting right away, and the gracious Ms Bitz kept me topped up with beer. It was mostly frantic Las Vegas Grind tittyshakers a go-go, but I also worked-in some rockabilly (Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Ricky Nelson, Elvis), urgent rhythm & blues (Ike and Tina, the late, great Etta James), cooing sex kittens (Ann-Margret, Jayne Mansfield, Brigitte Bardot, Mamie Van Doren), mini-tributes to filmmakers (songs from soundtrack of Kenneth Anger’s seminal gay biker/fetish classic Scorpio Rising -- truly a film to base your life around -- and various John Waters classicks). Appropriately - considering the smut we’d all just watched – I ended things on a gynaecological note (courtesy of Andre Williams, The Cramps and Connie Vannett).

Handclapping Time - The Fabulous Raiders
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Are You Nervous? The Instrumentals
Drummin' Up a Storm - Sandy Nelson
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Comin' Home, Baby - The Delmonas
Pass The Hatchet - Roger & The Gypsies
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Boots - Nero & The Gladiators
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Jim Dandy - Ann-Margret
Born to Cry - Dion
Beat Girl - Adam Faith
Makin' Out - Jody Reynolds
L'appareil a sous - Brigitte Bardot
Boss - The Rumblers
Roll with Me, Henry - Etta James
Chicken Shack - Ike and Tina Turner
Wipe Out - The Escorts
Beat Generation - Mamie Van Doren
Intoxica - The Centurions
Let's Go Sexin' - James Intveld
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
Scorpion - The Carnations
Sweetie Pie - Eddie Cochran
Woman Love - Gene Vincent
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
Can Your Pussy Do the Dog? The Cramps
Pussycat Song - Connie Vannett

Tittyshaker deluxe: Bettie Page embraces the spirit of ArtWank!. Musical backing: "Are You Nervous?" by The Instrumentals

Lloyd Johnson: The Modern Outfitter

2012-01-28T12:58:00.001-08:00

Johnson's Mannequins Sophie and Steve. Lloyd Johnson: The Modern Outfitter exhibit at The Chelsea Space

I moved to London in May 1992 (so this Spring marks 20 years of living in London. Now do you understand why I’m so jaundiced, so hardened? Let’s call it my “Twenty Years of Depravity”). Shortly afterwards I started discovering my social niche, tentatively exploring the subterranean rockabilly and retro club scenes: More than Vegas, Blue Martini, the Frat Shacks, rockabilly reunions at Dingwall’s, boozy Saturday nights at The Elephant’s Head. What to wear? As a student in Canada I’d lived in a uniform of black t-shirts and black Levis – which wouldn’t suffice now. This was long before vintage mania and eBay, so I was still able to score the occasional piece of (relatively) affordable original 1950s and 60s threads in Camden Market. My much-loved friends Gail and Jasja (aka Sparkle Moore and Cad van Swankster) still operated their boutique The Girl Can’t Help It from there and I would often swing by on a Sunday afternoon to hang out and scan the stock for incoming engineer boots and cool shirts.

For new "reproduction vintage" rock’n’roll clothes, there was Ted’s Corner in Victoria (I still wear a pair of winkle pickers I bought there in the 1990s), but I quickly determined that Johnson’s Modern Outfitters was the definitive source for sexy rockabilly clothes. There were two branches: Kings Road (close to Worlds End, so just around the corner from Vivienne Westwood) and Kensington Market. Visiting either of them was a heady, almost sensual experience. Rifling through the ultra-desirable clothes was certainly trance-inducing, but there was also the shops' wonderfully kitsch Tiki-inspired decor. The staff was charismatic and glamorous: in the 1980s, being a Johnson’s shop assistant made it almost inevitable you’d eventually appear in a Face magazine photo spread, like a model or rock star. In the nineties, some of the Johnson’s sales people would eventually become friends of mine, like the fabulous Mari Mansfield (musician, DJ, Trans-Atlantic sex kitten and today a psychotherapist-in-training) and Dean Micetich (the musician formerly known as Kid Rocker, currently in The Black Tibetans, co-founder of biker magazine DiCE). Even the atmospheric music playing in-store (a melange potentially encompassing twangy / sleazy instrumentals to tinkle-y exotica-lounge) was great. The whole Johnson’s ambiance was intoxicating.

Sadly, Johnson’s came to an end by 2000, a casualty of astronomically high rents and the changing London high street, which has become ever more faceless, bland and corporate since. Looking back, it’s miraculous something so niche, edgy and subcultural survived as long as it did. I numbly went to their closing-down sales and snapped-up some clothes I still wear today. Nothing similar has ever come along to remotely replace Johnson’s, and I pretty much thought that was the end of the story.

At the time I knew virtually nothing about Lloyd Johnson himself, the brains behind Johnson’s and whose vision the whole enterprise had been. I subsequently learned his fashion career dates back to the late 1960s (as an art school graduate Mod from Hastings, he started selling clothes at Kensington Market as early as 1967) and that Johnson was an unsung pioneer (hell, a visionary) of fusing music and fashion (what the more famous Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood - very much his contemporaries -- would also do). In the 70s and 80s Johnson launched his retail outlets (the Kings Road outlet opened in 1978). Obviously it was his rockabilly-inspired La Rocka! range that I gravitated towards, but Johnson’s clothing incorporated all the key British youth subcultures: Teddyboys, bikers, punks, Mods, Goths and jazz-beatniks could all find something to treasure at Johnson’s. And rock stars, too: pretty much all my favourite musicians (everyone from Billy Fury, Jerry Lee Lewis, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Sex Pistols, The Cramps, The Pretenders – even Hollywood show biz royalty like Fred Astaire and Liza Minnelli!) wore Johnson’s paraphernalia at some point. A true tastemaker and original, Lloyd Johnson deserves credit as one of the people who made London a cooler place and in a just world would be far better recognised for his accomplishments.

Around Autumn 2011 I saw something on Facebook about an upcoming exhibit (to be held at The Chelsea Space) honouring Johnson’s career, and that anyone with good condition Johnson’s clothes should get in touch. I contacted Lloyd Johnson himself via Facebook, we exchanged some messages, and I sent him photos of my La Rocka! clothes from the 1990s. He eventually came to my place in Archway in person one night after work to my to collect them, and he was modest, unassuming and gentlemanly – you couldn’t imagine anyone less “fashion-y.” He promised to ensure I’d be invited to the exhibit's private launch party.

(Clothes I loaned for the exhibit: Crocodile t-shirt. I also loaned an Indian motorcycle t-shirt and a pair of patent 70s Pimp Shoes. No, I can't believe I was ever this tiny / emaciated. This crocodile fetish t-shirt and the Indian motorcycle t-shirt both look like baby clothes to me now -- clothes for a very punky, kinky baby!)

(Black shirt. When I first got it, this shirt was shiny and very young Johnny Cash. Washing it over the years has turned it matte)

(Black Regency suit. I remember I was really skint when I bought this suit and it cost about £360 -- a lot of money for me in the early 1990s. I just thought, "Screw it!" and I wore it that New Year's Eve)

(Clothes I loaned for the exhibit: Blue Sharkskin Suit. I definitely bought this at the Kings Road branch during their closing-down sale)

Flash forward to the night of the preview party on 24 January 2012. Approaching The Chelsea Space, visible through the front window is the original frontage of the Kensington Market shop re-created -- enough to make me misty-eyed with nostalgia. First reaction: I’d forgotten just how beautiful the Johnson’s mannequins used to be! Second: None of the clothes I’d loaned made the final cut! Apparently over a thousand items were borrowed from customers and collectors around the world, and needed to be whittled down to a representative capsule of Johnson’s whole career. But hey, I’m not bitter. The collection they’ve assembled is exquisite and tells the story of how Lloyd’s ethos evolved over the decades, and it was a brilliant night.

Recreation of Johnsons front window: gave me a real pang of nostalgia! (I really should have taken this shot at the beginning of the night to give a better view, before the room was thronged with people! Doh!)

Better view Via

Johnson's rockabilly dreamboat male mannequins

Apparently well over a hundred people crammed into a pretty small gallery: a testament to the affection and loyalty Johnson’s inspired in its clientele – and how much it’s missed. (The crowd spilled outside, where people could smoke and admire the row of vintage motorcycles the biker contingent had arrived on). I think I drank far more than my share of the flowing free beer and wine (at least judging by my thunderous hangover the next day) and it was great meeting up with old friends (and making some new ones). After the gallery kicked us all out, the party continued at the pub around the corner.

There's talk of the La Rocka! range being revived on a small-scale ... fingers crossed this happens.

Anyway, here's a sampling of my photos from the night:

Gold leather fringed biker jacket (with matching gold leather jeans) as worn by Lux Interior of The Cramps . A silver version of this jacket was worn by Liza Minnelli on a 1989 issue of Vogue magazine. Who would have thought Lux and Liza had anything in common?!

Red leather-fronted pony fur jacket (as worn by Jerry Lee Lewis!)(To see a photo of the man himself wearing it, click here)

Pale blue with red fleck zoot suit

Scorpio Rising / The Leather Angels: Ultra beautiful and fetishistic biker jackets on the leather jacket wall

Mari (who used to work as a glamorous Johnson's sales assistant in the early 1990s when she was a scary Tura Satana/Bettie Page-style brunette) and Julian

Julian (whose "flamejob" cardigan is from Johnson's), Kayee and I

Gold Leather Fringed Biker Jacket (as worn by Lux Interior of The Cramps) and I. (I wish I'd taken off my camera bag for this shot!).

The great man himself: Lloyd Johnson and I

The Leather Boys: Bikers Thomas and Jake (this was taken at the pub afterwards)

See the rest of my photos from the party here

Read a nice interview with Lloyd Johnson on The Guardian website

Paul Gorman co-ordinated the exhibit at The Chelsea Space and blogged about it day by day in the lead-up to the opening

There were some other bloggers at the party who got some better, more detailed shots of the clothes than I did: try this one and this one

18 January 2012 Dr Sketchy Set List

2012-01-22T09:15:00.000-08:00

Suck it in! Buxom sweater girl Jayne Mansfield

The first Dr Sketchy of the New Year! I hadn’t DJ’d since the last one on 21 December 2011 (which had been all Christmas music, anyhow) and was itching to get back behind the decks at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Our emcee this time was a newbie, comic performer James Huntington (aka James H) making his Dr Sketchy debut (he did a great job). We had two model / performers: Bettsie Bon Bon made a welcome return visit after posing at the 8 October 2011 Dr Sketchy (and for her burlesque number wore an amazing exploding black feather headdress), and Crimson Skye, who performed in her drag king persona Duncan Donut. The leering and hirsute Duncan was a bit of a dirt bag, to be honest! He had a constant “wardrobe malfunction” (a certain private part of his anatomy was hanging out of the side of his thong pretty much the whole time) which I’m not convinced was entirely accidental! Thinking of sleazy gender-fucked songs for Duncan’s pose was a fun challenge (I went heavy on raunchy “blue” novelty songs by the likes of Faye Richmonde and Filthy McNasty). Then when Duncan and a scantily-clad Bettsie posed together, I laid-on a series of sultry male / female duets (Elvis and his Viva Las Vegas leading lady Ann-Margret, a heavy-panting Serge Gainsbourg and Bardot, etc).

I cheekily swiped some photos from the night via the Dr Sketchy Facebook page without asking permission! These shots are by Andrew Hickinbottom.

The gorgeous Bettsie Bon Bon

Duncan Donut, mercifully keeping it covered this time

Early on I tried to shake things up and do something a bit different, making an abortive attempt to create an eerie, atmospheric David Lynch-ian musical vibe. I've recently re-discovered one of my old favourites, unjustly forgotten chanteuse Julee Cruise, and that ghostly, finger-snapping 1950s jukebox-in-a-haunted house feel is where my head is at these days. But I’ve got to say I didn’t quite pull it off (and the sold-out capacity crowd was pretty rowdy and noisey), so I probably won’t attempt that again anytime soon! Anyway, that’s why you see Cruise’s sublime "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart" midway through the set list. I got back on track, taking listeners on an erotic journey south of my border (OK, maybe not) with my more usual titty shaker instrumentals and frantic rhythm and blues wig-outs (Ike and Tina, Esquerita, Big Maybelle, etc).

(RIP, Jennifer Miro of The Nuns. Pic from the wonderful book We're Desperate: The Punk Photography of Jim Jocoy, which documents the San Francisco / Los Angeles punk scene between 1978-1980)

Midway through the set I also worked in a tribute to the late Jennifer Miro, inscrutable ice queen front woman of pioneering San Francisco punk band The Nuns, who died of cancer on 16 December 2011, aged just 54. The track “Lazy” is from The Nuns’ 1980 self-titled album. Two years earlier they’d supported The Sex Pistols at their legendarily cataclysmic final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland, ensuring The Nuns would forever at least be a footnote in punk history. (Art-y but melodic and memorable, with the right management, record label and better luck, The Nuns could have been a West Coast equivalent of Blondie). Miro’s alluring persona was post-Marlene Dietrich and post-Nico: an icily pristine platinum blonde who exuded retro glamour, with a wonderfully glacial, haughty and deadpan voice. Her obituary certainly makes for melancholy reading: despite making music since she was 18-years old, Miro never enjoyed the financial rewards that accompany mainstream success (cult and punk credibility doesn’t do much for the bank balance) and before her death she was working as a receptionist. Miro died riddled with breast and liver cancer, alone and presumably in agony (she’d opted to eschew traditional chemotherapy and even pain killers for alternative homeopathic medicine). The original and definitive incarnation of The Nuns was short-lived, imploding in a welter of drugs and recriminations. Relocating to New York and re-naming herself Mistress Jennifer, Miro would maintain different line-ups of The Nuns over the decades, working a dominatrix image and taking things in a fetish-y/Gothic direction which, to be frank, looked embarrassing. Better to listen to the wry, stark and timeless-sounding Weimar Republic decadence of “Lazy”, with just Miro accompanying herself on the piano. It slotted in beautifully with the Marilyn Monroe and Dietrich tracks that followed (and it anticipates Nico's version of "My Funny Valentine."). It also makes you wonder what could have been. Jennifer Miro deserved better.

Serenata - Jonah Jones Quartet
Fever - Hildegard Knef
Melancholy Serenade - King Curtis
Watermelon Gin - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
Pas Cette Chanson - Johnny Hallyday
Sea of Love - The Earls of Suave
Rigor Mortis - The Gravestone Four
Rockin' Back Inside My Heart - Julee Cruise
Ebb Tide - Al Anthony, Wizard of the Organ
Dancing on the Ceiling - Chet Baker
Lunar Rhapsody - Les Baxter
Pad - Bobby Summers
It's Crazy, Baby - Ike and Tina Turner
Wipe Out - The Escorts
Unitar Rock - Willie Joe and His Unitar
That's a Pretty Good Love - Big Maybelle
Wait A Minute, Baby - Esquerita
House Party - The Party Rockers
Love Potion # 9 - Nancy Sit
Commanche - The Revels
Handclapping Time - The Fabulous Raiders
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Womp Womp - Freddie & The Heartaches
Traume - Francoise Hardy
Strip-tease - Nico
Un Ano D'Amor - Mina
Lazy - The Nuns
Lazy - Marilyn Monroe
The Laziest Gal in Town - Marlene Dietrich
Are You Nervous? The Instrumentals
Bombie - Johnny Sharp and The Yellow Jackets
Witchcraft - Elvis Presley
Dance with Me Henry - Ann-Margret
Nosey Joe - Bull Moose Jackson
Lucky Lips - Ruth Brown
Drums A G-Go - The Hollywood Persuaders
Don't Be Cruel - The Bill Black Combo
My Pussy Belongs to Daddy - Faye Richmonde
Seperate the Men from the Boys - Mamie van Doren
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
Big Man - Carl Matthews
Ice Man - Filthy McNasty
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
A Guy What Takes His Time - Mae West
Crazy Vibrations - The Bikinis
The Beast - Milt Buckner
The Stripper - John Barry (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Lola Lola - Eartha Kitt
Hump-a-Baby - Little Ritchie Ray
You're the Boss - Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret
Little Girl / Little Boy - John and Jackie
Je t'aime, moi non plus ... Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot
Pop Slop - Bela Sanders Und Sein Tanzorchester
Chattanooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
Hot Licks - The Rendells
Esquerita and the Voola - Esquerita
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Scorpion - The Carnations
Lucille - Little Richard

Finally, in my blog for the 23 November 2011 Dr Sketchy, I wrote about two great European divas: Italy's Mina and France's Francoise Hardy. It didn't occur to me until later that musically they overlapped on one memorable occasion. In 1966 Mina scored a big hit in Italy with "Se telefonado", written for her by Ennio Morricone --one of her essential statements. The same year Hardy would adapt her own French lyrics to Morricone's tune and release her interpretation, "Je Changerais D'avis."

Compare and contrast!

Mina's original

Francoise's French-ified version

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T10:22:00.000-08:00

Swedish sex bomb Anita (La Dolce Vita) Ekberg ringing in the new year

Wishing you all a swinging Jayne Mansfield-style New Year's Eve.

I Get Around

2011-12-27T04:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pretty damn privileged to have met many of my favourite artists over the years. If only digital cameras or camera phones had existed in the late 1980s/1990s, as that was when I did most of my freelance music journalism: I look back and wince at the lost opportunity to have photographed the likes of Poison Ivy of The Cramps, Lydia Lunch, Exene Cervenka (X), Henry Rollins, the Divinyls and Chris Isaak when I interviewed them and had the chance! Ah, well. Let’s take a sentimental journey. Note: These photos are arranged in strict chronological order, so as an added bonus you can monitor my ageing process while you look at them.

Rhythm and blues legend Ruth Brown (aka Motormouth Maybelle in the 1988 John Waters film Hairspray). Viva Las Vegas April 2006

Eartha-quake! Quintessential sex kitten chanteuse Eartha Kitt and I. Valentine's Day 2007

Undisputed First Lady of Rockabilly (and former girlfriend of Elvis) Wanda Jackson. July 2007

Vivacious Warhol Superstar Holly Woodlawn in London. September 2007

Ai chihuahua! With musician Robert Lopez (off-duty El Vez - the Mexican Elvis). May 2008

Punk photographer, raconteur and scene-maker Leee Black Childers at Cockabilly club night in Dalston. September 2008

Punk poetess Patti Smith at book signing for her memoirs Just Kids in London. March 2010

Burlesque Royalty: with the outrageous veteran stripper Satan's Angel (The Devil's Own Mistress!) at Viva Las Vegas 2010. (She's got some stories to tell! Oh, yeah).

One hot tamale: The mighty El Vez and I. (No wonder I'm slack-jawed). The 100 Club in London. June 2010

No, it's not Lemmy from Motorhead: Me with my old friend / petit frere Cyril Roy when he was in London for the premiere of the Gaspar Noe film he starred in, Enter the Void. September 2010

The King of Sleaze. And John Waters! Only kidding. Brutal close-up of the Pope of Trash (the Maestro!) and I. Book launch of the hard cover edition of his book Role Models. While he was in London I interviewed him for Nude magazine. November 2010

Unforgettable concert by beatnik / existentialist French chanteuse Juliette Greco at The Royal Festival Hall. November 2010

Eerily ageless Mistress of the Dark Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) and I at the Viva Las Vegas car show. April 2011

A Reunion with the Prince of Puke: John Waters when he was back in London to launch the paperback edition of his book Role Models. May 2011

Christmas Dr Sketchy 21 December 2011 DJ Set List

2011-12-24T08:38:00.000-08:00

Christmas Sweetheart: Diana Dors, the British Jayne Mansfield

This one will be a quickie, as I'm meant to be rushing out the door for a Christmas Eve dinner party! The last Dr Sketchy of 2011 went off with a bang! Our elegant resident emcee Dusty Limits was on top form. The featured model and performer was a new girl, the stunning and statuesque Beatrix Von Bourbon, who looked like a spicy rockabilly pin-up come to life. (Come to think of it, because of her extensive tattoos and piercings she probably qualifies more as a psychobilly!).

As an added bonus, my friend Jim (the one I go to Viva Las Vegas with) stopped by for a few drinks, accompanied by his dog Daisy. It’s always nice to kneel down and kiss the top of Daisy's head while DJ’ing (although what she tends to do is lunge for my mouth and plant a wet messy doggy kiss right on my lips when I do that. I’m wise to Daisy’s tricks!). On some of the quieter tracks, the audience may have been able to hear Daisy’s grunting and snorting noises from the DJ booth.

Season's Greetings -- via the great Bettie Page (surely one of Dr Sketchy's patron saints)

Musically, I aimed to whip-up the festive mania with my kitsch-iest and most abrasive selection of Christmas tunes, swirling together lounge, exotica, surf, doo-wop, rhythm and blues, rockabilly and just plain weird shit (the Mae West Christmas album seems to baffle people year after year!). I actually deeply love campy Christmas novelty songs: this year there was only one Dr Sketchy in December, and my CD player broke when I had my own Christmas cocktail party a few weeks ago – so I really seized the moment and revelled in the chance to wallow in this stuff. As of Boxing Day, all my Christmas music is going to be moth balled for another twelve months.

Christmas Song - Chet Baker
Exotic Night - Martin Denny
Violets for Your Furs - The Continental
Candles Glowing - Marlene Dietrich
The First Snowfall - The Coctails
White Christmas - Elvis Presley
Let Christmas Ring - The Coolbreezers
Ole Santa - Dinah Washington
Jingle Bells - Johnny Mercer
Cool Yule - Louis Armstrong
Merry Merry Merry Merry Christmas - Ruby Wright
Put the Loot in the Boot, Santa - Mae West
Jingle Bells - Gene Autrey
Christmas Time is Coming - Stormy Weather
Snowfall / Snowfall Cha Cha - George Shearing / Billy May
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus / Jingle Bell Bossa Nova - Eddie Dunstedter
Hey Santa Claus - The Moonglows
Baby It's Cold Outside - Carmen McRae and Sammy Davis Jr
Winter Wonderland - Peggy Lee
I Want a Man - Thelma Cooper
Here Comes Santa Claus - Elvis Presley
I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm - Dean Martin
Sleigh Ride - Lloyd Glenn
Nothin' for Christmas - Eartha Kitt
I'd Like You for Christmas - Julie London
Christmas Island - Bob Atcher and The Dinning Sisters
My Christmas Prayer - Billy Fury
Christmas Wish - El Vez
Santa Claus is Back in Town - Elvis Presley
Santa Baby - Mae West
White Christmas - The Ravens
Jingle Bells - The Vel Mares
Frosty the Snowman - The Ventures
Santa Please Don't Pass Me By - Jimmy Donley
Christmas in Heaven - Billy Ward & His Dominoes
Jingle All the Way - Lena Horne
Fat Daddy - Fat Daddy
Let It Snow - Wayne Newton
Sleigh Bells, Reindeer and Snow - Rita Faye Wilson
Winter Wonderland - Chet Baker
Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt
Warm December - Julie London
Christmas in Jail - The Youngsters
Jingle Bell Rock - Wayne Newton
Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley
Far Away Christmas Blues - Little Esther
Silent Night - Dinah Washington
Little Drummer Boy - Marlene Dietrich
I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm - Billie Holiday
The Merriest - June Christy
I Wish You a Merry Christmas - Big Dee Irwin and Little Eva
Christmas Morning - Titus Turner
This Year's Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt
There's Trouble Brewin' - Jack Scott
Sleigh Ride - El Vez
It's Christmas Time - The Five Keys
With Love from Me to You - Mae West
Here Comes Santa Claus - Elvis Presley
Blues for Christmas - John Lee Hooker

Finally: Not quite a tittyshaker, but it will do -- and it's seasonal. Shake it!

Christmas Cockabilly! 7 December 2011 at The George & Dragon

2011-12-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

Am doing a last-minute spurt of Christmas-related blogging now, ‘cause I figure in about 48-hours no one will want to read anything to do with Christmas!

The December Cockabilly (so therefore the Christmas Cockabilly) was on 7 December 2011. I didn’t do any DJ’ing at this one, but I did bring my camera, so this instalment won’t feature a set list but will be photo-heavy instead.

First of all, two photos that cropped up from the November 2011 Cockabilly taken by Mal Nicholson (alongside co-promoter/organiser Paul Draggoni, he's the brains behind Cockabilly). As a general rule, if the photo is sepia-toned, it’s Mal’s!

Christopher and I

Me looking utterly gormless behind the DJ booth!

OK, back to my friends going apeshit crazy at the December 2011 Christmas Cockabilly.

Christopher and Lauren

Craig, Therese and Paul

Therese and James

Christopher and Mal Nicholson

Therese and Christopher

Lauren and Paul -- simulating anal sex?! Let's not dwell on this for too long and move along swiftly

Lauren and Therese dancing (Erika and Mal visible in the background)

Lauren and Therese getting dramatic

Richard and Lauren: nice Jayne Mansfield-style cleavage shot of Lauren

Therese and Lauren lezzing-up (you'd never know it, but they'd never met before that night)

James and Erika

Therese and I. Paul apparently pretending he doesn't know us. Eine foto von Mal Nicholson. (You can see more shots on my flickr page).

The next Cockabilly is 4 January 2011. In the meantime, wishing everyone a Tom of Finland Christmas!

Farewell Violetta Villas (10 June 1938 - 5 December 2011)

2011-12-18T11:00:00.001-08:00

The night of John Waters's Christmas show at Royal Festival Hall, I came home to learn that the great, tempestuous Polish diva Violetta Villas (10 June 1938 – 5 December 2011) had died earlier that day at her home in the village of Lewin Klodzki aged 73. My Polish friend, work colleague and fellow Violetta fan Marta (the village where Marta is from borders Lewin Klodzki) had both texted me and Facebooked me alerting me of her death.

I first learned of the existence of Violetta Villas from the reliably excellent The Homoerratic Radio Show blog on 25 January 2011. It described her as a “Polska Yma Sumac” and provided a link to an MP3 of Villas singing an intoxicatingly strange but appealing Polka-Mambo hybrid entitled "Czterdziesci Kasztanów (Forty Chestnuts)": think Latin exotica from behind the Iron Curtain. You can listen to it here, and I recommend you do. I downloaded the song and frequently drop it into my Dr Sketchy set lists, especially towards the end when I'm drunk.

Intrigued, I started Googling Violetta Villas and hit the mother lode: Youtube was full of clips from her ultra- kitsch 1960s and 70s TV specials and film appearances. The next day at work Marta filled me in on the rest: how Villas’s promising international career (she was a celebrated Las Vegas headliner in the 1960s and appeared in some Hollywood films, including the legendarily awful 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon) was cut short by Communism, how she’s still revered in Poland now that she’s an elderly and eccentric recluse. I was so inspired that night when I blogged the latest Dr Sketchy set list, I incorporated a tribute to Villas (read it here), in which I rhapsodised:

" ... Villas is a berserk outsider artist; a wild low-budget Eastern European hybrid of Jayne Mansfield/Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita / Brigitte Bardot / Charo; a punk (her image and un-hinged performances can suggest Nina Hagen or Jayne County); and a self-parodic possessor of a camp /kitsch drag queen sensibility (is it deliberate or naive? Certainly her persona evokes the films of the Kuchar brothers and John Waters. There’s something wonderfully grotesque about how Villas deliberately buries her own natural beauty under the matted bouffant wigs and thick transvestite/ clown-like make-up)."

(Note: Marta has instructed me to point out I was wrong in claiming Violetta's hair was a wig. In spite of appearances, that wild, exploding mane of tousled blonde hair was apparently 100% Violetta's own, something she took fierce pride in. I stand corrected!)

