Lobotomy Room 23 February 2018 at Fontaine's DJ Set List

From the Facebook event page:

Attention late night diversion seekers! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 23 February 2018!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk cretin hops! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities and other weird shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell. Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Grainy black-and-white vintage erotica projected on the big screen all night for your adult viewing pleasure!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

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

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

February is a cruel month. It’s when revered and sacred Lobotomy Room religious figures Lux Interior (4 February 2009) and Tura Satana (4 February 2011) both died. It’s still deep, desolate winter with seemingly no end in sight. And blimey, both the Lobotomy Room film club and the dance party tanked in February!

/ Above: Lux Interior of The Cramps. Below: Tura Satana /

On dispiriting occasions like these, I try to remember the credo of hard-bitten, nicotine-stained veteran show business harridan Helen Lawson in Valley of the Dolls. To paraphrase: I’ve got to have a hard core (unlike that pill head Neely O’Hara) and learn to roll with the punches. ‘Cause as a one-man club promoter, believe me, in this business they come left, right and below the belt.

/ Booze party! Wild! Wild! Wild! /

Who knows why hardly anyone rocked up last month? January was buzzing! It could be peoples’ post-Christmas credit card debts started to bite? The cold weather was off-putting? The film club selection on 21 February was John Waters’ camp classic Hairspray (to commemorate its thirtieth anniversary – it was released in February 1988). In the past Waters’ trash epics have ensured full houses (previously we’ve screened Desperate Living and Female Trouble) and we anticipated Hairspray was a sentimental favourite that people would clamour to see on the big screen. Wrong! I wonder if the dreadful 2007 remake with John Travolta has tarnished the original’s reputation. Anyway, watching Hairspray again for the first time in many years I was struck by how sweet, funny, fresh and lovable it still is after all these years. Even if it proved to be an unpopular choice, I’m still glad we marked the occasion of Hairspray turning thirty!

It was a shame so few people came to the monthly Friday night booze party (I mean, dance party) two nights later, as it was one of those nights where the music flowed as effortlessly as snake venom. As well as February representing the anniversary of Lux Interior’s death, it also marked the birthday of The Cramps's eternally inscrutable co-founder and guitarist Poison Ivy (she turned 65 on 20 February 2018). Needless to say, I went heavy on The Cramps’ gravest hits to mark the occasion.

Caribbean Western - Lydia Lunch
Steel Pier - The Impacts
Surf Rat - The Rumblers
Bombora - The Original Surfaris
I Don't Need You No More - The Rumblers
Road Runner - The Fabulous Wailers
I'm Blue (The Gong-Gong Song) - The Ikettes
Train to Nowhere - The Champs
That's a Pretty Good Love - Big Maybelle
Uptown to Harlem - Johnny Thunders and Patti Palladin
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
I Love the Life I Live - Esquerita
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
Scorpion - The Carnations
Kismiaz - The Cramps
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Taboo - The Shangaans
Adult Books - X
Fever - Edith Massey
I'm a Bad, Bad Girl - Little Esther
Little Miss Understood - Connie Stevens
I Wish I Were a Princess - Little Peggy March
Wipe-Out - The Escorts
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
Be Bop A Lula - Alan Vega
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
Forming - The Germs
Garbage Man - The Cramps
Boss - The Rumblers
Pedro Pistolas Twist - Los Twisters
Your Phone's off the Hook - The Ramonetures
Year 1 - X
Cretin Hop - The Ramones
Strychnine - The Sonics
Deuces Wild - Link Wray
Touch the Leather - The Fat White Family
Yellow Submarine - Mrs Miller
How Does that Grab You, Darlin'? - Nancy Sinatra
Wailin' - The Fabulous Wailers
Woo-Hoo - The 5,6,7,8s
Ultra Twist - The Cramps
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
My Way - Nina Hagen

Upcoming Lobotomy Room dates! 

Next film club is Wednesday 21 March 2018

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s (third Wednesday of every month) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer!

This month we’re making it extra filthy and depraved – with a tribute to the fabulous Divine! Wednesday 21 March! Formerly known as Harris Glenn Milstead (19 October 1945 – 7 March 1988), Pope of Trash John Waters’ 300-pound drag queen leading lady of choice, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, disco singer, all-round freak diva extraordinaire and eternal role model for misfits everywhere died thirty years ago this month! And we’re commemorating this historic occasion with a screening of the glorious 2014 documentary I Am Divine. 

Doors to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. Seating is limited: we can accommodate 30-35 people maximum. Arrive early to grab a seat and order a cocktail! I’ll be blasting Divine’s hi-NRG disco classicks LOUD before the film starts! Dressing up like Divine is highly encouraged and may win you a free cocktail!

Event page

NOTE! There won't be a Lobotomy Room club night last Friday of March because Fontaine's is being reserved for a private party. Instead, we will return on Friday 27 April 2018 with an exciting new cocktail menu! Details to follow.

Further reading:

Follow me on tumblr for all your kitsch, camp, retro vintage sleaze and fifties homoerotica needs!

