Old Bort Designs Archives

June 15, 2018June 16, 2018

BREVIEW: Doug Stanhope @ O2 Academy 12.06.18

Words & illustrations by Emily Doyle

Andrew O’Neill seems like a strange choice to warm up for Doug Stanhope. The self-described occult comedian and heterosexual transvestite has eschewed the skirt tonight. He wears an oversized vest and skinny jeans, tinny in hand.

O’Neill delivers rapid fire one liners (“a bad workman doesn’t blame his tools, he blames ‘the Muslims’”) and enforces audience participation. It becomes clear that he has a tough job. The room reluctantly plays along as he sings…

“If you’re depressed and medicated, clap your hands!”

His set is short, but towards the end it’s become evident that he’s running out of material. By the time he’s getting the crowd clapping along to ‘We Will Rock You’, it’s time to introduce the main man. By way of a goodbye, O’Neill boasts of how he recently fist-bumped Ozzy Osborne.

Stanhope shuffles on stage in his trademark oversized suit, grumbling about O’Neill. The 38-year-old’s comparatively youthful energy made our host feel like an “angry old grandpa” in the green room.

In his interview for Birmingham Review back in May, Stanhope made it clear that he was not looking forward to his trip to our fair city. Tonight he announces that he “didn’t think it could get worse than Leeds”. This entrance is a far cry from the staple exercise of most touring acts; it seems customary to walk on stage to Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ any time you’re in the West Midlands. Instead, Stanhope tells the crowd that he feels like he’s in the Island of Dr Moreau every time he steps out of his hotel. Similar sentiments surface on his Twitter page the next day, where he writes the following:

‘The ferals of #Birmingham have come out in mass. They literally look unearthed. Every venture out for a smoke is a dangerous experiment. What is it that they seek? What is the addiction? Paint? A Gassy rag? I wear similar ratty pajamas as camouflage.’

He must be enjoying his day off.

It may come as some relief to know Stanhope doesn’t reserve this level of disdain just for his UK crowds. A Magners sponsored tour of East Asia earlier this year saw him performing to a string of expat audiences. Tonight he announces that they all reminded him of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Following this, Stanhope launches into a much anticipated retelling of the Bangkok fiasco he detailed in his podcast, and how he avoided being detained under Thailand’s strict lèse-majesté laws. These laws state that ‘whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, the Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment’.

“When they say don’t make fun of the king, it’s not a suggestion… I did a very timid show, but I’ve made fun of him every show since.”

He tells of people who’ve fallen foul of these laws, including author Harry Nicolaides. Nicolaides was imprisoned for three years over a 2005 novel which sold a total of seven copies. Stanhope encourages the skeptical crowd to check his Twitter feed for the facts. They can be found amongst a string of tweets criticising Thailand’s monarchy tagged #KingOfThailand.

As Stanhope’s set progresses, he delves deeper and darker into comedy’s untouchable subjects; he quips on racial prejudice and sexual violence at whim. It’s uncomfortable to watch, especially when he’s performing to an audience which is predominantly male and entirely white. When challenged by hecklers on his choices of topic, he shuts them down, shouting, “I’m not done with Indian gang rape, you fucking questioner!” The couple sat to my left, who are about five Jagerbombs deep in their evening, go from laughing at every sentence to a stony, indignant silence. One of them resorts to shouting their objections at an increasing volume, until Stanhope acknowledges them with a cursory, “Wow, you REALLY wanna get noticed.”

He goes on to dedicate his next joke to them, which happens to be on the topic of dead children.

“I’m sorry, did I take a subject that’s horrifying and maybe unavoidable and try and make it fun?”

At times Stanhope seems to defend his right to make jokes about certain topics. In the past he’s done whole bits about his partner’s mental illness. Tonight he tells how his longtime fan and friend Laura turned up to his North Carolina shows without fail in her final months, each time demanding new zingers on her terminal brain cancer. It’s all well and good, but this angle seems to undermine his jokes about race and gender. Why bother to justify the odd jibe about schizophrenia when in a heartbeat you’re rolling out cheap shots about black Americans and tipping?

The audience for Stanhope’s brand of comedy can be split into three groups. Some people seem uneasy with a lot of his material; he dares people to laugh at the jokes he makes, and in doing so pushes them to examine their own internal prejudice. Others seem worryingly oblivious to the whole subtext, cheering and laughing at every cliché. Stanhope acknowledges this himself, openly lamenting the upshot of his staunch anarchism.

“I think I’ve moved a lot of Nazis in my direction…”

It’s hard to make people sit and reflect on their own flaws, least of all at a stand up show where the bar sells plastic two pint cups of lager.

