A little trip down memory lane today, dear reader...
Although my recall of the exact timeline is understandably a little hazy after all these years, at some time in the early 1980s after I left school (probably 1982 - forty years ago), I and my school-friend Shane first ventured out to a pioneering club event - the "Bowie/Roxy Nights" at Newport's swanky and up-to-the-moment nightclub Lazers:
Obviously the quality is a bit shonky, given that this film dates from 1984, but this was the laser light-show that opened every evening of dancing and debauchery at Lazers nightclub...Within a fairly short space of time I became a regular punter (as did my sister). I really had found my niche in the emerging world of the "New Romantics", and - although I had a few years yet till I officially came out - I dressed the part: twelve-pleat pegged trousers in two-tone teal and amber, "Adam Ant" waistcoat, pirate shirts, pointy shoes, henna-ed back-combed hair, jewellery, the lot!
Among the classics such as Sound and Vision, Virginia Plain, Kraftwerk Das Model, Giorgio Moroder From Here To Eternity, Cerrone Supernature, Grace Jones Private Life, post-punk icons like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Toyah, Simple Minds and The Cure, and all the emergent New Wave/electro pioneers such as Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, OMD, Human League, Yello, Heaven 17, John Foxx, Visage and so on, one song really sticks out - one that instantly transports me back four decades to a very different world indeed.
No GDM (Dedicated to Quentin Crisp) by Gina X Performance was (and still is) unlike anything else I had heard. A song sung in totally cold, deadpan Germanic tones over a synth-heavy beat - yet with tantalising lyrics that blatantly mentioned "queer" and "lesbian"..? It's no wonder that it didn't take very long before first discovering this mysterious other-worldly music that I also "discovered my true self"...
Wanna be a great dark man,
Being but a lesbian.
You are perfect, you are sheer,
If you are a red-haired queer.
That's life, one dies.
C'est la vie, ma cherie,
But it really doesn't matter.
No G.D.M.
No great dark man
No G.D.M.
No great dark man
There won't be a great dark man,
If I am a red-haired queer.
You are perfect, you are sheer,
If you are a red-haired queer.
C'est la vie, have a sniff.
C'est la vie, ma cherie,
But it really doesn't matter.
Yellow teeth between pink lips,
Eyeline shadow with a crazy look,
The jewel behind my lobe of ear,
Rouge on my face hides my beard,
Long violet fingernails,
I adore those magic tales.
I don't mind, I don't mind.
No G.D.M.
No great dark man
No G.D.M.
No great dark man
Wanna be a great dark man,
Being but a lesbian.
You are perfect, you are sheer,
If you are a red-haired queer.
That's life, one dies.
C'est la vie, ma cherie.
C'est la vie, have a sniff.
That’s life, one dies.
C'est la vie, ma cherie.
C'est la vie, have a sniff.
That’s life, one dies.
C'est la vie, ma cherie.
C'est la vie, have a sniff.
That’s life, one dies.
C'est la vie, ma cherie,
C'est la vie, have a sniff
That's life, one dies.
C'est la vie, ma cherie.
Ah, memories...
I utterly adore it to this day.
Footnote:
Lazers (which itself was previously known as "The Stowaway" club) finally closed in 1990, subsequently reopened as "Brooklyn Heights" and later "Heights 2000" before finally closing under the name "Zanzibar". In 2018, arsonists burned the whole thing and the neighbouring chuch to the ground.