In the English-speaking world there really haven’t been any decent, thoughtful Villas obituaries. When you Google, what you keep finding on the web is the same press release statement announcing her death and giving a brief summary of her career and accomplishments recycled over and over. Marta says that in Poland, meanwhile, Villas’s death has caused a media storm, which makes sense considering she was their super star equivalent of a Bardot, Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. Her life was always scandalous and troubled and so, it appears, was Villas’s death. Looking at photos and Youtube clips of Villas in her heyday, she’d clearly modelled herself on Brigitte Bardot. Like Bardot, when Villas retired from show business she devoted herself to animal activism, operating an animal shelter from her home. But unlike Bardot, Villas didn’t have the wealth or resources to adequately maintain her animal sanctuary and shortly before her death the Polish authorities shut down her menagerie due to “overcrowding and insufficient care.” To further multiply the humiliation, Marta says at the same time Villas was also briefly committed to a psychiatric institution. Villas’s only family at the time of her death was her son Krzysztof, to whom she was seemingly estranged (he's apparently given interviews to the Polish media highly critical of his mother). In the initial obituaries it mentioned the cause of her death was unknown and that an autopsy had been ordered. Marta has since said the autopsy revealed nothing abnormal or suspicious about Villas’s death. She’d announced her retirement from public performing earlier this year (her last-ever concert was on Valentine’s Day 2011) and was obviously in declining health. (I’d read something about tuberculosis, but I might have misinterpreted that). It looks like Villas simply died of old age at what these days we think of as the relatively young age of 73.

It would be nice to think Villas had found some serenity in her later years after a stormy life of great success followed by profound personal and professional disappointments. Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s a cliché, but the music of Violetta Villas will live on and surely cult status beckons for this outrageously original artist. The world is a duller place without her!

A very young, unpolished but utterly magnetic Violetta Villas at embryonic stage: still with puppy fat, darker hair, possibly pre-nose job. Adorable

Sex kitten Villas in the late 1960s. I love the Jayne Mansfield squeals she emits at the beginning of the song, and the wild costume changes (leopard print bathing suit, Little Bo Peep; towards the end she appears to be wearing the rubber mini skirt and thigh boots of a dominatrix)

Villas tearing apart "Strangers in the Night" ... accompanied by a troupe of mimes in face paint. Watch for the climactic moment when she smashes her Champagne glass

Violetta Villas at her absolute zenith in 1970, singing in Russian in the 1971 Polish film Dzieciol. Wow ... just wow. This is majestic. Let's remember Violetta Villas this way!

John Waters's Christmas Show at The Royal Festival Hall on 5 December 2011

2011-12-17T13:23:00.000-08:00

Seeing John Waters at Christmas time is becoming something of an annual tradition. In December 2010 the Sultan of Sleaze was in London promoting the hardback edition of his latest book Role Models (that was when I interviewed him for the Nude website). While in London the irrepressible provocateur / raconteur did an onstage interview followed by a question and answer session at The Royal Festival Hall, which I attended with my friends Mari, Alison and Damon. It was a blast.

On 5 December 2011 Waters returned to the same venue, this time touring his long-running Christmas-themed spoken word show. Waters has long been garrulous about his rabid enthusiasm for the kitschy and campy aspects of Christmas: his 1987 book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters includes the essay "Why I Love Christmas" (read an excerpt here). In 2005 he collated a compilation of his favourite twisted Christmas tunes (mainly obscure 1950s and 60s Rhythm and Blues) entitled A John Waters Christmas (which is one of my DJ'ing staples during the Christmas party season). Fruitcake, the jinxed film project he’s been trying to get off the ground in recent years (his last film to date remains 2004's A Dirty Shame) was meant to be a seasonal children’s film about a criminal family who steals meat to order for Christmas dinner. And we can never, ever forget the single greatest Christmas scene ever committed to celluloid: Christmas morning with hair-hopping juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport and her family in Female Trouble (1974).

Beforehand, I met up with my glamorous friends Alison Leary and Laurie Vanian (Mari was meant to come, but was ill on the night. Luckily she recovered in time for my Christmas cocktail party on 10 December) for happy hour cocktails at one of my all-time favourite bars, Cubana in Waterloo. Even just walking towards Cubana cheers me up and gets my mouth watering at the thought of their Mojitos: as soon as you turn the corner and approach the bar, you see their giant painted mural of Carmen Miranda with her arms outstretched triumphantly (why a Cuban bar features gigantic tribute to Carmen Miranda – who was born in Portugal and raised in Brazil – is a whole other question). (I used to work in that neighbourhood, at a fetish / sex shop on Lower Marsh almost directly opposite Cubana. Let’s not open that whole can of worms. That was a lifetime ago!). Needless to say, talking trash with these two vixens (think of Alison and Laurie as my Chicklet and Concetta -- Dawn Davenport's bad-girl friends from Female Trouble) over two-for-one drinks was the perfect warm-up to seeing cinema’s Prince of Puke.

Chicklet (Susan Walsh) and Concetta (Cookie Mueller) in Female Trouble (1974). Photo Via

Alison (channelling Tallulah Bankhead) and Laurie at Cubana

Margaritas and Mojitos at Cubana ... and a crotch shot of me

Alison and I

Devastating glamour shot of Alison. Her sweater matches the radiator beautifully. She thinks of everything

Alison and Laurie

The great man himself: King of Sleaze John Waters onstage at the Royal Festival Hall. We were in row P: not bad at all, but not good enough to take any decent shots. His outfit is almost certainly by Comme des Garcons

I was quite drunk by the time John Waters came onstage (four Mojitos followed by some pre-show pints of lager on an empty stomach will do that), but I can confirm the show was a scream and far raunchier and "bluer" than the description “Christmas show” suggests. The anecdotes flowed effortlessly and Waters was on great form. Here are some of the highlights I can recall from my Mojito and lager fog:

Waters revealed that the only time Divine would drag up and try to actually convince or “pass” as a real woman was every Christmas Eve – when she’d go to Mass! (She probably just liked look a very zaftig Elizabeth Taylor wannabe).

One particulary great line: Waters was saying that unlike many of his friends, he really does believe some people are genuinely heterosexual. Most of his friends are apt to snarl, “Oh, so you’re straight? So is spaghetti until it gets hot!”

He lamented that all young people now shave their pubic hair off, recalling how in his youth he and his friends loved it and call it “pelt.” People used to actually say, “I want to get me some pelt tonight!” (This brought back a nice memory of the much-missed Edith Massey as Queen Carlotta in Waters’ 1977 cinematic atrocity Desperate Living exclaiming, “Look at that pelt!” as one of her evil henchmen stripped naked in front of her).

He said he loves learning new sexual slang. One of his friends recently told him he’s a “blouse.” When Waters asked, “What’s a blouse?” his friend explained, “An effeminate top!”

At the end, he wished us all a “filthy, bisexual, biracial Christmas!” It was a heart-warming end to the night, and rest assured I’m doing my damnedest to live up to John Waters’ Christmas wish. Which reminds me: I've got to get me some pelt!

Christmas Cocktail Capers! 10 December 2011

2011-12-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

My brutally minimalist Christmas decor (it's the same shit every year!). Shame this photo isn't Smell-o-Vision: the Muji Christmas candle is Cinnamon and Mandarin-scented. In the background: the damned, DAMNED stereo that died mid-party.

For the past few years I’ve been holding intimate but swingin' Christmas cocktail parties chez moi at my tiny studio flat in Archway. (See photos from previous parties here and here). This year’s fell on Saturday 10 December 2011. On the Facebook events page I created, I warned potential guests in advance:

Food will be minimal, so make sure you EAT FIRST. I live in a tiny studio flat (in the heart of London’s glittering Archway) with limited seating, so you will inevitably be forced to stand and mingle. I will be playing kitsch, abrasive Christmas tunes until you beg me to stop. (Do you still want to come?).

It sounds like I was setting the bar kind of low, huh? Looking back, here’s what I learned from my 2011 cocktail party:

1) Nobody really likes snowballs, in the same way very few people actually like mulled wine or mince pies. Snowballs are so intensely sweet they’re not exactly more-ish. So in retrospect I wish I’d only bought one bottle of Advocaat. I also bought a jar of maraschino cherries to garnish the snowballs with, and wound up only using a handful of cherries. Decades from now when the police recover my decomposed remains from this flat, that jar of cherries will still be there untouched in my cupboard.

My inspiration: Nigella Lawson knocking up some snowballs

2) Campari is definitely an acquired taste! I first had it in Rome and have come to love its extremely dry, bitter almost cough syrup flavour – but I was definitely in the minority. After the snowballs were drained, rather than open the second bottle of Advocaat I switched to another Nigella Lawson Christmas cocktail recipe (not sure if it has a name): Campari, blood orange juice and cranberry juice – it makes for a festive deep blood-crimson colour. Later on, I realised most people had barely sipped these and then set them down untouched. (I mentioned the unpopularity of Campari to my glamorous Roman friend Laura Casella and she fired back via Facebook, “Campari e' molto buono!”). So next time I’d stick with flutes of icy cold Cava or Prosecco – which everyone loves. (Nigella can steer you wrong: she once suggested buying the gingerbread-flavoured syrup that Starbucks flavours their Christmas gingerbread lattes with and adding a drop to glasses of Cava, claiming it tastes like “Christmas in a glass.” In fact it instantly turns a perfectly good glass of sparkling, clear Cava murky, flat, opaque and sickly sweet! That sticky bottle of gingerbread syrup – which wasn’t cheap, by the way -- sat untouched in my kitchen cupboard for a good two years before I finally chucked it out).

3) It was also just my luck that my CD player finally broke down the night I was having a party! It’s a faithful old 1990s relic which has lasted – and sounded great -- for ages, but it’s been gradually acting increasingly erratic and unreliable. The internal “eye” has stopped reading CDs properly: they either won’t whirr into action at all, or they’ll skip in a way that’s so annoying it’s like an audio torture device straight out of Guantanamo Bay. So I had to play my lovingly-selected Christmas CDs (all my atomic era Ultra-Lounge kitsch Christmas ones, Christmas albums by everyone from Mae West to Elvis to Chet Baker, etc) via iTunes on my PC instead, which sounded muffled and tinny.

At one point I put on a “joke” Christmas tape I’ve had since my student days at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario – a cassette called Christmas Party Dancing (the cassette part of my stereo was still working. Yes, it has cassette decks. I did say it was old). It's the kind of ultra-cheap budget cassette you would have found in a discount bin at a gas station in the 1980s. I wish I could scan the cover or find an image of it online: it’s a photo of a smiling young Afro-Caribbean woman with cornrow braids (she’s meant to signify “disco") wearing a red hooded fur-trimmed Santa’s cape (which signifies “Christmas”), with the title Christmas Party Dancing in zany red and white lettering and really bad old school clip art of a burning candle. It’s the most jaw-droppingly awful collection of Christmas carols re-interpreted as the naff-est possible disco music. Anyway, I put the cassette on as a camp-y joke but people seemed to think I actually thought it was good, so after a few uncomfortable minutes, I took it out again!

4) The entire first part of the night I was so busy mixing drinks I barely got to talk to anyone! The first set of guests had to leave by midnight to catch the last tubes home (they lived as far flung as South London and West London). The next shift of guests arrived circa midnight and stayed until 2 am (one friend -- my old mucker, French rockabilly Dominique -- helped me polish off some remaining bottles of Cava until 5 am!).

In spite of the above, my party was mostly a blast, if I do say so myself. Here are some shots of my elegant guests. If you want to see more, check out my flickr page.

Julian, Mari and Anthony (just to clarify: those curtains came with the flat, OK?)

Mari, Anthony and Rob

Christopher and Lauren (who are in the art-punk band Matron together) and the unpopular Campari cocktails

Christopher and Damon

Welsh people unite: Julian and Lauren

Who knew mixing drinks was such sweaty work? The blotchy, sweaty hosty and the glamorous Mari

Were two people ever more photogenic? Julian and Mari

No, he's not giving her the Heimlich Maneuver: Lauren and Julian

Two kinky blondes: Magda and Lauren

International sex kitten Magda raises a glass

Damon and I

Dominique and I

23 November 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-11-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

The astonishing Tempest Storm (judging by her bouffant hairstyle, circa the early-1960s)

It’s fair to say everyone at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern was blown away by this Dr Sketchy's featured performer, chanteuse and comedienne Sabrina Chap visiting from New York. Accompanying herself on keyboard, Sabrina sang three twisted, scabrous and funny torch songs so filthy they shocked even me. Afterwards Sabrina also posed: at one point she came onstage with her hair in Lolita-esque pigtails (or “bunches” as Brits insist on calling them) and posed giving the audience the finger. I wish I’d had something more aggressive and confrontational cued up to match her punk-y pose (it was Lizabeth Scott's heartbroken version of the jazz standard “Can’t Get Out of This Mood”, with its great campy and dramatic spoken introduction. Our eternally soigné emcee Dusty Limits reassured me the contrast between the music and Sabrina’s pose worked in spite of itself!).

The other model was Dr Sketchy veteran Mam’zelle Celine with the Bardot-like waterfall of long blonde hair. At the end of the night, Sabrina and Celine posed together. For one pose, Sabrina bound a startled-looking Celine’s hands behind her back – it was like something out of a 1950s Bettie Page-Irving Klaw bondage photo session! When two females model together at Dr Sketchy, I often pull out a Marilyn Monroe-Jane Russell duet from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Considering Sabrina is brunette and Celine blonde, it seemed particularly apt.

Mam'zelle Celine and Sabrina Chap (well, Bettie Page and victim as photographed by Irving Klaw. You get the general idea).

I threaded a subtle gynaecological theme throughout the night: "My Pussy Belongs to Daddy", "Poon-tang", "Eager Beaver Baby", "Beaver Shot", etc. Classy, huh? Not sure if anyone noticed, but I found it amusing. On a more elegant note, I also gave things a bit of Continental je ne sais quoi by playing some songs by two great 1960s European pop divas: France’s Francoise Hardy (singing in German) and Italy’s Mina. Both songs are from arthouse cinema soundtracks. Hardy’s “Traume” (which means “Dream” in German) is from the deeply strange and kinky black tragicomedy Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) by Francois Ozon (in a nice cross-European twist, it’s a film by a French director adapted for the screen from a play by a German (my hero the late, great maestro Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and the song is sung in German by a French chanteuse), while Mina’s “Un Anno D’Amore” (“A Year of Love”) is used in Pedro Almodovar’s High Heels (1991). “Traume” almost becomes a running joke in Burning Rocks: the film is set in the early 1970s (Hardy recorded “Traume” in 1970) and every time someone puts a record on the stereo, it always seems to be this. Listening to Hardy’s spellbinding performance of this sublimely morbid and tragic song, it’s easy to understand why she’s become a cult figure in even non-French speaking countries. Enigmatic, lush-lipped, ash blonde and fashion model beautiful, with a wispily alluring crystal tear drop voice awash in melancholy, Francoise Hardy is like a French equivalent of Nico or Marianne Faithfull without the troublesome heroin addiction.

France's exquisite Francoise Hardy singing "Traume" in German -- and channelling Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in The Blue Angel with her top hat, cigarette and mesh stockings

“Un Anno D’Amore” is the perfect encapsulation of the artistry of Mina (aka the Tiger of Cremona). She specialises in lush, swirling ballads surging with tension and romantic agony: think of Dusty Springfield in “I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten” / “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” mode with added Italian passion. (Like Dusty, Mina had a penchant for thick black eyeliner and false eye lashes. Unlike Dusty, Mina took things a few steps further by entirely plucking-out her eyebrows for extra impact). Extremely dramatic and intense, “Un Anno D’Amore” is a slow-burning heartbreak ballad that begins measured and restrained and keeps building to crescendos of raw emotion until Mina is finally wailing the chorus; the piercing sadness of her astonishingly emotive voice creates an almost operatic sense of tragedy. Needless to say, Mina’s songs and persona are a natural fit for the films of Spain’s Pedro Almodovar. In one of High Heels’ most memorable segments, the drag queen Letal portrayed by Miguel Bose (son of beautiful Italian actress Lucia Bose – the Italian Ava Gardner, check her out in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1953 film Le Signora Senza Camelie – and Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin) lip-synchs to “Un Anno D’Amore” in his nightclub routine. In fact, it’s rumoured Almodovar’s next film is due to be a biopic of Mina. It sounds like a marriage made in heaven.

Italy's Mina in full cry. Goose bumps! (I actually prefer this version, but annoyingly the person who uploaded it on Youtube disabled embedding! Make sure to check it out).

Miguel Bose in High Heels (note: this version is "Un Ano de Amor", sung in Spanish instead of Italian. Drag-tastic!)

Love Me or Leave Me - Nina Simone
Let's Get Lost - Chet Baker
When I Get Low I Get High - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
One More Beer - The Earls of Suave
Trash Can - Ken Williams
Mi Palomita - Yma Sumac
Mama, Looka Boo Boo - Robert Mitchum
Go, Calypso! - Mamie Van Doren
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
St Louis Blues - Eartha Kitt
The Whip - The Originals
Follow the Leader - Wiley Terry
Greasy Chicken - Andre Williams
Baby I'm Doin' It - Annisteen Allen
I Love the Life I Live - Esquerita
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Poon-tang - The Treniers
Beaver Shot - The Periscopes
Save It - Mel Robbins
Elle est Terrible - Johnny Hallyday
8 Ball - The Hustlers
Fever - Ann-Margret
Anasthasia - Bill Smith Combo
I'm a Bad, Bad Girl - Little Esther
Drive-In - The Jaguars
My Pussy Belongs to Daddy - Faye Richmonde
Womp Womp - Freddy and The Heartaches
Traume - Francoise Hardy
Mondo Moodo - The Earls of Suave
Un Anno D'Amore - Mina
Harlem Nocturne - Martin Denny
Caravan - The John Buzon Trio
Jealousy - Billy Fury
It's Legal - Shirley Anne Field (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Yogi - The Bill Black Combo
Fever - Nancy Sit
Tall Cool One - The Wailers
Teardrops from My Eyes - Ruth Brown
You'd Better Stop - LaVerne Baker
Shangri-La - Spike Jones New Band
I Love How You ... Lydia Lunch
Love - Eartha Kitt
Look-a There, Ain't She Pretty - Bill Haley (Pink Flamingos soundtrack)
Little Things Mean a Lot - Jayne Mansfield
Can't Get Out of This Mood - Lizabeth Scott
You're Crying - Dinah Washington
Let There Be Love - Diana Dors
Blockade - The Rumblers
I Can't Give You Anything But Love - Marlene Dietrich
L'appareil a sous - Brigitte Bardot
Pauvre Lola - Serge Gainsbourg
Just Two Little Girls from Littlerock - Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell
Bikini with No Top on the Top - Mamie Van Doren and June Wilkinson
The Whip - The Frantics
Revellion - The Revels
Bombie - Johnny Sharp and The Yellowjackets
Eager Beaver Baby - Johnny Burnette
All of Me - Mae West
Daddy Daddy - Ruth Brown
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
Witchcraft - Elvis Presley

12 November 2011 Dr Sketchy DJ Set List

2011-11-19T10:31:00.000-08:00

Kitsch icon Mamie Van Doren, Hollywood's Ultimate 1950s Bad Girl

This Saturday afternoon Dr Sketchy at The Old Queen’s Head in Angel featured Dr Sketchy veteran Marianne Cheesecake as the burlesque performer and model, Claire Benjamin in character as Freuda Kahlo as the emcee and Trixi Tassels on stage-managing duties. We also had comedian Jeff Leach as an unexpected bonus male model. He showed up with a camera crew to film him for an upcoming BBC Three documentary to be entitled Am I a Sex Addict? – and proceeded to pose stark, raving bollock naked, which really made an impression. Let’s just say he has porn star characteristics, and swiftly move on. (Having seen him pose at Dr Sketchy, I for one would personally be glad to help Jeff Leach in his research into determining whether he is indeed a sex addict. This was one of the Dr Sketchy’s where we really needed a photographer present!).

The vivacious Claire Benjamin always brings an element of genuine theatrical performance art to Dr Sketchy when she emcees – which keeps me on my toes and sometimes finds me wanting. She had three different pieces of music for me to play at specific times: introductory music to come onto the stage to, and backing tracks for the two songs she sang (one of them – her big finale – the Carmen Miranda standard “I Yi Yi Yi Yi Yi (Like You Very Much)”, for which she dons a plastic fruit-covered turban). I managed to get all three music cues wrong – without exception! Not some of my better moments. Hey, I was drinking lager all afternoon. Thankfully (and luckily for me) Claire is so smoothly professional (and so infinitely forgiving!) she just took it in her stride, and the audience seemed none the wiser. Yikes!

Like I said earlier – a shame we didn’t have a photographer at this Dr Sketchy. For one thing, Marianne Cheesecake’s costumes were dazzling. For her first pose she was styled as a 1920s flapper with a Louise Brooks pageboy wig. Later, for her performance she wore an astonishing Marie Antoinette get-up with a huge exploding black and white-streaked wig (think of a Cruella de Ville-Lily Munster-Bride of Frankenstein -Marge Simpson hybrid and you're on the right track) with a mask like a crystal chandelier hanging over her face. My description doesn't do it justice! It looked indredibly decadent and striking. I'll see if I can hustle some photos of Marianne in this costume (she showed me some on her phone, so they exist) and post them later, but in the meantime here is a tease-o-rama clip of Marianne Cheesecake paying tribute to the great Josephine Baker.

Spinning a few tracks by quintessential 1950s B-movie bad girl Mamie Van Doren always feels de rigeur when I DJ at Dr Sketchy. Van Doren was a voluptuous platinum blonde contemporary of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield in the 50s, but unlike them she never managed to graduate to big budget A-list films, instead finding her natural habitat in kitschy drive-in exploitation films (her irresistibly bad filmography includes the likes of The Girl in the Black Stockings (1957), Sex Kittens Go to College (1960), The Las Vegas Hillbillies (1966) and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1966)). Van Doren seemed to play teenage juvenile delinquents well into her twenties (in Girls Town (1959), even with her perky ponytail and tight Capri pants, the 28-year old Van Doren seems pretty overripe, fleshy and mature for a high school student).

Bullet-bra'd sweater girl Mamie Van Doren

In 1956 Van Doren’s rival Jayne Mansfield would appear alongside rockabilly legends Little Richard, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran in The Girl Can’t Help It, the deluxe Mercedes Benz of rock’n’roll musicals (and a key film for John Waters). Van Doren herself would go one better: an interesting footnote to her career is that she can genuinely claim to be the first female Hollywood star to sing rock’n’roll onscreen. In Untamed Youth (1957) her songs were written by rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran (he plays guitar on them, too) – and they’re not half bad (although it’s been pointed out that it’s a crime against music that the doomed Cochran – who’d be dead by 1960 – was only permitted to perform one onscreen song in Untamed Youth, while Van Doren has four!). Van Doren’s musical output is compiled on the highly enjoyable CD The Girl Who Invented Rock’n’Roll. It’s campy as hell, undisputed Queen of Rockabilly Wanda Jackson's reputation is secure, and for someone famous for her sensationally ample rack Van Doren’s singing is oddly flat, but Cochran’s tight, twangy songs pack a wallop, and Van Doren (in a punky display of enthusiasm over ability) delivers them with verve, conviction and a genuine feel for rock’n’roll . (Needless to say, I always play some of Van Doren’s 50s rockabilly songs when I DJ at Cockabilly, too). In High School Confidential (1958) – probably Van Doren’s best film – she doesn't sing, but it features an unhinged Jerry Lee Lewis pounding-out the title tune on his piano over the opening credits – a timeless rock’n’roll moment.

The trailer for Untamed Youth – the kind of lurid juvenile delinquent film that inspired John Waters’s Crybaby (1990). In the trailer you see snatches of Van Doren performing “Salamander” and “Go, Calypso!” – two tracks I play frequently at Dr Sketchy

Now a zaftig 80-year old, Van Doren remains an unrepentant scantily-clad and platinum-haired exhibitionist. Still a publicity-hungry starlet, she's active on the Hollywood social scene and parties at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion (Van Doren herself posed for Playboy in 1963). In 2006 she was photographed in a dual portrait with her spiritual heiress Pamela Anderson for Vanity Fair magazine. On her outrageous website sells autographed nipple prints (yes, she puts lipstick on her nipples, presses them onto paper and sells them) and cavorts for carefully-lit, heavily-retouched soft-core nudie photos and videos. In 1987 Van Doren unleashed her memoirs Playing the Field, in which she gleefully spills the beans about all the male Hollywood stars she slept with over the years and rates their sexual performances. (I haven’t read the book in well over twenty years, but I’ll never forget her describing dropping acid with Steve McQueen and having sex with him while tripping. Her prose turns psychedelic: “You you. Me me. I’m your dancing Mamie doll ...”).

She’s had a remarkable life; there’s a revealing interview with her on Salon.com from 2000 in which Van Doren holds forth on her life and career and emerges as an intelligent and sensitive woman. She recalls the sensual and cougar-ish older woman Marlene Dietrich giving her an appraising eye up and down backstage in 1957 (Van Doren didn’t realise at the time Dietrich was bisexual, otherwise she would have taken her up on the offer) and says the most meaningful work she ever did was long after her Hollywood career had fizzled out, risking her life to entertain American troops in war-torn Vietnam in the late 60s. “I have had more of a sex life than a love life,” she admits in the interview, “Love was secondary to me” and concludes, “My best asset is my brain. Without my brain, I don’t think the rest of me would be too hot.” Rock on, Mamie van Doren – the Jayne Mansfield who survived to see old age.

Singing in the shower: A clip of Van Doren in Girls Town (1959)which apparently got deleted from the final film for censorship reasons

D-Rail - The Flintones
Mama Looka Boo Boo (Shut You Mouth - Go Away!) - Robert Mitchum
Rolling Stone - Mamie van Doren
Don't Be Cruel - Bill Black Combo
Unchain My Heart - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
Oui je veux - Johnny Hallyday
Sea of Love - The Earls of Suave
Caterpillar Crawl - The Strangers
Dance with Me Henry - Ann-Margret
Kruschev Twist - Melvin Gayle
Work with It - Que Martin
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - 5,6,7,8s
Dragon Walk - The Noble Men
Comin' Home, Baby - The Delmonas
That's a Pretty Good Love - Big Maybelle
Bacon Fat - Andre Williams
This Thing Called Love - Esquerita
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
Cherry Pink - Bill Black Combo
Vírgenes del Sol - Yma Sumac
Je Me Donne A Qui Me Plait - Brigitte Bardot
Some Small Chance - Serge Gainsbourg (Strip-tease soundtrack)
Lullabye of Birdland - Eartha Kitt
Crazy Horse Swing - Serge Gainsbourg (Strip-tease soundtrack)
Do It Again - April Stevens
You're My Thrill - Chet Baker (instrumental version)
A Guy What Takes His Time - Marlene Dietrich
Harlem Nocturne - The Viscounts
Take it Off - The Genteels
Tony's Got Hot Nuts - Faye Richmonde
The Strip - The Upsetters
The Whip - The Frantics
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Revellion - The Revels
Chattanooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
The Beast - Milt Buckner
Rockin' Bongos - Chaino
Give Me Love - Lena Horne
Sexe - Line Renaud
The Good Life - Ann-Margret
La Javanaise - Juliette Greco
The Stripper - John Barry (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Un Jour Comme Un Autre - Brigitte Bardot
I Feel So Mmmm - Diana Dors
Kiss - Marilyn Monroe
Angel Face - Billy Fury
Night Walk - The Swingers
Black Coffee - Julie London
Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun - Mink Stole
The Bee - The Sentinels
De Castrow - JayBee Wasden
Bewildered - Shirley and Lee
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Crawfish - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Stop and Listen - Mickey and Ludella
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Groovy - Groovey and The Groovers
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley

I haven’t posted a tittyshaker video in a while. To remedy that, here is an eye-popping clip from the ultra-sleazy 1960 British sexploitation / juvenile delinquent flick Beat Girl (aka Wild for Kicks). I’ve posted before that its suave Cool Jazz-inflected John Barry soundtrack is an endless source of inspiration for my DJ’ing at Dr Sketchy. In this clip, jailbait teenage bad girl Gillian Hills (painstakingly styled to look exactly like Brigitte Bardot) has snuck into a Soho strip club and stares bug-eyed at exotic café con leche-skinned performer Pascaline’s burlesque routine – and who can blame her, when it mostly seems to consist of crotch-thrusting, floor-humping and ponytail twirling? (By the way: this nice piece of quasi-Mambo music that Pascaline dances to isn’t actually on the Beat Girl soundtrack – weird. Makes me wonder if this sequence was added after the film was completed to spice things up? We get glimpses of other striptease numbers in Beat Girl, but Pascaline's is by far the raunchiest.)