The third group of people can be described as the eagerly offended; it feels like a portion of the audience are here to hate on Stanhope as a pastime. After all, his reputation precedes him everywhere. No one can have bought a ticket not knowing what to expect.

For a follower of Stanhope’s work, it’s a strange and awkward evening. It turns out that watching his heavily edited TV performances, or even listening to his very candid podcast, is a sterile way to consume Stanhope’s comedy. What seems like a nuanced and thoughtful observation on capitalism becomes far blunter and messier when it’s just a sweaty man shouting over a drunk crowd, “how many jobs would be immediately lost overnight if you cured cancer?”

The couple on my left are still heckling, in between holding a conversation amongst themselves about whether or not Stanhope is a “real alcoholic”. It’s hard to believe they’re this outspoken in day to day life. The next day fans tweet at Stanhope that they were ‘suitably offended’ by last night’s show; it seems his comedy hits home with some and not others. The man himself seems not to mind.

For more on Doug Stanhope, visit www.dougstanhope.com

For more on Andrew O’Neill, visit www.andrewoneill.co.uk

For more from the O2 Academy Birmingham, including venue details and further event listings, visit www.academymusicgroup.com/o2academybirmingham

May 12, 2018May 12, 2018

INTERVIEW: Doug Stanhope

Words by Emily Doyle / Pics by Brian H ennigan

On Tuesday 12^th June, comedian and author Doug Stanhope brings his one man stand up show to the O2 Academy Birmingham – for direct show information, including venue details and online ticket sales, click here.

Emily Doyle caught up with the American comic before he sets off for the UK, to talk about his new book, upcoming tour, and the joys of a rioting Wolverhampton crowd.

____________

I’m calling across the Atlantic, not expecting international comic Doug Stanhope to pick up first time. And yet after a couple of rings, I’m greeted with a jubilant “Good evening!” It’s coming up to midday in Arizona, but it’s nearly 8pm here in Birmingham.

Stanhope has been touring his stand-up for a quarter of a century, gaining a reputation along the way. Chris Rock has called him, “the most dangerous comedian in the world.” British listeners will know his blunt social commentary from his turn as the ‘Voice of America’ on Charlie Brooker’s BBC show Newswipe. When asked how he ended up working with Brooker, Stanhope pauses before replying.

“…I don’t know. My manager sets up a lot of stuff just, tells me “Oh, we’re gonna do this thing.” The first one I did was Screenwipe where I had to shuffle down with a hangover to the theatre and sit in a chair – “Okay, here’s the topics, just riff on ‘em, and let ‘em edit out anything you might have said that was vaguely entertaining…” – but after that we set it up over here. It was always fun to do.”

Stanhope has released ten stand up albums and authored three books. The latest of these is This Is Not Fame – from What I Re-Memoir, a celebration of the chaos and excess of his comedy tours. His previous book, Digging Up Mother: A Love Story, was subject to a statute of limitations because of its descriptions of credit card fraud. I’m eager to know if the same is true of the new release.

“Oh, no, there’s nothing illegal,” confirms Stanhope, “There’s probably a lot of stuff I could get sued for. If I WAS famous, I’d probably get sued for that book, but no one would care.”

With the book, of course, comes the inevitable tour. And that means leaving America. I look out the window at Birmingham’s grey skyline and ask Stanhope if there’s any UK dates he’s especially looking forward to.

“What… over there? No!” he laughs, “I don’t look forward to the U.K. at all! You know what, we’re not doing it, but I’d be excited to go back to Wolverhampton just ‘cause the one time I played there – I mentioned it briefly in the book – was absolute chaos. It was one of those towns that everyone said was a piece of shit and we’d hate, and we knew we were gonna love it just ‘cause of all the warnings we get about it. And it became my favourite team and they just got promoted! The Wolverhampton Wolves!”

“I guess other people listen and don’t go there. So, it was just one of those crowds where they were really overly excited that anyone showed up, and they bum-rushed the van. There was a brawl outside after the show, unrelated to the show. But there was some, you know, violent ejections during the show, and fisticuffs outside afterwards but they (the venue) didn’t know what it was about, the rumble, so they secreted us out the back to the waiting van and then a bunch of fans, cool ones, were pounding on the side of the van and screaming like you’re the fucking Beatles. It was… fantastic. The only good part of that seven week tour.”

