Paper birds and silly string, sensible footwear and gay history, and St Albans with Debbie

It was with more than a modicum of excitement that I headed off [at first solo, but at the venue bumped into our friend Paul; as well as regulars Sexy Lexi and VG Lee, and many more besides] to the Southbank Centre last night for the latest outing of "London's peerless gay literary salon" Polari - for our headline guest was none other than that icon of "intellectual post-punk" combo [sometimes clumsily pigeonholed under the ghastly umbrella term "sophisti-pop"] Everything But The Girl, Miss Tracey Thorn!

But first, down to business - as our host Paul Burston opened proceedings by apologising in advance for any "costume clash", as both he and Miss Thorn were wearing leopard print, before introducing our first reader (and Polari First Book Prize winner in 2012), the lovely John McCullough.



Mr McC read for us a series of poems on themes from homelessness to homophobia from his newest anthology Reckless Paper Birds, including this one, which I thought particularly impressive:

Tender Vessels
I keep trying to slip away through the crowd
but history won’t take its mouth off my body.
What was exacted on someone else’s softness,
his cuttable flesh, is always about to happen here.
The vague kinship which exists between tender men
glowing with thirst starts in awareness of this,

how we’re unstitched by tongue prints, resurrections.
Standing in a street party one Pride, I saw a figure
stomp through, fists raised, and strike three boys.
They dropped to the ground, clutching their heads.
I witnessed everything, squeezed a stranger’s shoulder,
then, fifteen minutes on, my body was distracted

utterly by the smell of oranges. The unspeakable
scrapes a fingernail across my neck but I can only
concentrate so long before I wind up decanting
myself into the nearest fizzing light: Instagram,
house music. It’s like those inventors who tried to devise
a spray-on cast for broken bones, created Silly String.

But there are remedies worse than squirting
metres of sticky mayhem across a jubilant face,
outcomes bleaker than attempting, despite the scissors,
to inhabit this twenty-first-century skin.
I live in a dream of plummeting from the earth’s
tallest building without ever having felt more beautiful

because I’m not the only one falling. I’m in a crowd,
a loose democracy of descent, velocity with its hands
all over our bodies, but not enough to stop us
gossiping and blowing kisses as we speed
through the air together, reckless paper birds.
They will find us with our beaks wide open.



Next up was the estimable cartoonist for the Pink Paper Kate Charlesworth, who took us on a visual journey - reading some extracts from her new graphic memoir Sensible Footwear – A Girl’s Guide, accompanied by a series of illustrations from the book [click to embiggen]:



It was superb! Here's Kate herself, talking about the book:

Kate Charlesworth on Sensible Footwear – A Girl’s Guide

This evening's event was a special one for two individuals in the audience at the Royal Festival Hall - as the winners of this year's two Polari Prizes were announced [read the full shortlists for both prizes at the Publishing Perspective site]...



...the winner of the Polari First Book Prize 2019, Angela Chadwick for her debut novel "XX"...



...and winner of the Polari Prize for established writers [presented by none other than Booker Prize-winner Bernadine Evaristo], Andrew McMillan for his poetry collection playtime.

Congratulations all round!

After a break, a fag and a top-up of booze, it was time, however, for our leading lady.



Opening with a pithy examination of her teenage diaries (that form the starting-point of her second memoir, Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia) Miss Tracey Thorn immediately came across as a charming and frank reader and writer, hitting right to the crux of what it was like growing up in the suburban nonentity that is Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire in the 70s:

When I try to summon up the past – when I want to remember what really happened, instead of what I think happened, and what I really felt, instead of what I’d like to think I felt – I look at my diaries. They never fail to shock me with all the things they say, and all the things they don’t.

Going right back to the start, I try to picture myself on the day I first decided to keep a diary: 29 December 1975, when I was 13 years old. I must have been given it as a Christmas present, and although it was for the year 1976, its first few pages invited entries for the end of the previous year. So I began as the old year ended, just before it turned to face the new.

29 December 1975 – “Went to St Albans with Debbie. Got a belt. Could not get a jumper or skirt.”

That’s it, that’s all she wrote. No starting with a bang, no announcing herself to the world, or to a future reader, no declaration of intent. Nothing along the lines of “Dear Diary, draw closer and listen to what I have to say. Here I am; this is me; let me tell you the story of my life.” Not even the guileless enthusiasm of a 13-year-old self-introduction – “Hello, I’m Tracey and this is my diary.” Instead, I draw a circle and leave it empty, my eye caught by an absence. And it wasn’t an aberration; I carried on in that style for years, making countless entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, not going to school, a piano lesson being cancelled, the school coach not arriving. It’s a life described by what’s missing, and what fails to happen.

