Reflections on ... the death of Warhol Superstar Ivy Nicholson

/ Pictured: Ivy Nicholson in her 1950s supermodel heyday /

“Ivy Nicholson was a working-class girl from New York City who lit up the 1950s as one of Europe’s top fashion models, married a French count, posed topless for Salvador Dali and became one of the first “superstars” in Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was a flashbulb life built on bravado and sheer magnetism. But it was not a solid life, and when the 1960s ended and the big checks stopped coming, she was left on her own. She spent her last decades in or near poverty, sometimes homeless, telling anyone who would listen that she was on her way back up.” 

The New York Times obituary for erstwhile fashion model and Warhol Superstar Ivy Nicholson (née Irene Nicholson, 22 February 1933 - 25 October 2021) – who has died aged 88 – is compulsory reading! My highlights from her fabulous, messy life: 

“In her 20s Ms Nicholson appeared on the covers of Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Bazaar and other magazines. She built a reputation: fearlessly inventing characters and looks for her shoots, but often arriving hours late to the studio and refusing to pose until someone brought foie gras or met some other demand.” 

“When Howard Hawks flew her to Egypt in 1954 for a role in his epic movie Land of the Pharaohs, she objected to the studio’s multiyear contract. So, as she later told the story, she bit one of the actors to get out of the deal. Her replacement was Joan Collins.” 

“She went on to get small parts in Italian movies and by her account became obsessed with the actor Anthony Perkins. When he did not return her affections, she later said, she slit her wrists. The suicide attempt cost her a role in Federico Fellini’s 8½, according to her unfinished memoir.” 

Reading it, I was struck by Nicholson’s parallels with her fellow Warhol superstar Nico (another international supermodel in the fifties who actually did appear in a Fellini film) and Maila Nurmi (aka horror movie hostess Vampira), who also heedlessly squandered opportunities and burnt bridges in her prime and later lived in poverty. (Nurmi also romantically pursued Tony Perkins!).  

/ Andy Warhol and Ivy Nicholson in 1964 /

As a frequently homeless older woman, Nicholson maintained her sense of style and looked strikingly ravaged and wraith-like (like Nico, Chet Baker or Anita Pallenberg she exuded ruined glamour). Despite clearly difficult hardships, the admirably resilient Nicholson seemingly lived on her own terms and remained a free spirit until the end. What a woman! 

Read the full obituary here. 

See late-period portraits of Nicholson by photographer Conrad Ventur here. 

A nice insight into what Nicholson was like in her New York bag lady phase. 

Reflections on ... Brigid Berlin (6 September 1939 – 17 July 2020)

/ Portrait of Andy Warhol and his entourage of Superstars by Cecil Beaton, 1969. Left to right: Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling, Warhol and Ultra Violet /

Farewell to one of the last surviving Warhol Superstars (and last links to old-school New York bohemia) Brigid Berlin (sometimes known as Brigid Polk, 6 September 1939 – 17 July 2020), who has died aged 80. 

Like fellow Superstar Edie Sedgwick, Berlin was the wayward daughter from an old money high society family (her father was the chairman of the Hearst media empire) who jettisoned the role of debutante ordained for her to gleefully letting her freak flag fly at the Royal House of Warhol in the sixties and seventies instead. As Berlin herself explained, “My mother wanted me to be a slim respectable socialite … instead I became an overweight troublemaker.” 

/ Portrait of Brigid Berlin by Gerard Malanga, 1971 /

An outsized character in every sense (at one point her weight topped 300 pounds), Berlin is a ferocious, abrasive, frequently naked, sometimes scary and often hilariously funny presence in the underground cinema of Andy Warhol. Her performances in films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Imitation of Christ (1967), and Bad (1977) are rivetingly obnoxious. Berlin was also a notorious speed freak, who terrorized the unsuspecting in the VIP backroom of bohemian haunt Max’s Kansas City by jabbing them with her hypodermic needle of amphetamines. (Warhol films Berlin furiously ranting and shooting-up speed in Chelsea Girls). 