It seems fitting that Stanhope should feel at home in Wolverhampton, even in the middle of a riot he might have created. The self-proclaimed anarchist never shies away from the grittier side of life. His stand-up revels in the taboo and the touchy, tearing apart topics such as gun violence, prostitution, and his own mother’s suicide with nihilistic glee. Many of Stanhope’s American fans see him as a defender of free speech. I ask if he finds international audiences any more sensitive.

“The only problem I really run into over there is getting halfway through a bit and realising ‘Oh shit, the payoff to this is something they’re not going to get’ and I’m already into it. I should have prepared and I just realised the big fucking punchline makes no sense whatsoever over here. So, then you have to make the judgment call, do I just keep doing the next three or four minutes of this bit knowing it’s gonna die, or do I just abruptly end it?”

Stanhope pauses, “When you do that, you just go “Ah you’re not gonna like this bit, let me move on,” then people think you we’re about to say something really shocking and then they goad ya, “Do it, do the bit!””

One authority did see fit to draw the line, however: the BBC. In the wake of the 2015 Paris attacks, Stanhope’s segment for Charlie Brooker’s 2015 Wipe was deemed to offensive to air.

“We filmed some stuff over here; I forget what it was about. Some news story crushed the best bit that I had. I have an album titled ‘…before turning the gun on himself’. It was supposed to the title of the two previous albums I put out, and both of ‘em got shitcanned because there was a shooting right before they went out. So, I had two last minute title changes before I finally managed to self-publish and put that one out. It’s hard to time that title without there being gun violence.”

America is no stranger to the occasional public shooting spree. But, especially to the rest of the world right now, any mention of the US brings to mind one ominous, flatulent word: Trump. Stanhope has gone on record saying that he doesn’t talk about the American president in his stand-up. His UK tour is mere weeks before Trump’s visit though, so I can’t resist asking if he’ll get a mention.

“Yeah, unless something strikes me that I think might not have struck every other comedian, I’ll avoid it,” tells Stanhope. “It’s even destroyed twitter. My whole fucking twitter feed. All the comments are dour fucking really serious anti-Trump stuff. People are still really surprised when he gets caught in a lie? How many news stories are we missing because it’s all the fucking news?”

Stanhope becomes irate, and it’s easy to see why. He makes his living cracking wise about authority and institution; Trump beats commentators to the punchline with every move he makes.

“I’m trying to avoid the cliche of ‘the jokes write themselves’,” continues Stanhope, “but… I love that people are upset about it. They fucking created this. Reality TV, you know. Fawning over people that just talk shit from fucking Jersey shore. Why do I know who a fucking Kardashian is? I shouldn’t know that, you fucking brain-raped me into that. All these fucking zero-weight assholes. You celebrate them, and look at what you got. Good. Fucking sleep in it. I don’t have kids, I have no hope for the future. What do I give a shit about Trump?”

It’s a valid point, especially from a safe distance across the Atlantic. But whilst British audiences may be on board with Stanhope’s provocative material, that’s not the case everywhere the comedian performs. Earlier this year he completed a seven date tour of East Asia for Magners International Comedy Festival. In his podcast, Stanhope tells listeners of his “$12,000 boo boo”, which saw him almost cancelling his Bangkok show for fear of being locked up for treason. “You’ll hear about that onstage,” he confirms. “ You’ll hear about that for a while.”

At this point we are interrupted. Stanhope pauses to curse his girlfriend, Bingo, for calling while he’s in an interview. “Brain injury, she claims, but she was that dumb before the brain injury…”

A familiar voice to listeners of The Doug Stanhope Podcast, Amy ‘Bingo’ Bingaman has had her fair share of drama. Currently recovering from a life-threatening coma, which Stanhope lovingly documented by tweeting regular photos of her complete with tracheotomy and feeding tube, Bingo has been promoting her own book, Let Me Out: A Madhouse Diary – a journal of her experiences being institutionalised under the Wyoming Mental Health System.

Stanhope says it’s been a cathartic experience, both for her and for readers who’ve had similar experiences. “It’s in some cases made her a de facto spokesperson that she doesn’t wanna be – like, ‘Hey this is a diary, it’s not necessarily something I wanna be the face of’. A lot of people will email her looking for help.”

Bingo often gets a mention in Stanhope’s stand-up. In his latest album, No Place Like Home, he speaks candidly about his partner’s treatment under Arizona’s mental healthcare system. In order to access her mental healthcare, which consists of Skype sessions with a registered nurse, Bingo goes to a strip mall that’s home to a gun shop, a brewery, and her provider – Community Intervention Associates. Stanhope is quick to point out that for any patients suffering from paranoia, walking through a door marked ‘CIA’ to converse with a TV screen isn’t optimal. I ask if this is still the situation.