Follow me on twitter!

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

Lobotomy Room 26 January 2018 at Fontaine's DJ Set List

From the Facebook event page:

Attention late night diversion seekers! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 26 January 2018!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk cretin hops! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities and other weird shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Grainy black-and-white vintage erotica projected on the big screen all night for your adult viewing pleasure!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

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

A tawdry good time guaranteed! 

Gratifyingly, the first Lobotomy Room of 2018 pulled a decent crowd. This was especially heartening considering the prudes at Facebook completely banned me from advertising the January club. As regular readers may know, I wind up a-fussin’ and a-feudin’ with our corporate social network overlords on regular monthly basis. Unfortunately, in 2018, if you’re a club promoter you can’t not pay Facebook to “boost” your events – it’s how you reach new “cold” people. And unfortunately, they routinely reject my ads on the most spurious basis. This time, the Facebook advertising team claimed they were rejecting my January ad because they’d found nudity on my “landing page.” I challenged them: find me the nudity (which I was 100% confident was non-existent) and I’ll delete it.  Hours later, someone eventually emailed me back with a screen grab of the offending nudity -  and it was something I never could have anticipated. It was the official Fontaine’s logo – an Art Deco-style illustration of two 1920s flappers! Which had been prominently displayed on Fontaine’s Facebook page since at least 2015! And yeah, strictly speaking they are topless (but they are also wearing pasties. And they’re not real!). In his email, the Facebook representative emphasized that all depictions suggesting nudity are forbidden under all circumstances: whether it's medical, historical, artistic or even of an ancient statute! The biggest perverts of all must work for Facebook – they see sexually explicit imagery everywhere they look!  Anyway, it was on Fontaine’s Facebook page so there was nothing I could do about it.  (If it was my own Lobotomy Room page, I could have deleted it). All I could do was shrug, move on and hope for the best. And for whatever reason, we wound up with a relatively full house without any of Facebook’s assistance. Phew!

/ NSFW alert! Shield your eyes! /

While I’m on the subject: Facebook will routinely block your ad if they decide it “Refer(s) to the viewers’ sexual orientation” because in their twisted perspective, that can only be a derogatory thing.  My ultra-kitschy and campy events – the film club and the dance party – both primarily appeal to a queer audience but I’m barred from actively referencing that or targeting them in my Facebook ads. The statistics of my attendees are 70% female and 30% male and within that many of my regulars fall somewhere within the LGBTQ spectrum. Intentionally or not, Facebook’s policy winds up being frankly homophobic and presents a genuine dilemma for anyone trying to promote a queer-centric event! 

I endeavour to make every Lobotomy Room club a shimmering journey through decadence, but this month was particularly hedonistic: we had some genuine swingers in attendance!  It turns out one of the male attendees was celebrating his birthday – and his very accommodating and open-minded girlfriend was fulfilling his birthday wish by assembling (via Craigslist? I may have misheard!)  his own harem of female playmates for an orgy! Their erotic swinger’s party was apparently scheduled for the following night – Friday was their getting-to-know-each-other-first ice breaker.  The ice was certainly broken! Every time I glanced up from the DJ booth, there was girl-on-girl action and uninhibited “dirty dancing” (one of the girls was a young Joey Heatherton-type!).  Sleazy does it – that’s the Lobotomy Room way!

The 60th annual Grammy Awards fell on 28 January 2018 (two nights after Lobotomy Room), and the regal 78-year old Bold Soul Sister Tina Turner received a Lifetime Achievement Award. I revere Turner as the undisputed tigress of rhythm and blues – especially in her early 1960s manifestation as the fierce frontwoman of the Ike and Tina Turner revue. Looking at this photo, you can see why John Waters and Divine embraced Tina as a role model. She clearly knew a thing or two about liquid eyeliner! As ever, I played multiple tunes by Ike and Tina Turner at Lobotomy Room.

Meanwhile, the night before Lobotomy Room (25 January) represented the birthday of another glorious rhythm and blues diva – the irrepressible, blonde and bountiful Etta James (25 January 1938 - 20 January 2012). I played her 1955 classic “Roll with Me, Henry”. I love R&B bad girl James’ outrageous, drag queen-y 1960s look (platinum blonde bouffant wigs, thick black Cleopatra eyeliner). This is a good excuse to post a pin-up of her. 