/ Dual Polaroid portrait of Berlin with fellow Warhol Superstar Nico, circa early seventies /

Berlin was also an artist in her own right, using the mediums of Polaroid photography and “tit prints” (dipping her own breasts into paint and pressing them onto paper). Until Warhol’s death, Berlin (who’d kicked amphetamines by this point) worked as the receptionist at his Interview magazine – albeit an extremely unconventional one. (She preferred to eat candy, knit and fuss over her pet dogs than answer telephones). It’s undeniably disillusioning and bizarre to learn that as she aged, the rebellious Berlin gradually reverted to type, ultimately becoming every bit as conservative as her patrician socialite mother. Towards the end of her life, Berlin was even a Trump supporter! I did warm to her, though, when I read that in Berlin’s reclusive housebound later years, she “cleaned obsessively, then cleaned some more.” For me, the unapologetically butch and androgynous Berlin exuded a “big dyke energy”, but the otherwise thorough New York Times obituary doesn’t touch on her sexual preferences or romantic life. Director John Waters was an admirer (Berlin made cameo appearances in Waters’ films Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998) and he wrote the introduction to her coffee table book of Polaroid photography). In the NY Times obit he sweetly recalls, “I was scared of her in the best way.” Berlin is the subject of the 2000 documentary Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story, which I clearly need to see.

Reflections on ... Tally Brown, New York (1979)

/ Tally Brown photographed by Francesco Scavullo in 1969 /

"... but the most magnificent, inimitable fräulein is the zaftig subject of Tally Brown, New York (1979) - a must-see for all those interested in performance and the cultural history of New York in the 70s. The bewigged Miss Brown, with false eyelashes capable of sending her short, round body aloft, is the most mesmerising raconteur and cabaret artist you’ll hear all year. Opening the film with her indelible cover of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” Tally concludes with “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” performing that song’s line – “You’re not alone! / Give me your hands”—as a rallying cry far more rousing than several decades’ worth of tepid gay-rights chants."

Melissa Anderson reviewing Tally Brown, New York in The Village Voice in 2003

/ Tally Brown photographed by Francesco Scavullo in 1969 /

Watching Tally Brown, New York (1979), I couldn’t help but think: thank god, a filmmaker documented this remarkable, charismatic and completely original woman. And that it was someone as simpatico as queer New German cinema maverick Rosa von Praunheim.

Von Praunheim weaves a revealing portrait of chanteuse, actress, show business doyenne, bohemian earth mother and all-round diva Tally Brown (1924 – 1989), preserving both her riveting nightclub act and her personal offstage life. And good thing he did as Brown -  a vivid scene-maker in New York’s underground art subculture in the sixties and seventies - seems to have completely fallen through the cracks in the decades following her death. A Torch for Tally – the blues album she recorded in the fifties – is long forgotten. The Andy Warhol art movies she appeared in like Camp (1965) and Ari and Mario (1966) languish unseen in locked vaults at The Warhol Foundation (I managed to catch them when the British Film Institute held a comprehensive Warhol retrospective about ten years ago. Brown is magnetic in both). In 2017, Tally Brown barely seems to exist as a footnote.

/ Tally Brown photographed by Francesco Scavullo in 1969 /

The Barbican screened this ultra-rare documentary (in a grainy 16-millimetre print on loan from The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) on 4 October as part of it’s The Grime and The Glamour:NYC 1976 – 1990 series devoted to “the wild days and night of New York’s coolest era”. As the title implies, von Praunheim positions flaming creature Brown - a native New Yorker - as the personification of her city’s decayed glamour. In atmospheric and beautifully degraded footage, we see seventies New York at its most gloriously scuzzy, grungy and decrepit: the porn cinemas and peepshows of Times Square, gay bathhouses, The Chelsea Hotel, neon signs, dive bars, dissolute nightclubs. And it all looks heavenly!

/ Tally Brown photographed by Billy Name in the sixties (almost certainly at Max's Kansas City). This shot is in Name's 1997 book All Tomorrow's Parties - the first time I ever heard of Tally Brown /

/ Lady sings the blues: Tally Brown in her youth /

Brown was a classically-trained (at Julliard) and adventurous singer with a disparate repertoire who regularly performed at venues like Reno Sweeney’s, SNAFU and gay bathhouse The Continental Baths. Onstage, we see Brown deliver jazz and blues standards (like “Goody Goody” and an intense, emotionally tormented version of Kurt Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny”) with commanding authority. But she also had a penchant for wittily and radically re-interpreting modern rock music like “Love in Vain” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by The Rolling Stones. She was especially partial to David Bowie. In the film we see her cover “Heroes” (she sings the final verses in Marlene Dietrich-like German), an eerie “Lady Grinning Soul” and “Rock’n’Roll Suicide.” Accompanied only by a pianist, Brown transforms the Bowie tracks into perverse torch songs. Call me a heretic but I’m no “rockist” or Bowie fan, so I prefer Brown’s slinky, dramatic, tortured and Eartha Kitt-like versions to the originals.