“No actually, that’s one of those things I secretly take credit for,” tells Stanhope, “after I released that they changed the name from CIA to CHA. I think I’m responsible for that. They had to have seen this, it’s a small town. They had to have heard about it. They changed the name, if nothing else. The mental healthcare hasn’t gotten any better but at least they didn’t make it so blatantly obvious they don’t care by calling it ‘CIA’.”

With a population of around five-thousand, Bisbee, Arizona is indeed a small place. But Stanhope is evidently fond of his hometown. “Oh, I love it here. There’s few enough people that there a sense of community, I like knowing my neighbours, I like not having to lock doors. You probably should here… I’ve got angry dogs.”

It’s from their Bisbee home, a compound of bungalows, trailers, and miscellaneous kitsch, that Stanhope and Bingo run their annual ‘eBay Yard Sale’. I ask him what they’ve put aside; keen to know if there’s anything good going.

“That’s what we’re doing today,” explains Stanhope. “As soon as I’m done with you we start cataloging all the stuff. We got a bunch of shit. A bunch of suits, just stuff that just fills up your crawl space, you know. I’ll never look at this again. People send me, like, watercolour paintings of me and you know, hey, that’s a good painting, I guess, but what? Am I gonna put paintings of myself on my own walls? Fuck. So you sell it to the fans.”

Historically, the clearouts have been mostly made up of eclectic clothing. A scroll through Stanhope’s eBay shows up such descriptions as ‘Plaid Jacket 40R Serious Polyester’, ‘Bingo’s Turquoise Blue Pimp Suit’, and ‘Old Timey Wool Swimming Trunks’. This time around he’s got something a little more personal on offer.

“I got a picture that was on my wall from the first time we went over to London with Johnny Depp. It’s me and Bingo and Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and Ron Wood from the Stones and his gal, and I don’t want fucking Amber Heard on my wall any more so I’m gonna sell that, with the explanation that… if you know the stories then you know why I wouldn’t want this on my wall. But I will sell it and I’ll give that money to a charity for actually abused women. ‘Cause that’s what she supposedly did with her divorce money – “I’m gonna give it all to charities for abused women” – well I’m gonna do the same with your picture.”

“She dropped the lawsuit,” continues Stanhope – referring to the deformation case Heard brought, and dropped, against the comic. “She had no lawsuit, she was just doing it to try to shut me up. It would’a been fucking hilarious if she went through with it. Sue me in my own small town? Gonna come down here and sue me for all I’ve got? Get that house? You know you can’t sell that house; you’ll have to be my neighbour. Houses don’t sell down here very well.”

The legal run in Stanhope had with Amber Heard has been well documented, as is his friendship with Johnny Depp, who wrote the foreword for Digging Up Mother. Ron Wood is a new one on me, though. I ask him who else shows up in the new book. He simply tells me that, “you can’t have a book called ‘This Is Not Fame’ without name dropping a lot,” before directing me to the index, handily included in the press release I received: Brand, Russell. Clapton, Eric. Manson, Marilyn….

“I texted him,” beings Stanhope at the mention of Marilyn Manson, who sits next to ‘The Man Show’ and ‘Marijuana’ in the index of This Is Not Fame. “He’s legendarily flaky so I texted him, I said ‘Hey, will you write a blurb for the back cover of my book?’ And he just typed back ‘yes’ and never got around to it, so I just put that. He’s a fun character; he’s one who lives up to his reputation. We’ve hung out a few times but I don’t have that kind of stamina. He’s hardcore.”

“I envy the people like that who can party that hard and still create that much. I mean, I can hang with you for awhile but I’m not doing shit the next day. I’m not writing a song or… he paints, he’s just wildly artistic. I party like that and I’m just on the couch for twenty four hours.” Stanhope pauses, “often I will go out on stage to his ‘Killing Strangers’ song… puts you in the mood.”

This is about all the comic will tell me about his upcoming tour; either he’s closely guarding some prime material, or he’s still to write it. Time will tell.

Our time today, however, has come to an end. It’s getting dark here in Birmingham, and Doug Stanhope clearly has a crawl space or two to empty out before the day is done in Bisbee. I wish him well, and try once more to find out what went on in Bangkok. He’s not telling. “Be at the show in Birmingham. This is such a long-ass story…”

Doug Stanhope performs at the O2 Academy Birmingham on Tuesday 12^th June – as presented by Academy Events. For direct show information, including venue details and online ticket sales, visit www.academymusicgroup.com/o2academybirmingham/events/doug-stanhope

For more on Doug Stanhope, visit www.dougstanhope.com

For more from the O2 Academy Birmingham, including venue details and further event listings, visit www.academymusicgroup.com/o2academybirmingham

April 21, 2018April 20, 2018

INTERVIEW: Juice Aleem

Words & illustration by Emily Doyle

It’s the beginning of Birmingham’s short-lived heatwave. Tilt, the pinball bar, has its doors open and the clatter of the machines echoes into the street. The table is laid out with marker pens, various notebooks, and a black coffee. Juice Aleem arrives and orders a stout.

