The carnivores and the destructors

It's been an odd, doomy week for me. B is still, obviously, in my thoughts and me and TSB have been making arrangements to attend his funeral next week. That'll involve a train ride Up North, the second this month. First was a work-related trip up to Manchester on Thursday, back yesterday. Not bad because I was staying with my sister and caught up with her, my brother-in-law and all the little nieces and nephews. The eldest is just old enough that he's becoming fascinated with the concept of older people having family relationships other than parental ones: he's intrigued that his mother is also my sister, just like he's got sisters. His younger sister's disbelieving that such a thing is possible.

So that was nice. The trip back was annoyingly sluggish, because of scheduled work going on blah blah fishcakes, meaning I had the equivalent of the Slow Train To Euston via Birmingham International. I did, however, have a carriage almost entirely to myself and could stare out at the darkening countryside and imagine myself a lone survivor of some Terry Nation-penned catastrophe... I dozed off (which I usually do on trains) and woke to find the train was motionless with complete blackness outside, no lights at all. I'd no idea where we'd stalled or whether there was now a delay. Eerily disorientating.

Of course, it didn't help that I was nearing the end of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning The Road, a beautifully-written but terrifying piece of postapocalyptica. There's a lot of it about at the moment, what with Dead Set and now Survivors. I guess the recession causes one to consider other scenarios of civilisation collapse, from nuclear holocaust to plague to zombies. As I've remarked before, I find myself drawn to these doom-laden tales and in a weird way they're perversely comforting. The Road, however, is just so unremittingly (for the most part, anyway) bleak that I think that sense of bleakness (struggling to survive in a blackened, lifeless, cannibalistic world of grey ash and dead bones) suffused me for a while, mixing with the more particular ache of B's death.

Anyway, I'd planned to return to London by tea time so there'd be the option of Duckie. Slightly torn between the urge to cocoon at home with TSB (even short trips away make me feel like that) and the desire to get out of the house but be somewhere familiar surrounded by The Gays. A hot bath and the reflection that That's What B Would Want Us To Do saw us tending toward the latter. B not having been unacquainted with excess (wonderfully so), I suspect this won't be the last time he'll be invoked as rationale for getting out and partying.

To be frank, it felt a little like a post-apocalyptic version of Duckie, too. Some of that's undoubtedly carry-over of my general mood but the club itself was the sparsest I've seen it for a long while: Amy remarked on the credit crunchiness of the "smattering of applause" which greeted her appearance onstage and assured us we wouldn't be asked to dig deep for more. Just as well, really, in the case of the first act, Ruby Somethingorother (Nesk? Nesh?), a well-proportioned woman in a black satin basque and marabou-trimmed robe. She came on the strains of the Kaiser Chiefs' Ruby and... well, she walked around a bit, grinning. That was largely it. She said stuff that wasn't quite funny enough to be comedy, wasn't developed or engaging enough to be "character" and wasn't weird/unusual enough to fall into the Intriguing Duckie Oddities category.

What she did do spectacularly well was misjudge both audience and host to the point of alienation. Firstoff, she referred to Amy as the "compere" (to which Amy took exception) then made some half-cocked jibe about preferring male comperes and wondering whether Amy was a man in drag. That didn't go down well. She then started hassling a man in the front row, asking what he did for a living (worked in a museum bookshop) and taking the piss out of the fact that he had ginger hair and wore glasses. Not a great move, given that

a) the guy in question was really rather cute,

b) within the particular geek-chic beardygay demographic which attends Duckie, ginger hair and glasses are not only not automatically seen as bad/sad/undesirable, they're frequently fetishised as being especially sexy

and

c) Amy's partner is a bespectacled redhead.

So. All things considered, a bit rubbish really; she really lost the crowd. A less polite audience would've booed her offstage (as it was, there was a fair bit of disgruntled not-quite-booing at a couple of points). She wasn't called back to take her applause. Gareth and I wondered whether her act would've been successful in any sort of club setting, gay or straight. It just seemed weak and lacking in substance and, where audience banter was concerned, verging on nasty.