Steel Pier - The Impacts

Three Cool Chicks - The 5,6,7,8s
I Live the Life I Love - Esquerita
I Don't Need You No More - The Rumblers
Kismiaz - The Cramps
Vesuvius - The Revels
Mau Mau - The Fabulous Wailers
Little Darlin' - Masaaki Hirao
You Sure Know How to Hurt Someone - Ann-Margret
Bang Bang - Betty Chung
Fever - The McCoys
Scorpio - The Carnations
How Much Love Can One Heart Hold - Joe Perkins and The Rookies
I Want Your Love - The Cruisers
The Raging Sea - Gene Maltais
Scratching on My Screen - Ric Cartey
Fever - Edith Massey
It's a Gas - The Rumblers
Adult Books - X
Jukebox Babe - Alan Vega
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
Forming - The Germs
Vampira - The Misfits
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
Save It - Mel Robbins
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
Crawfish - Johnny Thunders and Patti Palladin
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
Punks Get off the Grass - Edith Massey
Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad - Tammy Wynette
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Jim Dandy - Ann-Margret
Roll with Me Henry - Etta James
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
Fever - Nancy Sit
I Would if I Only Kid - Ruth Brown
The Swag - Link Wray
Let's Go Baby - Billy Eldridge
Your Phone's Off the Hook - The Ramonetures
Wiped-Out - The Escorts
Margaya - The Fender Four
Wipe- Out - The Surf-aris
Surf Rat - The Rumblers
Treat Me Right - Mae West
Woo-Hoo - The 5,6,7,8s
These Boots Are Made for Walkin' - Mrs Miller
How Does That Grab You Darlin'? Nancy Sinatra
Harley Davidson - Brigitte Bardot
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep, Mountain High) - Wanderlea
My Baby Does the Hanky Panky - Rita Chao and The Quests
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Gunnin' for Peter - The Fabulous Wailers
Viens danser le twist - Johnny Hallyday
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
Big Girls Don't Cry - Edith Massey
Under My Thumb - Tina Turner
Johnny Are You Queer? Josie Cotton
What's Wrong with Me? X
Media Blitz - The Germs
Bikini Girls with Machine Guns - The Cramps
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Somethin' Else - Sid Vicious
Funnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Wild, Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
Love Me - The Phantom
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Breathless - X
Be Bop A Lula - Alan Vega
Bop Pills - Macy Skip Skipper
I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramonetures
Teenage Lobotomy - The Ramones
Heartbreak Hotel - Buddy Love
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Jim Dandy - Sara Lee and The Spades
Action Packed - Ronnie Dee
Rockin' Bones - Ronnie Dawson
Boss - The Rumblers
Can Your Pussy Do the Dog? The Cramps
Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice - The Monks
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Pedro Pistolas Twist - Los Twisters
You're Driving Me Crazy - Dorothy Berry
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley
Two Headed Sex Change - The Cramps
Cry-Baby - The Honey Sisters
Dames, Booze, Chains and Boots - The Cramps
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Pass the Hatchet - Roger and The Gypsies
He's the One - Ike and Tina Turner
Commanche - The Revels
Shakin' All Over - Johnny Kidd and The Pirates
Beat Girl - Zz en der Maskers
You Turn Me On - Mae West
Let's Spend the Night Together - Tina Turner
My Way - Nina Hagen

Upcoming Lobotomy Room dates for your social calendar!

Calling all hair-hoppers! Grab that can of Aqua Net and get teasing! Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s (third Wednesday of every month) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! Rat-up your hair like a teenage Jezebel and apply a thick layer of frosted white lipstick on Wednesday 21 February 2018 when Lobotomy Room commemorates the 30th anniversary of one of John Water’s best-loved movies – Hairspray! (The film premiered in Baltimore on 16 February 1988 and went into general release on 26 February). Rest assured we’re showing the original definitive camp classic starring Divine, Deborah Harry and Ricki Lake – most definitely NOT the 2007 abomination with John Travolta! So learn how to frug and Watusi and come see Hairspray, described by Rolling Stone as “a family movie both the Bradys and the Mansons could adore!" It promises to be a night of hair-raising fun!

Doors to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. Seating is limited: we can accommodate 30-35 people maximum. Arrive early to grab a seat and order a cocktail!

Event page

And the next Lobotomy Room dance party is Friday 23 February!

Event page

Further reading:

Follow me on tumblr for all your kitsch, camp, retro vintage sleaze and fifties homoerotica needs!

Follow me on twitter!

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

Lobotomy Room at Fontaine's DJ Set List 24 November 2017

From the Facebook events page:

Attention late night diversion seekers! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 24 November 2017!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Grainy black-and-white vintage erotica projected on the big screen all night for your adult viewing pleasure!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

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

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

Not that there's been a public outcry, but I’m trying to ease my way back into blogging regularly again after a lengthy hiatus. Stopping certainly wasn’t by choice! I’ve never stopped jotting-down my Lobotomy Room set lists from behind the Bamboo Lounge's DJ booth – I’ve just never got around to posting them. There have been a few calamities preventing me in recent months. At first the main issue was damned Photobucket. For the first several years of this blog (when I was at my most prolific), I used the photo-sharing website Photobucket to upload pics. If you’re a millennial or non-blogger, you might well have never even heard of Photobucket. They were an obligatory site in the Myspace era! Trust me, I now wish I'd never heard of Photobucket either. Plenty of people still use it for blogging or sharing photos on sites like Amazon and eBay. At first Photobucket was free to use. Later I used to pay an annual fee of something like $39.00 for the privilege. In summer 2017 Photobucket committed reputation-destroying corporate hara-kiri by abruptly notifying its users (it claims to have 100 million of them) by email that their online photo libraries would be held to ransom unless they signed-up for their new package of almost $400 a year! All over the internet, blogs suddenly had blank black squares where photos used to be. It led to a tsunami of negative press for Photobucket and was a PR disaster! Photobucket customer support confirmed to me my existing package was in place (and my blog posts would remain secure) until March 2018, which gave me a deadline to work toward. There was no way I was agreeing to the frankly ludicrous $399.99 a year package, so in the meantime my ambitious and time-consuming art project was to comb through several years’ worth of old blog posts and manually, painstakingly replace Photobucket html links with actual photos one by one. It took months – but I did it! Phew! But that meant for a long time, my priority was fixing old blog entries rather than posting new ones.