Cockabilly DJ Set List 2 November 2011

2011-11-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

(I’m currently reading Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring. The book is an eye-popping revelation, lifting the lid on the subterranean pre-Stonewall gay social history, and in particular the astonishing life of Samuel Steward (1909-1993) – who packed enough different identities and adventures for several life times. Read the NY Times review here for more juicy details. One of Steward’s most intriguing aliases was re-inventing himself as a tattooist in the 1950s called Phil Sparrow (who’d be a key mentor for godfathers of tattoo culture Ed Hardy and Cliff Raven. And it was Phil Sparrow who tattooed the word LUCIFER on Kenneth Anger's chest in the 1960s -- how cool is that?!). A connoisseur of firm male flesh, this is one of “Phil Sparrow”’s own photos of his handiwork adorning a sexy young sailor or juvenile delinquent. Get the book -- it has plenty more photos like this!)

Was this perhaps the best Cockabilly (London's only gay rockabilly night) ever? The crowd at The George and Dragon was buzzing, sexy, well-lubricated and bohemian. For once, most of my friends who said they were going to come actually turned up: Swedish Therese, Christopher and Paul from red-hot art punk band Matron, Jim (who turned up with his dog Daisy, who is now apparently part of my DJ’ing entourage. It’s certainly more fun when she’s there, and people invariably fall in love with her sweet demeanour and adorable face).

(For once I brought my camera and actually used it. Although I waited until so late in the night Therese, Jim and Daisy had already left).

Christopher and Paul from the band Matron

There were four DJ’s this time: Mal and Paul (the brains behind Cockabilly), myself and guest Emma La Wolf from Twat Boutique (who instantly dazzled me by playing the title track to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! by the Bostweeds as her first song). I played a tight 45 minute set (and yet my friends still managed to sneak out for cigarette breaks outside while I was playing. Yeah, don’t think I didn’t see you. Couldn’t you have waited until I was finished?!). My set encompassed rockabilly (Charlie Feathers, Wanda Jackson), some punk (X, Sid Vicious), girl group, hillbilly (Hasil Adkins), sleazy grinding instrumentals (Link Wray, the Rumblers, The Revels) and a 1957 rock’n’roll number by Robert Mitchum (my all-time favourite actor). Playing some tracks from John Waters’s soundtracks (“Chicken Grabber” by the Nite Hawks and Queen of Rock'n'Roll Little Richard's “The Girl Can’t Help It” from Pink Flamingos, the title track by the Honey Sisters from Cry-baby) always seems de rigueur, because John Waters is the patron saint of Cockabilly, and from the DJ booth you can see a big framed poster of Divine.

Cockabilly's Mal Nicholson and Paul Dragoni

From there, things unravelled. I was pounding back pints of lager on an empty stomach (one of the perks of DJ’ing is free drinks. I’d be insane to turn them down. And they tasted sooo good!). While DJ’ing I accidentally dropped a CD and it fell down a crack in the DJ booth. Retrieving it involved writhing and squirming on the floor amongst the tangles of cables and generations of thick grungy dust bunnies – luckily I found it, though (it was Copycats, the 1988 album of retro duets by Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin. It’s one of my DJ’ing staples. No freakin’ way was I letting that go). It’s always swelteringly hot at the George and Dragon: in a sweaty and drunken stupor I removed and left behind a black Viva Las Vegas rockabilly weekender sweatshirt (that sweatshirt dates back to 2003! Technically that’s almost vintage – or at least well and truly irreplaceable. Fortunately it was found and kept for me behind the bar at the end of the night, and I was eventually re-united with it days later).

Then when I was meant to be leaving, I encountered my friend (and fellow Canadian ex-pat) Erika standing outside talking to this dreamy Brazilian “Boy from Ipanema”-type (tall and tan and young and handsome ...). She introduced me to him. I sure wish I’d met him several drinks earlier – I would have made a better impression, or at least a less swaying and slurring one. His name is lost in the mists of time, and I was wracking my brains trying to impress him with my very limited Portuguese vocabulary (it doesn’t extend much beyond asking “Tudo bem?” and ordering a Caipirinha). He definitely told me his last boyfriend was Canadian, and I said mine was Brazilian. From there somehow he was trying to give me his phone number. I have a flashback to him taking my phone out of my hand and typing his number into it -- but the next day when I scrolled through the names on my phone, there were no new or unfamiliar ones, and certainly no Brazilian-looking ones. Ah, well. Maybe he was shining me on? If it’s meant to be I’ll bump into him again. Anyway, the night was so fun it was worth the crippling hangover I had at work the whole next day.

Two shots of the insanely photogenic Erika

Deuces Wild - Link Wray
My Honey's Lovin' Arms - Robert Mitchum
Salamander - Mamie van Doren
Elle est terrible - Johnny Hallyday (French-ified version of Eddie Cochran's Somethin' Else)
C'mon Everybody - Sid Vicious
Dancin' with Tears in My Eyes - X
Shake a Leg - Margaret Lewis
One Hand Loose - Charlie Feathers
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
Vesuvius - The Revels
I Stubbed My Toe - Bryan "Legs" Walker
I Was Born to Cry - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Rock-A-Bop - Sparkle Moore
Boss - The Rumblers
Comin' Home - The Delmonas
Save It - Mel Robbins
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Funnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Crybaby - The Honey Sisters
Hanky Panky - Rita Chao & The Quests
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
That's Why I'm Asking - Carl Dobkins Jr with Lew Douglas His Orchestra & Chorus
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard

I referred to Pope of Trash John Waters earlier. Another beloved cinematic influence of mine is the twin brother outsider artists / filmmaking duo George and Mike Kuchar. In the 1960s, alongside contemporaries Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, the Bronx-born Kuchar brothers were the demented and inspired borderline idiot-savants of American underground cinema. In labour of love no-budget masturpieces (sic) like Hold Me While I'm Naked and Sins of the Fleshapoids (which I have fond memories of seeing at the much-missed Scala cinema in the early 1990s), the Kuchar brothers revelled in a totally idiosyncratic and irresistible kitsch, queer sensibility that would have a huge impact on the oeuvre of their successor John Waters.

The Kuchar brothers initially made films together, and then independently. George Kuchar died 6 September 2011; Mike survives him. Watch Mike Kuchar’s torrid 1967 melodrama The Craven Sluck below. Seemingly channelling Jayne Mansfield, leading lady Florain Connors gives an anguished, hot pool-of-woman-need, cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof performance. The Craven Sluck has it all: raw emotion, infidelity, a suicide attempt, a dog taking a crap, a hideously unconvincing drag queen, flying saucers -- crammed into just under 21-minutes. Enjoy!

Reflections on Fish Tank (2009)

2011-10-30T08:53:00.000-07:00

In Fish Tank (2009), the follow-up to director Andrea Arnold’s striking debut Red Road (2006), Katie Jarvis portrays 15-year old Mia. In her uniform of tracksuit with hooded sweatshirt and gold Argos hoop earrings, hair scraped back into a ponytail, Mia outwardly conforms to the social type of “chav” geezer bird. Hip hop cranked up on her iPod, her coltish adolescent limbs hunched into defensive body language and her default facial expression set to perma-scowl, Mia is a spicy, volatile and complex combination of tough, vulnerable and hurt. A product of poverty and parental neglect, the wary and wounded Essex council estate urchin has a bubbling inner inferno of rage (we see her head-butting another girl, breaking her nose) which she tempers with vodka and cider-drinking binges.

More constructively, Mia finds escape, creative release and emotional expression in urban dance: Arnold shows her dancing alone to rap music in a sun-drenched abandoned flat in her council building, lost in her own world. (Don’t worry: this is nowhere near as Flashdance as I make it sound). Mia seems to have stoically minimal expectations from life – but her dancing (fluid, introspective and athletic) could be a pathway to something better, if she doesn’t jab the self destruct button first.

Mia lives in an abject high-rise council estate with Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), her sewer-mouthed, tough-as-nails little sister, and Joanne (Kierston Wareing), her booze-sodden thirty-something single mother. Joanne – a blowsy slattern in a denim micro mini-skirt – is a real piece of work, apt to warn her daughters, “I’m having my friends ‘round later. Either stay in your room or get out. No kids!” Later she confides to Mia, “Did I ever tell you I nearly had you aborted? I even made the appointment.” It’s an appalling thing to say, and yet the exchange is the closest thing to intimacy we’ve seen between Mia and her mother.

The arrival of Joanne's charismatic new boyfriend, Irish charmer Connor, awakens in Mia an aching and confusing craving for a paternal figure in her life, for the male tenderness she’s never known – feelings she probably didn’t even know she had. (There is not a single reference in the film to whoever Mia and Taylor’s biological father(s) may have been). In her interactions with an emaciated horse belonging to a local gypsy family, we’ve already seen Mia has a great but thwarted capacity for affection. But Mia and Connor’s nascent relationship is complicated by a smouldering and antagonistic mutual attraction, and the potential for adult betrayal and disappointment seems inevitable. (As portrayed by the sinewy and frequently shirtless Michael Fassbender, Connor is certainly sexy as hell).

I’m determined not to give away any spoilers, but there is a virtuoso, heart-pounding scene towards the end where one character breaks into another character’s house and uncovers the secret of their hidden double life. The skin-prickling suspense of them potentially getting caught is intertwined with the primal fascination with uncovering the unknowable secrets of other peoples’ lives. The sequence recalls the mesmerising scene in Arnold’s earlier Red Road, where the female protagonist crashes a house party thrown by a man she’s stalking, and can be favourably compared to Jeffrey sneaking into nightclub singer Dorothy Vallen’s apartment in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

For a Brit film set amongst the council estate-dwelling under classes, Fish Tank is never once “gritty” in the clichéd and predictable sense – it’s lyrical and sensitive. Arnold’s eye is sensual, grungy and tactile, finding desolate beauty and scuzzy poetry in unexpected places: sites of urban decay, scrubby wastelands, overcast skies, chain link fences, a bulging-eyed dying fish gasping for air. This is exciting modern filmmaking by any standards – Arnold tells Mia’s story in jagged shards, using jittery hand-held camera and jarring jump cuts to plunge us into the drama.

Arnold has been compared to Ken Loach and Lynne Ramsay, two British filmmakers I’m ashamed to say I’m not terribly au fait with. Interestingly, The New York Times compared Fish Tank to The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut’s 1959 nouvelle vague study of maladjusted adolescence. What Fish Tank reminded me of is Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s early hard-edged social realist tragedies Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), updated to the present-day council estates of Essex. Arnold shares Pasolini’s clear-eyed compassion for her deeply-flawed and impoverished characters, and her long takes depicting Mia isolated and alienated in her gray concrete surroundings recall how Pasolini presented Franco Citti as his doomed anti-hero in Accattone.

Like the Italian neo-realists, Arnold frequently casts non-professional actors in her films. The acting in Fish Tank is naturalistic and nuanced without exception. Professionals Fassbender and Wareing are certainly deserving of kudos, but Katie Jarvis – who had no prior acting experience before Fish Tank -- is a heartbreaker, affecting in the way only an untutored “amateur” can be. (There’s no “technique” to her performance and no drama school could teach Jarvis’ ability to suggest mute hurt and curiosity. She’s pure animal grace and innate sensitivity). As well as Jean-Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows, Jarvis evokes wild child gamine actress Linda Manz. Manz famously never went on to have much of a film career after her powerful early impact in Days of Heaven (1978) and Out of the Blue (1980). Not to sound overly pessimistic, but Fish Tank probably represents a once in a lifetime opportunity for Jarvis, who is unlikely to ever get another great role like Mia again. But then did Ettore Garofolo (the boy who played Anna Magnani’s son in Mamma Roma ) ever act in another film again? And his sole performance remains haunting and memorable almost 50 years later; so, inevitably, will Jarvis’s.

Fish Tank is frequently wrenchingly painful and a tragic conclusion seems imminent from its opening frames, and yet (again being scrupulous about no spoilers!) it ends on a note of cautious but genuine optimism and hope for change. One of the last songs we hear on the soundtrack is by the rapper Nas, with the repeated refrain “Life’s a bitch.” Nas isn’t wrong, but one of the compelling qualities in Andrea Arnold’s films is that people do reflect and learn from their mistakes.

19 October 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-10-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

And God Created ... Brigitte Bardot

Happily, my jinxed period at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern has definitely has come to an end – this Dr Sketchy was smooth sailing and a really enjoyable night. My friend Jim (who I go to Viva Las Vegas most years with) turned up with a surprise guest: his Staffordshire bull terrier Daisy. Daisy was beautifully-behaved, nestling on the floor in the corner of the DJ booth. It was an added, unexpected bonus to get to kneel down and kiss a dog on the forehead while DJ’ing.

Sweet face: Daisy photographed at my place in February 2011. She's a bit bigger now. Who's a good girl? Who's a good girl? You are, Daisy

The emcee this time was Dusty Limits (Weimar Republic decadence personified), and we had two burlesque performers/models: brunette Australian minx Sarina del Fuego and the frankly very fit Spencer Maybe. For once I kept the tone a bit classy and elegant (relatively-speaking), at least during Sarina’s pose. After her performance, Sarina had stripped down to just black lace lingerie and a kinky black lace eye mask. Her musical selection for her striptease was the dreamy finger-snapping instrumental “Perdita” by Angelo Badalementi, from the soundtrack to the 1990 David Lynch film Wild at Heart. Inspired by the song and Sarina’s outfit, rather than crank-up the sleaze and tittyshakers, I played some moodily lingering 1950s cool jazz-inflected make-out music: Dolores Gray's minimalist bongo drum-propelled "You're My Thrill", Julie London, Chet Baker, Eartha purring “I Want to Be Evil.”

Later I compensated when our male “boylesque” performer Spencer Maybe posed, and then he and Sarina posed together, spinning my raunchiest single-entendre novelty songs like “Tony’s Got Hot Nuts” by Faye Richmonde and Filthy McNasty’s “Ice Man”. I also incorporated exotica (Yma Sumac, Martin Denny), rockabilly, rhythm and blues and some 1960s French pop (Brigitte Bardot, more than one song by Johnny Hallyday!).

During Spencer’s pose I also played a track by Lizabeth Scott, the most haunting and enigmatic of 1940s and 50s film noir actresses. Because of Scott’s languid mane of ash blonde hair, smoky eyes, sultry and insolent demeanour and raspy low voice “that sounded as if it had been buried somewhere deep and was trying to claw its way out” (John Kobal) she’s been frequently (and unfavourably) compared to the more famous Lauren Bacall. In fact, Scott was a much stranger, more intense and harder-working actress than Bacall, and made more interesting choices.

A true actrice maudite, Scott has traditionally been disparaged or overlooked by mainstream film historians. An all-too typical assessment is writer Penny Stalling’s: “Scott ... churned out twenty-two films between 1945 and 1953, but few are memorable.” In fact Scott’s filmography between 1945 and 1957 (when she abruptly retired), is studded with obscure gems, and virtually all of them are films noir, partnering her with many of the greats of the genre: Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan. It’s only in recent years that Scott has emerged as a genuine cult figure for old film obsessives (like me!) and her career has been more generously reappraised. In particular, search out 1949’s Too Late for Tears (aka Killer Bait) to see Lizabeth Scott at her most mesmerising, almost serpentine as a suburban Los Angeles housewife with a treacherous and homicidal dark side.

Seperated at birth: Lauren Bacall and Lizabeth Scott

By the mid-50s the film noir cycle was coming to an end as public tastes changed, and so were Scott’s days as a leading lady. What certainly was a contributing factor to her abrupt and premature retirement was scandal magazine Confidential “outing” her as lesbian in 1955 – making her what must be one of the first victims of tabloid homophobia. In the article Confidential gloated “In recent years Scotty’s almost nonexistent career has allowed her to roam further afield. In one jaunt to Europe she headed straight for Paris and the left bank where she took up with Frede, the city’s most notorious lesbian queen and operator of a nightclub devoted exclusively to entertaining deviates just like herself.” (In fact the shadowy Frede was the proprietoress of the posh Parisian nightclub Carroll’s, where key figures of French show business performed to a presumably mixed clientele. A very young Eartha Kitt, for example, launched her singing career there in the late 1940s. In her 1989 memoirs Kitt describes Frede (a former lover of Marlene Dietrich’s) as “the most beautiful manly-looking lady in the world”).

An intriguingly butch study of Lizabeth Scott. The safety pin makes a punk statement

Scott took legal action against the magazine, but the damage was done and shortly afterwards she quit the film industry – and withdrew from public life. To date, Scott has never publicly acknowledged the gay rumours – certainly the general consensus was that she had been the mistress of (married) film mogul Hal B Wallis, who’d guided her career in the 1940s at Paramount. Now 89, the elusive Scott never married and lives in deep seclusion in her palatial Hollywood Boulevard mansion, declining all interview requests as the enigma around her grows. We can only hope Scott writes an autobiography before she dies or gives one last genuinely revealing interview – but at this point it looks likely she’s taking her secrets to her grave.

After completing her last major film role (in the 1957 Elvis Presley musical Loving You, incongruously enough!), Scott’s one last gasp at a show business career was re-launching herself as a torch singer with the album Lizabeth in 1957. (Weirdly, Scott frequently played nightclub singers in her films – but always lip-synched over another singer’s dubbed voice!). It’s an alluring and credible album, with Scott warbling jazz standards like “Willow Weep for Me” and “Can’t Get Out of This Mood” in a husky 40 cigarettes-a-day voice over stylish arrangements courtesy of Henri Rene and his Orchestra (he’d previously collaborated with Eartha Kitt, so knew a thing or two about chanteuses with idiosyncratic voices). Sadly, Lizabeth wasn’t a hit, and Scott didn’t pursue singing but I love to drop in an occasional track from it when I DJ.

The cover of Lizabeth Scott's 1957 album Lizabeth

Lovely and dramatic: Lizabeth Scott singing "He is a Man" on television in 1958 from her album Lizabeth. The guy leaning against the lamp post in a trench coat whistling is such a nice touch.

Watermelon Gin - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
Town without Pity - James Chance
Pas Cette Chanson - Johnny Hallyday
Because of Love - Billy Fury
Early Every Morning - Dinah Washington
Beauty is Only Skin-Deep - Robert Mitchum
Too Old to Cut the Mustard - Marlene Dietrich and Rosemary Clooney
Virgenes Del Sol - Yma Sumac
Exotique Bossa Nova / Quiet Village Bossa Nova - Martin Denny
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Contact - Brigitte Bardot
Rockin' Bongos - Chaino
Greasy Chicken - Andre Williams
Follow the Leader - Wiley Terry
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Whisper Your Love - The Phantom
I'll Drown in My Own Tears - Lula Reed
The Fire of Love - Jody Reynolds
It - The Regal-Aires
Miss Irene - Ginny Kennedy
Give Me a Woman - Andy Starr
Don't You Feel My Leg - Blue Lu Barker
Night Scene - The Rumblers
Woh! Woh! Yeah! - The Dynamos
Drive-In - The Jaguars
You're My Thrill - Dolores Gray
Shadow Woman - Julie London
Sexe - Line Renaud
I Want to Be Evil - Eartha Kitt
Lonely Hours - Sarah Vaughan
Shangri-La - Spikes Jones New Band
Little Girl Blue - Chet Baker
Crawfish - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
I Learn a Merengue, Mama - Robert Mitchum
Go, Calypso! - Mamie van Doren
Rock-a-Hula - Elvis Presley
Honalulu Rock'n'Roll - Eartha Kitt
Elle est terrible - Johnny Hallyday
L'appareil a sous - Brigitte Bardot
You Can't Stop Her - Bobby Marchan
Roll with Me Henry - Etta James
Man's Favourite Sport - Ann-Margret
Cat Man - Gene Vincent
Tiger - Sparkle Moore
Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad - Betty Hutton
He Is a Man - Lizabeth Scott
The Strip - The Upsetters
Tony's Got Hot Nuts - Faye Richmonde
Ice Man - Filthy McNasty
Ford Mustang - Serge Gainsbourg
Seperate the Man from the Boys - Mamie van Doren
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Kruschev Twist - Melvin Gayle
Wino - Jack McVea
Summertime - Little Esther
La Javanaise - Juliette Greco
Fever - Hildegard Knef
Work Song - Nina Simone
Beat Girl - Adam Faith
You've Changed - Billie Holiday

For all you glove freaks out there, as modelled by stripper and bondage / fetish model Tana Louise, aka "The Cincinnati Sinner".

8 October 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-10-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

Early 1960s Ann-Margret: distilled essence of sex kitten

For once I have some photos from the day to post: my old pal Melissa Houston was in attendance armed with a seriously impressive big-ass photojournalist camera, and it turns out she’s a pretty damn good photographer . Seriously – who knew Melissa had any talent? She also had a good (crotch-level) seat right by the front of the stage – oh, the sights she must have seen that afternoon!

Las Vagueness: Me behind the DJ booth, lost in thought -- or just blank?

This nicely laidback and boozy Saturday afternoon Dr Sketchy at The Old Queen’s Head in Angel featured the ever-soigné Dusty Limits as emcee, Bomb Voyage modelling and Bettsie Bon Bon performing a bump-and-grind striptease routine and modelling.

Dusty Limits

The dazzling Bettsie Bon Bon knows how to make a real impression: rather than stripping down to her pasties and g-string and stopping, she kept going ... disrobing until just a tiny glittery silver heart-shaped merkin was left to preserve her modesty!

Bettsie Bon Bon

The ornately-tattooed Bomb Voyage is definitely one of our punkier and edgier models. On this occasion she posed while wielding a baseball bat, so I cranked-up the aggression and confrontation musically. “She is My Witch” is pretty much Bomb’s theme tune; the knuckle-dragging piano and unearthly screams of Esquerita’s blood-curdling “Esquerita and the Voola” suggests the soundtrack to a Santería voodoo ritual -- or human sacrifice.

Bomb Voyage

Later, Dusty asked for a Beatnik-style art-y jazz instrumental. Needless to say I dusted-off "A Cruise to the Moon" from Lydia Lunch's 1979 death-jazz Queen of Siam album, over which Dusty improvised some finger-snapping Beat poetry. It worked dreamily, daddio.

Beatnik Poetry, Part 1 (Note: that's Uncle Fester from The Addams Family on piano -- I shit you not).

Beatnik Poetry, Part 2

Towards the end of the day, I improvised a little mini-tribute to Sylvia Robinson of 1960s rhythm and blues duo Mickey and Sylvia, who died on 29 September 2011, aged 75. Robinson had a fascinating and long career on pop’s fringes as a singer, songwriter and producer: after her musical partnership with Mickey Baker ended, the durable Robinson went on to have disco hits in the 1970s (like "Pillow Talk") and was a key figure in the emergence of hip hop in the early 1980s. Obviously it’s her early R&B I prefer. I played the snarling “No Good Lover” by Mickey and Sylvia, Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin’s cover version of “Love is Strange” and her sassy early solo song (when she was billed as "Little Sylvia")“Drive, Daddy, Drive.”

A pretty girl is like a melody: Bettsie Bon Bon and Bomb Voyage pose together

Afterwards, Mel and I went on a bar crawl, from The Old Queen’s Head to The Joiners Arms to The George and Dragon. It got messy. Let’s stop here ...

Watermelon Gin - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
Little Ole Wine Drinker Me - Robert Mitchum
Souvenir, Souvenir - Johnny Hallyday
Friction Heat - Bonnie Lou
Leave Married Women Alone - Jimmy Cavallo
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
Get Back, Baby - Esquerita
I Ain't in the Mood - Helen Humes
Greasy Chicken - Andre Williams
Fever - Nancy Sit
Baby Let Me Bang Your Box - The Bangers
Beaver Shot - The Periscopes
Poon Tang - The Treniers
Nosey Joe - Bull Moose Jackson
Eager Beaver Baby - Johnny Burnette
Cafe Bohemian - The Enchanters
I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues - Billie Holiday
You're Driving Me Crazy - Chet Baker
Angel Face - Billy Fury
Shangri-La - Spike Jones New Band
Go Slow - Julie London
Traume - Francoise Hardy
Ford Mustang - Serge Gainsbourg
Night Walk - The Swingers
She's My Witch - The Earls of Suave
The Rat - The Ventures
Rigor Mortis - The Gravestone Four
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
A Cruise to the Moon - Lydia Lunch
Beat Generation - Mamie van Doren
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Elle est Terrible - Johnny Hallyday
Drums A Go-Go - The Hollywood Persuaders
My Daddy Rocks Me - Mae West
8 Ball - The Hustlers
Blues in My Heart - The John Buzon Trio
C'est Si Bon - April Stevens
Teach Me Tonight - Dinah Washington
Mack the Knife - Eartha Kitt
Chattanooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
Drive-In - The Jaguars
Beat Girl - Adam Faith
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
I Learn a Merengue, Mama - Robert Mitchum
Go, Calypso! - Mamie van Doren
Rum and Coca-Cola - Wanda Jackson
Groovy - The Groovers
Frenzy - The Hindus
Rockin' Bongos - Chaino
Train to Nowhere - The Champs
You Don't Know Baby - Wanda Jackson
Boss - The Rumblers
Rip it Up - Little Richard
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Love is Strange - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Drive, Daddy, Drive - Little Sylvia
Happy, Happy Birthday Baby - The Tune Weavers
Stop and Listen - Mickey and Ludella
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Begin the Beguine - Billy Fury
Love for Sale - Hildegard Knef

Cockabilly DJ Set List 5 October 2011 at The George and Dragon

2011-10-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

Dress to the right ...

One of the things I love about DJ'ing at Cockabilly (London’s only gay rockabilly club night!) is the opportunity to play some frantic hardcore rockabilly (it’s not really part of the titty shakin’ burlesque vibe at Dr Sketchy, my regular gig ), so I really seize it when I get the chance. I did a pretty brief “guest” set (about 30 minutes long), but I went perhaps too heavy on the abrasive / kitsch / punk / hillbilly side of rockabilly this time, and am not sure it went down so well! Obviously I was hoping to look out from the DJ booth and see people dancing like this...

Have learned my lesson: if I get to DJ at another Cockabilly, will ensure to vary it more and play some more user-friendly stuff (i.e. more 50s rhythm and blues. Everyone loves 50s R&B, especially female singers: people don’t need to even know who, say, Big Maybelle, Lula Reed or Annisteen Allen are to instinctively respond to them).

Mal and Paul: the brains behind Cockabilly

I’d also packed my DJ bag while in a hung-over / zombified state (I’d had a late one the night before; my friends the punk band Matron had played at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern) and when I started my set I realised to my horror that I’d packed one of my favourite CDs (You Better Believe It 1955-1969: White Trash Rockers) but not the insert with the track listing, which didn't help. Then my very first song wasn’t cued quite right, which rattled me. I don’t think my set ever quite recuperated from that shaky start!

Getting ready for Cockabilly

Anyway, it was still a great night. Princess Julia – the eyebrow-less high empress of East End bohemia – was in attendance (the George and Dragon just doesn’t feel right when she’s not there). The two Alexes were also both there, which always guarantees a fun time (the last time I saw them was at the 2012 Butt magazine calendar launch party a few weeks ago!). Both Alexes keep hilarious blogs, which are highly recommended: find them here and here. And Mal secured some great branded promotional Cockabilly merchandise: nice and threatening-looking juvenile delinquent spring-release novelty flick combs! To be kept in the back pocket of your Levis and whipped out to either smooth back your pomaded Gene Vincent quiff or to menace squares with. Don’t make me cut you!

Heartbreakin' Special - Duke Larson
Club Delight - Jack Jolly
Snow Surfin' Matador - Jan Davis
Bottle to the Baby - Charlie Feathers
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Breathless - X
Willie Joe - The Mystery Trio
Settin' the Woods on Fire - Hank Williams
Poor Little Critter on the Road - The Knitters
Lonesome Me - Ann-Margret
Raging Sea - Gene Maltais
The Big Bounce - Shirley Caddell
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires

The mighty Los Angeles punk band X tear apart Jerry Lee Lewis's "Breathless" on The David Letterman Show in the early 80s. Awkward interview (Letterman doesn't seem to know what to make of them), awesome performance. X was one of my favourite bands as a teenager and I still listen to them today. They remain the perfect punk-rockabilly hybrid.

Du hast ja keine Ahnung wie schön du bist Berlin!