Juice Aleem has been a key figure in the Birmingham hip hop scene since the mid-nineties. He’s fronted Big Dada collective New Flesh, hosted for Ninja Tune, and collaborated with Coldcut, Hexstatic, and Adam Freeland. 2016 saw the release of his album, Voodu Starchild, and a book on Afrofuturism. He is a director of B-Side Hip Hop Festival. This weekend, he joins Sid Peacock’s Surge Orchestra for a performance at mac to launch Surge in Spring II Festival.

“It’s my first time performing with Sid,” tells Aleem. “We’ve done a few things in the past, like me reviewing some of their gigs. I became aware of them around the time they were doing a tribute to Sun Ra, and I’m quite a Sun Ra fan and someone was like ‘Oh they’re doing this and maybe they could use you and you could meet Sid and you might like this…’ So, that was a two or three years ago and since then we’ve kept in contact. This is part of the culmination of that.”

The performance is titled ‘Rivers of Love’. It’s a reflection on Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered fifty years ago this week in Birmingham.

“We thought a lot of people are going to concentrate on the negatives because it wasn’t the exactly most happy time,” explains Aleem, “so instead of that, let’s look at the positives of the time. Some of them are obvious, some are less so. The country that my father came to, and then my mother later, from two different islands in the Caribbean – when they came here, a bell pepper was something that was hard to get hold of. A bell pepper, as innocuous as a bell pepper is – it’s not spicy, but it only grows originally in certain parts of the world. It has to have sun, it has to have certain types of soil – and it wasn’t here in great amounts. I’m not saying people didn’t know what a bell pepper was, but it wasn’t in every meal. Like on a basic level, there’s a Caribbean food shop just there. We’re sitting here drinking beers and coffees and things. These kinds of beers and coffees in general don’t come from this country. But you know, we all drink coffee. We enjoy these things day in day out.”

“In a way though I understand his speech. I understand some of what he was getting at, though it’s very right wing. The funny thing is, it was Enoch Powell that actually made the call to bring people over here, that’s what people don’t understand. He was the main person to say ‘Hey, Nigeria, India, Jamaica, Trinidad, come over here, come help.’ He was important in that call, and afterwards he was like, ‘ah…’ And that’s what the speech actually entails. It wasn’t necessarily saying don’t come, it wasn’t necessarily saying you have to go home now, but it was saying you have to wear a bowler hat. He talks about how people speak, and learning to speak the Queen’s English. I’m paraphrasing here but like, ‘if you’re going to be here, be here like us. Don’t be too… dark’”.

When asked about the value of looking back at Enoch Powell’s speech, Aleem is quick to argue it’s cultural importance. “You have to analyse the past. That should be the reason we have history, not just to pass tests. I’m gonna quote Malcolm X: he says that most of the education we have is not an education, it’s an indoctrination. History especially – especially especially.

I think by now we should have learned some kind of lesson about invasion of people’s land and privacy, ownership, cultural hegemony. I think history is very important, and it’s important to address in it in an artistic manner. It’s incumbent upon artists to do something – you don’t have to be the most knowledgeable. You don’t have to be Public Enemy. You don’t have to be Bob Dylan. You don’t have to get yourself arrested, but at least address certain things within your understanding of the world. Whatever your issue is, whether it’s just being allowed to skateboard in a certain park – that’s your politics.”

Aleem’s own politics are rooted in the Afrofuturist movement. The author of 2016’s Afrofutures and Astro Black Travel: A Passport to a Melanated Future, he is eager to explain the label.

“I think Afrofuturism – let me say straight off, I’m not concerned with that title. It’s just a name for an idea or a concept or an emotion, and we often give things names that we can’t necessarily contain within those letters. It helps people understand… like the film Black Panther. I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘I get what you’re on about now – I’ve just watched Black Panther and I get it’.

Why did Picasso become a better artist by studying what they call primitivism and cubism, by going into African culture? The standard of European cultural so-called superiority is all based on African precepts. Mathematics, archaeology, language; it’s all from a dark skinned person somewhere, usually a dark skinned woman, funnily enough. So, then feminism features in, and intersectional feminism.”