Hair hoppers are welcome – at Lobotomy Room!

More disastrously – on 17 November I was burgled! I’ve been living in the same building for about nine years now and the front door lock has always been an issue. For the lock to click shut you have to slam the door hard and most of the other tenants seemed blissfully unconcerned! (Living on the ground floor, I was always aware I was at greater risk of being burgled than them). I’ve complained about it to the landlord over the years. More recently the landlord has been undertaking repairs in the hallway to fix a damp problem and the walls had been stripped back to the exposed brick. In one corner close to my flat it was further stripped to just a panel of thin wood (where the original door used to be). It was a very opportunistic moment for burglars while that was going on. The robbers were able to gain entry to the building (probably because the front door hadn’t been shut properly) and then literally kick a hole in the hallway wall, push the wardrobe out of the way and crawl into my flat! When I got home from work that night there was a gaping hole in the wall, my door was wide open, the lights were on and the place had been completely ransacked.

/ Goodbye, every single hat I've ever owned /

The thieves took my laptop and iPad which is bad enough. I don’t have home insurance and my day job in the charity sector is - shall we say - modestly paid, so replacing these (especially so close to Christmas) is a totally unexpected drain on the finances. I’ve written off the iPad but I can’t function without a laptop so I have had to cough up well over £600 for that. I lost all the contents on the old laptop (documents, photos, music), but that’s not the end of the world. What’s most gutting is the robbers also stole a dark grey Muji weekend bag from the top of the wardrobe – that contained my entire collection of vintage and reproduction hats. I don’t even think they really intended to steal them: they probably just wanted something to stuff the iPad and the laptop into.  My vintage fez, my Scorpio Rising biker cap, my white leopard print fur flat cap … all gone! This is all American stuff I picked up over the years during trips to Las Vegas (for the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender) and San Francisco. Even the reproduction items are now so old they're discontinued and every bit as irreplaceable as the genuine vintage pieces. (I immediately contacted My Baby Jo in California about replacing my biker cap. The company that used to manufacture them has gone bust! ). So at the moment I’m still waking up angry every day, alternating between rage and depression and genuinely grieving for my stolen stuff! Yes, it is "only stuff" but it does feel like a major loss. I had to DJ bare-headed at this Lobotomy Room, which just felt wrong! But yes - I feel pretty despairing at the moment. 

Yikes! What a downer. OK let’s change the subject. This Lobotomy Room was particularly tough in terms of competing events happening on the same night. Dirty Water Records presented King Salami and The Cumberland 3 with Los Coyote Men at The Lexington– an absolutely killer garage punk / surf instrumental double bill that even I would have been tempted to attend! How unlucky! More annoyingly (and a bit suspiciously), a Cramps tribute event called Bad Music for Bad People was held at Paper Dress Vintage (the venue where Lobotomy Room got its start in 2013). That was especially galling considering I’ve been doing Lobotomy Room at Fontaine’s every last Friday of the month now since summer 2015, regularly billing it as a night of “Bad Music for Bad People” and “Songs The Cramps Taught Us!” And they even projected “vintage b-movies”! It’s not even like 24 November represented something significant like the birth of Lux Interior or the anniversary of his death. And it did siphon-off some of my usual crowd! But having said that, some of the Paper Dress Vintage attendees did wind up at my night afterwards (they said it finished by about 11 pm. The reports I heard the next day made it sound fairly tepid). Luckily in the end enough people descended into the Bamboo Lounge to make doing this Lobotomy Room worthwhile – and most importantly, people danced!

/ “The violence that was normally only a promise (or threat) in rock'n’roll was realized in Esquerita’s sound.” Charles Gillett in his book The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock‘n’Roll  /

Some eternal Lobotomy Room favourites celebrated birthdays in November. Such as the flamboyant, pompadoured "kween" of outsider rhythm and blues Esquerita (aka Eskew Reeder Jr, born in Greenville, South Carolina on 20 November 1935. He died in 1986). Esquerita was such a beauty! I made a point of playing “Esquerita and The Voola” – which sounds like he’s shrieking a lunatic voodoo incantation. It's an invitation to human sacrifice!