Brown moved in avant-garde circles and in von Praunheim’s film we encounter a pantheon of the era’s countercultural hip queer elite, including her friends Taylor Mead (his drooling village idiot antics are either enchantingly childlike or grating depending on your sensibility) and the effervescent, self-deprecating Holly Woodlawn. A silent Andy Warhol is briefly seen (but not interviewed). At one point No Wave “it girl” Anya Phillips performs an abject burlesque routine to a bar full of indifferent men. A glittering, turbaned Eartha Kitt is viewed carried aloft on the shoulders of a semi-naked African-American bodybuilder (she was then starring in the Broadway production of Timbuktu). For Divine fans the film offers a bonanza. We see him offstage with his own cropped greying hair, clad in a red kaftan and then onstage in full drag in a fragment of the 1978 stage production The Neon Woman. Post-show Brown “interviews” Divine backstage and jokes about regularly getting mistaken for him - and even signing autographs as him.

/ Above: Eartha Kitt as she appears in Tally Brown, New York (costumed for the musical Timbuktu) /

/ Divine and Tally Brown /

/ Divine (as Flash Storm) backstage during a performance of The Neon Woman at Hurrah in New York, 1978 /

/ Grace Jones and Tally Brown /

In an ideal world Brown would be revered as a LGBTQ icon. Certainly, she has qualities that should make her catnip for aficionados of camp. For one thing, Brown looks like an escapee from a John Waters film. Squint and she can resemble both Divine and Edith Massey. Her highly individual and distinctive appearance is extreme and drag queen-like. She favoured white powder, heavy black eye shadow, false eyelashes as thick as tarantulas and huge, ratty bouffant wigs. (Judging by the film, she also chain-smoked like a demon).  Brown’s plump feline face can evoke both Kewpie doll or Kabuki mask.

/ Tally Brown in the underground film Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) /

And she was zaftig. Or Rubenesqe. Hell, the rotund Brown was frankly and defiantly fat and owned it. Von Praunheim shows her visiting a much-younger artist ex-lover who lives in The Chelsea Hotel. Asked what attracted him to Brown, he explains it was her sensuality and confidence about her size, likening her to “a fertility goddess … like the Venus of Willendorf.” Unfortunately, by the time von Praunheim made this film, Brown’s body was a ruined temple. Following an accident that shattered her knee, she relied on a cane and lived with a degree of immobility and pain.

Tally Brown, New York is most enthralling when von Praunheim simply follows Brown wandering around her local neighbourhood as she shields her vampiric pallor with a pink parasol, just like Vampira or Lily Munster. Or visiting her elderly mother in Florida (which Brown dismisses as “a geriatric ghetto”). The Floridian sunbathing seniors in pastel-coloured leisurewear stare aghast as Brown passes by. During these segments, accomplished raconteur Brown extemporises on the soundtrack about the vagaries of life on fringes of show business (she speaks with maternal tenderness about fallen Warhol superstars doomed to die young like Ingrid Superstar, Andrea Feldman and Candy Darling), her encounters with the Mafia, her love of marijuana (she was initiated into smoking reefer by jazz musicians and is contemptuous of “the Woodstock generation” embracing it). Her speaking voice is posh, cultured (she’s clearly had elocution lessons) and reminiscent of Eartha Kitt’s or Elizabeth Taylor’s. Brown got her start singing rhythm-and-blues in sleazy burlesque joints and her preferred audience was old strippers and young sailors. Asked about singing at The Continental Baths, she purrs that it turned her on. (“I love real decadence …”). As well as New York and Florida, the film shuttles to other places Brown lived over the years while touring in theatrical productions such as The Pajama Game, Medea and Mame, including Las Vegas, Hollywood and New Orleans. Wherever she performed, Brown immersed herself in the local demi monde. In Vegas she embraced a nocturnal lifestyle, performing three or four shows daily and then not sleeping for days at a time – perhaps outing herself as speed freak? Brown reminisces about partying with the drag queens of New Orleans’ French Quarter while von Praunheim shows us a leather man in chaps loitering outside a gay bar, his furry ass exposed in a pair of chaps. Ah, the low-life of Bourbon Street! Basking in Tally Brown’s ambience for 93-minutes is intoxicating.