(I should say also that there're no photos of this week's Duckie. I brought my Good Camera along and stupidly left the detachable lens at home. D'oh!)

The second act was better (they'd have been hard pushed to be worse): Stewart Somethingorother (neither act is named on the Duckie website, hence my uncertainty), a naggingly familiar-looking chap who's apparently played guitar as part of David Hoyle's act in the past. He came on in a sort of genderqueer early Bananarama drag, full slap, cap, shirt, baggy slacks and really rather lovely shoes. A kind of mimed finding a guitar, licking it and starting to strum chords. Eventually, he became entangled in the flex, fell over and lay still - only to be dragged offstage by a menacing, portly chap dressed like a football hooligan and snarling song lyrics at the audience. All a little bizarre but at least interesting to look at and deserving of applause.

Thank Gawd for the Readers Wifes. They pretty much saved this week's Duckie: almost despite myself, I ended up jumping and air-punching to the likes of Laid and He's On The 'Phone. Bought tickets for their New Year bash and am in the process of enjoying their annual CD mix.

Oh, and Maur Valance was there, so I got a chance to congratulate her for winning the Femme Realism prize at Liverpool Is Burning. She's lovely.

"Destructors" would, I think, be a fitting description of the last hour or two of KUNST, a couple of Fridays ago. This was my second time (the first being the fabulous night featuring Our Lady J's debut solo performance) and I'd made a token gesture toward the Narnia/History of Art dress code by wearing a black shirt and spidery jewellery, gingering up my beard and sticking a large dressing over one ear. I was Vincent Van Goth, ho bloody ho. No, no-one else got it either but I did receive several concerned enquiries as to my aural health. Halfway through the evening, I got pissed off with hearing everything in mono and ripped the dressing off. Shame sunflowers were out of season.

In the event, the couple of punters who actually paid any heed to the dress code went as Narnians, specifically the White Witch. Our lovely host, Dusty Limits, had gone pale and witchy too (not to say a tad consumptive):



KUNST is, I'm coming to realise, more cabaret-heavy than either Duckie or Vauxhallville. I liked Miss Leggy Pee, who showed us her puppies:



She later did a couple of really rather cute Doris Dayesque lip-synched duets with her little old man-puppet:





There was also a rather pleasing operatic version of Psycho Killer



and some excellent poetry from Salena Godden (seen here with truly goddess-like sun-disc balanced on her head):



Nathan Evans did his Queen puppetry striptease:



It's a clever act but I've seen it before at least twice now and I agree with Gareth that some of the trampled-upon rights mentioned in his critique seem to date faster than others in terms of audience response.

For me, however, the oddest part of the evening was the finale, a live last-ever-performance (well, before they return to the US, I don't think they're splitting up) from KUNST's resident house band, Holy Ghost Revival. Apparently they traditionally come on and play toward the end of each KUNST but presumably Our Lady J took their place the last (and first) time I was there.

I guess I found them odd because it all seemed really un-Weimar Cabaret somehow. It wasn't bad, necessarily - there was something quite exhilarating about all that rawk 'n' roll energy - but it did seem to go on about twice as long as it should've done. When Dusty Limits called for a lock-in and an encore, I found myself thinking, "couldn't we just have the DJ back, playing music I actually like?" It was all a little bit jarringly hetero, too, but queered up a bit by Dusty's tales of snogging various band members, reenacted for us onstage.

Here's some pics:











I dunno, though. I don't really understand the appeal of that sort of rock/metal interface; it really has always seemed to me a peculiarly heterosexual thing, the straight boys' opportunity to strut and revel in glitter, spandex, tight leather and big hair while aggressively proclaiming their rampant desire for the ladeez. I was slightly surprised, at one point, to find myself mouthing the words despite not remotely recognising the tune (or even a tune): it was a cover or a part-sampling of Like A Prayer, probably my favourite Madonna song.

How queer.

Knee deep in the hoopla

Hmmm. You can tell it's been a good (or at least an alcohol-soaked) Duckie when it takes me several days to pen the comedown post.