2011-10-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

I've been to Berlin three times now: 2006, 2008 and again just recently (10-13 September 2011). Edgy, gritty, punky, cosmopolitan and still steeped in Weimar Decadence, Berlin is one of my favourite cities in the world. Every time I go to Berlin, I want it to be awash with excellent German bier and Schlager music, and to feel like I'm channelling Marlene Dietrich, Hildegard Knef, Rainer Werner Fassbinder films (Fassbinder was actually from Bavaria, though), Christopher Isherwood and Nico -- and it never disappoints. Turns out I'm a total Germanophile -- who knew? (But then I'm also a Francophile and an Italophile: it's just that when I'm in Rome, I'm channelling Pier Paolo Pasolini and Anna Magnani in Pigneto).

Mainlining German Culture: Me in 2008, reading Hildegard Knef's memoirs and drinking Berliner beer at the cafe Cake in Kreuzberg

I joked on Facebook just before my latest trip that when I went to Berlin this time, I intended to recreate scenes from the 1981 film Christiane F: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. (Relax! Obviously I was only kidding!)

Jayne Mansfield singing in German in 1963, Part 1

Nina Hagen In Ekstasy! German clown princess of punk Nina Hagen going apeshit in Alexanderplatz.

My friend Ali and I stayed in the Friedrichshain district this time (when I was there in 2008 we stayed in Mitte; before that, in Prenzlauer Berg). We were walking distance from Alexanderplatz, so ultra-central in other words. We enjoyed (mostly) better weather than poor Nina in this clip. (There was just one jinxed night when we tried to go out bar hopping in Prenzlauer Berg and it was like a freakin' tropical monsoon drenched us).

The Fernsehturm / Berlin Television Tower in Alexanderplatz looms in the horizon of virtually every photo you take in Berlin! It's definitely worth going up to the revolving restaurant at the top of the tower, even if just for a drink (it's very pricey). The views of Berlin are spectacular and the revolving sensation is very freaky.

Me in 2011

I can’t imagine going to Berlin without paying a visit to Filmmuseum Berlin, which is devoted to the history of German cinema. It also houses the Marlene Dietrich archives (donated by her daughter Maria Riva after Dietrich's death in 1992): a whole section is allocated to Dietrich's film, stage and personal wardrobe and costumes, memorabilia and even her home movies and love letters. It's a treasure trove for Dietrich obsessives. Going to the filmmuseum is like a religious pilgrimage!

Me at the Filmmuseum in 2008. Hildegard Knef and Dietrich look on

Me at the Filmmuseum in 2011

The actual sexy / curvaceous Art Deco robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

Memento mori: The beautifully macabre death mask of great silent film director F W Murnau (1888-1931). For years it was in the possession of his friend Greta Garbo.

The beautiful gigantic poster of La Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932) that ushers you into the Dietrich wing of the Filmmuseum

A video of Dietrich's wonderfully insolent 1929 screen test for Der Blaue Engel is played on an endless loop; you can hear the young Dietrich warbling "You're the Cream in My Coffee" echoing through the museum. (I can't embed the video, annoyingly. Watch it here)

Dietrich's top hat in display cabinet

Perhaps it's even this one ...

Genius: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's chair

My all-time Fassbinder film was one of his last: the haunting / haunted Veronika Voss (1981). I read about the death of its unforgettable leading lady, Rosel Zech just before we split for Berlin in September 2011. Here is Zech huskily crooning the Dean Martin standard "Memories Are Made of This", Dietrich-style. What a woman. RIP, Rosel Zech

Conveniently located adjacent to the Filmmuseum is the Billy Wilder cocktail bar.

My martini in 2008. Damn, it was good

Mural of the great director Billy Wilder on the wall of the cocktail bar

In 2008, after visiting the Dietrich collection at the Filmmuseum, it felt de rigeur to go to her gravesite next. Dietrich's grave is in the Friedhof Friedenau cemetary in Schoneberg (where she was born), a very leafy, quiet and elegant neighbourhood. About three graves away is the gravestone of photographer Helmut Newton. The inscription on Dietrich's tombstone translates as: "Here I Stand on the Marker of My Days."

Me putting flowers on Dietrich's grave in 2008

Mostly, though, Berlin is dreamy for simply bar and cafe-hopping, sampling the excellent variety of German biers, or eating kaffee und kuchen.

In conclusion, my favourite bars in Berlin:

Möbel-Olfe in Kreuzberg: This place kills me. Seriously -- it almost makes me cum. The bleak green-tinged neon lighting makes everyone look interestingly ashen, and the place exudes such a brooding, dissolute atmosphere it feels like you’re starring in your own Fassbinder film. I would live here if I could.

Roses in Kreuzberg: fun, trashy, kitsch gay bar with great decor (Our Lady of Guadalupe mural; pink-fur covered walls like something out of Barbarella). It feels like an early Pedro Almodovar film. Always a rowdy, boozy vibe.

Beers at Roses

Portrait of me at Roses in 2008

Pinguin Club in Schönberg: Wonderfully atmospheric punk-y and grunge-y rock’n’roll dive bar.

Pinguin Club

Old movie star portraits on the wall at Pinguin Club. See if you can spot Gary Cooper, Alain Delon, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, Jayne Mansfield and Ingrid Bergman. Brigitte Bardot (circa Le Mepris) is there -- but in a black wig

Barbie Bar in Kreuzberg: Like Roses, this bar (painted Jayne Mansfield pink) has the kind of kitsch decor Berlin excels at. I love this place, but have never managed to get here when it’s really buzzing (probably because am getting there too early!).

Barbie doll chandalier at Barbie Bar

Barbie Bar

Neues Ufer in Schöneberg: Nice laidback gay cafe, but mainly of historical interest. It dates back to 1970, and used to be called Cafe Nemesis. It was one of the favourite hang outs of David Bowie and Iggy Pop when they were based in Berlin in the 70s, recording their masterpieces Low, Heroes, The Idiot and Lust for Life and competing for the favours of drag queens; they lived in a flat virtually next door.

What used to be one of my favourite Berlin bars ... I went to White Trash Fast Food in Mitte with friends on my first trip to Berlin in 2006, had a blast and I always go back when I’m in town. It’s in a beautiful venue: a baroque and palatial old Chinese restaurant with all the old fixtures intact, transformed into a hipster restaurant / bar with an American white trash / hillbilly / punk sensibility (hence the name). It holds punk gigs and features DJs and serves trashy carb-heavy American-style fast (comfort) food. Sadly, it was a let-down this trip. Yes, it was extremely busy (the crowd seemed to be 100% American tourists, which might suggest Berliners themselves are avoiding the place these days) but the service (from the unsmiling harridan with the dyed-black Goth hair who “greets” you at the door demanding the one Euro cover charge to the embittered and queen-y male bar staff) was inept bordering on hostile. And for a place that seems to pride itself on being hipper-than-thou, it needs to sort its music out. While Ali and I were there (long enough to drink one round of drinks and split ‘cause it was so unwelcoming) we heard the likes of Hall and Oates and The Bangles! Hell-o. Raise your game, White Trash Fast Food!

At White Trash Fast Food in happier times: Anne, Jonathon, me and Philip at White Trash in 2006. If anyone knows whatever happened to Jonathon Long (my Irish friend who used to be based in Berlin as a translator), tell the mofo to get in touch. I lost track of him many years ago.

Hildegard Knef (aka "Die Knef"): The post-Dietrich German chanteuse with the guttural whisky-and-cigarettes voice is synonymous with Berlin (she's their equivalent of Paris's Juliette Greco. Like Greco, she went to Hollywood for a brief and unhappy stab at American stardom in the 1950s). Her ultra-deep, nicotine-stained baritone babe (almost drag queen-y) vocal stylings are definitely an acquired taste (like all the best things in life), but I've grown to love her. I was introduced to her by my German friends in London, who revere her and collect her old records. Like Dietrich, she's Berlin personified.

21 September 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-09-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

Jayne Mansfield letting it all hang out

This was the first Dr Sketchy back at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern since July. The two previous Dr Sketchy’s at The RVT had been marred by some truly catastrophic technical glitches (fuses blowing, performers’ CDs malfunctioning at crucial moments. You can read about them here and here if you really want to re-visit the full horror). The whole day leading up to this Dr Sketchy I was so anxious about either sound or lights going tits-up again this time that by the time I arrived at The RVT I was acting all twitchy and bug-eyed like Natalie Portman in Black Swan. And just to crank up the pressure, the actual founder of Dr Sketchy, Molly Crabapple from New York, was in town and would be in attendance. (In other words, the actual Queen Mutha of Dr Sketchy herself!). Nothing could wrong!

In fact this Dr Sketchy turned out to be not just smooth and problem-free, it was actually pretty damn triumphant. The night had long been sold-out in advance and was filled to capacity (which always makes things feel buzzing and more fun) with a quite liquored-up and rowdy crowd (suitably, the theme for this Dr Sketchy was “indulgence”). There was cabaret and burlesque aristocracy both onstage and off: the emcee this time was Ophelia Bitz; the featured striptease artiste / model was Cherry Shakewell; Trixi Tassels was working the door and an off-duty Ava Iscariot was in the audience. Throughout the night Molly Crabapple was drawing a gigantic mural / backdrop along the back wall of the RVT stage (the way the DJ booth is situated at The RVT means I couldn’t actually see her art work until the end of the night, but it was pretty freaking amazing).

As usual, the effervescent Ophelia Bitz was the hostess with the mostest. “I’m dressed like a 1960s art teacher” she explained (her beatnik-inspired ensemble involved Capri pants – or toreador pants if you prefer – and a headscarf, with paint brushes sticking out of her hair). Inspired, while Ophelia did some warm-up poses before Cherry Shakewell came out I played “A Cruise to the Moon“ from the timelessly alluring 1979 death jazz album Queen of Siam by the then-19 year old Lydia Lunch when she was the perma-scowling Death Kitten of New York's No Wave scene. Variously described as “a Billie Holiday nightmare” and “a putrid classic of style and substance”, Queen of Siam first well and truly corrupted me when I bought it at a second-hand record store as a teenager and it remains a touchstone of mine to this day. (Around the same time I interviewed Lydia herself for the first time for my university’s newspaper – now that was an education. She taught me about champagne enemas). "A Cruise to the Moon" is actually an instrumental, an epic of discordant art-y big band beatnik jazz-punk -- and was arranged by Billy Ver Planck (the composer of The Flintstones’s theme song!). (I also played a track by Lunch's No Wave contemporary and former partner in crime: a spikey deconstruction of Gene Pitney's "Town without Pity" by James Brown/Chet Baker hybrid James Chance).

She's In a Bad Mood: Lydia Lunch around the time she would have recorded Queen of Siam (1979)

Perennial Dr Sketchy favourite Cherry Shakewell works an irresistible 1960s go-go dancer / babydoll image (think Lori Williams as Billie in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) which always prompts me to go full tilt-boogie on 60s sex kitten tracks (Ann-Margret, Nancy Sinatra and Brigitte Bardot). When it comes to lechery, Dr Sketchy operates an equal opportunities policy: we also featured the male model Luscious Luke (he’s aptly-named). I had some tracks cued for his first pose, but as soon as he came onstage and I saw his outfit (pretty much nothing but a pair of black leather hotpants, wielding a spanking paddle in his hand) I quickly replaced them with some S&M-tinged instrumentals ("The Whip by The Originals, "The Whip" by The Frantics, "Torture Rock" by The Rockin' Belmarx).

Soundtracks by David Lynch and John Waters are a constant source of inspiration for me. While I spun the slinky instrumental “The Beast” by Milt Buckner (used in Mulholland Drive), I pondered the folly of David Lynch's much-hyped new nightclub venture Club Silencio in Montmartre in Paris (based on the nightclub of the same name in Mulholland Drive, the one where the woman sings Roy Orbison’s “Crying” en Espanol). While the idea of an eerie and seductive Lynchian nightclub experience makes my nipples harden in ecstasy, it’s hypocritical to describe Club Silencio as a potential successor to Andy Warhol’s Factory, as a Guardian journalist has proposed. At the Factory (at least initially) its genuinely bohemian open door policy meant low-life denizens like junkies, hustlers and drag queens could mingle, flirt and get stoned with socialites, Hollywood stars and Tennessee Williams. Club Silencio meanwhile is a member’s only club – and the most basic membership starts at an eye-watering 780 Euros a year (420 Euros for under-30s and non-French residents). Somehow I think I won’t be checking it out next time I’m in Paris! (I think the pricey and elitist membership fees are designed to weed-out the likes of me, anyway). And anyway, it would have been far cooler to base a nightclub on The Slow Club, the dive bar where Dennis Hopper listens to poor Isabella Rossellini croon her endless, tuneless Nico-like dirge rendition of Blue Velvet.

A few months back Cherry Shakewell Facebooked me asking for urgent help finding suitable music for a new routine she was working on with a cavewoman/ primitive vibe. Honestly -- so demanding! What a diva! Two songs that instantly popped into my head were "Watusi Zombie" by Jan Davis and “Primitive” by The Groupies – and she wound up using both. While I didn’t play “Primitive” at this Dr Sketchy (it’s too 1960s garage punk for the Dr Sketchy vibe), I just found this clip on Youtube – so I guess my idea of using this track for a burlesque number wasn’t quite so original after all! Still – Blaze Starr. What a beauty, and it's this installment's tittyshaker.

Town without Pity - James Chance
Pas c'est chanson - Johnny Holliday
Unchain My Heart - Florence Joelle's Kiss of Fire
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Follow the Leader - Wiley Terry
The Greasy Chicken - Andre Williams
Club Delight - Jack Jolly
Take Half - Hal Singer
Hole in My Heart - Esquerita
Vesuvius - The Revels
Where Yo Is? Fat Daddy Holmes
Sick and Tired - Lula Reed
Rockin' Out the Blues - The Musical Linn Twins
Trouble - Jackie De Shannon
Don't Be Cruel - Bill Black Combo
Hound Dog - Little Esther
Jungle Walk - The Dyna-Sores
Virgenes del Sol - Yma Sumac
Cha Cha Cha du loup - Serge Gainsbourg
Babydoll Mambo - Belmonte & His Afro-American Music
Love for Sale - Hildegard Knef
Java Partout - Juliette Greco
Lunar Rhapsody - Les Baxter
Ole Devil Moon - Chet Baker
Always True to You in My Fashion - Denise Darcel
Astrosonic - Jimmy Haskell and His Orchestra
A Cruise to the Moon - Lydia Lunch
Pop Slop - Béla Sanders und Sein Tanzorchester
Cherry - The Jive Bombers
Screwdriver - Luchi
Womp Womp - Freddie and The Heartaches
Black Coffee - Julie London
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Crank Case - Bill Black Combo
Lightning's Girl - Nancy Sinatra
Harley-Davidson - Brigitte Bardot
The Rat - The Ventures
Bombie - Johnny Sharp and The Yellow Jackets
Dragon Walk - The Noble Men
Eight Ball - The Hustlers
The Whip - The Frantics
Rigor Mortis - The Graveyard Four
Torture Rock - The Rockin' Belmarx
Ice Man - Filthy McNasty
Tony's Got Hot Nuts - Faye Richmonde
Love Potion # 9 - Nancy Sit
Beat Out My Love - Lee Dresser and The Krazy Kats
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Peter Gunn Mambo - Jack Costanzo and His Orchestra
Work Song - Nina Simone
Beauty is Only Skin Deep - Robert Mitchum
La Bamba - Eartha Kitt
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
The Swinger - Ann-Margret
Sexe - Rene Linaude
The Girl Who Invented Rock'n'Roll - Mamie van Doren
As the Clouds Drift By - Jayne Mansfield
The Beast - Milt Buckner
Makin' Out - Jody Reynolds
Let's Go Sexin' - James Intveld (A Dirty Shame soundtrack)
Little Boy, Little Girl - John and Jackie
Hot Licks - The Rendells
Charge It - The Playboys
Intoxica - The Revels
My Daddy Rocks Me - Mae West
Drive Daddy Drive - Little Sylvia
Kruschev Twist - Melvin Gayle
Ring of Fire - The Earls of Suave
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
Surfin' Snow Matador - Jan Davis
Fever - Timi Yuro

One last grumble: I looked back at some older blogs of mine and discovered that at least 40% of the Youtube videos I'd lovingly chosen to illustrate blog entries have been deleted! They're now just blank black boxes. The standard reasons seem to be the user has deleted their Youtube profile (which means their videos vanish), or (in my case) Youtube has changed its policy on nudity and sexual content. Go check some of your own older blogs and feel instantly discouraged!

Bonus tittyshaker! Jayne Mansfield rocks it out in the wigged-out, floor-writhing dance sequence from Primitive Love (1964)

NOTE: A very talented photographer called Derek Bremner was taking excellent photos at this Dr Sketchy all night long. Check out his blog to see them. I highly recommend you do. The shots of Cherry Shakewell "spanking" Luscious Luke are my favourite.

Ann-Margret at The Stardust Casino in 2005

2011-09-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

(Note: I originally wrote this review for the London website Artrocker way back in 2005. They deleted it from their site long ago, so figured I’d dust it off and post it here for posterity. This already feels like a lifetime ago. The Stardust was closed the following year, and demolished in 2007. Atomic-era sex kitten turned serious actress Ann-Margret is one of my abiding obsessions, maybe just a few notches below Jayne Mansfield. I can't imagine not playing a few tracks by her when I DJ at Dr Sketchy).

Ann-Margret: Wayne Newton Theatre, Las Vegas
March 2005

"Her Vegas revue was slick, gratifyingly kitsch cabaret. Her costumes, for example, were by Nolan Miller, the designer behind Crystal and Alexis's clothes on Dynasty in the 1980s, and as hideous as that statement leads you to expect..."

You know that 1950s flick The Wild One where Marlon Brando's biker gang roar in and take over an entire town? Viva Las Vegas - the annual rockabilly rumble that rocks Las Vegas -- feels something like that. In a revenge of the freaks against the squares scenario, every long Easter weekend for the past eight years hepcats from all over the world descend and drag Vegas down to their level. Glancing around surrounded by side-burned and tattooed greasers and vicious bullet bra-ed cuties with Bettie Page fringes, it feels like you've been dropped into your own juvenile delinquent exploitation movie.

As a happy coincidence, during this year's Viva Las Vegas, veteran sex kitten extraordinaire Ann-Margret was doing a residency in the Wayne Newton Theatre at The Stardust casino. The ticket wasn't cheap, but attendance felt compulsory. This is after all the woman whose romantic life - if gossip is believed - encompassed Elvis, Sinatra and JFK. (She serenaded Kennedy with "Happy Birthday" in '63, the year after Marilyn Monroe did).

Having made her Las Vegas showroom debut 45 years ago, Ann-Margret is one of the few lifelines to the whole swingin' Old Vegas Rat Pack era still active. Not to mention golden era Hollywood: she made her film debut in 1961, starring in musicals like Bye Bye Birdie in the genre's dying gasp. Then there's the Elvis connection: Her luscious presence as love interest Rusty Martin makes 1963's Viva Las Vegas one of Elvis's few (only?) tolerable film vehicles. And at 64 years old, who knows when Ann-Margret might retire from performing and if I'd be in Vegas at the same time as her again? My ass was there.

Ann-Margret shaking it in Viva Las Vegas (1963)

A local journalist predicted Ann-Margret would lure the visiting rockabillies, anticipating she'd look out from the stage "and see a hallucinatory-level concentration of hair-greased and black t-shirted conventioneer Elvii." I wish: I was certainly the only rockabilly present the night I went, surrounded by senior citizens and a particular strain of camp-hungry gay men of a certain age. Before her entrance and during her many costume changes giant movie screens on either side of the stage transmitted beautifully edited footage from her old films and performances spliced together and spat out in vivid, jarring shards: Ann-Margret cavorting with Elvis; her animated cartoon image as "Ann-Margrock" on The Flinstones, singing and dancing with Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble; frenzied go-go dancing atop a motorcycle; goofing around with Dean Martin; duetting (in hot pants) with a hoochie mama Tina Turner on "Proud Mary" in an early 1970s TV special.

Ann-Margret duetting with Tina Turner ...

and Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble

The clips bore testament to Ann-Margret's strange career (she must have starred in some of the trashiest films ever made; she manages to be hip and naff at the same time, part of her kitsch appeal) and her alluring 1960s sex kitten image (see also Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda in Barbarella and Nancy Sinatra) that hipsters recall with such affection. It's an American interpretation of Bardot's wild child / female James Dean persona, with the feral sensuality overlaid with an essentially wholesome niceness: Ann-Margret's good girl / bad girl mixed messages in films like The Pleasure Seekers and Kitten with a Whip echo today - for better or for worse -- in Britney Spears.

Sex kitten gone berserk: 1969 TV special

Ann-Margret's early pop career has been well served by two greatest hits packages. 1996's Let Me Entertain You and 2004's Viva La Vivacious focus on her years on the label RCA (1961 - 1966), when her image was pitched somewhere between the “New Monroe” and a “Female Elvis”. Both contain her slinky interpretation of Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel" and her biggest chart hit, the winsome, harmonica-driven girl group-style lament "I Just Don't Understand." Typically, she purrs, coos and sighs, dripping honey over sultry Country & Western-inflected rock'n'roll. It's appealingly disorienting to hear unvarnished rhythm & blues and rockabilly standards like "Kansas City", "Jim Dandy" and "Dance with Me Henry" filtered through a jazzy cocktail lounge sensibility and delivered by someone wearing false eyelashes.

Only a few years later, under the guidance of Lee Hazlewood, Nancy Sinatra (another Elvis leading lady) would achieve greater commercial success with a brasher, tougher variation on this formula. (In another parallel with Sinatra, Ann-Margret and Hazlewood teamed up in 1969 for an album of duets, The Cowboy and The Lady).

Ann-Margret sang none of these tracks at The Stardust, opting instead for covers of other people's songs and schmaltzy ballads. Her Vegas revue was slick, gratifyingly kitsch cabaret. Her costumes, for example, were by Nolan Miller, the designer behind Crystal and Alexis's clothes on Dynasty in the 1980s, and every bit as hideous as that statement leads you to expect. Singing a Swedish-language ballad dedicated to her immigrant parents, she wore a matronly violet gown that was pure mother-of-the-bride. But with each costume change the audience ooh-ed and aah-ed and burst into applause. She connected to a reassuringly middle of the road conception of old fashioned glamour (tousled bouffant hair, cleavage, sequins), which was sweet.

Still curvy and compact, Ann-Margret certainly looked great, and her voice is still buoyant and feline. She was accompanied by three muscular, queer-as-a-three-pound note male dancer / background singers wearing Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation-style headset microphones, who picked her up and twirled her around in dance routines. At one point she gushed she wanted to hug us all. Later she asked if there were any war veterans in the audience, then thanked them in an emotion-choked voice and demanded we all applaud them. It felt simultaneously cringe-worthy and heartfelt.

Early 1970s TV Guide cover

Ann-Margret in mid-70s

Ann-Margret in 1981: The disco era (warning: you must have a high tolerance for camp before even contemplating watch this! If watching this clip turns you gay, don't blame me)

In show biz reminiscences she reverently called Frank Capra and John Wayne and George Burns "Mr Capra", "Mr Wayne" and "Mr Burns." When the screens showed scenes from Ken Russell's berserk 1975 film of the Who's rock opera Tommy (in which she played Roger Daltrey's volatile mother and earned an Oscar nomination), the audience was tangibly baffled. This was one aspect of the Ann-Margret oeuvre that left them cold. It was deliciously weird when she sang a hard rock version of "Pinball Wizard" in a long white dress, shrouded in billowing dry ice.

Two clips of Ann-Margret going batshit crazy in Tommy

In homage to Elvis, she sang "A Little Less Conversation" and (perhaps inevitably) for her big finale "Viva Las Vegas". Reflecting on how as a young starlet her looks saw her typecast in bad girl roles, she recalled," I call it my Kitten with a Whip phase. Sometimes I still feel like that little kitten. It's just getting a little harder to crack the whip. But I still manage." Then she sang Shania Twain's "I Feel Like a Woman" while wearing wraparound sunglasses and a fringed black leather biker jacket and draping herself across a Harley-Davidson while her male dancers gyrated and crotch-thrust around her. It was that kind of show. Musical credibility is not a priority for an old school entertainer like Ann-Margret, whose objective is simply to please her audience. On that level, she succeeded impeccably.

Present-day Ann-Margret: it looks like she's self-administering a face lift

Present-day Ann-Margret, Part Deux: Last of the Red-Hot (Motorcycle) Mamas

Excellent fan website

Back from Canada

2011-09-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

My 7-year old niece and I at the beach in Norway Bay, Quebec. 27 August 2011

Mickey Hargitay and Jayne Mansfield. 1957

You can see photos from the trip here.

Reflections on Andy Warhol’s BAD (1977)

2011-09-03T12:17:00.000-07:00

“The final film released under the Andy Warhol moniker is a much more polished affair than Flesh, Trash or Heat, but preserves the oddball wit and eccentric flair that made those films so memorable. A New York housewife has to support a houseful of relatives on her own. She pays the bills by operating an electrolysis service out of her home and by running a murder-for-hire service staffed exclusively by women.” Allmovie Guide

When you watch BAD, “polished” is definitely not the word that spring to mind, although admittedly it’s all relative. And the above description seems to underestimate the poetry of Paul Morrissey’s admittedly rough and unvarnished but frequently beautiful earlier films, which cover similarly lurid subject matter but feel entirely different to BAD (which was directed by Andy Warhol’s then-boyfriend, Jed Johnson, rather than Morrissey). While BAD certainly has a significantly higher budget than the Morrissey films, it frequently feels inept, the performances are mostly grating and it has the smudged, dark, murky and ugly look typical of low-budget films of that period (see also: the el cheap-o drag queen comedy Outrageous! also from 1977 -- perhaps the only true Canadian cult film), although for some that could be part of BAD’s grungey allure.

BAD aims to be a satirical exercise in deliberate bad taste, but (for me) it misjudges the tone. It’s a botched black comedy with gratuitously nasty violence (I’m the first to admit to being ultra squeamish when it comes to violence). BAD’s most notorious sequence shows a woman throwing her baby to its death from a high rise balcony (obviously a doll, but still distressing!). A scene where one of the hit women kills an illegal immigrant mechanic by crushing him under a car and then cutting off one of his fingers (presumably as proof she’s completed the job) is pretty grim, too. (The scene is so badly-lit you mercifully can’t see much, but I can’t get the bone-crunching sound effects out of my head!).

John Waters has always been voluble about how as a youth watching Warhol’s trailblazing 1960s underground films like Chelsea Girls (1966) shaped (twisted? Corrupted?) his aesthetic sensibility. With BAD, it feels like the Warhol crowd was now taking cues from Waters himself, and trying to catch up with the prince of puke. BAD captures the nihilism of early Waters like Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (like BAD, 1977), but with his gleefully campy verve, wit and humour mostly surgically excised. Instead, BAD is just grindingly unpleasant, brutal and bleak.

(Pedro Almodovar was clearly an acolyte of Waters in his scabrous early films; maybe he also saw BAD. If BAD reminds me of any film, it is Almodovar’s deliberately offensive feature debut Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), made during the post-Franco punk era in Madrid. It’s probably my least favourite film by Almodovar, who I revere).

Bear in mind I’ve always wanted to see BAD (it’s only just recently been reissued on DVD in the UK after being long unavailable). I remember reading about BAD in Danny Peary’s book Cult Films as a teenager and almost physically yearning to see it! And I’m a hardcore Warhol fanatic: I used to watch Warhol double-bills at the much-missed sleaze palace The Scala cinema in London’s Kings Cross. I’d stay until the bitter end of, say, Lonesome Cowboy (1968) when the cinema was virtually empty after most people had long since drifted out, exasperated. (Read this great blog with a contrasting point of view about the merits of BAD).

Warhol films were traditionally enlivened by the presence of his charismatic and freaky stable of Superstars, but their era had come to an end by BAD. Glam rock scene-maker and Max’s Kansas City habitué Cyrinda Foxe (whose admirers included New York Doll David Johansen, David Bowie – she’s featured in his "Jean Genie" video -- and Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler) plays RC, one of the hit women. Foxe looks sensational, a 1950s platinum blonde rockabilly bombshell (in one of the early scenes, she sashays down a Queens street while a group of garbage men hoot at her – it recalls Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It!). But Foxe is no actress, and her mystique evaporates every time she speaks.