While we talk, I’ve been making sketches for a portrait of Aleem. He looks over at what I’m working on and asks if he can sketch me too. Producing a case of markers, he gets to work. Aleem’s art style is a reflection of him – bold, unapologetic, but always endearing. It echoes eighties comic books, a recurring topic in our conversation. I ask why he feels drawn to the medium.

“I love Stan Lee and Jack Kirby,” tells Aleem. “Marvel not only made superheroes, they also took existing heroes because these aren’t owned by any copyright anymore, so you’ve got thousands of years of stories that you don’t have to pay for. You put Thor, the god of thunder from Norse mythology, you put him in to the premier superhero group of the sixties Marvel Comic Company, and this is perfect.

Superheroes already exist in mythology. One of the first heroes in East African mythology, where some people speculate we get the word ‘hero’, is Heru, or Horus. He’s already a superhero by virtue: ‘Oh my parents are kind of like gods, and I did this and I conquered that and I came back from death…’ Well, you’re a superhero. If you explain an angel to somebody without using the word, it would sound like a superhero. In west African mythology you have things called the orishas which are like gods, spirits, but lesser than the supreme. They have different attributes, this one can control the water, this one can do that. We would call those beings superheroes.

Since we’ve started calling superheroes ‘superheroes’, there’s been a lot of wars. Comics came to the fore particularly in the forties and fifties, times of world war. There’s a need in the human psyche to be saved. And as we’re, in a general, less religious, in the Judeo-Christian monotheistic sense, we might not call for Jesus anymore or Jehovah… we may call for Superman. We may call for Spiderman. And again, these archetypes already exist. Spiderman, Anansi, you know where I’m going. Superman is Kal-El – in Hebrew, ‘of god’. They’re already there.”

Juice Aleem is a font of knowledge on the lineage of the superhero archetype throughout civilisation. I ask him if it’s role within the Afrofuturist movement is a healthy one – does African/African Diaspora culture deserve a more varied representation in the future?

“I think Luke Cage is a representation of the black everyman,” answers Aleem. “Obviously, the everyman that got put through a chemical process that gives him bullet proof skin and super strong muscle strength, which obviously happens to most people… Actually, as much as I down it a little bit, I think that’s what Black Lightning’s good for. He’s got powers, but he’s very much a school teacher. I think that’s the problem with the programme. All the crescendos of the story are based in almost too normal a storyline for an African-American family. For me, personally, I’m happy to escape that. Do I need another story about black gangs, black-on-black violence, drug dealing? I think I might have seen that already.

That’s why Afrofuturism is important to me, more interesting, because it flips a different switch in your brain. Even if we consciously want to be friends with everybody, we are subconsciously going to be sexist. We are subconsciously going to be misogynist. We are subconsciously going to be homophobic, or racist. There’s certain things in our upbringing, in our society that are going to trigger us. And that’s why I think it’s important to do things that are going to challenge us, not only in our documentation but in our experimentation.”

Juice Aleem and Surge Orchestra present ‘Rivers of Love’ at mac on Saturday 21^st April. Doors open for the mac Theatre at 1pm, with ticket priced at £10 / £9.10 – for direct event information and online ticket sales, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk/event/surge-in-spring-ii-juice-aleem-and-surge-orchestra

For more on Juice Aleem, visit www.juicealeem.co.uk

For more on Sid Peacock and Surge Orchestra, visit www.surgeorchestra.com

For more from the mac, including full event listings and online ticket sales, visit www.macbirmingham.co.uk

April 19, 2018April 19, 2018

BREVIEW: Dragpunk Presents Candyland @ The Nightingale Club 06.04.18

Words & illustrations by Emily Doyle

On Friday 6^th April, queer art collective Dragpunk took over the middle floor of The Nightingale Club. This was the venue for their brand new performance night, Dragpunk Presents. For the uninitiated, we caught up with host Amber Cadaverous – who began by explaining the origins of the group’s name.

The ‘drag’ in Dragpunk recognises that, “drag artistry is the expressive and creative art for anyone regardless of their gender, sexual identity and orientation,” tells Cadaverous, “it knows no gender but subverts and mocks all gender and art norms.” The collective’s values of “expressive, individual freedom that is anti-establishment and anti-mainstream society,” are where the ‘punk’ comes in.

“Whether your interest is makeup, performance art, drag art, queer politics, or you’re simply in need of a safe space for fun, self-expression, and excitement, we want to provide this,” continues Cadaverous. “We plan and run all events as safe space for those across the LGBTQ+ community and allies. We only encourage fun and freedom – dress how you want and be who you want. We welcome all of those who just want to feel the love of a community.