Remembering Nico (16 October 1938 - 18 July 1988)

Warhol superstar Nico (16 October 1938 - 18 July 1988) - the ultimate wraith-cheekboned, crypt-voiced, chain-smoking, heroin-ravaged chanteuse and the Marlene Dietrich of punk - died on this day in 1988.

A nice way to remember her: These two moody and dramatic portraits of androgynous crop-haired 18-year old beatnik Nico in her fashion modeling days in Paris in 1956.

Below: a much later shot of the angel-of-death diva in the 1980s. (The cigarette was ever-present, spanning decades).

Note the skull-studded black leather wristband she's wearing here - one of her punk-y sartorial trademarks in the 1980s. I wonder who has it now, or if she was cremated wearing it? And did anyone ever smoke a cigarette with such bleak conviction? I've blogged about Nico many times: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico here; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard "My Funny Valentine" (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; and finally, When Patti Smith Met Nico.

Mixed Bag O' Shite Updates: Part Two! Last Blog Before Christmas

Tom of Finland Christmas

Things have felt rushed and chaotic since Autumn 2012. First DJ’ing at Bestival, followed by a long weekend in Paris in September 2012, then two weeks in Canada (I got back 2 November). A couple of draining weeks of jetlag and cold ensued after that.  Next thing I know, we're hurtling towards Christmas!

My mind has felt fogged-over and distracted lately, but there is a backlog of stuff I want to blog about. So this entry will be a bit of an epic catch-up about various random (schizophrenic?) things that have preoccupied me over the past few months.

/ Gee: Do you think he dresses to the left? /

Friday 19 October 2012 was the opening night launch party for an exhibition of the red-hot 1950s beefcake / physique pin-up photography of John Palatinus at the Space Station Sixty Five gallery in London. Needless to say my friends and I were there. I’ve long been an admirer of Palatinus’s work, and photos of naked men and free booze are two of my favourite things in life. As a bonus, Palatinus (now an impressively dapper 83-year old) and his curator and archivist Alan Harmon were there in person (and very articulate and affable they were, too). Anyway, the party was a blast.

/ Photographer John Palatinus and curator Alan Harmon /



/ Christopher and I in front of one our favourite shots /

Palatinus’s 1950s bodybuilder rockabilly pin-ups may be slathered in baby oil and virtually naked except for engineer boots or a sailor's cap, often with ropes or chains coiled around them, but they still retain a sweetness and naivety which would be impossible to capture today.  (This is the same quality that also makes mid-century female cheesecake photos of, say, Bettie Page or Jayne Mansfield so beguiling. It’s hard to define: an un-ironic lack of self-consciousness?).

More examples of Palatinus at his best, all taken circa the late 1950s

I find this model (apparently named Bob Ireland) particularly heart-melting. He looks so au courant with his sexy, scruffy little beard. If he rocked up to The Joiner’s Arms or The George & Dragon in Shoreditch looking like that, he wouldn’t be buying his own drinks all night

Palatinus was arrested on obscenity charges in 1959 at the height of the McCarthy witch hunt era. Most of his work was seized and destroyed. What was especially fascinating about the exhibit (which closed on 18 November 2012) was its inclusion of contemporary newspaper articles covering Palatinus’s arrest: the press didn’t just publish his name and home address – it also detailed the full names, addresses and occupations of his mail order clientele! It makes you shudder thinking about the shame and destroyed lives of these presumably closeted men all over the US in the repressed 1950s, for something so innocuous. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Afterward, my friends and I continued the party at ultra rough, old-school boozer The Little Apple nearby in Kennington. Christopher embraced the spirit of things by donning a sailor cap. (The cap is actually mine! I lent it to him; Christopher was going to be playing a sailor in a pop video).

 

Read more about John Palatinus on his official website. Alan Harmon's V-M-P Vintage Male Physique blog is a real treasure trove; I highly encourage you to check it out. You can see more of my photos from the night on my flickr page.