Meanwhile, glorious Bold Soul Sister, blissed-out and fright-wigged Acid Queen and the absolute tigress of rhythm and blues Tina Turner (née Anna Mae Bullock) turned 78 on 26 November. (Above is the fabulous Tina ripping it up onstage with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in the seventies). I can’t imagine not playing a frantic 1960s Ike and Tina Turner rave-up at Lobotomy Room, but I also threw in Tina’s solo 1975 cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Does anyone not like Tina Turner? At one point a friendly and garrulous woman with a cocktail in her hand joined me behind the DJ booth and started flicking through my DJ bag. She asked, “Do you mind me doing this?” I smiled and said "No" but of course I did! That’s a real liberty! All DJs hate that, and she was getting in my way. My solution was to say, “I’m going to play some Tina Turner for you. You should dance to this!” And she did! Problem solved! Thank you, Ms Turner!

Anyway, here's what I played:

Tall Cool One - The Fabulous Wailers
Drumble - Dennis and The Menaces
Blockade - The Rumblers
Road Runner - The 5,6,7,8s
Jukebox Babe - Alan Vega
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
I Don't Need You No More - The Rumblers
Johnny Lee - Faye Adams
Commanche - The Revels
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
I Need Your Lovin' - Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford
Bombora - The Original Surfaris
Rock-A-Bop - Sparkle Moore
Wild Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
Let's Have a Party - Wanda Jackson
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Bop Pills - Macy "Skip" Skipper
Wiped-Out - The Escorts
Let's Go Baby - Billy Eldridge
Big Bounce - Shirley Caddell
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Adult Books - X
Intoxica - The Revels
Wipe Out - The Surfaris
Batman - Link Wray and His Raymen
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Surfin' Bird - The Trashmen
Pedro Pistolas Twist - Los Twisters
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Viens danser le twist - Johnny Hallyday
Ultra Twist - The Cramps
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep, Mountain High) - Wanderlea
Under My Thumb - Tina Turner
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
These Boots Are Made for Walkin' - Mrs Miller
Last of the Secret Agents - Nancy Sinatra
Dance with Me Henry - Ann-Margret
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Somethin' Else - Sid Vicious
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Be Bop a Lula - Alan Vega
Margaya - The Fender Four
Blitzkrieg Bop - The Ramonetures
Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice - The Monks
Year 1 - X
Forming - The Germs
Tunnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Aphrodisiac - Bow Wow Wow
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Surf Rat - The Rumblers
Love Me - The Phantom
Scorpio - The Carnations
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Vampira - The Misfits
Boss - The Rumblers

Further reading:

Follow me on tumblr for all your kitsch, camp, retro vintage sleaze and fifties homoerotica needs!

Follow me on twitter!

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

Remember: Lobotomy Room the incredibly strange dance club is the last Friday of every accursed month! Therefore the next one is Friday 29 December (come head-bang away your post-Christmas blues!). The film club is third Wednesday of every month. BBC2 is finally screening the sublime series Feud: Bette and Joan as of Saturday 16 December. Therefore Lobotomy Room is jumping on the bandwagon (I mean, embracing the spirit!) with a themed mini-season of "hagsploitation" horror films starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis - starting on 20 December with the mutha of them all, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Details to follow soon!

Lobotomy Room at Fontaine's DJ Set List 24 June 2016

/ Won't you join me for a cocktail - at Lobotomy Room? /

From the Facebook events page:

Wilder than you can imagine! Explicit beyond belief! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s premiere Art Deco vice den Fontaine’s! Friday 24 June! 

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabillybooze party! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities! And Other Weird Shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety).

Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Now with vintage erotica projected on the wall for your adult viewing pleasure! Come for the £6 cocktails - stay for the putrid music and dirty movies!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

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

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

Wow. Bumpy times! Where to start? My 25 May 2016 Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies film club screening of Valley of the Dolls had to be cancelled at the ultra-last minute (as in, on the night itself) because Fontaine’s projector packed-up just hours before it was due to start. What timing! And it was due to be a full house.  As anyone following this blog knows I’ve had my share of travails club promoting (mortifying technical glitches, DJ’ing to cavernously empty rooms) but having to frantically pump-out Facebook updates urging people not to come to my event (after having aggressively promoted the ass of it for a month pleading with people to attend) represented a definite nadir. I was gutted!

/ Ai chihuahua! Jayne Mansfield and canine companion. Flyer by Ego Rodriguez Illustrations /

After the disaster on Wednesday I wasn’t filled with confidence and sure enough the Lobotomy Room club night that Friday was pretty dismal. Two people turned up, surveyed the empty room, finished their drinks and went back upstairs, never to return! Not being able to project my vintage erotica on the big screen while I DJ’d was a definite drag. I admitted defeat by 12:30 am.

Just to rub salt in the wounds: Bloc Bar in Camden appears to have thrown Cockabilly under a bus! It’s hard to gauge how permanent this situation is, but the night that was Cockabilly’s is now committed to someone else. In the past the now-defunct, much-missed George & Dragon in Shoreditch would invite us to do Cockabilly there, bounce us out after a few months and then eventually invite us back. No bridges have been burned, but for the foreseeable future Cockabilly is in limbo.