Similarly, Perry King as LT, the sole male hit man in Hazel’s doll squad, looks great: a chiselled dark-haired hunk in a muscle shirt, if you squint he resembles Joe Dallesandro (apparently the role of LT was conceived with Dallesandro in mind). But King completely lacks Dallesandro’s strange, torpid almost Robert Mitchum-like magnetism. He may be a charisma bypass, but King does have one nice moment, when he announces completely straight-faced, “I committed suicide last year.”

What BAD can boast is the presence of a genuine Hollywood star, albeit a somewhat faded one down on her luck at the time. Carroll Baker plays homicidal Queens housewife and beauty salon proprietor Hazel Aiken (a role originally intended for Shelley Winters; the fact that Winters, an actress not exactly known for quality control, turned it down speaks volumes. Weirdly, I’ve also read the role was offered to Vivian Vance – Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy sidekick Ethel Mertz! Now that would have been mind-blowing casting).

Caroll Baker as Hazel. Photo Via

Baker first caught the public eye in the 1950s in the deluxe family melodrama Giant (1956) co-starring alongside the likes of James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Later that year Baker created a sensation as a prototype Lolita in the scandalous Tennessee Williams adaptation Baby Doll, along the way getting nominated for a Best Actress Oscar and enraging the Catholic Legion of Decency. (John Waters has recalled the nuns in his Catholic school in the 50s warning him that to see Baby Doll was a guarantee of going to hell). With the exception of The Carpetbaggers (1964), Baker’s subsequent films (like a 1965 biopic of Jean Harlow) bombed and after legal battles with Paramount she re-located to Rome to salvage her career with kinky / arty Euro-sexploitation giallo films like The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and Paranoia (1969).

Pouty and perverse: the famous image of a thumb-sucking Carroll Baker in her crib in Baby Doll (1956)

Returning to the US to star in BAD, the film finds Baker long past her Baby Doll prime: Photographed unflatteringly, she looks frumpy and matronly. To her credit, though, Baker seems to revel in Hazel’s callousness; she re-invents herself as a mature character actress and nails a witheringly aggrieved, acidic delivery. (Baker has a nice Joan Crawford moment towards the end when she snarls at Perry King, "I don't have the luxury of being sensitive!"). And at one point, when alone in her bedroom and feeling nostalgic, Hazel takes a luxurious white fur coat out of the closet and wraps herself in it you suddenly get a brief glimpse of Carroll Baker in her 50s sex kitten heyday.

I tell a lie: there is one true Warhol Superstar in BAD. Amongst the grotesque freak show of clients who hire Hazel’s hit women, blowsy Warhol stalwart Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk) is on blistering form as the racist, misanthropic Estelle who hires the sociopathic sisters Marsha and Glenda (“You’ve got to kill a dog, and you’ve got to do it viciously!” she screams). BAD sparks to life every time she appears: Berlin gets the film’s best lines, and sinks her teeth into them with venomous zeal. “People stink – all they do is eat, fuck and watch TV!” she philosophises. Later, when Estelle violently attacks one of her neighbours, her hateful foul-mouthed tirade (“You dirty old shithead! You Irish bastard!”) includes, “You welfare recipient!”

Another high point is provided by Geraldine Smith and Maria Smith (real-life sisters) playing the sneering, sarcastic killer sisters with Dorothy Hamill haircuts, Glenda and Marsha. (Geraldine had already been memorable as Joe Dallesandro’s venal wife in the 1968 Warhol / Morrissey film Flesh). They maintain deadpan, contemptuous expressions and flat nasal Brooklyn-accented voices (think Penny Marshall in Laverne and Shirley) even while killing and committing arson.

Maria and Geraldine Smith as sullen killers-for-hire Glenda and Marsha. Photo Via

Susan Tyrell also makes a strong impression as Hazel’s much-abused, downtrodden daughter in law Mary. A tremulous, wincing mousey depressive constantly trying to console her crying baby, Mary is apt to lament, “I just can relate to smoking. It’s the only thing that’s always there ...” and then burst into tears.

It’s the traumatised Mary who nails the film’s whole ethos when she whines, “People are so sick. The more you see them, the sicker they look.”

In retrospect, perhaps Andy Warhol's BAD's lasting contribution is ... it made for a great t-shirt.

Canada Bound

2011-08-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

I’m blowing this gosh forsaken heckhole (to paraphrase Marge Simpson) tomorrow to go to Canada (depart 23 August, arrive back on 2 September. Am sure I’ll be kissing the tarmac at Heathrow airport when I get back. Visiting Canada once a year is great, but I miss London while am there). I pretty much go annually, usually around the beginning of September as soon as peak travel season is over and the prices return to normal. This year I nabbed a decent affordable-ish flight for August, so am hoping the weather will be good and I’ll be going to the beach every day (my mother’s house in rural Quebec is walking distance from the beach).

Don’t suppose anyone has urgent tips on breaking the news to your mother you now have big tattoos on your arms? I’ve not mentioned it in advance and think just taking off my jacket and waiting for her to notice isn’t the right approach! Most of you probably don’t realize quite how rural / square my background is (the reason I hot footed it to London in the early 90s in the first place). Am just hoping it won't be a big emotional scene! I’m intending to take the “I waited until I was 41” angle. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, please watch this brief clip for a snapshot of Canadian culture and politics, and reflect on this woman’s wise words about bilingualism.

20 August 2011 Dr Sketchy DJ Set List

2011-08-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

Rare glimpse of Jayne Mansfield as a brunette (her natural colour. Great line in the film Kiss Them For Me: Cary Grant compliments Jayne on her beautiful hair, and she coos, "Thank you. It's all natural. Except for the colour.")

On this occasion we were back at The Paradise in Kensal Green for an intimate and private Dr Sketchy as part of a woman’s hen party. (I’ve been living in the UK for almost twenty years now, but I seem to recall in North America these are called bachelorette parties: a party organised for a woman getting married and her female friends).

It may have been a small-scale Dr Sketchy, but the bride-to-be lucked-out, because it was quite star-studded, featuring the urbane Dusty Limits as emcee (he was splitting to perform at The Edinburgh Festival the next day) and for the models, pulchritude of both the male and female variety (burlesque elite Hooray Henry Higgins and Sophia St Villier respectively, both seasoned Dr Sketchy veterans). (Speaking of male pulchritude, I noted that The Paradise has a strapping, lanky broad-shouldered new bartender: Sonic Youth t-shirt, black nail polish on one hand like early 1970s Lou Reed circa Transformer, punk-y safety pin in his ear. Sigh. But if I’ve learned anything in 2011, it’s to stay the fuck away from the bar staff where I DJ).

Anyway, it shaped up to be a fun time: the girls in the hen party were rowdy, good-natured and up for a laugh. The bride-to-be won a pair of nipple tassels at the end of the afternoon and was happy to model (and twirl!) them for us. And the performers were great. For the second part of the afternoon Sophia St Villier was to perform her big burlesque number, then pose. I’d cued some typically sleazy Las Vegas Grind-type titty shakers to play while Sophia posed, but promptly re-considered when I saw her startling outfit: jet black sequinned nipple tassels and thong, black feathered headdress and – the pièce de résistance -- a sensational, kinky black lace mask across her eyes. The contrast of the black lingerie against her pale complexion and Rita Hayworth-red hair was stunning. As Dusty Limits suggested, “She looks very True Blood!” Imagine a 1950s burlesque pin-up / vampire priestess hybrid. So instead I played some macabre and mondo mood-y stuff, like Freddie & The Hitchiker’s unearthly “Sinners” (with its eerie screaming theremin) and spine-tingling instrumentals (“Black Tarantula” by Jody Reynolds, "The Rat" by The Ventures). The cluster of male-female duets towards the end (literally climaxing with the Bardot-Gainsbourg version of "Je t'aime ...") was for while Sophia and Henry modelled together. I also cranked up the raunch factor (and lowered the tone) by playing “Ice Man” by Filthy McNasty and “The Pussy Cat Song” by Connie Vannett (the latter personally requested by Dusty) – the two filthiest single entendre novelty songs I own.

In an ideal world, when I look out from the DJ booth, this is what I'd see ...

How life-affirming is that? "Jaan Pehechan Ho" by Mohammed Rafi: 1965 Bollywood heaven. The surf guitar sound on that slays me. And doesn't the masked singer with the black pompadour and sleazy little moustache look a bit like an Indian version of El Vez?

Sano - The Revels
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
Wait a Minute, Baby - Esquerita
Rock-a-Hula Baby - Elvis Presley
Honolulu Rock and Roll - Eartha Kitt
Tic, Tic, Tic (The Lost Watch) - Robert Mitchum
Go Calypso - Mamie van Doren
Rum & Coca-Cola - Wanda Jackson
Bombie - Johnny Sharp & The Yellow Jackets
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
Elle est Terrible - Johnny Halliday
Night Walk - The Swingers
Cherry Wine - Little Esther
Club Delight - Jack Jolly
Train to Nowhere - The Champs
When Did You Leave Heaven? Jimmy Scott
I'm a Fool to Want You - Billie Holiday
Tony's Got Hot Nuts - Faye Richmonde
Take it Off - The Genteels
Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad - Betty Hutton
Ice Man - Filthy McNasty
The Gentleman is a Dope - Diana Dors
The Stalk - The Giants
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Your Line Was Busy - Big Bob
Trouble - Jackie De Shannon
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
Cry-Baby - The Honey Sisters
I Was Born to Cry - Johnny Thunders
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Don't Be Cruel - Bill Black Combo
Jaan Pehechaan Ho - Mohammed Rafi
Sinners - Freddie & The Hitchikers
Black Tarantula - Jody Reynolds
Shadow Woman - Julie London
The Rat - The Ventures
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Assez - Marlene Dietrich
Charge It - The Playboys
You're the Boss - Elvis Presley and Ann-Marget
Pussycat Song - Connie Vannett
Je t'aime...moi non plus - Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot
Can Your Pussy Do the Dog? The Cramps
Beaver Shot - The Periscopes
I Stubbed My Toe - Bryan "Legs" Walker
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard

Saturday 6 August 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List at The Old Queen’s Head

2011-08-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

Peru's volcanic Yma Sumac -- the high priestess of Latin Exotica

After some turbulent recent Dr Sketchy’s at The Royal Vauxhall where I was overwhelmed with technical glitches (fuses blowing, malfunctioning CDs), was reassuring to have a laid-back Saturday afternoon Dr Sketchy at The Old Queen’s Head where everything just went smoothly. It also helped that the audience was buzzing and up for it, and ace stage manager-ess Trixi Tassels kept me topped up with beer all afternoon!

Making her debut as a Dr Sketchy emcee was the brilliant comedienne and performance artist Claire Benjamin (in character as “Freuda Kahlo” (sic), complete with hirsute mono-brow, hint of a moustache and broad comedy “Spanglish” accent). At one point I had to introduce Freuda onto the stage – the first time I’ve ever spoken into the microphone at a Dr Sketchy. Amazing how nervous it made me! I had to write down word for word my introduction, and then mentally rehearse it in my head! (Bear in mind all I was saying was something along the lines of, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage your hostess ...”). So now I’m also technically a performer / actor. It’s gone straight to my head and I’m well on my way to becoming a temperamental artiste. Next time I’ll demand to know what my “motivation” is.

The model / performer for the day was Tempest Rose, who exuded such impeccable old-school glamour and poise I toned down the usual raunch and aimed for something a bit more elegant music-wise while she posed. Inspired by Claire’s Freuda Kahlo persona, I also went heavy on the Latin exotica like mambo and bossa nova (For her big finale, Freuda donned some plastic fruit on her head and sang Carmen Miranda’s "I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi (I Like You Very Much)").

Miss Irene - Ginny Kennedy
Women are the Root of All Evil - Paul Williams
Jungle Drums - Earl Bostick
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
Take Half - Hal Singer
Crazy, Crazy Feeling - Esquerita
Red Hot - Billy Lee Riley
Astrosonic - Jimmie Haskell and Orchestra
I Ain't in the Mood - Helen Humes
Yogi - The Bill Black Combo
Hanky Panky - Rita Chao & The Quests
Caravan - The Dell Trio
Drive-In - The Jaguars
The Beast - Milt Buckner
Give Me Love - Lena Horne
Anasthasia - Bill Smith Combo
Mack the Knife - Eartha Kitt
Begin the Beguine - Ann-Margret
Womp Womp - Freddie & The Heartaches
You're My Thrill - Chet Baker
Blues in the Night - Julie London
I Put a Spell on You - Nina Simone
Taki Ruro - Yma Sumac
Ou-es tu, ma joie? Caterina Valente
Peter Gunn Mambo - Jack Costanzo
Laisse-moi tranquille - Serge Gainsbourg
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
Rum & Coca Cola - Wanda Jackson
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Chihuahua - Mina
Chihuahua - Luis Oliveira and His Bandodalua Boys
I've Been in Love Before - Marlene Dietrich
Some Small Chance - Serge Gainsbourg (Strip-tease soundtrack)
I Travel Alone - Hildegard Knef
Mondo Moodo - The Earls of Suave
Strip-tease - Juliette Greco
Misirlou - Laurindo Almeida
Pop Slop - Bela Sanders Und Sein Orchester
Oh Honey - Gloria Wood
Take Half - Hal Singer (yes, it appears I played this twice)
Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby - Ann Richards
Imagination - Diana Dors
Blues in My Heart - John Buzon Trio
Don't You Feel My Leg - Blue Lu Barker
One Night of Sin - Elvis Presley
Chattanooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
All of Me - Mae West
You Can't Stop Her - Bobby Marchan
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
Salamander - Mamie van Doren
Jim Dandy - LaVerne Baker
That's a Pretty Good Love - Big Maybelle
Groovy - The Groovers
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Moi je joue - Brigitte Bardot

An ethereal Marlene Dietrich mesmerises a young John Wayne by huskily warbling "I've Been in Love Before" in the film Seven Sinners (1940)

3 August 2011 Cockabilly DJ Set List

2011-08-07T03:02:00.000-07:00

Who says smoking isn't sexy? The dreamy pairing of James Dean and Sal Mineo in Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause (1955). Photo shamelessly stolen from the ever-wondrous A Queens' queen blog.

It’s always a blast to guest DJ at Cockabilly (London’s only queer rockabilly night!) at the reliably louche George and Dragon in Shoreditch. (The other guest DJ was the awe-inspiring Beyondadoubt, Beth Ditto’s tour DJ).

It was an incredibly hot night, so I was drenched in sweat (my hair was soaking wet!) and pounding back lager for my entire hour-long set. I managed to incorporate frantic hillbilly, sleazy instrumentals, female-fronted rockabilly (Wanda Jackson, Sparkle Moore, Janis Martin, Shirley Cadell), punk (X, The Sex Pistols) and even a tribute to the late Amy Winehouse (Wanda Jackson’s great cover of “You Know I’m No Good”). My only regret is I didn’t crank the volume up even LOUDER: when Beyondabout came on right after me, she blasted everyone’s faces off with her soul 45’s! Ah, well – lesson learned. It was a great night and well worth the following day’s agonising hangover. (That final pint at The Joiners Arms with Marc and the two Alexes afterwards might have been ill-advised -- fun, though)

Willie Joe - The Mystery Trio
Deuces Wild - Link Wray
Poor Little Critter on the Road - The Knitters
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins
Big Bounce - Shirley Cadell
Bang Bang - Janis Martin
Lonesome Me - Johnny Cash
Tongue-Tied Jill - Charlie Feathers
Dancing with Tears in My Eyes - X
Tunnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Whistle Bait - The Collins Kids
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Boss - The Rumblers
Scorpion - The Carnations
Killer - Sparkle Moore (screaming version)
Stranger in My Own Hometown - The Earls of Suave
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
Beat Generation - Mamie van Doren
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
You Know I'm No Good - Wanda Jackson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Bop Pills - Macy "Skip" Skipper

Let's see how long this photo stays here before Photobucket deletes it ...

1950s cowboy demonstrates how to wash jeans. Not sure he gives them sufficient time to dry, though.

Naked Under Leather: Marianne Faithfull Reminisces About Girl on a Motorcycle

2011-07-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

Naked Under Leather, Part 1: Marianne Faithfull in the 1968 film Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

It’s easy to forget Marianne Faithfull has been acting as long as she’s been singing. Obviously her musical career as rock’s quintessential tortured torch singer has dominated the popular imagination, but over the decades she’s had an erratic but interesting sideline as an actress in films, stage and television. She’s worked with art cinema auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard (Made in the USA, 1966) and Kenneth Anger (Lucifer Rising, 1972), and on the other extreme schlock-meister Michael Winner: Marianne Faithfull was the first person to say the word “fuck” in a mainstream studio film (she screams, “Get out of here, you fucking bastard!” to Oliver Reed in the Winner’s 1967 I’ll Never Forget What’sisname). More classily, she’s performed in Chekhov’s Three Sisters onstage (1967) and portrayed Ophelia both onstage and onscreen (1969), and Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Empress of Austria, in Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006). Faithfull has a new film (Belle du Seigneur) due out in 2012.

Perhaps suitably for someone with such a wild child / bad girl /fallen angel image, Faithfull’s filmography seems conceptually bookended by two notorious sexually explicit films maudits: the kitsch soft core sexploitation flick Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and the strange, low-budget indie black sex comedy Irina Palm (2007) in which she plays a respectable suburban grandmother turned Soho sex worker. In most of her film work, Faithfull appears in supporting roles – decades apart, these both represent her two cracks as leading lady.

In the past Faithfull has spoken dismissively about the campy Girl on a Motorcycle (alternate titles: Naked Under Leather in the US and La Motocyclette in France) as an embarrassing disappointment and source of regret. Certainly in her lacerating 1994 autobiography Faithfull, she mentions it only in passing. “I made a couple of terrible films that year” is pretty much all she has to say about both I’ll Never Forget Whatshisname and Girl on a Motorcycle, while noting her gorgeous leading man on the latter (32-year old French heartthrob Alain Delon) made an arrogant, desultory (and unsuccessful) pass at her. (She was still with Mick Jagger at the time).

The trailer for Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

Happily, Faithfull’s attitude has since mellowed considerably and she’s now able to look back at Girl on a Motorcycle with affection. When I interviewed her in January 2011 for Nude magazine about her latest CD Horses and High Heels, I seized the opportunity to ask her about it. (This didn’t make the final cut of the article). She told me:

“I had no idea it was going to become such a cult movie, that people would still like it so many years after. I didn’t really like it at the time; I thought it was a bit stupid! But I loved (director) Jack Cardiff and I was very grateful to Jack Cardiff for making me look so beautiful. He really did. I mean, the lighting – the whole thing is just gorgeous. So I’m very grateful for that, that one day I’m able to look back at Girl on a Motorbike (sic) and say, Wow! That wasn’t too bad. And also, I think one of the most lovely things about Girl on a Motorbike is, do you know where it’s most popular? In India! I saw it myself, the first time I saw it was in Delhi, in Hindi. And it was absolutely great, but what was really great was how much the Indian audience loved it. And even now on the net there are articles – long, evaluating articles about this film. I’m delighted!”

It’s been years since I’ve seen Girl on a Motorcycle, but for such a trashy and misjudged film it made an indelible impression on me. The first time I ever saw it was circa 1992 when I first moved to London, onscreen at the much-missed, wonderfully dilapidated and grungy art house cinema The Scala, in Kings Cross when it was still a really seedy and dangerous neighbourhood. It was on a typically inspired Scala double bill, paired with Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels (1966), another biker-themed exploitation film of the same vintage starring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra.

The risible dialogue in Motorcycle is truly dreadful and makes it one of those so-bad-it’s good, unintentionally funny and perversely enjoyable films. I definitely remember a sequence where Faithfull (as frustrated young bride Rebecca, abandoning her callow husband to be with her intellectual French lover Daniel, played by Delon) zooms past a graveyard on her glistening black Harley-Davidson and rhetorically ponders in the voiceover, “Why don’t the dead rebel?” Her worldview, she exclaims, is “Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!”

Poor Faithfull actually has to do a lot of ersatz hippie / revolutionary 1960s philosophising in the interminable voiceover, over seemingly endless footage of her astride her bike zipping across lush European countryside. (The footage of her “driving” is clearly fake – it’s been pointed out Faithfull never turns the motorcycle’s handlebars). Zipping herself into her sensational ultra-fetish-y fleece-lined, skin-tight black leather cat suit, she muses, “It’s like skin. I’m like an animal.” Later, when Rebecca and Daniel are finally reunited, she lies across his lap and instructs him, “Peel me ...” As he begins to unzip her cat suit, a stony-faced Delon purrs in his thick French accent, “Your body is like a beautiful violin in a velvet case.” Later, lovingly contemplating Faithfull’s bare feet, he solemnly intones, “Your toes are like little tombstones ...” (I suspect Delon – who would go on to work with all the major European art cinema directors in his distinguished career – has wiped Girl on a Motorcycle from both his résumé and his memory).

To be fair, though, Motorcycle has its fluffy redemptive charms. For better or for worse, it’s a real period piece: the clothes, music, decor and whole ethos are pure 1960s pop art -- the film is catnip for aficionado of kitsch. The psychedelic sex scenes remain eye-popping. Jack Cardiff is far better known (and skilled) as a cinematographer than a director and while the film’s acting is stilted and the pace fatally sluggish, he ensures the film looks spectacular – especially the adoring close-ups scrutinising Faithfull’s exquisite face. Perhaps the best you can say about Girl on a Motorcycle finally is it documents the 21-year old Faithfull at the height of her 1960s beauty: throughout she suggests an English rose version of Brigitte Bardot. (Delon looks pretty devastating, too). The image of Faithfull in her sleek, clinging cat suit, with her mane of tousled blonde hair remains – alongside Bardot singing "Harley-Davidson" in her 1968 TV special in mini skirt and thigh boots, Jane Fonda as Barbarella and the album covers of the go-go booted Nancy Sinatra – one of the definitive archetypes of the 1960s sex kitten.

Naked Under Leather, Part 2: Faithfull photographed in Paris by Helmut Newton circa 1978-1979, around the time of her post-punk comeback album Broken English

Naked Under Leather, Part 3: Faithfull photographed by Helmut Newton again, in 1999

Naked Under Leather, Part 4: The 64-year old Faithfull in 2011. Promotional shot for her new CD Horses and High Heels

13 July 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-07-22T11:04:00.000-07:00

Fun couple: Elvis Presley and flame-haired burlesque icon, Tempest Storm in the 1950s. (According to her, they were lovers until Colonel Parker broke it up). Tempest is 83 now and still performs occasionally. She made an appearance at the Viva Las Vegas rockabilly weekender this year. I snatched a photo of her at the car show. See it here.

Wow. Just ... wow. This night at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern was the nadir of my DJ’ing career to date – I was completely overwhelmed by technical glitches.

It started well enough. Performance artist Claire Benjamin (in the persona of her character Obsessia Compulsia D’Sorda) did a great, strange, edgy piece. The burlesque performer for the evening was emergent Australian starlet Ava Iscariot, who’s performed at Dr Sketchy before. The song for her number was by Marilyn Manson. I tested her CD by playing a snatch of it early on, and it worked just fine. You’d think I would have learned from the debacle with Chocolat's CD the last time I DJ'd at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern!

Claire Benjamin in character as Obsessia Compulsia D’Sorda, filmed in performance at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 2009

Anyway, Ava’s track was ready and I pressed play when it was her cue. I stepped away from the decks to watch her perform. It was all going smoothly. Her track was 4-minutes long: about two minutes and 11 seconds into it, the CD abruptly stopped playing! Needless to say, as soon as anything audio-related goes wrong, every head in the venue swivels to stare at me! Poor Ava stopped dead in her tracks: she was standing with her back to the audience, about to unlace her corset and was looking at me wondering what the hell was happening. I was frantically jabbing “Play” and nothing was happening. The ever-unflappable emcee Dusty Limits swung into action and quickly brought Claire Benjamin back onto the stage to pose while I tried to work out what the hell was wrong with Ava’s CD. I tried to stick on another song to at least provide music while Clare was posing (the sound of silence and the audience murmuring was freaking me out! The multi-talented Claire played the musical saw, Dietrich-style, while she posed, by the way), but this time I couldn’t get anything to come out of the other CD deck either – and when I pressed the “Open” button, the CD drawer wouldn’t open!

By now sweat beads were popping out of my head and I was getting frenzied. The Royal Vauxhall Tavern manager came over: we established that Ava’s CD was simply faulty (I played it again through my headphones and it consistently stopped at the same point), and that the reason I couldn’t coax any music out of the decks or even open the CD drawers was because a fuse had blown! What are the odds of both these things happening at once? Could only happen to me! (And by the way: the night was being filmed, and apparently a Time Out journalist was in attendance).

Once the blown fuse was fixed, I was able to get back on track, although the rest of the night was a jittery blur. (My nerves were shot. I self-medicated with beer; had one mutha of a hangover the next day at work). Mercifully a friend of Ava’s had the song she needed on his iPod. We hooked up his iPod to the decks so Ava was able to come back out at the end of the night and do her (excellent) routine properly. Phew!

Now let’s never speak of this night again...

Follow the Leader - Wiley Terry
Bacon Fat - Andre Williams
Baby, I'm Doin' It - Annisteen Allen
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Mambo Miam Miam - Serge Gainsbourg
Unchain My Heart - Florence Joelle
I Was Born to Cry - Dion
Fever - The Delmonas
My Baby Does the Hanky Panky - Rita Chao & The Quests
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
One More Beer - The Earls of Suave
Revelion - The Revels
Leave Married Women Alone - Jimmy Cavallo
Little Girl - John and Jackie
It - The Regal-Aires
Save It - Mel Robbins
Bikini with No Top on the Top - Mamie van Doren and June Wilkinson
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
Maybe Baby - Esquerita
The Sneak - Jimmy Oliver
Heartbreakin' Special - Duke Larson
Jungle Walk - The Dyna-Sores
Bop Pills - Macy "Skip" Skipper
Shombalor - Sheriff and The Revels
Cheesecake - The Nite Sounds
Drive-In - The Jaguars
C'est si Bon - April Stevens
Some Small Chance - Serge Gainsbourg (Strip-tease soundtrack)
Kiss Me - Dolores Gray
Shangri-La - Spike Jones New Band
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Java Partout - Juliette Greco
Caravan - John Buzon Trio
Yogi - Bill Black Combo
Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer) - Nina Simone
Work with It - Que Martin
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Snow Surfin' Matador - Jan Davis
8 Ball - The Hustlers
Love for Sale - Eartha Kitt
The Lonely Hours - Sarah Vaughan
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Somewhere Over the Rainbow - Gene Vincent
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley
Jim Dandy - Ann-Margret
Beat Girl - John Barry (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Ne Me Laisse Pas L'Aimer - Brigitte Bardot
Tall Cool One - The Wailers
Womp Womp - Freddie & The Heartaches
Your Love is Mine - Ike and Tina Turner
The Bee - The Sentinels
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
I Walk like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s

Shombalor by Sheriff & The Revels

It Was A Pleasure Then: Remembering Nico

2011-07-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t get it together to blog this in time, but I still felt it was worth noting that yesterday (18 July 2011) marked the 22nd anniversary of the death of my all-time favourite singer, the ever-inscrutable Nico. (Had she lived, she’d be 73 now). Not that I ever need an excuse to pay tribute to the late, great Nico: rock’s ultimate diva of despair with the blood-freezing vampire priestess voice, the heroin-ravaged former chanteuse of the Velvet Underground, and the Marlene Dietrich of punk.

I feel really privileged that over the years I’ve managed to meet most of my idols, but I’ll always be gutted I never got the chance to meet Nico. Whenever I encounter people who knew her, I always pump them for details and inevitably they always have interesting stories about her. She was a fascinating and completely unconventional woman. Yes, her life was dominated by heroin addiction but she reminds me of that line from the Morrissey song “Piccadilly Palare” where he sings “We threw all life’s instructions away.” For better or for worse, if anyone can claim to have done just that, it was Nico. She lived a decadent, rootless, genuinely bohemian life in the tradition of 19th century poets like Rimbaud – and paid the consequences. And no matter how screwed up her life, she could still pull herself together and (like Chet Baker, Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf) make powerful music.

