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Back in the mid 1980?s nightclubs were a playground for subversive fantasists. And Taboo, HQ of Leigh Bowery?s fashion fusionists, was the big daddy of them all...
British NightWorld is an influential thing. It's so deeply embedded in our culture ? and has been since the '60s ? that each new scene or movement has at least one antecedent in a small and sweaty nightclub. Take the modernist, neon mash-up of new rave: without clubs like The Blitz, Le Beate Route and the big daddy of insane fashion hedonism, Taboo, where music, fashion and art collided to create hyperactive, subversive nightlife, new-school London clubs like Boombox and Kashpoint could never have existed.
Where better to start than with ?ber club character Leigh Bowery? It was The Blitz, the New Romantic club favoured by Steve Strange, Siouxsie Soux and Boy George that turned Bowery onto the power of the nightclub. Nightclubs, he realised, were places where life could be amplified way beyond normal but were also spaces where he could showcase his best talent - himself.
In May 1985 Bowery found his HQ, a trashy timewarp disco called Maximus, located in the heart of London's tourist black hole, Leicester Square. Taboo only ran for eighteen months - and early parties only happened fortnightly - but it has entered legend as one of the most influential nightclubs of all time. Right from the start the aesthetic was hard, trashy glamorous and confrontational: flyers for the opening night consisted of pictures torn out from porn mags stuck onto playing cards.
Like most of the best clubs, and certainly the best conciously avant-garde clubs, it took place mid-week. Only the truly committed came: door picker Mark Vaultier, who died of a methadone overdose in 1986, was brutal in his decisions about who would enter and who'd be sent blushing, famously holding up a mirror to failed entrants asking, "well, would you let you in?"
Jonny Slut, now signed to Gigolo as Atomizer, knows all about weekday clubs thanks to his involvement in early '80s night, Batcave. "The great thing was that you had a real cross-section of cultures - post-punk, pre-goth, psychobilly, the fetish crowd and gay skins all moshing together merrily every Wednesday."
Steven Mallinder, co-founder of Cabaret Volatire was a regular visitor to Taboo. The one-time soul boy recalls going down with Marc Almond and Matt Johnson from The The. "It was a real creative crowd and pretty gay," he says. "It seemed to be just before the E thing really became known so there was a hint of madness that was not really understood."
It wasn't all about Taboo, although the club was obviously a hub. The space between punk which was by the mid '80s a distant memory and dance - which hadn't yet happened - was filled by a grand selection of mid-week nightclubs; havens for the sparky, dispossessed, bored youth of grey, depressed '80s Britain. Thursdays at the Camden Palace; The WAG, Billy's on Dean Street; The Mudd; the illegal squat vibe of Dirtboxx; and a night on Battlebridge Road run by Dave Dorrell, later member of acid house hit band M/A/R/R/S.
The standard history of rave has acid house as a reaction to the overdressed, conservative, expensive West End and suggests that in some way it swept away all that came before it. That history fails to notice the sheer amount of people, and indeed aesthetic shared between the scenes. One might have come clothed in full body make-up and a pre-Ketamine (although distinctly recognisable to K-world 2007) craziness, the other in jeans, T-shirts and long hair, but the link is undeniable. Over to you, Jonny Slut: "Either you are a punk at heart or you ain't. Spirit and aesthetic are what counts."
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