It was with the greatest of excitement that I, John-John and (eventually) our friend Paul met up for the first time since last October - in a pub (Halfway to Heaven, of course). For not only were we getting our first taste of "freedom" as lockdown restrictions are lifted, but the occasion was for the triumphal return of "London's peerless literary salon" Polari to the legendary Heaven nightclub! And what an evening's entertainment was in store...
Our hostess-with-the-mostest Paul Burston looked ecstatic to welcome us back, opening proceedings with an apposite reminder that, although the sense of relief was palpable at the prospect of the coronavirus pandemic coming under control in the UK, for many people in the room this was actually the second pandemic we have lived through and survived to tell the tale - about which there would be more in parts of the evening's programme.
Opening the evening, however - emerging through the "rock concert-style" dazzling light-show and dry ice that enveloped the stage [the effect of which meant that 160 out of the 183 photos I took went straight to the delete bin as the glare made it impossible to see anything in them] - was a gleam of exuberant joy, in the form of the delightful PJ Samuels. I love the way she described herself in one of her blog posts way back in 2014:
I am a black woman. Rastafarian. Christian. Immigrant. Exile. Lesbian... I am by no means confused. This relationship in my skin sits like ice lolly on a hot day, a magnum original on the stick. So many reasons why it shouldn’t work together but heaven when you taste it. So for every group that I don’t fit in because of the other aspect of me that I embrace, it’s your loss. I’m delicious. All kinds of delicious. A smorgasbord of incongruous flavours that are heaven on a platter. Damn I want to eat me…
Mesmerised by her recitative delivery of a selection of her poems and songs: some tender, some angry, some empowering, our audience wanted to "eat" her up, too!
Speaking of "poetry powerhouses", next was the turn of Joelle Taylor, as excited to have just received her first print copy of her new anthology Cunto and Othered Poems [this Polari being its "unofficial" launch] as she was to be performing extracts from it on stage again!
According to the eminent Patience Agbabi she is
"...a shape-shifter, myth-maker, linguistic risk-taker; poetical activist, surrealist with a raised fist. She knows how to handle a pen. Razor sharp, tattooed or AWOL, her women are the best dressed men. Her material – fractured glass and human skin; the effect – a maze, a mosaic, a hall of mirrors. She redefines the dispossessed, the caged in and gives them a way out."
Focusing largely on her own experiences as a masculine presenting woman, a "Butch" or "Boi" on the in London lesbian scene in the 1990s, the poems she read for us were a combination of pent-up frustration, intriguing and sometimes menacing characters, politics, anger, love, lust and loss - like this one:
...and here's one she made earlier...
Just when we thought "how does one possibly top that?!" - our lovely "Sexy Lexi", the sublimely talented Alexis Gregory trolled up to the mike...
Riot Act is surely his magnum opus - he wrote this one-man-drama based upon three real-life interviews: with Michael-Anthony Nozzi, one of the only remaining Stonewall survivors; Lavinia Co-op, a 1970s London radical-drag artist; and someone a little closer to home.
The piece he performed from it for us was the tale of an activist in the era of fear and loss and anger that encompassed the gay world when AIDS reared its ugly head in the 1980s, of his conflicting experiences of camaraderie and dull political correctness, of placards and protests and forming a chained blockade across Waterloo Bridge, of attending funeral after funeral after funeral of people who were too young to die, of experiencing rejection and denial on the gay scene, burn-out and "survivor guilt", partying too hard to try and blot out the grief, and the feeling of hopelessness that a whole generation of collective memory has been lost, so the next wave of gays has no connection with that era and would rather forget it ever happened - all too, too real. And familiar. I cried.
The subject of the monologue was, of course... Paul Burston himself.
Here's the trailer for the show:
I really needed a cigarette after that!
After the break and some more drinkies, served to our table of course, it was time for a familiar friend and Polari stalwart to appear. However - shock! horror! - to our dismay, Paul announced that would be the very last time the lovely VG Lee [for it is she] would ever perform live again...
From her entrance with a sort-of "1960s catwalk model" routine, to the end of her performance with a series of her hilarious "Dear Auntie Val" agony aunt letters, she had us enthralled!
Accompanied as she was [in fact, all our speakers including Paul B had their own similar large-screen back-drop] by a selection of photos from various points of her younger - and dead glam - life, she revealed that ("before I was a lesbian") she had actually been married (to "Hemel Hempstead's answer to Barry Gibb") for quite a few years - and even wrote a semi-fictional, and hilarious, short story about it in her recent anthology Oh You Pretty Thing, which she read for us. Here she is with a [unfortunately abridged - the longer extract she read for us continued with a more pithy take on the relationship and its inevitable fate...] version from a Zoom-based event she did last year:
If this really was the "farewell performance" of such a legend, there's going to be one helluva gap in the Polari repertoire... We'll certainly miss her!
Finally, from one legendary long-serving performer to another.
Ian Elmslie was (the cuter) half of the cabaret duo Katrina and the Boy [who I saw on stage - after attending Gay Pride in Kennington Park - at the long-demised gay pub the Market Tavern in Nine Elms/Vauxhall way back in 1991. There's some fab footage of one of their performances in this video on YouTube - however, you'll need to skip to the 2:20:00 mark to see a very youthful Mr Elmslie in action!]
click any photo to embiggen
Latterly, Mr Elmslie published his entertainment memoirs - A Marvellous Party, from which he read an extract at Polari back in December 2017 - and still "keeps his hand in" as a cabaret singer-songwriter; indeed, he had not one, but two CDs on sale last night. He also, it emerged, is a bit of a Bowie fan [hence the photo at the head of this post with the neon sign "Boys Keep Swinging"] - and the major part of his performance was indeed dedicated to the great man, with audience participation, to boot! I'm not sure any previous audience in the history of Heaven nightclub has been encouraged to shout "Hot Tramp!" en masse in quite the same way before...
He also treated us to one of his own songs The Other Man from the new Old Boyfriends CD, which I think is brilliant:
After resounding applause came the customary curtain call...
...and without further ado, it was time to clear the decks and bugger off for last orders at the pub.
It was such a brilliant evening that, despite having suffered the "getting up for work" bit afterwards, I'm still coming down to earth.
Unfortunately we might miss the next outing at the RVT on 4th June (with headliner the lovely Adele Anderson), as it's not just selling out fast, but apparently clashes with other arrangements... but we do indeed love Polari!