Birmingham is our home, and Birmingham is brimming with art and creativity that needs an outlet and a voice.”

The theme for tonight is Candyland. Paul Aleksandr runs the door. Head to toe in neon pink, complete with bedazzled facial hair, he offers cakes and sweets to guests as they arrive. Hands are stamped and drinks are bought.

Around midnight, Cadaverous totters on stage. She wears platform heels, a paint splattered prom dress, and an enormous purple wig topped with an even bigger pink bow. Her face is painted with a Glasgow smile and heavily lined eyes, but her excitement about the evening shines through. She welcomes and introduces fellow Dragpunk, Lilith.

Lilith looks like she’s stepped straight out of your MySpace top friends from 2004. She’s dressing up a cinched and contoured club kid look with buckets of kimo-kawaii accessories. A dynamic routine to Blood on the Dance Floor’s ‘Candyland’ sets the tone (and the pace) for the night. Strobe lights illuminate her backcombed wig.

Eva Lution follows, serving a look described by Cadaverous as “glamour granny”. Her glamour is certainly timeless, as she performs the evening’s most articulate lip sync to ‘A Spoonful of Sugar’. Lution’s floor length gown ripples across the stage. It looks effortless, but the costume designer and fashion student later confirms that it was sewn by her own fair hands. When the music switches to Def Leppard, Lution shrugs the gown to the floor. She reveals fishnets and thigh high boots. This girl is no granny.

Ginny Lemon brings a change of pace to the stage next. Some may remember Lemon from an appearance on ITV’s X Factor in 2017, or perhaps from her regular turn as a host at The Village Inn on Hurst Street. Either way, her face is not one you’ll forget in a hurry. Looking like the bastard daughter of Marge Simpson and Velma from Scooby Doo, Lemon emerges from the DJ booth gesticulating along to Tori Amos’ ‘Sugar’ followed by ‘Candy Shop’ by Madonna. These go down like a delicious citrusy treat with the crowd, but her original composition (an a cappella ode to biscuits) is even better.

After a short interval, the room fills again for Mama Mamba. The 2017 winner of Church of Yshee has set the bar high. She perches on the side of the stage, legs bound into a mermaid tail. The room goes quiet. ‘Part of Your World’ from The Little Mermaid fades in.

Mamba flirts with the crowd, winking and pouting throughout the lipsync while she’s photographed. She checks her flawless makeup in a shell-shaped mirror and combs a fork through her turquoise hair. Slowly, she pulls herself up onto her fins and shimmies out of the tail, flaunting the best bum on Birmingham’s drag scene. Mamba struts across the stage in a iridescent miniskirt, and when the song reaches its falsetto climax she gleefully removes her seashell bra to reveal matching nipple tassels. It’s what Walt Disney would have wanted.

A new face on the local scene, Stormy Carl’s creator describes her as “a messy woman zoomed in on.” She wears a pink satin slip which clashes against her emerald curls. If you look down, pink stripy socks peep out the top of her platform sandals. Carl has taken the evening’s theme and run with it, crafting a playful mix for her routine that features Aqua, Austin Powers, and a smattering of Spongebob Squarepants dialogue.

She drizzles caramel over herself and throws her sticky dress to the ground, untangling it from her feet as the room takes in her pink paisley bikini. Her athletic, chaotic routine leaves the crowd wondering where she’s been hiding.

We caught up with Stormy Carl after the show for a few words. As one of Dragpunk’s female performers, she had a few words on the role of women within the scene:

“Drag at its core, to me anyways, is just about playing dress up,” explains Carl. “Historically it was a way to entertain and escape from society. You can be ANYONE in drag: yourself, an egg, a celebrity, or just whatever you perceive as beautiful. I like to take the idea of ‘woman’ that society has constructed and just times it by 100.”

Nora Virus opens the third and final set of the evening. A key player in Birmingham’s club kid community, Virus is a part of the Opulence collective and founder of another new drag event coming to Birmingham, Mother’s Meeting. Wearing a cropped, tie dye t-shirt and candy floss pink wig, she delights in completely desecrating ‘Pure Imagination’ from 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Beckoning fellow artist Liam Layland from the crowd, Virus invites him to reach inside the large, plush doughnut strapped around her waist and try his luck. What follows can’t be repeated here, but it ends with them skipping off stage together to the tune of ‘I’ve Got a Golden Ticket’.

Self-described ‘burlesquer and activist’, Petite, is a bundle of cardigan and big frothy petticoats. She dances to Jackie Wilson’s fitting ‘Reet Petite’, grinning at the crowd. This saccharine tone quickly dissolves when ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ starts playing for the second time this evening.