Flash forward to June and things look much rosier. The film projector at Fontaine’s is operational again and Valley of the Dolls was re-scheduled for Wednesday 22 June. Mercifully, the night went off without a hitch. In fact it was triumphant! I swung into action promoting the screening on social media like a demon again and the numbers wound up being even bigger for the postponed night. (In the end, we got a few more people than for The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield and Kitten with a Whip, a bit less than Desperate Living – our busiest film club to date. In any case, the Bamboo Lounge was nicely full!).

/ "Neely O'Hara - nice kid turned lush": Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls /

“If you’ve never seen Valley of the Dolls before, it is a life-changing film,” I told the attendees by way of introduction. “You will be quoting lines from this for the rest of your life!” I’ve only ever watched Valley on DVD at home, so seeing it surrounded by an enthusiastic audience tipsy on Fontaine's potent cocktails was a revelation. The crowd loved it and it was fun to see the bits they really reacted to. I went for an ill-timed piss so missed their response to Sharon Tate’s “You know how bitchy fags can be” line, but of course they went nuts for the infamous ladies room “wig yanking” scene. People spontaneously applauded Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) when she tied that scarf over her grey hair and defiantly announced, “I’m going out a star …” But for me, Valley of the Dolls is really about the monstrous, rampaging, majestically awful performance of Patty Duke as Neely O'Hara. Like Mommy Dearest and Showgirls, Valley truly is a perfect film and the ultimate campy “bad movie we love.” I wouldn’t change one single frame of it! I’ll inevitably do a separate blog post about Valley of the Dolls to do it full justice.

After the successful film night, I was in a much more positive frame of mind for Friday’s Lobotomy Room on 24 June 2016. That date, of course, is now historic: voting on the European Union referendum was on Thursday 23 June and that Friday morning we woke up to the sickening news confirming Brexit. In response, on the Facebook events page I posted:

I know the news today is gloomy, but if you feel like headbanging away the heartbreak I will be playing ANGRY punk music and loads of European / Continental foreign-language cover versions LOUD downstairs at Fontaine’s tonight! Let’s get drunk and twist angrily to Johnny Hallyday! I'll be projecting dirty movies (sorry - "vintage erotica") on the big screen all night to accompany the putrid music.

Ruby (Fontaine’s beehive-haired boss lady) suggested cancelling Lobotomy Room because 1) one of the speakers downstairs in the Bamboo Lounge is malfunctioning (it didn’t work for Valley of the Dolls but I compensated by cranking up the volume extra loud. It was OK for a movie night, but not ideal for a club night) and 2) the gruesome news about Brexit made her suspect she wouldn’t get any customers that night. (Seriously – it felt like London was numb with heavy shock and depression that day). I told her, "Let’s carry on as normal but I’ll do Lobotomy Room upstairs instead. Maybe after such an awful day people will want to come out and have a drink". It worked out fine and in fact we had a decent, rowdy crowd straight through until 1 am. The sole downside to doing Lobotomy Room upstairs is I couldn’t project my “blue” movies!

As promised, as a protest I worked in some pro-European foreign language stuff: Portuguese (via Brazil’s wailing sixties pop starlet Wanderlea), French (the sultry, pouting Brigitte Bardot and Johnny Hallyday) and Polish (the utterly berserk Violetta Villas). And some angry, snarling punk too: X, The Germs, The Cramps, The Ramones – and self-styled “queen of punk” Mama Edith Massey.

/ Adorable young Violetta Villas (1938 - 2011) in "hair hopper" mode. Think of her as a deranged low-budget Eastern European hybrid of Yma Sumac, Bardot, Jayne Mansfield and Charo. Why isn't this woman revered as a kitsch naive outsider artist and queer icon?  /

