Stephen Brogan
Between January 1985 and May 1986, the Australian fashion designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-94) hosted Taboo, a now notorious nightclub held on Thursdays at Maximus, in London’s Leicester Square. Bowery and Taboo are the focus of ‘Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London’, a new exhibition at The Fashion and Textile Museum. The show draws together the designers of the capital’s urban streetwear and clubwear, many of whom frequented Taboo, the premise being that the club’s clientele was an especially creative crowd that also included pop stars, film makers, artists, and stylishly dressed nightclubbers.
It is the first exhibition held in London devoted to this predominantly LGBTQI+ subculture of some forty years ago, and to its credit it places the clothes that Bowery designed within their immediate context, something that none of the books devoted to him have done. Yet the title itself quickly raises an eyebrow. Outlaws? Renegades? These were nothing of the sort. Rather, they were fashion designers, many of whom sold their clothes in Kensington and on Bond Street and were happy to dance at Taboo to mainstream pop such as Wham and Madonna. Hardly William Burroughs’ territory.
The exhibition has been a labour of love for its curators, but its misleading title points to a bigger concern, namely, the tendency for Taboo to be over-hyped within the media. It is often discussed in isolation, presented as ‘the place to be in mid-1980s London’, an exclusive bacchanalian club with a strict door policy, packed with a dressed-up clientele of hedonistic, artistic types. This is exemplified in the article in the March 1986 issue of The Face that marked Taboo’s first birthday. Obviously, there is some truth in this, but Taboo was far from being the only decadent and creative club in the capital at this time. Alternatively, Taboo is bookended by two other clubs that have also received a disproportionately large amount of media attention: Steve Strange’s Blitz (the home of London’s New Romantics, that ran from 1979-80), and Shoom (the acid house club that ran from 1987-90). This approach, however, reduces the history of London’s nightclubs during the 1980s to three giants, with some also-rans mentioned briefly.
Taboo was regularly featured in style magazines such as i-D and The Face, and in listings magazines such as City Limits. It was also a key component in the 25-minute documentary commissioned on Bowery by London Weekend Television for its arts series, South of Watford, broadcast in the spring of 1986. The coverage focused on Bowery and his circle of friends—his ‘All Gay Family’ as i-D dubbed them in April 1985—all of whom wore his clothes and frequented his club.
Bowery was originally an Australian fashion student who moved to London in 1980 determined to become part of its alternative nightclub set. He achieved this primarily through the media coverage given to his startling fashion collection of 1984 that radically re-worked glam rock clothes and spearheaded the first 1970s revival. The other key members of the ‘All Gay Family’ included Trojan (née Gary Barnes), artist and muse to Bowery; Marc Vaultier (née Golding), drag-queen doorman of Taboo; Rachel Auburn, fashion designer and DJ at Taboo; David Walls, Bowery’s good friend and flatmate.
Most of Taboo’s press coverage was found in the nightclub listings and reviews sections, alongside other ground-breaking clubs that, unlike Taboo, all put on shows or bands. Major players included Philip Sallon’s Mud Club, at which Vivienne Westwood showed her collections; Heaven’s alternative Thursday night called Asylum; The Hippodrome, that had a gay Monday night and an alternative Thursday night, and put on shows by the likes of Divine and Marilyn; Bolts, the north London gay club that held Hi-NRG-related PAs; and The Batcave, London’s best-known goth club that had its own cult, in-house band, Specimen. Like Taboo, these clubs all operated strict door policies to protect their character and their clientele, and like Taboo, they all attracted pop stars and other creative types, as well as a dressed-up, sexually diverse crowd. Indeed, cross-pollination was the order of the night, with clubbers socialising at a variety of different nightclubs.
Taboo closed abruptly after sixteen months, following an article in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine (1 June,1986) that revealed widespread drug use at the club. Once again the media shaped perceptions of Bowery’s nightspot. Since then, the mythologising of the club has been on a slow but steady burn in magazine articles and documentaries, often those that highlight the ‘alternative’ culture of Thatcher’s London. Boy George’s musical Taboo has also kept the flame alight. The club’s posthumous reputation includes the rumours that circulated about it during its lifetime, including scandalous tales of celebrities and drug use and, ludicrously, stories that people were crushed in the throng outside, with one of them dying (The Face, March 1986).
Despite the media hyperbole, the fashion crowd that frequented Taboo were but one tribe in a capital city saturated in youth tribes, all of which had their own striking dress codes, music, and social spaces. Magazines like i-D and The Face featured the Taboo regulars alongside punks, goths, rockabillies, psychobillies, rock n rollers, skinheads and oi!, b-boys, soul boys and girls, breakdancers, gender benders, drag queens, and leather clones, to name just some of the tribes who all had their own specific cultures of pubs, clubs, gigs, and shops. This smorgasbord of alternative culture is depicted in the striking art of Mark Wigan, the artist who has documented London’s nightlife since the 1980s. His illustration from 1984, ‘Interiors of the Subterraneans’, places Leigh Bowery and Trojan (and with hindsight Taboo, which was soon to open) within Britain’s heterogenous youth culture.
Once Taboo closed, the depictions of Bowery in the media changed: he was presented as a stand-alone figure rather than as part of a nightlife clique. This was because within seven months of Taboo shutting, Trojan and Marc Vaultier had both died of drug overdoses, tragedies that hit Bowery hard. Other friends simply moved on. True, the Australian would go on to become more famous as a performance artist, an artistic collaborator with dancer Michael Clark, and a model for painter Lucian Freud. But post-Taboo, Bowery was presented in the media as a lone artist. This was accentuated by Bowery’s appearance: he continued to wear his own designs, of course, but his fashions mutated into costumes that often hid his face and distorted his body shape. Unlike the ‘All Gay Family’ days, he was the only person who wore them. This situation continued until 1992, when Bowery teamed up with anarchic drag queens Stella Stein and Sheila Tequila to form their troupe, Raw Sewage.
Since Bowery’s death on New Year’s Eve 1994, the publications devoted to him have also treated him in isolation, rather than presenting him alongside fellow performance artists and nightclub stars. Similarly, within those publications, Taboo is discussed with little or no reference to its nocturnal context. So, we are back where we started, having come full circle. If we are to appreciate Taboo more accurately, then, what is needed is a richer study of London’s alternative, gay and gay-friendly nightlife at that time that illuminates both how Bowery’s club followed set patterns and how it broke with them. The inspiration for such a study could be Wigan’s image, and it would show that Taboo was one tile in a huge, vibrant mosaic of youth culture.
Stephen Brogan is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a History Tutor at the Mary Ward Centre. His book The Royal Touch in Early Modern England was published in 2015 and went into paperback in 2019. Stephen is currently writing a book on the Chevalier d’Eon (1728-1810), the soldier and spy who, having been born male, lived the second half of their life as a woman. Stephen spent some of his youth in most of the clubs mentioned in this article; he performed in drag as Stella Stein; and he worked closely with Leigh Bowery in the early 1990s.
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