Petite takes this more literally than Eva Lution did and strips down to lingerie before liberally pouring a whole a bag of Tate & Lyle over her body. When the song’s over, the performers all scrabble to clear the floor of sugar, whipped cream, and cupcake crumbs in time for the final act.

The fourth and final member of the Dragpunk collective, Tacky Alex, is here to close the night. Joined on stage by Stormy Carl and Mama Mamba for a choreographed routine to Katy Perry’s ‘California Girls’, Alex begins pulling audience members up to join them. After the show, Amber Cadaverous picked this out as the highlight of her night.

“It felt so silly and fun but had a real community vibe and spirit; everyone was laughing and smiling. It just felt so right!“

It seems a fitting ending to a night celebrating the playful and inclusive nature of drag as an art form; everyone left feeling pleased to see the Dragpunk team pull it off.

”There is always something really magic about seeing all your plans come to life,” Cadaverous agrees. “Our ‘Presents’ night is going to be regular throughout the year, each time with a new theme and a production showcasing local and national UK drag of all genders, sexualities and abilities… expect us to release the next theme and line up shortly! As well as our performance night we also run a queer alternative party called I’m Not Okay and our next one of those will be at Birmingham Pride in Nightingales on the Future Stage.

We are also working on some events that will run during the day and outside of club spaces so our fans and friends under 18 will be able to enjoy queer performance art and community based events. Plans include film viewings, drag makeup workshops, drag queen life drawing, open mic performance segments and more!”

For more on the Dragpunk Collective, visit www.facebook.com/dragpunkcollective

For more from The Nightingale Club, including full event listings and online ticket sales, visit www.nightingaleclub.co.uk

April 5, 2018April 4, 2018

BPREVIEW: Dragpunk Presents: Candyland @ The Nightingale Club 06.04.18

Words by Emily Doyle

Local queer collective, Dragpunk, are launching a brand new performance based night – Dragpunk Presents. The inaugural event is on Friday 6^thApril at The Nightingale Club, with tickets priced at £4 (adv) and £6 (otd).

For direct event information, including online ticket sales, click on the following links to visit the Eventbrite ticket website or the Dragpunk Presents: Candyland Facebook Event Page.

For Dragpunk Presents’ first show, the theme is Candyland: A Celebration of Drag – with the team behind it promising ‘a happy land of modern, diverse, inclusive and utterly creative drag and performance!’. Following on from the roaring success of Dragpunk Collective’s alt queer night, I’m Not Okay, this new event will be ‘showcasing local and national UK drag of all genders, sexualities and abilities that you’ll adore!’. Looks like it’s going to be a big one too.

Hosting Candyland is Amber Cadaverous, the DJ and performance artist known for her arresting and sometimes unsettling looks. When she’s not busy studying at Birmingham School of Art, Cadaverous is hard at work as one quarter of the Dragpunk Collective. Another bonafide drag punk, Paul Aleksandr will also be in attendance – fresh from a delightful turn at The Glee Club supporting BenDeLaCrème. Expect fishnets, body paint and butchered cuddly toys.

Also performing is Yshee Black, icon of the Birmingham scene and host of regular drag contest Church of Yshee at The Village Inn. If you were at the congregation last November you may recognise a few other faces at Candyland, including burlesque dancer Petite, club kid Nora Virus, and Church of Yshee winner Mama Mamba.

Tacky Alex will also be taking the stage at Candyland. Alex’s pastel perfect looks have been a hit at queer nights Glittershit and Second Self, with a chance to catch them at The Nightingale before she is back on stage supporting Trinity Taylor and Vander Von Odd in May.

Self-described ‘emo trash’, Lilith, will also be at Candyland – putting Siouxsie Sioux to shame with her eyes, alongside Glittershit regular, Pork Pie, who will be keeping it all a bit avant-garde.

You can also expect otherworldly looks from Stormy Carl, stunning costumery from Eva Lution, alternative glamour from Ginny Lemon, and something truly indescribable from Auntie Jamie…

Candyland: A Celebration of Drag comes to The Nightingale Club on Friday 6^th April, as presented by the Dragpunk Collective. For direct event information, including online ticket sales, click on the following links to visit the Eventbrite ticket website or the Dragpunk Presents: Candyland Facebook Event Page.

For more on the Dragpunk Collective, visit www.facebook.com/dragpunkcollective

For more from The Nightingale Club, including full event listings and online ticket sales, visit www.nightingaleclub.co.uk