24 April 2006
Art of the Matter: The club where gay turned wry
Tim Teerman: The Times
Duckie was born 10 years ago as a joke to send up gay culture
I?m
always a bit suspicious when people start boasting about being in on
key artistic moments. ?I was there in the Golden Heart when Tracey
first came in, swearing that this unmade bed she?d created was gonna be
hotter than Damien?s shark.? ?I saw Scissor Sisters in the East
Village, like, aeons ago. Ana Matronic had a bubble perm.? But hey,
finally I can gain some cred. I really was at Duckie when it all
started back in 1995. Duckie still remains proudly unprepossessing. The weekly club
night takes place at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in Vauxhall, South
London, a genuine spit-and-sawdust pub (though the loos have been
redecorated), where Paul O?Grady?s Lily Savage started out. At the time
Duckie was unique and it remains so: a club where dancing is les
important than performance, and pretty twisted performance at that. Suddenly
its alumni are everywhere. On its first night Chris Green took to the
stage and performed as Tina C, a deranged, unstable country music diva.
Now Green is performing ? out of drag ? as part of the RSC?s Complete
Works Season a one-man show that takes audience members into the
dressing room of a Shakespearean actor. Amy Lamé, one of the club?s
creators, has been a regular roving presenter on Richard and Judy, appeared on Celebrity Fit Club
and presents a an afternoon radio show. This summer, she takes a
one-woman show to Edinburgh. The Barbican has invited Duckie for a
second residency this Christmas for a supper show that sees the
audience broken down into upper and lower classes. Its last Barbican
show won an Olivier award.
How did such a small, alternative place come to be so hot? It
was founded as a gay club when everyone was going nuts about ?post-gay?
? so it rejects everything that is formulaic about gay clubbing; the
tight T-shirts, the dance music, the pneumatic posing. That wider
understanding has slowly seeped into the mainstream, which has started
looking beyond acceptably gay stars ? Clary, Norton and co ? to edgier
folk. Scott Capurro?s filthy act is a fixture in straight comedy clubs
and he regularly crops up as a panellist on panel shows. Duckie has
always supported acts traditionally shunted to the fringes. I remember
one man blood-letting on stage, another young performer throwing
missiles into the audience and the charms of the self-explanatorily
named Miss High Leg Kick (enough to turn any homo straight). Duckie?s
foundations are rooted in that moment in the mid-1990s when notions of
what comprised ?gay culture? splintered. Now the mainstream is getting
wise to the same subtleties. Lamé, her business partner Simon Casson and others began the
club inspired by the success of gay indie club Popstarz, which also
opened in 1995. Back then, only a couple of gay venues offered anything
remotely different from pecs and pumping house. The Bell pub in King?s
Cross was so rough and full of freaks it seemed as if William Burroughs
had made it up. There was also a veggie café, First Out, near Tottenham
Court Road station, which was lefty and worthy. It?s still there, and I
often fantasise that the feta and olive pasta has been on a low simmer
since 1987. Naturally, First Out is a collective. Lamé worked in First
Out when she arrived in London from the States and there fell in with a
group of arty fags who, like her, disdained the conventional gay scene.
When they started Duckie, the in-house DJs, the Readers? Wifes, played
Siouxsie and the Banshees and punk. Their favourite song was Kate
Bush?s Wuthering Heights.
Ten years on Duckie still has that spiky insistence on
difference it had at its birth. It is also in thrall to variety and
performance: some of the artists are controversial, even gross, but
there is a real element of music hall at play, which has become more
apparent with Duckie?s one-off events. These take place in ornate but
faded, grand ballrooms. At its tenth birthday party a gasp came from
the usually unshockable crowd when a performance artist appeared on a
white horse, à la Bianca Jagger/Studio 54.The strange thing is no one,
despite Duckie?s enduring coolness, has attempted to imitate it. Only
Too 2 Much, on the site of the former Raymond?s Revue Bar in Soho, pays
homage to its heritage by staging cabaret. In the East End the George
and Dragon attracts some alternative acts. But really Duckie stands
alone. That surprises Casson. ?Duckie started out as a satire on the
commercialism of the gay scene, but we can?t be enfants terribles any more,? he protests. ?I?m nearly 40!?
It may have started as satire, but Duckie has grown into a
profitable brand, and one which can only become ever more profitable as
people realise ?gay? doesn?t end with Colin and Justin. A spot of
cross-dressing genital piercing on Richard and Judy can only be a beat away.
duckie.harmsen.net |