I avidly follow Decaying Hollywood Mansions  in all its manifestations (it's a Facebook group, a tumblr page and a blog). Think of it as a guide to the haunted, eerie and crepuscular subterranean underbelly of Old Hollywood, in the vein of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. A few months ago they posted some intriguing photos of the actress Merle Oberon in the long-forgotten, very kitsch-looking 1946 Technicolour exotica oddity A Night in Paradise. (It looks like the cinematic equivalent of Yma Sumac's delirious music). 

Merle Oberon in A Night in Paradise (1946)

I hadn’t thought of Oberon in ages and it reminded me of her strange, secretive life story. Her exact origins will always be clouded in mystery, but it appears the Anglo-Indian Oberon was born in 1911 in Bombay of mixed race heritage (her mother was Indian, her father British). For the entirety of her life (she died aged 68 in 1979) Oberon denied her biracial background and “passed herself off” as white. When her dark-skinned and sari-clad mother eventually moved with Oberon to her Hollywood mansion, Oberon told everyone she was her maid! Oberon was widely regarded as one of the great beauties of her era; apparently even Marlene Dietrich was jealous of her. To modern eyes, she certainly looks like an exquisite Asian woman (film historian John Kobal would accurately describe her exotic beauty as “jasmine scented”).

Nonetheless, it wasn’t until years after Oberon’s death that her secret was unmasked in a biography I remember reading as a teenager. (In this regard, her story echoes that of musician Korla Pandit's).

An almost scary 1930s portrait of Merle Oberon. The lighting makes her look like an escapee from a Josef Von Sternberg film

Who are we to judge? In the 1930s miscegenation was strictly taboo; a biracial race actress could never have become a mainstream star. Oberon emerged from an impoverished background and apparently had a steely determination to succeed. It could be that Oberon was a far better actress in real life than she ever was onscreen. The great irony is that if Oberon is remembered at all today (she’s mostly not, except for playing Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights), it’s not for any of her film performances but for being the half-Indian actress who painstakingly concealed her ethnicity – the one thing she didn’t want anyone to know about!

The great Self-Styled Siren film blog devoted a whole entry to Oberon’s story a while back, comparing her to the doomed and conflicted mixed race character Sarah Jane in the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life. It’s the balanced and ultimately sympathetic account that Oberon deserves.

Coco and I at my mother's place. Re her green-ish paws: my brother-in-law had just mowed the lawn, the grass was damp and Coco ran through it

Since moving to London twenty years ago now, I make an annual trip back to visit my family in Canada. I usually aim to get there around the beginning of September when "peak season" is over but the weather is still relatively summer-y and I can swim (my mother lives walking distance from the beach). This year the airfare was so prohibitive I had to wait until late October (I was there 22 October – 1 November), which meant I was home for Halloween. I divided my time between my mother’s place in Norway Bay, Quebec and my sister’s in the suburbs outside Ottawa, and spent most of it sleeping (averaging 11 hours a night), eating (I’ve gained about ten pounds), playing with my nieces (Maya, 10 and Miranda, 8) and getting to know their new dog – an adorable Shih Tzu called Coco.

My mother and I

I’d forgotten what a big deal Halloween is in North America. Check out my flickr page for how elaborately the people of suburban Ottawa decorate their houses for Halloween (and loads of shots of the many moods of Coco).

Vampire princess Miranda in her front yard on Halloween night



Miranda and I




Maya and I. (Her costume was "bloody nurse")



Portrait of Warhol drag queen Jackie Curtis by Leee Black Childers. No one documented the iconic Warhol drag Superstars (Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling) better than Leee

On 5 December 2012 my friends Christopher, Mari and I went to the launch party for Leee Black Childer’s book Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rockstars and Punks at The Vinyl Factory (a chi chi art gallery in South Kensington). In case Leee needs any introduction: In the 1960s he was one of Andy Warhol’s assistants; later on he was involved in the management of the music careers of the likes of David Bowie, Iggy and The Stooges, The Heartbreakers and Levi and The Rockcats. Throughout, he was photographing everything: the Warhol Superstars, the whole decadent Max’s Kansas City and Chelsea Hotel milieu, glam rock, and the emergence of punk on both sides of the Atlantic. A natural raconteur, in the essential oral histories of punk (like England's Dreaming and Please Kill Me), Leee is always interviewed as one of the key witnesses and scene makers. His wonderfully grainy, gritty and evocative portraits of the Sex Pistols and Warhol drag queen Superstars in particular are like cat nip for me.  (Obviously there were other photographers documenting the Warhol scene at the time, but Leee’s photos of Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn have a real intimacy and rapport). I’ve known Leee for several years now via mutual friends and usually wind up seeing him when he comes to London (he’s based in New York). It was really gratifying to finally see his work get the deluxe coffee table book treatment (and accompanying exhibit) it merits.

