Love and insanity and pagan profanity before a worshipping crowd

"Someone once said to me ‘Billie, you are so pretentious – I think it was Jean Paul Sartre. Or it could’ve been the Dalai Lama, I forget."

Madam Acarti and I were very pleased to get tickets for the opening night of Musik, the new "sequel" to the faboo Pet Shop Boys musical Closer to Heaven, that we went to see in - gulp! - 2001!

The basic premise of this wonderful one-woman tour-de-force is that we are being "treated" to an evening with "Bille Trix", club hostess, muse to the world's great artists, the woman who was in the right place at the right time to witness many of the milestones of modern history. Think Forrest Gump, only with more vagina references and a shitload of drugs.

It's an utterly hilarious, camp-as-tits and entrancing performance by Miss Frances Barber [see also here] (as if we would expect anything less from our Patron Saint of the maniacal husky laugh) - and she had the audience [the Leicester Square Theatre was packed to the brim - the short five day run is sold out, apparently!] in the palm of her hand throughout. With shit-hot writing from the lovely Jonathan Harvey [see here, here and especially here] and musical numbers by PSB, it's a class act.

"Billie"'s journey veered from being the unwanted child of an unloving mother and and unknown soldier father (she describes her desolate childhood in the song Mongrel), through exodus to the USA and earning a crust busking (with a ridiculous "hippie-era" ditty called Cover Me in Calamine, apparently a duet with a girl later to be renamed Nico), to the Vietnam war (to which she attributed her song Run Girl Run), to Andy Warhol's Factory (she allegedly gave Warhol the inspiration for his Campbell's tin artworks, as explained in the bizarre Soup song), a year in a Soho Square phone box, and a resurrected career as a "disco diva"; en route she hung around with everyone from Dali to Donald Trump (who allegedly was a fellow émigré from Germany, took her virginity, and whom she "inspired" to build "the wall"), the Beatles, the Jaggers and Damien Hirst. Her Mother Courage was reviewed as “incomprehensible”; and her singing inspired everyone to shout, as her mother did on her death-bed: "When will it end?"



In her own world, however, Billie Trix is music, is art, is gender; a “zeitgeist for sore eyes” - and let no-one tell her otherwise!

We absolutely loved it, from beginning to end. Here are two of the songs Neil and Chris wrote especially for the show - first, her "disco diva" number:

Frances Barber as Billie Trix - Ich Bin Musik (Pet Shop Boys)

... and her contemplative closing number:

Frances Barber as Billie Trix - For Every Moment (Pet Shop Boys)

The PSB boys also re-used a couple of numbers from Closer To Heaven, not least our favourite, the "torch song" Friendly Fire. Fortuitously, some fabulous person out there in YouTube-land has found some actual footage of that original West End show from eighteen years ago, in which Miss Barber sings it:

Closer to Heaven (2001) - Frances Barber- Friendly Fire, Paul Keating - Closer to Heaven (reprise), Cast - Positive Role Model (finale)

An inspirational tirade against me
How to explain my life?
Boys to the left of me
girls to the right of me
neither husband nor wife
Though the days are filled with pain
there is no one who'll explain
why I'm coming under friendly fire
shot in the fatal cause of rock 'n' roll
but there's nothing, really nothing, to say

Why I endure under force majeure
slander without shame or tact
I who studied make-up, mime and Buddha
who taught two generations to react
About me the critics lied
I ignored them and survived
in spite of coming under friendly fire
shot in the fatal cause of of rock 'n' roll
I have nothing, really nothing, to deny

When I look back my eyes are filled with tears
Danger to mascara, applause to my peers

When fame sustained me and arenas acclaimed me
I floated through life in a cloud
of love and insanity and pagan profanity
before a worshipping crowd
Now my status is ill-defined
As an icon I'm inclined
to be coming under friendly fire
shot in the fatal cause of rock 'n' roll
but whatever dull or clever points they've scored
I have never, oh no never, been ignored.

Amen to that!