I'll Be Your Mirror

When I interviewed that other chain-smoking baritone babe-voiced heroin ravaged chanteuse Marianne Faithfull in January 2011 I seized the opportunity to ask her about Nico (the two women have so many parallels in their lives. Faithfull clearly identifies with Nico, and even wrote a song about her in 2002). She told me:

“Well, I’m so lucky in my life and I know it, that my life worked out so well. And I felt a lot of compassion for Nico, that she had such a hard time. Obviously a lot of that was to do with drugs, too. If you take a difficult life anyway and then add that, it’ll get much worse. I just felt it was very tragic story and I felt a lot of love for Nico. I think she tried really hard. She did make a couple of great records – I love The Marble Index (1969). I value her a lot, and I don’t think she was really valued in her lifetime.”

(Read my full interview with Marianne Faithfull on the Nude website here)

John Waters reflects on his single encounter with Nico in my blog here.

Nico with Andy Warhol

Nico accompanying herself on harmonium

The best way to remember Nico is simply to listen to her suicidally bleak but achingly beautiful music. So here are some clips of the angel-of-death vocal stylings of Nico that I think represent her creative peak: call them her "Gravest Hits" if you like.

"Janitor of Lunacy", circa early 1970s

Nico interviewed on French TV in 1972 (unfortunately, no English subtitles). Stunning performances of "Janitor of Lunacy" and "You Forget to Answer"

Performing "Gengis Khan" on French TV (1978)

If you can, track down the documentary Nico Icon (1995) by Susanne Ofteringer or the sadly long out of print 1993 book Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts, the definitive Nico biography to date.

5 July 2011 Cockabilly DJ Set List

2011-07-17T04:39:00.000-07:00

He was there!

She was there!

OK, maybe not -- but she definitely was there!

And so was she! (My escort for the evening was Swedish Therese. I took this photo of her at The Virginia Creepers club a few years back).

Cockabilly is London’s only gay rockabilly club night. It was its organisers Mal Nicholson and Paul Dragoni that really gave me the confidence to pursue DJ’ing when they first launched their monthly Cockabilly night in 2008 and graciously let me make some tentative guest appearances. (So now you know who to blame for unleashing me on the world).

The Early Days: Leee Black Childers and I at Cockabilly in 2008 when it was still at The Moustache Bar in Dalston

Mal and Paul themselves describe Cockabilly as "a rockabilly disco with homosexual tendencies, aimed at juvenile delinquents, homo reprobates, high school drop-outs and everything in between." Over the years Cockabilly has alternated between various venues (like the Moustache Bar and Dalston Superstore in Dalston and The Haggerston in Hackney). In summer 2011 it was re-launched at Shoreditch’s louche George & Dragon: the epicentre of East End bohemia and surely Cockabilly’s natural habitat and spiritual home. (Cockabilly’s patron saint is John Waters. Part of the George & Dragon’s shabby chic/kitsch decor is a gilt-framed poster of Divine in Pink Flamingos, garlanded with twinkling Christmas lights. ‘Nuff said).

It’s been ages since I guest DJ’d at Cockabilly, so I jumped at the chance when Mal and Paul invited me to at the July Cockabilly (plus it was dreamy to make my George & Dragon debut). The whole night was a blast and I really regret not having brought my camera to document it (I came so close to bringing my camera, but at the last minute I decided humping my DJ bag was enough – doh!). The crowd was really buzzing and it turned out to be quite star-studded: George & Dragon regular Princess Julia was there, and The Gossip’s Beth Ditto turned up and danced her ass off. In the flesh, she's much tinier and more beautiful than you might expect, with an incredible alabaster complexion. With her teased black beehive hairdo, Ditto looked like someone out of a John Waters film – which is meant as a compliment.

Grainy shot of me on the night taken by Mal with his phone. I don't know what I would have done without my DJ'ing assisant

My modus operandi at Dr Sketchy is to create a sleazy cabaret / burlesque / titty shakin' vibe. It was a nice change to go for something a bit more abrasive and punkier and to play some full-throttle rockabilly, too. Anyway, this was my quick, tight, lager-fuelled 45-minute Cockabilly set:

Heartbreakin' Special - Duke Larson
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Khrushchev Twist - Melvin Gayle
All You Gotta Do - Tracy Pendarvis
I Love the Life I Live - Esquerita
Ain't That Lovin' You Baby - The Earls of Suave
Breathless - X
Salamander - Mamie van Doren
Little Lil - Mel Dorsey
Juvenile Delinquent - Ronnie Allen
Cooler Weather (Is A-Comin') - Eddie Weldon
Skull and Crossbones - Sparkle Moore
Tornado - Dale Hawkins
C'mon Everybody - Sid Vicious
Save It - Mel Robbins
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
One Hand Loose - Charlie Feathers
Comin' Home, Baby - The Delmonas
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
Little Things Mean a Lot - Jayne Mansfield
The Fire of Love - Jody Reynolds

In honour of Cockabilly, Kenneth Anger's sublime 1965 film Kustom Kar Kommandos. The Paris Sisters cooing "Dream Lover" will give you instant erect nipples.

Reflections on Querelle (1982)

2011-07-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

Brad Davis in R W Fassbinder's Querelle (1982)

“The idea of murder often evokes the idea of sea and seafarers ...” opens Querelle of Brest, French literary bad boy Jean Genet's notorious novel (written in 1947, published in 1953). It’s also the opening line of Querelle (1982), the great German filmmaker Rainer Werner’s Fassbinder’s last film. He died of a drug overdose (which may have been suicide) aged just 37 before it premiered. (The film is dedicated to his Moroccan lover El Hedi Ben Salem, who had just recently committed suicide. Salem appeared in several Fassbinder films; he’s unforgettable in 1974’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). In theory, Fassbinder’s hallucinatory adaptation of Genet’s book should have been a perfect meeting of minds. Genet (dubbed “the poet of evil of our times” by Cyril Connolly) and Fassbinder would appear to be kindred spirits (both are certainly heroes of mine): both were scathingly brilliant and uncompromising anarchistic outlaw gay artists in their respective fields. Who better to translate Genet’s lurid, scatological, profane and homoerotic poetry to the screen than Fassbinder? In fact the resulting film aroused controversy and disappointment, was not a critical success and still has a problematic reputation.

Saint Genet at the height of his powers

Set in the port of Brest (or “the fetid, stinking port of Brest” as its described on the back of my paperback), the plot focuses on Angel of the Apocalypse, the titular young sailor Georges Querelle (Brad Davis), a totally amoral anti-hero with a sideline in murder, theft and opium smuggling. (He can be interpreted as Genet's ideal man). Querelle is so physically beautiful he’s irresistible to both men and women: pretty much every character he encounters becomes fatally attracted to him. Beneath his aloof and patrician militaristic exterior, Querelle’s superior Lieutenant Sablon (Franco Nero) secretly pines for him in his diary entries. When he goes to investigate the local brothel La Feria (described by a fellow sailor to Querelle as “the raunchiest whorehouse in the world”), Querelle becomes embroiled in the sex games of its owners, kinky married couple Nono (Fassbinder regular and ex-lover Günther Kaufmann) and Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau) – and is re-united with his lookalike brother Robert (who’s having an affair with Lysiane). Querelle winds up having a complex sexual relationship with both Nono and Lysiane, a corrupt cop called Mario (Burkhard Driest), and Gil, a Polish laborer and murderer-on-the-lam. To complicate things, the characters of Gil and Robert are both played by the same actor (Hanno Pöschl). Confused yet? In fact the plot is far more complicated than this summary suggests. There are several subplots involving double-crossing, betrayals, anal sex and murders. Maybe read a more detailed precis here.

Querelle’s “failure” is perhaps not surprising. But in fairness to Fassbinder, its “failure” is rooted in his faithfulness to Genet’s vision. In the book, Genet withholds conventional literary / novelistic pleasures. (As the novel speeds towards its abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion, Genet interjects to opine, “This book has already occupied too many pages and is beginning to become a bore.” What other author would do that?). True to the sensibility of his source material, in the film Fassbinder denies conventional filmic pleasures like plausibility, coherence, psychological realism, character motivation and a linear plot that’s resolved tidily at the end. The characters are almost entirely unsympathetic and their motivations are opaque. (Well, their motivations are mostly lust-driven). Instead he offers a total rejection of naturalism and realism. The whole highly-stylised film was filmed on a soundstage without a single exterior scene or glimpses of nature or natural light. The effect is distancing, even alienating. When everything is artifice, it creates a sense of airlessness and claustrophobia.

Querelle also frequently feels theatrical rather than cinematic – like watching a filmed play. The novel Querelle of Brest has a sexy and violent reputation. While the film is permeated with an atmosphere of sleaze, there is actually minimal nudity and the sex scenes are surprisingly chaste (when Nono sodomises Querelle, we mostly only see close-ups of their sweaty faces). The sporadic eruptions of violence are choreographed to look ridiculously fake (the knife fight between Querelle and Robert, for example, is almost balletic and looks like something out of Westside Story). Even when someone is stabbed with a flick-knife or gouged with a broken bottle, it feels bloodless and coolly detached.

Still, Fassbinder’s vision is alluring and seductive: the film looks like one of Pierre et Gilles sailor photos or a Tom of Finland drawing come to life. (In fact, according to Wikipedia, Fassbinder was primarily inspired by the pre-Tom of Finland artwork of George Quaintance, one of whose specialties was campy, kitsch homoerotic drawings of idealized sailors. I’d never heard of him before, but he certainly is intriguing).

Pierre et Gilles photos of sailors

"Shore Leave" by George Quaintance. Looks like a fun party!

The film's poster was designed by Andy Warhol

Nice ass: In the 1950s there was a limited edition of Querelle of Brest featuring erotic illustrations by Jean Cocteau. Presumably this drawing represents Querelle himself. Google these: they are a bit too explicit to post here and they're definitely worth seeing

The art direction is outrageous: Brest is depicted as a lurid, neon-lit, highly-sexualised playground, an entirely self-contained universe. In particular note the obscene phallic brick "cock and balls" tower that juts out of the high fortressed wall of Brest in front of the brothel. The most immediately noticeable aspect of Querelle’s look is the permanent glowing amber / orange light that everything and everyone is constantly bathed in. It’s a netherworld of perpetual autumnal sunset, la vie en orange. (There’s a weird moment when Querelle greets Lieutenant Seblon with “Good morning” and it appears to be night-time).

Franco Nero as the tortured Lieutenant Seblon

Fassbinder also messes with the audience’s expectations by creating a disorienting sense of timelessness: the film belongs to no particular era. Genet’s novel was written in the late 1940s and Edmund White (author of Genet: A Biography, surely the definitive Genet biography) estimates the action takes place at some point before the outbreak of World War II. The actors mostly wear retro 1940s era clothes and coiffures, but Fassbinder scrambles things by introducing 1980s-era touches, like a video game in La Feria and Seblon dictating his diary entries into a portable mini tape recorder.

The film even sounds odd: strange choral music by Peer Raben, who composed the music for virtually all Fassbinder’s films, is loud and intrusive on the soundtrack, sometimes jarring with what’s being shown onscreen. Querelle is filmed in English, which was certainly rare for Fassbinder (all his masterpieces are made in German). A European co-production, the international cast speak in the full gamut of every potential accent: Davis’s flat American, Moreau’s throaty French, Franco Nero’s Italian, and almost everyone else’s German. The minor characters are appallingly dubbed. (Apparently Fassbinder’s favourite version has everyone dubbed into German, with English subtitles). Actors have to speak out loud what in the book were internal monologues. They translate horribly into spoken dialogue: Genet’s lengthy Existential meditations about the nature of evil, the allure of crime and murder and the sexual attraction between men were never meant to be spoken out loud (in Genet’s novels, there are long stretches without any dialogue at all. When characters do speak, what they say often reads like terse hard-boiled 1930s gangster slang. Interestingly, the only time Genet directed a film himself – the lyrical and erotic Un Chant d’Amour (1950) – it was a silent film). Everyone in Querelle seems to snarl their lines. (The acting style appears to be deliberately flat and unemotional). With dialogue this stilted, it’s hard to judge between “good” acting and “bad” acting (for example, what to make of Brad Davis's blank, stony-faced performance as Querelle? He’s frequently upstaged by his own -- admittededly impressive -- furry, baby-oiled pecs).

Fassbinder makes some interesting amendments. I don’t recall the image of Lysiane as a fortune teller consulting tarot cards from the book, but it’s a nice touch, evoking Marlene Dietrich as Tania the bordello madam in Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil (1958). In the book brothers Querelle and Robert are meant to be identical, which confuses and torments Lysiane. Onscreen actors Brad Davis and Hanno Poschl don’t look remotely alike. But having Poschl play the dual role of Robert and Gil (the fellow murderer Querelle falls in love with) suggests that Lysiane is right and Querelle is in fact sexually attracted to his brother.

Querelle watches as Lysiane and Robert dance. Who's he jealous of?

Strangely, Fassbinder also seems to cast actors who are uniformly older than how Genet describes the characters in the book. (Querelle himself is meant to be permanently smiling, with an angelic appearance that belies how corrupt he really is. Tough as nails Brad Davis looks like a thug who's been around the block a few times and is clearly already corrupted from the start). This is especially true of Mario the police officer: Genet rhapsodises at length about how handsome he is, whereas (all due regards to Burkhard Driest) the actor who he plays him looks like a grizzled and dessicated S&M leather daddy in Village People drag.

Querelle, Mario and Nono gathered at the bar of La Feria

Jeanne Moreau strives to breathe dignity and humanity into Lysiane. She certainly has some truly thankless dialogue (“You know, I’ve dreamt about your prick a lot lately,” she says with a straight face to Querelle). There’s something abject and masochistic about the deluded Lysiane, in love with younger men who would rather be with each other. Genet was not known for writing strong female characters (they certainly weren’t his priority), but Fassbinder is known as a truly great director of actresses. It’s easy to see why Moreau – one of the high empresses of European art cinema, a muse for many of the great art house auteurs – would have leapt at the chance to work with Fassbinder, but she draws the short straw here.

Swathed in a wardrobe of black sequins and feathers, Moreau seems to be channelling Marlene Dietrich. In Fassbinder’s interpretation, Lysiane isn’t just a whorehouse madam: she’s a French-accented Dietrich-style cabaret chanteuse, too. Moreau has to huskily warble her way through a much-loathed song that’s meant to comment on the action, with lyrics that paraphrase the line “Each man kills what he loves best” from Oscar Wilde’s 1898 poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”. “Each man kills the thing he loves ....” she sings ad nauseum, until it becomes grating and unintentionally funny.

La Feria must be one of the most dissolute settings ever captured on celluloid. We get only the most teasing glimpses of Lysiane’s “girls”, but they appear to be mostly trannies. The patrons of the brothel are a freak show collection of drag queens, leather daddies and clones. Ostensibly a heterosexual brothel, most of the clientele appear to be gay. (In the book, a sailor warns Querelle, "La Feria's a queer sort of joint." He's not wrong). La Feria’s vibe is Josef von Sternberg-ian, evoking the debauched fleshpot / casino settings in his films like The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Macao (1952). (Moreau as Lysiane is Dietrich-like, but also suggests Ona Munson as Mother Gin Sling, the regally sinister proprietoress of the casino in Shanghai Gesture).

Dragon Lady: Ona Munson, unforgettable as Mother Gin Sling (with Gene Tierney) in Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture (1941)

But La Feria also functions as a saloon, and the saloon is one of the crucial locales of the Western genre. The image of butch cowboys swaggering through the swinging doors into the saloon presided over by the saloon mistress / love interest and ordering whisky is one of the key tropes of the Western, and it’s a recurrent image in Querelle. Querelle’s setting is a seaport and its main characters sailors (and it's absinthe they're drinking rather than whisky), but maybe Querelle can be read as a quasi Western, in particular in the tradition of the dark, twisted and kinky “psychological” noir Westerns of the 1950s: Johnny Guitar (1954) by Nicholas Ray or especially Fritz Lang's German Expressionist Western Rancho Notorious (1952)(starring a mature Marlene Dietrich, who would've been roughly the same age as Moreau here.) (It's also worth noting Franco Nero's presence as Seblon: he did after all star in Django (1966), making him a Spaghetti Western icon). In queer studies courses, the romantic triangles in Westerns where two men fight over one woman is re-interpreted as veiled homoerotic tension, suggesting perhaps the real erotic frisson is actually between the men. (Indeed that’s been said of Rancho Notorious, where Jose Ferrer and Arthur Kennedy vie for the attentions of Dietrich). In Querelle, Fassbinder rips away that veil.

Arthur Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich and Jose Ferrer in Fritz Lang's 1952 noir Western Rancho Notorious. Gee, do you think Dietrich's waist may have been re-touched?

Fassbinder’s masterstroke is implying Genet’s characters are trapped in hell. The look of the film is frequently described as “dreamlike” or “surreal” – but in truth it’s more like a vision of fiery orange hell. Fassbinder’s Brest is not just a hell hole; it is hell (or maybe purgatory or limbo) and the brothel the inner circle. Characters may enter and leave through its Art Deco frosted glass doors, but their apparent mobility is deceptive. In some sense there is no exit – everyone always returns to the spiderweb-like La Feria. At the conclusion, the film has come full circle: it ends with seemingly the very same shot of sailors toiling onboard the ship that it opened with, except this time it’s overlaid with the sound of the defeated Lysiane’s malevolent / maniacal laughter on the soundtrack (she quite literally gets the last laugh). The novel ends with Seblon finally able to declare his love for Querelle and the two going off together. In the film, this is more ambiguous: our very last glimpse of Querelle sees him alone, through the window of the brothel, suffused in blue neon light. The characters will continue playing their self-destructive (and other people destructive) games, trapped in their rituals, doomed to repeat their roles, captives of the brothel. Seblon will continue endlessly dictating his journals into his tape recorder; Lysiane will endlessly trill her tuneless dirge. It’s a wonderfully bleak and unsettling ending, and characteristic of Fassbinder’s (and Genet's) pessimistic vision.

Querelle is perhaps not the most fitting end to Fassbinder’s career (the towering Veronika Voss (1982) is a better final statement), and if you’ve never seen a Fassbinder film before, it’s not a good representative introduction to his work. Still, as a fascinating experiment, a noble failure and a powerful study of decadence, it’s ripe for reappraisal. Edmund White has praised Fassbinder’s film as “magisterial” (the Village Voice calls it "galvanic") and declared it the best screen adaptation of Genet’s work. Previous directors, he explained, couldn’t manage “to find a visual equivalent to Genet’s eloquence. The only exception is Fassbinder’s Querelle, which is visually as artificial and menacing as Genet’s prose.” Once seen, Querelle is unforgettable. It lingers in the mind like a feverish (wet) dream.

Reflections on Henry and June (1990)

2011-06-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Maria de Medeiros as Anais Nin and Uma Thurman as June Miller in Henry and June

I would have first seen the 1990 film Henry and June as a 21-year old university student in Ottawa, Ontario. At the time, Philip Kaufman’s exploration of the romantic and literary triangle between Anais Nin, Henry Miller and his wife June and his supremely seductive depiction of 1930s Parisian bohemia seemed to me to be the ne plus ultra in decadence. The film was transformative, firing my imagination of what a creative beatnik life ideally should be. I watched it over and over again, dragging friends, and started dipping into the sexually-charged works of Miller and Nin.

This weekend I re-watched Henry and June for the first time in about two decades. Risky: would I be disillusioned? Would it be as good as I remembered? Or maybe my tastes had simply changed in the intervening twenty years (bear in mind, I once thought Siesta (1987) was a profound art movie. Hey, I was 18 when I saw it and I soon learned better). The film was notoriously sexually explicit for its time (it was the first film to receive the NC-17 rating – one step away from an X). Since then, films have become far more explicit and Henry and June’s sex scenes – while still undeniably steamy – don’t pack the same shock value they once did.

It’s also easy to roll your eyes dismissively over the long scenes of Nin and Miller having heated debates about the merits of D H Lawrence and declaiming about poetry and literature in Parisian cafes in between bouts of athletic bonking, or Nin’s breathless narration about her inner musings about liberation and promiscuity – plenty of critics did at the time, and people probably still do now. Any film that can be summarised as “one woman’s erotic awakening” threatens comparison to the cheesily softcore 1970s Emmanuelle films, and Henry and June’s tone of highbrow erotica borders on pretentious – but it’s attempting to convey ambitious, weighty ideas about art, sex and life and doing it in a very stylish way. And for me, all these years later Henry and June still casts a spell.

The film covers the years 1931-1932 (when Nin first met the Millers), and Kaufman offers a swooningly romantic evocation of 1930s Art Deco Paris: every single shot is lovingly composed and art-directed to the hilt to look like a Brassai photograph or a Tamara de Lempicka painting come to life. The soundtrack is equally redolent, marrying 1920s and 30s jazz with accordion-laced French chanson. (The key songs are "Parlez-Moi D'Amour" by Lucienne Boyer and Bing Crosby’s “I Found a Million Dollar Baby" and there is especially haunting use of Josephine Baker’s "J'ai deux amours" in a brothel scene). The combined effect is as intoxicating as an absinthe cocktail. This is clearly a personal labour of love for Kaufman, and it shows.

Tamara de Lempicka painting

The film is about the erotic and intellectual / literary initiation of Anais Nin; the screenplay is derived from her diaries and told from her point of view. Certainly the camera is enthralled by Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros’s elfin heart-shaped face (her features are simultaneously sharp and bird-like and delicate; with her tendrils of black hair and dark almond-shaped eyes, she looks remarkably like Anias Nin). Fred Ward is charismatic and brash as literary bad boy Henry Miller - and he does a mean Popeye impersonation. But the film is utterly stolen by Uma Thurman, then only 20-years old, as Miller’s predatory and volatile bisexual wife, toxic beauty June Miller.

(This is a potentially disillusioning aside, but Nin, her diaries and Kaufman’s film shouldn’t be regarded as strictly truthful. Nin was a skilled self-mythologiser and massager of facts. Read this interview with Nin biographer Deirdre Bair on Salon.com: she blows apart some of the key aspects of the film. Much of Henry and June’s humour derives from Richard E Grant’s comic turn as Nin’s bumbling, clueless husband Hugh. In real life he was far more urbane and fully aware of Nin’s affairs. Bair also suggests Nin and June probably never actually had a sexual relationship: June was genuinely bisexual, Nin wasn’t).

Seeing it again, it’s surprising how relatively small the role of June is considering her impact. Her name may be 50% of the title, but it really is a supporting role. (Someone on imdb estimates Thurman’s screen time in Henry and June only amounts to about 25 minutes, and the film is over two hours long). Long before she properly enters the film, the characters talk about June and we see glimpses of her in flashbacks – the effect is tantalising. Her delayed arrival builds up anticipation, giving her a proper “star” introduction when she finally arrives.

And what an arrival: Nin wrote of her first encounter with June, “A startlingly white face, burning eyes ... As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth.” To their credit, Kaufman and Thurman nail this moment. Kauffman typically introduces June as emerging out of mist or shadows, behind screens of cigarette smoke, a nocturnal vampiric creature in shabby black velvet. When June vanishes back to the US for the movie’s whole middle section, she still haunts the film like a spectre and we (like Nin) crave her return.

As portrayed by Thurman, June exudes low-life allure and ruined glamour like luxurious perfume that’s curdled. Her inscrutability and kohl-smudged smoky eyes hint at exciting depravity. (In real life, June would have looked almost like a punk. As well as powdering her face a cadaverous chalk-y white, she typically wore lipstick in shades of either black or green. She must have looked like she was decomposing! The film shies away from this extreme). Her origins are mysterious and disreputable – complicated by the fact she’s a compulsive liar. The film hints June resorted to borderline prostitution to finance Henry Miller’s nascent writing career; certainly she was a 10 cents a dance “taxi dancer” when they first met. In an inspired and apparently true-to-life touch, June sometimes carries around an eerie male marionette like a kinky accessory. Called Count Bruga, in close-up his angry face feels German Expressionist and genuinely sinister. The imagery of June and her devilish puppet would appear to have inspired Madonna, who cavorts with a similar male “devil doll” in her "Erotica" video two years later.

Uma Thurman as June Miller

The real June Miller

A particular highlight: June lures Nin to a dissolute subterranean lesbian nightclub full of butch / femme couples (the butches wear men’s tuxedos with short pomaded hair; the femmes wear glittering bias-cut 30s evening gowns). June and Anais slow-dance to a sultry, blues-y instrumental rendition of the song "Moi Je M'Ennuie", one of Marlene Dietrich’s sexiest standards, performed by an all-female jazz band (the song’s suggestion of Dietrich injects a whiff of Weimar Berlin decadence). This is probably the most erotic lesbianic dancing scene since Dominque Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). June exhales huskily into Nin’s ear, “There’s so much I wanted to do with you ... I wanted to take opium with you ...” then purrs, “I’ve done the vilest things ... the foulest things. But I’ve done them superbly ...” It gave me goose bumps when I was 21. It still does now!

Shame about the murky quality of this clip, and the Chinese subtitles -- but you get the idea

(I must mention the appearance of Brigitte Lahaie in the mostly mute small role of a prostitute in the brothel scenes, who seems to mesmerise Nin because of her resemblance to June. In a dream sequence in which Nin and June make love, Lahaie appears as June’s doppelganger. Lahaie was a former actress in French porn films, and she’s certainly at ease in her nude scenes here. She makes a powerful impression in Henry and June: smouldering, almost scary, strangely androgynous and sexually voracious).

Thurman/June’s mere appearance instantly injects turbulence, tension and high drama into the film. (Especially towards the end, when the tempo begins to sag – June’s return salvages it). Tough but vulnerable and unpredictable, June is less cerebral than Miller and Nin, more emotional. When June belatedly realises Miller and Nin have been having an affair behind her back, suddenly the film feels like it has urgent emotional content, something is at stake. The final confrontation between the trio is wrenching. June is a muse to both of them, but she’s a critical one, recognising how precarious her role is, and vocal in her in disappointments. She’s the one who’s done the desperate living and taken the risks – they’re the ones who reap the kudos for writing about it. “I wanted poetry!” she wails at Miller after reading how she’s represented in his Tropic of Cancer manuscript. “I wanted Dostoevsky!” Being their inspiration leaves her unfulfilled. When Nin tries to reassure her, “I worship you!” June snaps, “I don’t want worship – I want understanding.”

(June was right to be suspicious of Miller and Nin cannibalising her life for their literary works. The film ends in 1932. After Henry and June divorced in 1934, both Miller and Nin seemed to abruptly lose interest in their shared muse, pretty much abandoning June to a squalid and despairing life ravaged by extreme poverty and mental and physical illness. When Miller encountered June for the first time in years in the 1960s, he was reportedly shocked by her deterioration. The woman praised by Nin for her "tantalizing somber beauty" was now a withered crone. June’s later years are shrouded in mystery and mostly undocumented, but they are recently beginning to come into sharper focus. Her Wikipedia page and this excellent blog fill in some of the blanks. She apparently died in 1979 aged 77).

In her exquisitely-lit, dreamy close-ups, Thurman as June can suggest a Tamara de Lempicka painting, Ingrid Thulin in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) or Warhol superstar Candy Darling at the height of her 1930s-style, Harlow-inspired glamour (not to imply Thurman looks like a drag queen, but she is Amazonian in stature and I’ve always thought she shares Darling’s sculpted bone structure) – or an escapee from a Josef von Sternberg film. Imagine Marlene Dietrich’s shady demimondaine Shanghai Lil from Shanghai Express (1932) with a tough Brooklyn accent (Thurman’s hard-boiled Depression-era Brooklyn accent as June is perfection). Thurman’s beguiling way of lowering her head and looking up through hooded half-closed eyes is pure Dietrich (in the 1940s the insolent young Lauren Bacall adopted this stance, too. When she did it, it was called “The Look”). If anyone could have played Dietrich in a biopic, based on this film, it’s Thurman. In fact the great French auteur Louis Malle was planning to make a film about the early life of Dietrich starring Thurman – but when he died in 1995, the project was abandoned.