Adult Books - The Ramonetures
High Wall - The Wailers
Taboo - The Shangaans
Kismiaz - The Cramps
Beatnik - The Champs
I'm a Bad, Bad Girl - Little Esther
I Love the Life I Live - Esquerita
Train to Nowhere - The Champs
The Flirt - Shirley and Lee
Bombora - The Original Surf-aris
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thundes and Patti Palladin
Bossa Nova Baby - Elvis Presley
Hearbreak Hotel - Ann-Margret
Jailhouse Rock - Masaaki Hirao
Go Calypso - Mamie Van Doren
Mama Looka Boo Boo - Robert Mitchum
Dona Wanna - Wanda Jackson
Vesuvius - The Revels
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
Jukebox Baby - Alan Vega
Town without Pity - James Chance
Torture - Kris Jensen
Dream Lover - The Paris Sisters
I Wish I Were a Princess - Little Peggy March
Margaya - The Fender Four
Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad - Tammy Wynette
Leave Married Women Alone - Jimmy Cavallo
That's a Pretty Good Love - Big Maybelle
Love Potion # 9 - Nancy Sit
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep Mountain High) - Wanderlea
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
Adult Books - X
I'm A Woman - Peggy Lee
Fist City - Loretta Lynn
Three Cool Chicks - The 5,6,7,8s
The Swag - Link Wray
Harley Davidson - Brigitte Bardot
Carbona Not Glue - The Ramonetures
Teenage Lobotomy - The Ramones
Boss - The Rumblers
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard
Suey - Jayne Mansfield
Pass the Hatchet - Roger and The Gypsies
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
Wiped Out - The Escorts
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Rip It Up - Elvis Presley
Kruschev Twist - Melvin Gayle
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Twist Talk - Jack Hammer
Viens danser le twist - Johnny Hallyday
Beat Girl - ZZ en de Maskers
It's a Gas - The Rumblers
Chicken Grabber - The Nite Hawks
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
Intoxica - The Centurions
Sweetie Pie - Eddie Cochran
Cry-baby - The Honey Sisters
How Much Love Can One Heart Hold? Joe Perkins and The Rookies
Fujiyama Mama - Annisteen Allen
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
Roadrunner - The Fabulous Wailers
Meu Bem Lollipop - Wanderlea
Contact - Brigitte Bardot
Breathless - X
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Heartbreak Hotel - Buddy Love
Big Bad Boss Beat - The Teen Beats
Jim Dandy - Sara Lee and The Spades
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Treat Me Right - Mae West
Punks Get Off the Grass - Edith Massey
Little Queenie - Bill Black's Combo
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Wild Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
Batman - Link Wray
Media Blitz - The Germs
Czterdziesci Kasztanów (Forty Chestnuts) - Violetta Villas
Under My Thumb - Tina Turner


Further reading:

Never been to a Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies film club night before? Curious? Read this revoltingly candid first-hand account! Disguised under a Jayne Mansfield wig, intrepid journalist Corinna Tomrley of red-hot Loverboy Magazine entered the Mondo Trasho Wild Wild World of Lobotomy Room and afterwards wrote this shock-by-shock exposé!

Read about all the previous antics at Lobotomy Rooms to date here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Follow me on tumblr for all your kitsch, camp, retro vintage sleaze and fifties homoerotica needs!

Follow me on twitter!

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

Lobotomy Room at Fontaine's DJ Set List 29 April 2016

From the Facebook events page:

Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s premiere Art Deco vice den Fontaine’s! Friday 29 April! With sensational special offer cocktails on the night!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Curiosities and other Weird Shit! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Now with vintage erotica projected on the wall for your adult viewing pleasure! Come for the £6 cocktails - stay for the putrid music and dirty movies!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

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

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

/ Human sacrifice is strictly optional - at Lobotomy Room! Pic is from Macumba Love (1960) - a voodoo-themed horror film set in Brazil/

OK I’ve probably claimed this already – but this installment was perhaps the single best Lobotomy Room yet! I’ve learned to approach each one with an open mind and minimal expectations. The previous two Lobotomy Rooms in a row were pretty quiet (think morgue or funeral parlour quiet). But on the plus side, my Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies film club that Wednesday night (27 April) was bustling. (The film selection was the ultra kitsch 1968 exploitation classick The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield. La Mansfield is, of course, the face and patron saint of Lobotomy Room. It was gratifying to see the attendees really embrace the spirit and celebrate all things Jayne. That night warrants its own separate blog post).  So I was cautiously optimistic about Friday.

Friday night began quietly. Then a group of people would arrive – followed by another group – and then more. And finally I glanced up and we had a nice buzzing (and most importantly dancing) crowd. And what a hip, stylish and sexy bunch! Of course I have no photographic evidence. (Multi-tasking isn’t my forte and it’s pretty hard to DJ and dash around with a digital camera documenting the scene).  But trust me – it was fabulous.

As per usual I endeavoured to whip-up an ambiance of hardcore sensual and depraved vintage sleaze, musically and visually. (Apparently one of Fontaine’s young male bar staff went upstairs and told boss lady Ruby, “It’s a weird atmosphere down there.” That’s Lobotomy Room for you!). I played burlesk tittyshaker films on the big screen most of the night (Bettie Page, Tempest Storm and Lili St Cyr in bump-and-grind action, Russ Meyer’s boob-tastic Mondo Topless). Towards the end of the night I swapped to fifties and sixties beefcake homoerotica. At the first glimpse of grainy black and white male semi-nudity, a guy’s voice exclaimed, “Why didn’t you start with this? I’ve been looking at tits for an hour!” That was one of my highlights of the night.

Like I said, I have no shots from the 29 April Lobotomy Room, but here are a few shots from the Mondo Jayne Mansfield film night on 27 April.