Needless to say, I snapped a few shots on the night.Before heading to Leee’s party, we assembled for Happy Hour drinks at Simmons Bar in Kings Cross (great place; I highly recommend it. It has a skull-shaped disco ball!). They had a lurid hot pink (or should that be fuchsia?) acrylic Christmas tree in the corner that transfixed us. So artificial! So Jayne Mansfield! And so futuristic: it was like a Space Age Barbarella Christmas.  



Christopher and the glamorous Mari

Christopher and I



Mari and Leee




Leee, Mari and novelist / journalist Rupert Smith




Leee and I way back in September 2008 at Cockabilly at The Moustache Bar in Dalston




I can claim to actually have been photographed by the great Leee Black Childers myself, once! He took this shot at the club night Polari at the sadly now defunct Trash Palace bar on Wardour Street. This was also taken in September 2008. Left to right: Rupert Smith, Christian Rodrigues and me

Check out photos from the last time Leee Black Childers was in town on my flickr page

I held my annual Christmas cocktail party on 5 December. As promised (threatened?) on the Facebook events page:

Right: Am thinking of having another intimate Christmas cocktail party chez moi again this year. For those of you who came last year, you know what to expect: I live in a shoe box! Seating is minimal, so you will have no choice but to stand and mingle for the most part (or sit on the floor). The couch represents the elite VIP area. Kitsch and abrasive 1950s and 60s Christmas music will be cranked up LOUD (my CD player is fixed!). I don't "do" food, so eat beforehand, although there will be olives and crisps! (I make these things sound so tempting, don't I?). I will be making snowballs, but I only have one bottle of Advocaat and I ain't buying another one, so if you want snowballs, arrive early to avoid disappointment. After the snowballs, am thinking oceans of icy Cava and maybe Prosecco!

Anyway, the party really swung. In fact it rocked! A week later I was still finding stray bits of broken glass, wasabi peas and roasted peanuts under the sofa bed. Here are a few shots from the night (there’s loads more on my flickr page). Look at these and try to imagine how hung-over I felt that Sunday. Then multiply that by ten.


Paul smoking his head off




Sally and Paddy



Lauren and I, Part 1



Lauren and I, Part 2




Marlene Dietrich, Eric and Divine: all in one shot




Eric and Sally




Christopher and Lauren. They are in a band together called Spanking Machine, by the way, destined to be big in 2013. (Don't you love how the red dumb bells in the corner match Lauren's dress perfectly? What's that about?!)




Dez and Paul. I love this shot of Paul: at his most louche, gesticulating wildly, smouldering cigarette on the go

Right: I’ve pretty much brought things up to date. There was no Dr Sketchy at all this month, so I didn’t DJ any Christmas music which felt a bit sad. The most exciting but nerve-wracking bit of upcoming news is that I’m launching my club night Lobotomy Room on Saturday 29 December 2012! It’s happening at Paper Dress Vintage in Shoreditch. The organiser / promoter Steve is going to be away that weekend, he had nothing scheduled for that night and offered it to me, to launch my night in a low-key, no pressure way. (I know it’s very likely loads of people will be away for the holidays. London can be quiet the week between Christmas and New Years). Fingers crossed, if this goes well Lobotomy Room will become a regular monthly occurrence in 2013. Wish me luck: I’m shitting bricks / sweating bullets / having kittens trouble-shooting all the things that could go wrong! Hopefully my next blog will be posting the set list from the first night of Lobotomy Room.

Lobotomy Room ... it's coming!

Anyway, this is almost certainly my last blog before 25 December, so Merry Christmas to everyone! I know I post this pic of Jayne Mansfield every year but it never gets tired.