Candy Darling. I mean Uma Thurman. I mean Candy Darling

You've got that look that leaves me weak: Uma Thurman as June Miller

Marlene Dietrich

Henry and June captures Thurman early in her career: with the benefit of hindsight, Thurman’s subsequent filmography is decidedly patchy. It’s not Thurman’s fault, but she never quite had the opportunity to live up to the potential Henry and June suggested (and certainly she’s had plenty of roles since that have found her wanting). She’s probably best-loved for her collaborations with Quentin Tarantino (who’s been quoted as saying he sees Thurman as the Dietrich to his von Sternberg), but neither Pulp Fiction (1994) nor the Kill Bill films (2003-2004) challenged her dramatically the way June Miller did. (Funnily enough, Pulp Fiction reunites her with Maria de Medeiros, but I don’t recall them having any scenes together in it). These days she’s more regarded as a great beauty than a great actress. But while the proposed Dietrich film starring Thurman is a great cinematic “what-if”, Henry and June remains a testament to what a riveting screen presence Thurman can be.

Finally, you can watch the actual Anais Nin onscreen in glorious colour in Kenneth Anger’s hallucinatory experimental art film Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome (1954). This is just a snippet, showing the 51-year old Nin looking great in black fishnet tights, with a gilded birdcage on her head. Warning: watching this might turn you into a Satanist! (Kenneth Anger would probably like that).

11 June 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-06-19T05:24:00.000-07:00

Photo of me, selecting what records to play at Dr Sketchy. No, seriously it's 1950s vintage beefcake physique model (winner of Mr Muscle Beach 1951) and sometimes actor (his filmography includes Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Wild Women of Wongo (1958) and Colossus and The Amazon Queen (1960) Ed Fury: he looks like a right laugh, huh? I wonder if he's a distant relation of Billy Fury's?

This was a typically raucous and laidback Saturday afternoon Dr Sketchy at The Old Queen’s Head in Angel. The emcee was the suave-tastic Hooray Henry Higgins and the model/performer was the ultra-glamorous Annette Bette. A very talented member of the audience took some great moody and dramatic photos of the afternoon. Here are two shots of Annette Bette in action where the photographer accidentally managed to get me looking gormless in the frame. (I love the detail of the martini glass in the foreground).

See the full set on the photographer's flickr page.

Musically I launched straight into raunch mode with the single entendre smut of “Ice Man” by Filthy McNasty. Later on just to amuse myself, I paid homage to one of my all-time favourite films (Kenneth Angers’s 1964 avant-garde homoerotic biker / occult art movie Scorpio Rising. That film really warped me at an impressionable age!) by playing a cluster of songs from its soundtrack (“Devil in Disguise" by Elvis, “Fools Rush In” by Ricky Nelson and “Torture” by Kris Jensen, in case you’re curious).

Ice Man - Filthy McNasty
Cooler Weather is A-Comin' - Eddie Weldon
Nobody But You - Mamie van Doren
The Grunt - The 50 Milers
Love Potion No 9 - Nancy Sit
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Kiss Me Honey Honey - The Delmonas
The D-Rail - The Flintales
Drive Daddy Drive - Little Sylvia
Club Delight - Jack Jolly
The Swag - Link Wray
I Only Have Eyes for You - The Flamingos
Blame it On My Youth - Ann-Margret
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - The Mallet Men
Dancing on the Ceiling - Chet Baker
Let There Be Love - Diana Dors
The Bouelvard of Broken Dreams / Fever - Sam Butera
Work Song - Nina Simone
Intoxicated Man - Serge Gainsbourg
Makin' Whoopee - Marlene Dietrich
A Week from Tuesday - The Pastels
Work with It - Que Martin
The Squeezer - Big Bob Dougherty
Cherry Pink - The Bill Black Combo
Anasthasia - The Bill Smith Combo
Summertime - Little Esther
Love Me or Leave Me - Lena Horne
Drive In - The Jaguars
Shangri-La - Spike Jones New Band
Yes, Sir That's My Baby - Ann Richards
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Close Your Eyes - Dolores Gray
Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend - Eartha Kitt
Womp Womp - Freddie & The Heartaches
Rigor Mortis - The Gravestone Four
Go Slow - Julie London
Sexe - Line Renaud
Town without Pity - James Chance
Teardrops from My Eyes - Ruth Brown
I Live the Life I Love - Esquerita
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Fujiyama Mama - Annisteen Allen
Torture - Kris Jensen
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Last Night - Lula Reed
Jezabel - Edith Piaf
Strip-tease - Juliette Greco
Kiss - Marilyn Monroe
Caravan - John Buzon Trio
Wondrous Place - Billy Fury
The Beast - Milt Buckner
All of Me - Mae West
Night Walk - The Swingers
Willow Weep for Me - The Whistling Artistry of Muzzy Marcellino
The Girl Who Invented Rock'n'Roll - Mamie van Doren
Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun - Mink Stole
Tall Cool One - The Wailers
Daddy Daddy - Ruth Brown
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
One Night of Sin - Elvis Presley
Beat Girl - Adam Faith (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Chattanooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
The Whip - The Originals
Esquerita & The Voola - Esquerita
Take It Off - The Genteels
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Groovy - The Groovers
Pussycat Song - Connie Vannett
The Stalk - The Giants

I don't think I've posted this tittyshaker already.

Ed Fury knocking up drinks behind the bar. Hmmm: Canada Dry Ginger Ale? I hope he’s making Moscow Mules.

30 May 2011 Dr Sketchy DJ Set List

2011-06-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

Tough Cookies: wonderful pic courtesy of the red hot A Queens' queen blog

Because this Dr Sketchy fell on a Bank Holiday Monday, it was scheduled as an afternoon one from 4 pm until 7 pm. But apparently there was a misunderstanding with the management at The Paradise in Kensal Green, who assumed we wanted the venue from 7 pm till 10 pm like normal. For one thing, that meant there wasn’t enough staff to work behind the bar upstairs: Dr Sketchy customers would have to go to the downstairs bar for their drinks and to order food – not the end of the world. More worryingly, apparently a few people had called The Paradise enquiring about Dr Sketchy and been told to come at 7 pm like normal! Dr Sketchy promoter Clare and I felt a sense of mounting panic: the tickets hadn’t sold out in advance and people had been told to come at the wrong time -- was anyone even going to come? So it was a massive relief when people started filing in by 4 pm and in fact everything went off fine. The info was correct on Twitter, Facebook and the Dr Sketchy website and obviously that was what most people referred to. Phew!

Clare herself was the emcee this time, and she's getting more assured onstage all the time. The model and performer was the reliably excellent Sophia St Villier, a Dr Sketchy veteran. The ethereal Sophia looks like a pale-skinned redheaded English rose (although she’s actually from New Zealand!): think of the beautiful red-haired English actress Moira Shearer in the film The Red Shoes. During one of Sophia’s poses, it felt compulsory to play a slinky sex kitten track by that other red-haired vixen – Ann-Margret. It may have been the pose while Sophia was wearing a glistening emerald green latex dress. (Yes, Sophia St Villier even looks ethereal while wearing rubber).

Sophia St Villier

Moira Shearer

I’d been to a boozy dinner party the night before – the hint of a hangover combined with it being a Bank Holiday Monday afternoon made this Dr Sketchy feel nicely mellow and low-key. (I also drank a few Bloody Marys). I eased into things with some 1950s Cool Jazz and Latin exotica before building into more raucous titty-shaking mode.

I Remember You - Chet Baker
Falling in Love Again - Billie Holiday
Dansero - The Don Baker Trio
Chihuahua - Mina
Besame Mucho - Betty Reilly
Babydoll Mambo - Belmonte and His Afro-American Music
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
Oink Oink Mambo - Chuy Reyes & His Orchestra
Fredy - Eartha Kitt and Perez Prado
Ou es-tu ma joie? Caterina Valente
Witchcraft - Joe Graves & The Diggers
Les Cigarillos - Serge Gainsbourg
Rum & Coca Cola - Wanda Jackson
Eso - Conjunto TNT
Misirlou - Laurindo Almeida
Maria Ninguen - Brigitte Bardot
Peter Gunn Mambo - Jack Costanzo
Night Walk - The Swingers
Imagination - Diana Dors
Anasthasia - Bill Smith Combo
Romance in the Dark - Ann-Margret
Drive In - The Jaguars
Fever - Nancy Sit
The Stripper - John Barry (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Rigor Mortis - The Gravestone Four
Mondo Moodo - The Earls of Suave
You're My Thrill - Dolores Gray
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Chattanooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
Jungle Drums - Earl Bostick
Sick and Tired - Lula Reed
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
Vesuvius - The Revels
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
Harlem Nocturne - The Viscounts
The Fire of Love - Jody Reynolds
I Only Have Eyes for You - The Flamingos
The Stalk - The Giants
Little Things Mean a Lot - Jayne Mansfield
Honey Rock - Barney Kessel
Wondrous Place - Billy Fury
Cheesecake - The Nite Sounds
You're Crying - Dinah Washington
My Funny Valentine - Chet Baker
I'm Through with Love - Marilyn Monroe
Boss - The Rumblers
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Witchcraft - Elvis Presley
Bacon Fat - Andre Williams
Your Love is Mine - Ike and Tina Turner
Whatever Lola Wants - Eartha Kitt
Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend - Julie London
Give Me Love - Lena Horne
Baubles, Bangles and Beads - Marlene Dietrich
Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun - Mink Stole
Mack the Knife - Hildegard Knef
Begin the Beguine - Billy Fury
Petit Fleur - Chet Baker
Somewhere Over the Rainbow - Gene Vincent
So Long - Ruth Brown

Ultra-Belated But Heartfelt Tribute to Elizabeth Taylor

2011-06-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

I know she died way back in March, but:

1) Has anyone ever given the finger with such style and conviction?

2) Or applied eye shadow (and clicked on a pair of sunglasses) with such bug-eyed intensity?

What a woman!

28 May 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-06-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Nice cleavage shot of Dinah Washington, the great torch singer of R&B

This Bank Holiday Saturday afternoon Dr Sketchy at The Old Queen’s Head was nicely mellow and boozy (well, I’m speaking for myself here) with no stressful technical glitches (apart from some last-minute drama about locating a microphone for emcee Ophelia Bitz, but nothing major).

The performer / model this time was Tallulah Tempest, making her Dr Sketchy debut. We were all dazzled by Tempest: A former ballerina-turned burlesque performer, she still wears her white satin ballet shoes and displayed her ballet skills by posing en pointe for long, tortuous stretches. Ophelia and I admired Tempest’s powerful calf muscles while she modelled – impressive! Tempest performed to The Doors's version of the Kurt Weill song "Alabama Song". Her costume was great, too: a sort of harlequin / Pierrot black and white diamond-patterned ballerina outfit, with black tear drops drawn coming out of the corner of one eye. She looked like an escapee from the 1950 Kenneth Anger film Rabbit’s Moon.

You can actually watch Kenneth Anger's wondrous Rabbit's Moon in its entirety on Youtube. I recommend you do. Or better yet, get it on DVD. The dream-like imagery, married to a doo wop soundtrack, is sublime

The vivacious Ophelia Bitz and I enjoying some sparkling repartee. How we laughed! Photos by Maria Depaula-Vazquez

When I was in Vegas in April I spent a whole afternoon exploring the maze-like Charleston Antiques Market. One of the used books I skimmed and was tempted to buy was Queen: The Life and Music of Dinah Washington by Nadine Cohodas. (The other one I almost bought: a pristine edition of Funeral Rites by Jean Genet. I really should have snapped that up!). I’ve never read any biographies of the great Rhythm and Blues torch singer. Her life and career are fascinating. One of the true jazz and blues greats, Washington’s influence is incalculable: just as Washington as a young singer was initially indebted to Billie Holiday, you can recognize Washington's idiosyncratic phrasing in the like of Esther “Little Esther” Philips, Lula Reed and Timi Yuro. (When I play Timi Yuro’s swinging, finger-snapping version of “Fever”, people assume it’s Dinah Washington). Today, Amy Winehouse has declared she reveres Washington.

Washington’s life was short but tempestuous and decadent – qualities audible in her remarkable gritty, bluesy wailing voice. A dedicated boozer and pill-popper, she was dead by the age of 39 (in 1963) of an apparent accidental overdose when she unwisely mixed diet pills (which in those days were essentially amphetamines; Washington struggled with her weight) with sedatives and alcohol – a combination that proved lethal. What a loss, as Washington was still at the peak of her powers at the time of her death.

There was a great photo in the biography of Washington shortly before her death wearing a platinum blonde bouffant cotton candy wig, a mink coat and an outrageous pair of diamante-trimmed cat’s eye sunglasses: the caption says something like “Dinah wearing her two favorite accessories: a wig and a mink coat”. One of the first African-American superstars to enjoy crossover success on the white pop charts, Washington was financially able to indulge her love of bling. Luxuriating in jewelry, furs and sports cars, she embraced the ghetto fabulous ethos decades before hip hop. Washington was called The Queen of The Blues in her lifetime, and by all accounts her manner was definitely imperious. A defiant and willful tough cookie, she was known to pull out a gun in disagreements. During recording sessions she would pound back magnums of pink champagne (no wonder her vocals sound so relaxed and effortless!). By the end of her life Washington was married seven times.

Her career was as volatile as her private life. As a recording artist, Washington was very prolific and there wasn’t always the highest quality control (the liner notes to one of my CDs claims “Records were released that Dinah didn’t even remember making”). On the plus side, that means there are always more treasures to discover in La Washington’s oeuvre. Dinah Washington is definitely an artist I play a lot at Dr Sketchy. I know she’s most loved for classics like “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” and “September in the Rain”, her duets with Brook Benton and her sumptuous, string-drenched version of Noel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy”, but I think I like her best at her most subdued and melancholy, when she drops the trademark bravado and sassiness to reveal a sensitive, bruised side. Check out these two stunning, goose-bump inducing heartbreak ballads I’ve recently discovered – to me they sound like Dinah Washington baring her soul. I’ve been playing both these a lot lately when I want to drop the tempo to something sultrier and dramatic.

"You're Crying" by Dinah Washington

"I Want to Cry" by Dinah Washington

Miss Irene - Ginny Kennedy
Cheesecake - The Nite Sounds
That's Why I'm Asking - Carl Dobkins Jr with Lew Douglas Orchestra & Chorus
Heartbreakin' Special - Duke Larson
Rock'n'Roll Waltz - Ann-Margret
Leave Married Women Alone - Jimmy Cavallo
Little Ole Wine Drinker Me - Robert Mitchum
Too Old to Cut the Mustard - Marlene Dietrich and Rosemary Clooney
Jungle Walk - The Dyna-Sores
Oui je veux - Johnny Halliday
Over the Rainbow - Gene Vincent
It's Only Make Believe - Billy Fury
Little Things Mean a Lot - Jayne Mansfield
Directly from My Heart - Little Richard
The Strangeness in Me - The Runabouts
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
The Heel - Kay Martin
Bombie - Johnny Sharp
Out of Limits - The Marketts
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
The Chase - Chaino
Khrushchev Twist - Melvin Gayle
Stop Talking, Start Walking - Annie Laurie
Save It - Mel Robbins
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
That's a Pretty Good Love - Big Maybelle
Blockade - The Rumblers
Torture Rock - The Rockin' Belmarx
Salamander - Mamie van Doren
Please Don't Go Topless, Mother - Troy Hess
My Baby Cried All Night Long - Lee Hazlewood
Raunchy - Bill Black Combo
Do It Again - April Stevens
Anasthasia - Bill Smith Combo
The Beast - Milt Buckner
Screwdriver - Luchi
Willow Weep for Me - Nina Simone
Lullabye of Birdland - Eartha Kitt
Night Walk - The Swingers
I Want to Cry - Dinah Washington
Blues in My Heart - John Buzon Trio
Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Denise Darcel
The Sneak - Jimmy Oliver
I Need Your Lovin' - Don Gardner and DeeDee Ford
Everywhere I Go - Ted Taylor
Daddy Daddy - Ruth Brown
This Thing Called Love - Esquerita
Fever - The Delmonas
Stranger in My Own Hometown - The Earls of Suave
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
Comic Strip - Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg
Rigor Mortis - The Gravestone Four
Black Tarantula - Jody Reynolds
The Whip - The Frantics
A Guy Who Takes His Time - Marlene Dietrich
Bonjour Tristesse - Juliette Greco
Drums-a-Go-Go - The Hollywood Persuaders
Intoxica - The Centurions
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Like a Baby - Wanda Jackson
The Stalk - The Giants
Blues in the Night - Julie London
Sleep Walk - Henri Rene & His Orchestra
What is This Thing Called Love? Lena Horne
Rollercoaster Blues - Diana Dors
Let's Get Lost - Chet Baker
The Lady is a Tramp - Hildegard Knef
Mambo Miam Miam - Serge Gainsbourg
Gopher - Yma Sumac
What is This Generation Coming To? Robert Mitchum
Lover - Peggy Lee
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley
You Know I'm No Good - Wanda Jackson

A Reunion with The Prince of Puke

2011-06-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

Reunion: My mentor / filth elder John Waters and I at the book launch for the paperback edition of Role Models in May 2011

Brutal close-up of John Waters and I in December 2010, at the book launch party for the hardback edition of Role Models. Both photos by Damon Wise

I was at the launch party for the UK paperback edition of John Waters’ book Role Models last Thursday (26 May) and figured I’d better blog about it now while the details were still fresh in my mind. (Well, fresh-ish: it was a boozy night).

The venue was a tiny East End hipster art gallery called The Last Tuesday Society. The Sultan of Sleaze himself was in attendance (the publishers flew him into London for one day only). As per usual Waters was looking soignée in a Comme Des Garçons ensemble (the jacket was incredible, a pattern alternating daisies with skulls). Waters signed books in the art gallery and then went next door to a former Victorian pub renovated into an astonishing private home to give brief readings from Role Models. I’d interviewed him for the alternative arts and culture website Nude when he was last in town in December 2010 to promote the release of Role Models in hardback (that launch party was at the Comme Des Garçons store on Dover Street). I didn’t honestly expect him to, but Waters did recognise me (be still my fan boy heart!): he recalled the Nude interview and said, “That came out nice!” Even if he was simply being gracious and pretending to remember, it still made my toes curl in ecstasy. While he signed my book and we had our photo taken, I was quickly able to tell him I’d recently seen Boom! on his recommendation (Waters has enthused that Boom! is his all-time favourite film and has even toured and given lectures about it). He was curious about the audience’s reaction to it. I admitted the theatre was pretty deserted and that some people walked out during the film. Waters didn't look surprised.

Afterwards next door there wasn’t much in the way of seating, so people mainly sat on the floor in front of the podium where Waters gave his reading. Surveying the crowd he remarked he felt like he was at a Beatnik coffee house circa 1958 and proceeded to read the intro to the chapter on outsider porn. Afterwards there was a short Q&A session. Asked about his reaction to the death of Bin Laden, Waters said he loved The New York Post’s headline about discovering a stash of pornography in Bin Laden’s bunker: “Osama Bin Wankin’!” (He said his all-time favourite New York Post headline remained the one announcing the death of Ike Turner: “Ike Beats Tina To Death!”). He was also asked about his response to extreme performance artist Leigh Bowery using the name “John Waters” as an alias when he checked into the hospital just before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1994 (he heartily approved). Finally he was asked about Lady GaGa. Waters complimented GaGa and her PR team for being so incredibly hard working (like me, Waters is a Jayne Mansfield fanatic – he presumably recognises and appreciates a tenacious publicity-seeking starlet when he sees one) and remarked admiringly that all the little twelve year old kids who think they might be gay listen to Lady GaGa and then they are gay!

I went to the party with my old friend, the ace film journalist Damon Wise who’s known Waters for years and is a something of a confidant for him. Afterwards I wound up taking Damon (who’s straight as an arrow, by the way, but hip) on a bit of a bar crawl of Shoreditch’s most bleeding-edge gay drinking establishments, starting off at The Joiners Arms and ending up at The George and Dragon (fittingly, a poster of Divine in Pink Flamingos takes pride of place on the wall there, garlanded with Christmas lights). At the latter, alternative club royalty Princess Julia was DJ’ing. With her shaved-off eyebrows, punk-y eye make-up and Sean Young-in-Blade Runner / Joan Crawford-in-Mildred Pearce 1940s pompadour hairstyle, she looked simultaneously retro and futuristic -- like a beautiful alien. By then we’d polished off several pints of lager, gin and tonics served in vintage tea cups at the launch party, whiskey and then more lager. When Princess Julia played Bobby Vinton crooning “Blue Velvet”, it was a dizzyingly weird but appropriate end to the night.

18 May 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-05-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

Jayne Mansfield with a totally impractical surf board

This was my first post-Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender Dr Sketchy. I scored some great CDs in Vegas: a Ruth Brown greatest hits package and two wonderfully seedy compilations of freaky rockabilly and garage punk oddities -- Twisted Tales from the Vinyl Wastelands volume 8: Please Don’t Go Topless Mother and You Better Believe It 1955-1969: White Trash Rockers! Both of these more than live up to the promise of their lurid titles. I also recently acquired volume three of the Las Vegas Grind titty shaker series, which represent the bedrock of my DJ sets. It was about time I’d refreshed my music and I drew heavily on these new CDs at this Dr Sketchy. Music this sleazy and abrasive is like oxygen to me.

The night (which was at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern this time) featured Dusty Limits as emcee and two great performers / models: Trixi Tassels and Chocolat (aka Ruka. Alongside Dr Sketchy promoter Clare Marie, she's one of the proprietors of red-hot new lingerie emporium Sugarlesque). Unfortunately poor Chocolat’s performance occasioned the worst technical glitch of my DJ’ing career thus far! Both Trixi and Chocolat gave me their CDs of music for their acts, I tested them beforehand (as per usual) and both worked just fine. After the break, Dusty was to introduce Chocolat, I'd have her song cued, and she’d go straight into her act. Dusty announced her; I pressed “play” and ... nothing. I frantically yanked the CD out and tried another CD player and – still nothing! And then a message I’d never seen before came up on the little monitor: Disc Error! I was well and truly bugging out (my blood pressure was exploding, sweat beads were popping) and the crowd was murmuring impatiently wondering what the hell was going on. Luckily these people are total pros and swung into action: Dusty brought Trixi back out to pose some more and keep things moving while we sorted out the music crisis. Rising burlesque starlet Slinky Sparkles was in attendance and worked out with Chocolat backstage some potential alternative songs for her performance – except I had none of them! But Slinky herself had one of the songs on her iPod. We were able to hook up her iPod to the decks and use it for Chocolat’s number. Phew! I’m forever in Slinky’s debt! It was a relief to get everything back on track, and Chocolat’s act was great: she came out covered in balloons and gradually popped them one by one with a cigarette.

Sophia Loren sneaks a peek at Jayne Mansfield

Anyway, in a sense the night was my delayed tribute to Jayne Mansfield. (Although in truth every time I DJ is a bit of a valentine to Jayne Mansfield, anyway – just like it is for other heroes like Esquerita, Little Richard and Eartha Kitt). I’d read the month before that Jayne’s birthday is 19 April -- so if she hadn’t been killed (aged 34) in her 1967 car crash, Mansfield would have turned 78 this year. Because she’s been dead for so long, Mansfield feels like a distant figure from a bygone age but it’s certainly feasible she could still be alive: her contemporary Elizabeth Taylor just died in March aged 79; Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot are both alive and well at 77. It’s fascinating to speculate what Mansfield would be like if she’d lived to see old age -- her personal life and career seemed to be circling the drain when she died. Maybe she'd be like her closest living equivalent Mamie van Doren, who's still posing for softcore nude photoshoots and partying at the Playboy Mansion aged 80. I’m not sure if anyone even noticed, but to honour her I played “I Walk like Jayne Mansfield” by the wondrous all-girl Japanese surf band 5,6,7,8s and then “That Makes It” by La Mansfield herself. RIP, Jayne.

Two fun couples: Mamie van Doren and date. Mickey Hargitay (Mr Universe 1955) and Jayne Mansfield. Jayne's eyes look like they're clocking Mamie's cleavage

Shame the audio quality is so muffled

Otherwise: when Ruka / Chocolat models at Dr Sketchy I tend to go heavy on the great rhythm & blues divas: Dinah Washington, Little Esther, Eartha purring “Mack the Knife". I ended things on a defiant note with the wounded / wounding “I Hold No Grudge” by the angrily politicised High Priestess of Soul Nina Simone. “I’m the kind of people you can step on for a little while,” she snarls. “But when I call it quits, baby, that’s it! I’m the kind of people you can hurt once in a while. But crawling just ain’t my style!” Sing it, sister! Belt it out! (The 1966 song is by the great Angelo Badalamenti, long before he became David Lynch’s soundtrack composer. You can already discern the signature ominous / brooding 1950s Cool Jazz keyboard sound he’d later bring to the music for the likes of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, an atmospheric sound so essential to Lynch's cinematic vision).

Heartbreakin' Special - Duke Larson
Leave Married Women Alone - Jimmy Cavallo
Whisper Your Love - The Phantom
Teardrops from My Eyes - Ruth Brown
The Fire of Love - Jody Reynolds
The Flower of My Heart - Sparkle Moore
De Castrow - Jaybee Wasden
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Khrushchev Twist - Melvin Gayle
The Sneak - Jimmy Oliver
Out of Limits - The Marketts
Stampede - The Scarlets
Snow Surfin' Matador - Jan Davis
Scorpion - The Carnations
Vesuvius - The Revels
Rockin' Bongos - Chaino
Pas C'est Chanson - Johnny Halliday
Because of Love - Billy Fury
Go Calypso - Mamie van Doren
Rum and Coca Cola - Wanda Jackson
Try It No More - Genbe Marcum
I Just Don't Understand - Ann-Margret
Fool I Am - Pat Ferguson
The Chase - Chaino
Hillbilly Surfer - Whitey White
Oh Baby - Esquerita
Nightscene - The Rumblers
Cherry Pink - Bill Black's Combo
Drive In - The Jaguars
Womp Womp - Freddy and The Heartaches
Bad, Bad Girl - Little Esther
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
Beat Party - Ritchie & The Squires
She's My Witch - The Earls of Suave
The Coo - Wayne Cochran
Rigor Mortis - The Gravestone Four
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
The Bee - The Sentinels
L'il Lil - Mel Dorsey
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Anasthasia - Bill Smith Combo
Go Slow - Julie London
You're Crying - Dinah Washington
Aged and Mellow Blues - Little Esther
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Mack the Knife - Eartha Kitt
Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby? Ann Richards
My Daddy Rocks Me - Mae West
Happy, Happy Birthday Baby - The Tune Weavers (in honour of Dr Sketchy Clare Marie's birthday)
I Was Born to Cry - Dion
Begin the Beguine - Billy Fury
La Javanaise - Juliette Greco
You Can't Stop Her - Bobby Marchan
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
I Hold No Grudge - Nina Simone

When Mansfield’s Hollywood career fizzled out by the late 1950s, she resorted to low-budget European films – like ultra-obscure 1963 German film Heimweh nach St. Pauli (known as Homesick for St Pauli in North America). Mansfield’s speaking voice is dubbed by a German actress, but the singing in the musical numbers is obviously all her! The film looks irresistibly trashy – dig Mansfield’s cotton candy bouffant wig. I love it when she serenades the sailors. I’ve been reassured by German friends her accent and pronunciation are appalling.

Update! It turns out there was a journalist in attendence at this Dr Sketchy, and he wrote a great article online about it. Some great photos of Chocolat in action in her balloon costume.

Reflections on Accattone

2011-05-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

After French actor Pierre Clémenti died, cult author Dennis Cooper lovingly dedicated a blog to the androgynous and perverse poster boy of 1960s European art cinema. One of the motivations Cooper gave for his tribute was simply because the Bardot lipped, doe-eyed Clémenti is “what beauty looks like.” After recently seeing the Pier Paolo Pasolini film Accattone (1961) for the first time, for me the equivalent of “what beauty looks like” is closer to the Italian actor Franco Citti. (OK, Alain Delon figures in there somewhere too). Citti is of a similar vintage to Clémenti (who of course worked with Pasolini himself) but of an entirely different, butch-er and swarthier type.

Accattone represents the film debut of both the great uncompromising Italian auteur Pasolini (who wrote and directed it) and neophyte 26-year old leading man Citti. In the Italian Neo-Realist tradition, Pasolini cast his films with non-professional actors. Pasolini certainly struck gold with Citti, who he’d go on to use in several subsequent films. Accattone entirely centres on Citti’s astonishingly natural performance and charismatic physical presence. As writer Judy Bloch has pointed out, his “rough-hewn beauty is like a slap in the face.”