My second ever entry is just as banal:

30 December – “Went to Welwyn with Liz. Didn’t get anything except a bag of Kentucky chips.”

Was it me or was it my surroundings? Was it just that I was the dullest child in existence, noticing nothing, experiencing nothing, thinking nothing, or was it at least in part an embodiment of something in the air, something vague and undefined? Even when I write about it now, I realise that the time and place in which I grew up, 1970s suburbia, is easier to define by saying what it wasn’t than what it was. Brookmans Park was a village but not a village. Rural but not rural. A stop on the line, a space in between two landscapes that are both more highly rated – the city, and the countryside. A contingent, liminal, border territory. In-betweenland.

1 January 1977 – “Went to Welwyn with Mum and Dad to get some boots but couldn’t get any.”

8 January – “Liz and I went to Potters Bar in the afternoon to try to get her ears pierced, but she couldn’t.”

Anywhere with a tube station, however “end of the line” that stop may be, still feels to me like part of London, physically linked by the tunnels and rails. Things would still happen there. But beyond the reach of the underground lies a different and less certain terrain. Where things might not happen at all. Where you might continually try but continually fail, in endless small endeavours.

19 January 1979 – “Deb and I went to St Albans. Tried to get some black trousers but couldn’t find any nice ones.”

17 March – “Tried to go to the library but it was shut.”

When I came to write a song about the place, Oxford Street, I fell back into this habit of describing by subtraction, stating what wasn’t there – “Where I grew up there were no factories” – and only then going on to admit that “there was a school and shops, and some fields and trees”. But although there were fields, there was no agricultural life. No one worked as a farmer. All the men got on the train every morning with a briefcase to go up to town. Nature writers would have found little there to describe; it was not a place of shepherds, or hawks. There was no real scenery – no hills, or lakes, nothing in the way of a view.

Here I am again, talking about what it is not. What is it about the place that it demands to be written about in such an equivocal way? I rebelled as a teen and so have often felt that I abandoned the old me and invented a new one, casting off the time and place I came from. But as I get older, I sense its presence inside me. I want to reconnect with the self I left behind. It’s partly that common impulse of curiosity – which informs a TV programme like Who Do You Think You Are? or a song like Where Do You Go to My Lovely. I want to look inside my head and remember where I came from. Because I can’t quite believe it was as lacking as my diary suggests.

Excellent stuff, indeed. Then, in an absolutely engrossing and in-depth conversation with Paul Burston, she delved deeper into the hows and the whys that led her creative mind out of that stifling environment - and her feeling that she had never, quite, escaped it. Her revelations about her parents, for example - they never could come to terms with her musical fame, and apparently it wasn't until she married (her co-member of Everything But The Girl Ben Watt) and had kids that they even began to treat her as any kind of "normal" being; even then, they simply "tutted" at her later solo musical efforts, and she never quite understood why...

But success, it certainly was, albeit slow. The band itself was a sort of "meeting of minds" [both she and Ben were in different groups, and only reluctantly decided to work together at first], emerged from the unlikely environs of Hull University in the post-punk wave in 1981, and became a "cult" hit with serious music journos everywhere - they even had a Top 3 hit with their cover of the classic I Don't Want to Talk About It in 1989 - but it wasn't until after they had been dropped by their record label sixteen years later, that one of their songs caught the attention of a certain "super-cool" American DJ/remixer, and the rest is history!

Everything But The Girl - Missing (Todd Terry remix)

It's years since you've been there
Now you've disappeared somewhere
Like outer space
You've found some better place

And I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain

How appropriate.

What an evening! We absolutely loved it.



And thus, with a final "curtain-call" it was time to say farewell again. The next Polari - its 12th birthday, featuring the multi-talented Russell T Davies as headliner - is apparently completely sold out (shame!), so (if tickets are available), the next outing will be A Very Polari Xmas, featuring Lisa Jewell, Will Brooker, Ben Fergusson and Carolyn Robertson, on 9th December...

J'adore Polari!