/ Above: Trixi Malicous and Corinna. Corinna (on the right) had specially ordered the platinum blonde wig and miniature "toy chihuahua" from eBay for the night. Trixi always looks like that! /



/ Emma and Emily /



/ Corinna and I /

See more photos from The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield night here: 

My musical selections from the 29 April Lobotomy Room: 

A Cruise to the Moon - Lydia Lunch
High Wall - The Fabulous Wailers
Sheba - Johnny and The Hurricanes
Three Cool Chicks - The 5,6,7,8s
Monkey Bird - The Revels
Wimoweh - Yma Sumac
Kismiaz - The Cramps
Adult Books - X
Little Darlin' - Masaaki Hirao
Beatnik - The Champs
Taboo - The Shangaans
Accentuate the Positive - The Bill Black Combo
Mama Looka Boo-Boo - Robert Mitchum
Dona Wanna - Wanda Jackson
Go Calypso - Mamie Van Doren
Mambo Baby - Ruth Brown
She Wants to Mambo - Johnny Thunders and Patti Palladin
Love Potion # 9 - Nancy Sit
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep Mountain High) - Wanderlea
Blockade - The Rumblers
Black Tarantula - Jody Reynolds
Drive Daddy Drive - Little Sylvia
I Love the Life I Live - Esquerita
Sweet Little Pussycat - Andre Williams
Bombie- Johnny Sharp and The Yellow Jackets
Fever - Nancy Sit
Comin' Home Baby - The Delmonas
Rock'n'Roll Radio - The Ramonetures
Let's Go Baby - Billy Eldridge
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Wiped-Out - The Escorts
Here Comes the Bug - The Rumblers
He's The One - Ike and Tina Turner
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Gunnin' for Peter - The Fabulous Wailers
Viens danser le twist - Johnny Hallyday
Khrushchev  Twist - Melvin Gayle
Ultra Twist - The Cramps
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Surfin' Bird - The Trashmen 
Batman Theme - Link Wray and His Wraymen
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Funnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Breathless - X
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Action Packed - Ronnie Dee
Jim Dandy - Sara Lee and The Spades
The Big Bounce - Shirley Caddell
Juke Box Baby - Alan Vega
Margaya - The Fender Four
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
C'mon Everybody - Sid Vicious
Boss - The Rumblers
Sweetie Pie - Eddie Cochran
Intoxica - The Centurions
Aphrodisiac - Bow Wow Wow
Heatwave - Martha and The Vandellas
How Much Love Can One Heart Hold? Joe Perkins and The Rookies
Where's My Money? Willie Jones
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
Trash - The New York Dolls
Honolulu Rock'n'Roll - Eartha Kitt
Rock-A-Hula - Elvis Presley
Chicken - The Cramps
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins

Upcoming Lobotomy Room dates for your social calendar:

Wednesday 25 May 2016: As host and DJ of the regular monthly Mondo Trasho punkabilly club night Lobotomy Room, I – Graham Russell - will occasionally crash Fontaine’s free weekly film night and screen a rancid title of my choice, with an emphasis on the cult, the queer and the camp! The Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies film club selection in May is … The Valley of The Dolls! Wednesday 25 May!

“You have to climb Mount Everest … to get to The Valley of The Dolls.” Before Mommie Dearest … before Showgirls … the original “What the hell were they thinking?” Bad Movie We Love was The Valley of the Dolls. (Or Vallée des poupées if you want to get all French about it). A perennial favourite of drag queens and a cult classic for connoisseurs of kitsch, the unintentionally hilarious and wildly entertaining 1967 film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s lurid 1966 bestseller took the already trashy source material – and went even tawdrier with it! (At the film’s premiere, an outraged Susann reportedly called the film “a piece of shit!”).

A cautionary tale about the perils of show business, it follows the travails of three ambitious casualties of the glamour jungle: friends Anne, Neely and Jennifer. (The “dolls” of the title refer to the fistfuls of uppers and downers the characters pop like Tic Tacs throughout – usually washed down with booze).The Valley of The Dolls packs everything discriminating thrill-seekers demand in its lunatic two hours: hammy performances, pill-popping, bouffant wigs, catfights, slurring drunken scenes, rehab, drug-fueled meltdowns and crap-tastic musical numbers.

This screening is dedicated to the memory of Dolls’ recently deceased-leading lady Patty Duke (14 December 1946 – 29 March 2016). Former child star Duke is rivetingly awful rampaging through the role of Neely O’Hara, a scenery-chewing performance so berserk it can be favourably likened to Ann-Margret’s in Kitten with a Whip. Get yourself a stiff drink and strap yourselves in for a wild ride when Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies presents The Valley of The Dolls!

As usual: arrive circa 8 pm to order your drinks and grab the best seats. The film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. The Bamboo Lounge seats about 22 people. If you’re feeling proactive, contact Fontaine’s to reserve a seat in advance: email ruby@fontaines.bar or call 07718 000546. Events page

Friday 27 May 2016: Oh god, it's happening again ... the next Lobotomy Room club night. Events page. 

Further reading:

Read about all the previous antics at Lobotomy Rooms to date here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Follow me on tumblr for all your kitsch, camp, retro vintage sleaze and fifties homoerotica needs!

Follow me on twitter!

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