I actually saw Pasolini’s second film, Mamma Roma (1962) before Accattone. (I love Mamma Roma slightly more than Accattone simply because it features a lacerating performance from the volcanic Anna Magnani, the earth mother / she-wolf of Italian cinema. Citti pops up in Mamma Roma too – again playing a pimp as he does in Accattone, this time with a sleazy little moustache). Both Accattone and Mamma Roma firmly share the same sensibility as Luis Bunel’s Los Olvidados (1950): they’re devastating politicised studies of how grinding poverty defines peoples’ lives and their options.

Anna Magnani, the great tragedienne of Italian cinema, in Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962)

Pasolini in conversation with Anna Magnani during the filming of Mamma Roma (1962)

Pasolini was fascinated and inspired by the uncorrupted and marginalised peasant culture of the cafone (the Italian equivalent of hillbillies; in English subtitles, when characters in Accattone and Mamma Roma argue their insult of choice is frequently translated as “hick”, which seems to be a scathing put-down). This is the milieu of Accattone, depicting the underclass of pimps, prostitutes and thieves struggling for survival in the post-war borgate (slum or shanty town) outside of central Rome. (Accattone, like Mamma Roma, was filmed in the Pigneto district – one of my favourite, most atmospheric neighbourhoods of Rome. At the time Pigneto would have been a slum. It’s been gentrified considerably since these films were made, but for me Pigneto is still haunted by Accattone and Mamma Roma and the ghost of Pasolini).

Citti plays the film’s anti-hero, a sullen young pimp. He’s named Vittorio but everyone calls him “Accattone” (Roman slang for beggar or scrounger). Accattone and his gang of lay-about friends reject work for a life of sponging, hustling and pimping -- and who can blame them, when the film implies the only alternative would be back-breaking hard physical labour at starvation wages anyhow? “Work?” Accattone howls, incredulous, at one point. “Animals work!”

At first you think how brave Pasolini is to base a film around such a callous, amoral and unsympathetic character, especially when you see how abusive Accattone is towards his dim-witted whore Maddalena and realise he has a wife and young child he’s abandoned. So Accattone is a prick, but as portrayed by Franco Citti he's a sexy and compelling prick. And as the film progresses we see chinks of despair, self-loathing and stoical suffering in Accattone -- revealed mostly wordlessly through Citti’s soulful expression and sorrowful hooded eyes. One of Citti’s best moments is after his brother in law kicks the snot out of him, while the entire extended family and neighbours cheer him on. With jeers of, “Pappone!” ("Pimp!") ringing in his ears, the battered Accattone makes his abject walk of shame home; we alone see the dejected expression on his face. It’s a heart-wrenching moment.

Pappone! Pappone!

Seen today, Accattone is still viciously hard-edged and unsentimental. Men beat whores for the sheer sport of it, and because they can. Cartagine (a rat-faced, feral teenaged psychopath and one of Accattone’s partners in crime) brags in a bar about how the night before he and his friends assaulted a prostitute. “What a beating! You should have seen us,” he laughs. “How she begged us!”

(An aside: one of the prostitutes (Margheritona) is played by actress Adriana Moneta, who's like someone out of Fellini's Le notti di Cabiria (1957). She’s instantly recognisable as Ninni, the prostitute who gets picked up by a slumming Marcello Mastroainni and Anouk Aimee in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). According to IMDb, these were her only two film credits – if true, her filmography may be modest but she can claim to have played the archetypal earthy, tough but good-natured Roman prostitute for two of Italian cinema’s great maestros).

Marcello Mastroianni, Adriana Moneta and Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita (1960)

Pasolini ennobles the struggles of his characters while never romanticising their poverty. (To his credit, he’s never guilty of poverty chic or poverty porn). These are people who are genuinely at risk of going hungry, who are reduced to stealing and selling their father’s false teeth in order to eat; it’s shown as virtually inevitable that a pretty girl will turn to prostitution. Accattone is simultaneously squalid and lyrically beautiful. What Pasolini does do is elevate the harsh, grinding suffering of the impoverished cafone to the level of operatic high tragedy in beautifully composed shots that evoke Renaissance paintings, with classical music swelling on the soundtrack. When Maddalena is driven to a deserted wasteland and savagely beaten by some vengeful Neapolitan henchmen of her previous pimp, Bach soars on the soundtrack as the camera observes her lying like a broken doll on the ground, swooping down on her abandoned handbag and a solitary shoe.

Maddalena is played by Silvana Corsini, presumably another non-professional actor. Pasolini obviously liked her, as she would later play Bruna, the town tramp with fuzzy arm pits who seduces Anna Magnani’s teenaged son in Mamma Roma. Information about Corsini is scarce: maybe she was simply a pretty local girl and Pasolini liked her face, but Corsini has an interesting screen presence and is exceptional at suggesting credulous, slightly uncomprehending not particularly bright child-women. After Maddalena’s assault, there is a memorable scene in the police station where the local thugs and pimps are brought in for her to try to identify her attackers. A true connoisseur of firm Mediterranean male flesh, Pasolini’s camera lingers over the handsome criminals’ tough insolent faces in loving close-ups. In retrospect, you can’t help but shudder and recall Pasolini was murdered by a psychotic teenaged rent boy in 1972 - if they represent his ideal type, Pasolini certainly paid the consequences.

The subtitles are in French for this clip, unfortunately

From the start, it’s hinted that Accattone painfully recognises the futility of his life and harbours a death wish. We see funeral processions, premonitions of death, and nightmares about impending death. “Either the world kills me, or I’ll kill it!” Accattone wails towards the end of the film. One guess who wins that challenge. Suffice to say, the film ends with a character exhaling, “Ah, now I’m fine ...” with cruel irony, while someone else stands over them making the sign of the cross with handcuffs on their wrists.

A drunk Accattone with tears running down his face

Reflections on Boom!

2011-05-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

Together they devour life! Or at least chew the scenery

Baroque. Opulent. Decadent. Berserk! I celebrated my birthday on 12 May by attending a rare screening of the infamous 1968 Joseph Losey film Boom! at The Institute of Contemporary Art with my friend Alison. I’ve long been curious about the film for its reputation as one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history and because Pope of Trash John Waters (one of my heroes) has championed it so enthusiastically and persuasively as his all-time favourite movie. "I show it to every person I think I'm falling in love with,” Waters claims. “If they hate it, I don't talk to them anymore." And finally, it seemed like a nice way to pay tribute to the film's leading lady, Elizabeth Taylor, who died in March. (When I interviewed Waters for Nude magazine in December 2010, he recalled how in the 90s he finally met Taylor at a party and was able to profess his love for Boom! She was horrified and screamed, “That movie is terrible!”). I can confirm Boom! still hasn't lost its capacity to alienate and annoy: the screening Alison and I attended was sparsely-attended. The couple in front of us walked out early on.

The wonderfully lurid trailer for Boom!

A true “film maudit”, Boom! is mainly remembered as a disastrous star vehicle / vanity project for tempestuous then-married duo Taylor and Richard Burton, at what author Lee Server has called “their jet-setting, conspicuously-consuming, bad-movie making height.” Tennessee Williams himself adapted the screenplay from his flop play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Taylor plays ageing hedonist Flora “Sissy” Goforth, the much-married, drug addicted richest woman in the world (and it’s been argued, the most irritating woman in the world). From the windswept high solitude of her all-white villa on the edge of a cliff on a private island on the Amalfi Coast, the terminally ill Goforth is in denial about her imminent death, distracting herself by dictating her sensational Proustian memoirs into a tape recorder and directing her diva’s wrath at her long-suffering servants in fractured Italian (“Shit on your mother!” she screams at a maid who displeases her). "I need a lover," she growls to her secretary. Sure enough, she is visited by the enigmatic Christopher Flanders (played by Burton), a failed poet turned gigolo notorious on the international jet set as an ambiguous and parasitic Angel of Death who materialises whenever a wealthy woman is about to die.

In theory Boom! initially may have seemed promising. Taylor and Burton were show business royalty and the public was still entranced by their glitzy soap opera lifestyle. Taylor had triumphed in earlier film adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly Last Summer (1959). Joseph Losey was a hip, art-y director of the moment, critically acclaimed for films like The Servant (1963). But considering the play Milk Train had failed on Broadway twice already in two different versions (in 1963 and 1964), it seems an odd choice as source material for a lavish big budget film adaptation. Tennessee Williams himself couldn’t be expected to be objective, but surely Losey, Taylor and Burton probably should have considered the play’s failure as an ominous premonition? The doomed 1964 Broadway production (which closed after only five performances) certainly sounds fascinating: it perversely partnered the odd couple of dissipated grand dame of the American stage Tallulah Bankhead as Goforth with wholesome 1950s teen heartthrob Tab Hunter as Flanders.

Tab Hunter as Christopher Flanders and Tallulah Bankhead as Sissy Goforth in the 1964 Broadway production of The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

The resulting film is overblown, irresistibly absurd, high camp run amok and unintentionally hilarious. Losey depicts the Goforth mansion as a grotesque freak show deluxe, complete with a sadistic dwarf bodyguard in jodhpurs and riding boots, a pet monkey on a chain, a talking mynah bird in a cage and sitar-playing Indian musicians. A cadaverous-looking Noel Coward pops up in a dinner jacket as a gossipy gay socialite nicknamed the Witch of Capri. When Flanders first trespasses onto Goforth’s island, her savage attack dogs are released – just like Mr Burns does with his hounds on The Simpsons.

Taylor as Sissy Goforth and Burton as Christopher Flanders

Boom! feels drenched in a boozy / narcotic haze, which apparently extended both on and off screen. “They made this film drunk …” Waters has pointed out. The Burtons were famously hard-drinking, and Losey and the cast reportedly began each day’s filming with a round of Bloody Marys, and it shows. Drunken impaired judgement would certainly explain a lot. In any given shot it’s rare for a character not to have either a drink or a cigarette in their hand -- in Taylor's case, usually both (Taylor wields an outrageously long cigarette holder). The camera lingers over characters availing themselves of huge pitchers of Bloody Marys (which, it has to be said, look pretty tempting). There’s almost as much pill-popping as in The Valley of the Dolls. At one point Taylor washes down a fistful of pain killers with a gigantic snifter of brandy.

Then there’s the eternal problem of film translations of Tennessee Williams plays: his dialogue (heightened, poetic, high-falutin’) doesn’t translate easily to the screen. The atmosphere of decadence and impending tragedy is laid-on thick; everyone seems death-obsessed and is apt to suddenly start philosophising in long, meandering soliloquies about the meaning of life. Waters has shrewdly argued Boom! should be approached as a “failed art movie”: certainly Losey (out of his depth and reportedly intimidated by Liz and Dick) seems to be striving for high European art cinema seriousness, layering on heavy-handed symbolism a-go go, soundtracked by a doom-laden John Barry score and the constant sound of waves crashing onto the rocks. The moments of Taylor suffering panic attacks on her balcony, for example, recall Monica Vitti’s existential nervous breakdown in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 Il Deserto Rosso. (Maybe if Boom! was made in a different language, if Taylor and Burton were dubbed in Italian, the film would have felt less risible?).

Considering Boom! was primarily conceived as a showcase for Taylor and Burton, they’re surprisingly miscast. For one thing, their ages are all wrong: Taylor is too young and Burton too old -- the play was about the relationship between an older, dying woman and a much younger man. Sissy Goforth is supposed to be dying: when Tallulah Bankhead played the role onstage she was in her 60s and genuinely wraith-like, prematurely ravaged by emphysema and the consequences of a suicidally debauched lifestyle (it would be her last major theatrical performance and she would die within five years). The 35-year old Taylor, on the other hand, looks sun-kissed, plump and in robust good health even when coughing up blood in a consumptive fit or writhing in agony screaming for an injection.

Another bourbon, darling? Tallulah Bankhead towards the end of her life

Similarly, as an elite high society gigolo Flanders surely should be a bronzed Adonis, or something like Terence Stamp in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema. Clad throughout in a samurai warrior’s robe (complete with ceremonial sword), Burton looks haggard and faded. It's he who looks like he’s dying, instead of Taylor. (We get a few fleeting glimpses of Burton swimming naked – they’re deeply unappealing).

Taylor pouts through the pain. Burton as the angelo della morte looks moodily into the distance

In any case, Boom! is overwhelmingly dominated by Taylor in full-throttle imperious, overripe, scenery-chewing diva mode. Camille Paglia has written of Taylor in another Joseph Losey film, Secret Ceremony (also 1968) as being “at the peak of her mature fleshy glamour.” That’s definitely true here, too. Shrouded mainly in floor-skimming caftans, with elaborate bouffant hairstyles augmented with hair pieces, Taylor is glamorous but prematurely matronly and slathered in thick make-up. Still channelling Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and shrieking like a harridan, Taylor’s Sissy Goforth is self-parodic, unhinged and drag queen-y: no wonder John Waters says Taylor’s appearance and abrasive performance in this film were a beloved source of inspiration for Divine. (Waters has said Divine was so influenced by Taylor that he smoked Salem cigarettes purely because they were Taylor's brand of choice).

So demanding ...

Boom! is recognised today as a camp classic (it ticks all the right boxes as listed in Susan Sontag’s 1964 Notes on Camp essay, especially in terms of “failed seriousness”). It certainly seems to have a queer sensibility, and perhaps the role of Sissy Goforth is best approached as a coded drag queen. Interestingly, Rupert Everett played the role of Sissy in drag in a 1994 British stage production of Milk Train. And famously the role of the Witch of Capri was originally conceived as (and played onstage by) a woman and in Boom! it’s played by Noel Coward. (The part was originally offered to Katherine Hepburn – who was deeply offended). There’s a jaw-droppingly tasteless and misogynistic scene where the Witch of Capri describes a friend who refers to women as “poisson” and sniffs from a vial of ammonia to disguise the scent of any menstruating woman who might pass by him on the street. Seriously – what the hell were they thinking?!

While by no stretch a "good" film, Boom! is incredibly beautiful to look at, weirdly enjoyable and frequently mesmerising in a way only a truly trashy bad movie can be. There's a wonderful tension between the film's high-minded, literary aspirations and its actual lurid vulgarity. Essentially a filmed play, Boom! is extremely talk-y, but Losey’s prowling camera and elegantly composed shots ensure it’s never dull to watch. The production values were obviously high, and they're visible on the screen: the jewels Taylor wears, for example, are all genuine, on loan from Bulgari and worth an estimated $2,000,000. The art direction, sets, exteriors and Taylor’s garish wardrobe (especially her eye-popping Kabuki ensemble with the exploding headdress) are incredible. (Some of Taylor's costumes were apparently designed by Karl Lagerfeld). Captured in glorious Panavision, the sun-drenched Italian Riviera locale is exquisite (Boom! is usually described as having been filmed in Capri, but the closing credits say it was filmed on location in Sardinia). Boom! is immersive, a noble and ambitious failure, a real experience. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s interpretation of Sissy Goforth, it’s simultaneously seductive and repellent. Boom! is finally majestic in its misguided awfulness.

Taylor in Kabuki costume and Coward as The Witch of Capri

John Waters discussing his love for Boom!

Las Vegas Grind! Viva Las Vegas 2011

2011-05-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Viva Las Vegas 2011 seemed to go by a blur! Maybe that’s the reason I took less good photos than usual. Less of my American friends went this year, which was a bit of a letdown. I caught brief glimpses of Satan's Angel and Dean Micetich of DiCE Magazine (aka the artist formerly known as Kid Rocker) but then never saw them again for rest of weekend. Missed Sweetpea’s Hootch and Smooch warm-up party on afternoon of Thursday. Didn’t make it into Double Down Saloon or Atomic Liquor and Cocktails (my two favourite Las Vegas dive bars. In fact Jim and I did make a special trek to go to the Double Down Saloon, but I neglected to bring my passport and the bouncer on the door wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have ID to prove I was over 21! At my age!). Didn’t catch Big Elvis's lounge act this year (a sacrilege!). Didn’t catch either the burlesque showcase or the burlesque contest, even though my friend Sarah (aka Slinky Sparkles) was a contestant in the competition (the long queues to get in to both were extremely off-putting). Where the hell did the time go?!

After about a grand total of twelve and a half hours in an airplane, Sarah and Jim were gasping for a cigarette by the time we arrived in Vegas

Sarah and I at The Orleans. Note her Vivienne Westwood handbag. It's genuine

The highlights: Caught some great bands. Pachuco Josey y Los Diamantes. The Modern Don Juans. Los Straitjackets. Los Tiki Phantoms. (Yes, the future of rockabilly is Latino!). After Chuck Berry’s creaky and underwhelming performance in 2010 (Jim and I left after watching only three or four songs), I was wary of headliner Jerry Lee Lewis but the 75-year old rockabilly legend was in great voice and on stately / majestic form (even if he didn’t sing “Breathless”, my favourite song of his).

Closest thing I could get to a close-up of Jerry Lee Lewis performing at the car show

Meeting Mistress of the Dark Elvira at the car show involved queuing in the baking sun for about 35 minutes and then buying wildly over-priced merchandise for the privilege of having my photo taken with her – but was well worth it to meet one of my teenaged idols. Elvira (aka Cassandra Peterson) was gracious and charming, and the woman is an ageless icon, revered by punks, rockabillies and Goths.

Elvira and I

Close-up of Elvira: the photo is even better with me cropped-out!

Flame-haired veteran burlesque legend (and star of Teaserama) Tempest Storm at the car show

Tempest Storm in the 1950s

Exploring the Charleston Antique Mall (a treasure trove of mid-century vintage kitsch) was fun. Was great seeing Jorge from Los Angeles (aka DJ Zorch) and his beautiful new girlfriend, albeit briefly. Finally meeting Sean Law! The pool parties with the surf band Aquasonics performing live every afternoon. For their sets they were joined onstage by Seattle burlesque starlet Miss Kitty Baby go-go dancing. Watching Kitty Baby (an escapee from a 1960s Russ Meyer film, with added tattoos) shake it like a Poloroid in the dreamy Vegas sunshine while drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon is a life-affirming experience: if the Viva Las Vegas weekender has a queen, it’s Miss Kitty Baby.

Me, Jim and Jorge (aka DJ Zorch from Los Angeles)

Historic Meeting: Two Canadians Meet in Las Vegas! Sean Law and I

Go, baby, go! Miss Kitty Baby in action, go-go dancing to the surf sounds of the Aquasonics

Jim and Miss Kitty Baby: Note how the lurid colours of his Hawaiian shirt and her go-go dancer outfit coordinate beautifully.

Fittingly, one of the film selections on the flight back to London was the classic 1953 Marlon Brando juvenile delinquent / motorcycle gang film The Wild One. I hadn’t seen it since I was a teenager and before popping an Ambien and crashing out for most of the journey I made a point of watching it. By today’s standards some aspects of The Wild One may seem camp-y and dated, but it’s a tightly-constructed, energetically told and really enjoyable B-movie, and as a rockabilly fanatic it obviously holds a timeless fascination for me. For one thing, the film came out before rock’n’roll burst through, so it’s surprising when a smouldering and insolent young Brando swaggers into a cafe and fires up the jukebox, instead of a burst of twang-y rockabilly it emits ... jazz. (Frantic bebop jazz, but even still! No wonder the trailer refers to them as “jazzed-up hoodlums”). And the clothes Brando and his gang The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club wear are so covetable they had me virtually drooling. The black leather engineer boots, the perfect Levis with the perfect turn-ups, the t-shirts, the leather jackets, the caps, the sunglasses, the quiffs, the sideburns ... Brando and his gang remain the absolute visual / sartorial ideal for male rockabillies in the way that, say, Bettie Page or Mamie van Doren do for female rockabillies.

Anyway, roll on Viva Las Vegas 2012!

See more of my Viva Las Vegas 2011 photos on flickr

DJ Set List for Gail and Jasja's Leaving Party 15 April 2011

2011-04-27T09:11:00.000-07:00

Gail and Jasja (aka Sparkle Moore and Cad van Swankster, the proprietors of London's most chi chi vintage clothing emporium The Girl Can't Help It) were given a raucous and boozy send-off at their farewell party at Ryan’s in Stoke Newington on 15 April 2011.

(Gail and Jasja were married on 1 April 2011. The sugar couple from the top of their wedding cake looks eerily like them -- down to the fine details of Jasja's tattoos!)

In the 1990s Gail was the hostess / promoter of sleazily atmospheric club nights like More than Vegas and Blue Martini – clubs that plunged Soho back to its seedy neon-lit 1950s golden age. I discovered More than Vegas early on when I first arrived in London and it was instrumental in making me the twisted fuck I am today!

I didn’t take as many photos as I should have at the party (how could I not have photographed Mari Mansfield?!). I was DJ’ing for the first half of the night, which was a bit chaotic (technical problems a-go go!) and afterwards drank a helluva lot to de-stress. (Did I mention it was a boozy night?). Gail and Jasja have re-located to San Diego and will be much-missed by their friends in London. (Jasja would definitely want me to point out The Girl Can't Help It is staying put at Alfie's Antique Market and is in the safe hands of Laurie Vanian).

It was an honour to be asked by Gail to be one of the DJ's at their leaving-do. Going to More than Vegas in the early 90s was definitely a factor in making me want to pursue DJ'ing, and the More than Vegas resident DJs like Jake Vegas and (especially) the sublime Mari Mansfield were certainly an inspiration.

(The Way They Were: Mari Mansfield and Jake Vegas in the old days at More than Vegas at The St Moritz on Wardour Street)

Gail's only musical stipulation was she wanted lots of Eartha Kitt, Jayne Mansfield and Violetta Villas so I definitely played more than one track by each (well, except for Violetta as I only have one song by her!). Playing at least one song by the original Sparkle Moore, the great female rockabilly chanteuse Gail swiped her name from, was also compulsory.

Me DJ'ing at Gail and Jasja's leaving party. Can I just say in my own defence, it was very hot in that corner and I'd been running up and down the stairs earlier ...

I was the first DJ on and the whole audio situation was very much cobbled together at the last minute and very stressful (and I was pounding back beer to combat the stress), so my set wasn't as smooth and flowing as I would have liked. But anyway, here it is ...

Woh! Woh! Yea! Yea! The Dynamos
Vesuvius - The Revels
Rock-A-Bop - Sparkle Moore
Boss - The Rumblers
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
St Louis Blues - Eartha Kitt
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
The Whip - The Originals
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Beaver Shot - The Periscopes
Chatta Nooga Choo Choo - Denise Darcel
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
Fujiyama Mama - Annisteen Allen
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley
Heartbreak Hotel - Ann-Margret
Beat Girl - Adam Faith
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Fever - Timi Yuro
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Comin' Home - The Delmonas
I Was Born to Cry - Dion
Summertime - Little Esther
You're My Thrill - Chet Baker
Willow Weep for Me - The Whistling Artistry of Muzzy Marcellino
Little Things Mean a Lot - Jayne Mansfield
Dragon Walk - The Noble Men
I Love the Life I Live - Esquerita
Czterdziesci Kasztanów (Forty Chestnuts) - Violetta Villas

See more photos from Gail and Jasja's leaving party here
See photos from Gail and Jasja's last-ever yard sale here

(Looking at this set list in retrospect, am sure I've left some songs off ... I definitely played Eartha Kitt's version of "Mack the Knife" in there somewhere. I DJ'd for at least 90-minutes, so there must have been more songs than that! Ah, well. They're lost in the mists of time now).

13 April 2011 Dr Sketchy Set List

2011-04-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

An intoxicated and bleary-eyed Jayne Mansfield parties with Mamie van Doren (check out Mamie's outrageously fake wighat). Jayne looks the way I feel

This might be a bit of a rush job: I fly to Vegas for the annual Easter rockabilly weekender Viva Las Vegas early morning on 20 April and want to blog this set list while it's still fresh in my mind.

I’m the first to admit this night wasn’t one of my better ones: lots of technical glitches to feel anxious about (i.e. with the microphone, the decks themselves, and will I ever work out how the stage lights at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern work?!). Plus the RVT is synonymous with still-agonising romantic disappointment for me (don’t worry, I’ll spare you the details) and as a result I drink one helluva lot more there while DJ’ing, which probably impacts on things. Hopefully the music didn’t come across as too disjointed and erratic.

Musically what I’m really feeling at the moment is moody, atmospheric 1950s heartbreak ballads, the kind with lots of echo on the singer’s voice and ghostly rockabilly guitar: think Eddie Cochran’s "Half Loved", “The Strangeness in Me” by The Runabouts and the eerie “Flower of My Heart” by Sparkle Moore. (I’m kicking myself for not packing “The Fire of Love” by Jody Reynolds – something I’ll rectify next time). "Mess of Blues" is one of my favourite Elvis ballads. “Nobody Knows” by The Earls of Suave packs a boozy sense of regret I can certainly relate to these days.

I wrote recently about my love for the turbulent Turners, but I didn’t realise Ike and Tina ever did a version of “Love Letters” until recently. The song is something of a pop standard, covered by everyone from Elvis, Peggy Lee, Julie London and of course Kitty Lester, whose hushed, gospel-inflected version was used so hauntingly by David Lynch in Blue Velvet. Ike and Tina's rendition couldn't sound less like a typical Ike and Tina number: it opens with a swirl of sugary strings and the Ikettes sound almost angelic, contrasting nicely with the sandpaper rasp of Tina's voice. Her delivery initially starts quite measured but within no time she’s in full roar, tearing the song apart with her bare hands – you’ll never hear a more urgent version of “Love Letters!”

The inimitable Ophelia Bitz was the emcee again this time. This night featured a burlesque performer (Lady Cave, who’s Australian and sports a black patent leather Louise Brooks bob) and the model Tiffany Chin-Sim. For her pose Tiffany wore a spangled belly dancer costume, so needless to say I played Eartha Kitt’s “Uska Dara” and exotica like “Camel Walk” by The Saxons and “Lust” by Les Baxter, featuring the Yma Sumac-like wails, growls and screams of Bas Sheva.

Nobody Knows - The Earls of Suave
The Flower of My Heart - Sparkle Moore
Mess of Blues - Elvis Presley
Reconsider Me - Margaret Lewis
Love Letters - Ike and Tina Turner
Love Oh Love - Little Esther
Two-Timing Loser - Johnny Thunders and Patti Paladin
The Strangeness in Me - The Runabouts
Harbour Lights - Dinah Washington
Sea of Love - The Earls of Suave
Stop and Listen - Mickey and Ludella
Fury's Tune - Billy Fury
Tiger - Sparkle Moore
Half-Loved - Eddie Cochran
Willow Weep for Me - Lizabeth Scott
Ebb Tide - Al Anthony
Solitude - Eartha Kitt
Les Amours Perdue - Serge Gainsbourg
If I Should Lose You - George Shearing
The Thrill is Gone - Chet Baker
I'm Through with Love - Marilyn Monroe
I Almost Lost My Mind - Bill Black Combo
Night Scene - The Rumblers
The Beast - Milt Buckner
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Fever - Nancy Sit
Comin' Home - The Delmonas
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Mondo Moodo - The Earls of Suave
Aged & Mellow - Little Esther
Jungle Walk - The Dyna-Sores
Makin' Out - Jody Reynolds
I Wanna See You Dance - Hank Stirrup and Chet Tendon
Gizmo - Jimmy Heaps
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Baby Doll Mambo - Belmonte and His Afro-American Music
Catwalk - Jack Constanzo
Uska Dara - Eartha Kitt
Camel Walk - The Saxons
Frenzy - The Hindus
Lust - Les Baxter
You Know I'm No Good - Wanda Jackson
That's Why I'm Askin' - Carl Dobkins Jr
Salamander - Mamie van Doren
Wait a Minute, Baby - Esquerita
Snow Surfin' Matador - Jan Davis
Nicotine - The Vikings
Tu veux ou tu veux pas - Brigitte Bardot
Fever - Timi Yuro
Teach Me Tonight - Dinah Washington
Harlem Nocturne - Martin Denny
I Feel So Mmmm - Diana Dors
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Mallet Men
C'est si Bon - April Stevens
Bachelor's Paradise - Ann-Margret
Crawlin' - The Untouchables
Torture Rock - The Rockin' Belmarx
One Night of Sin - Elvis Presley
Shangri-la - Spike Jones New Band
Beat Girl - Adam Faith (Beat Girl soundtrack)
Like a Baby - Wanda Jackson
Mack the Knife - Hildegard Knef
Jealousy - Billy Fury
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - Nina Simone