Me and TSB undoubtedly drink more than the somewhat arbitrary Government-set Recommended Maximum Number Of Units. We went through a period not so long ago of not drinking at all during the week: this was all well and good but, come Friday, we were practically bursting forth from our respective workplaces like Bart Simpson on his skateboard, hurtling o'er bridge and under tunnel for Soho. Set the controls for the heart of the pub!

This weekday/weekend distinction's been relaxed a little and we sometimes break open the wine or G&T of an evening. We've yet to completely lose the Friday pub-scramble, though. We likes our booze, we does.

After the exotica of Liverpool Is Burning and last week's more cabaretastic pleasures, we were hankering for a chunk of ye olde original Readers Wifes. Kim Phaggs awol this week but Chelsea Kelsey ably assisted by Jock (with both Cloths on the door plus Amy and Simon, making a healthy five out of six) did the business, tickling our aural G-spots to perfection.

There's usually something visually engaging playing onstage at Duckie before the cabaret starts. We found ourselves increasingly engrossed in an evocative little black-and-white film about two apparently deaf-and-mute grafters in a grotty bedsit in 1950s London. The industrial landscape was all-encompassing, making both me and Mel (sporting the black version of her teardrop necklace) think of a host of Smiths songs. It occurred to me that the basic message of many (most?) of this kind of British drama of the period was Life Is Grim, Don't Get Ideas Above Your Station. In this case, there was a "moral" dimension too, as one of our hapless deaf-mutes canoodles, post-pub, with a young woman who's clearly No Better Than She Should Be - and subsequently dies, pushed off a wall into a canal by some feral children. With horrible irony, his friend passes by but doesn't see him and can't hear his cries. So he dies. The End. Life's a bummer. Don't Have Sex (With Tarts-With-Hearts).

We were all, including Gareth, briefly traumatised by this abrupt and rather shockingly downbeat ending. TSB later discovered the film is called Together and features the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi (designer of the Tottenham Court Road Tube mosaic!) as the surviving main character.

Amy was working a vaguely '80s silver-and-black look, including a chunky pendant fashioned from what appeared to be a tea strainer.



Starting cabaret act was the first of two turns by Probe, a duo who performed a Fred 'n' Gingeresque dance in vintage evening dress. Very swish. As Theo, the handsome male half, stood at the front of the stage at the beginning, a voice to my left said thoughtfully and appreciatively, "quite big bulge" and we all tittered like big ol' gays.



They made it all look sooo easy.



Their second act was a more contemporary piece that took the piss out of po-faced contemporary dance ("and then I did this... and suddenly the gap between here and here became significant"). Quite a few Duckie virgins around (I'd found myself becoming Mr Crankypants Thirtysomething around them, particularly when they squawkily invaded the stage between acts and I felt compelled to tidy away a pint glass that seemed permanently on the verge of being knocked into the audience) and their attention seemed to drift a little during this part.



At one point, Antonia, the female Probe, put a foot wrong and fell backwards off the stage. There was an audible gasp of maybe half a second but she was caught in the arms of someone standing in the front row and sprang immediately back onstage as if on elastic. Impressive.



Final act was Marawa, hula hoop artiste extraordinaire. I've seen her before at Duckie (I think - Amy seems to have a particular love of hula hoopery and there've been a few hula girls over the years) and was excellent this time too, really working the crowd. Her calypso outfit, moves and some of her expressions (exaggerated by enormous fake eyelashes) reminded me of the bit at the beginning of Belleville Rendezvouz featuring the Josephine Baker caricature.






(Armwavey pint of beverage not photographer's own.)

'Twas a bit of an odd night for me, as I kept glimpsing an ex-colleague of mine in the middle of a moderately rowdy group of people (one of several birthdays in the RVT that night) and wondering if I should go over and say hello. At one point, I turned around to find him directly behind, looking right at me without a hint of recognition. I said (shouted) hello. Still no recognition. After a minute or two, I was reminded that my ex-colleague had a twin brother; it was he I was talking to. Heh.

Another in-house arts installation thingy, this time "being photographed taking poppers for free" (as Amy put it) in the Tavern's upstairs bathroom. At 1.30am, the results were projected onto the onstage screen and I was moderately glad I hadn't taken part.

Keep keep bleeding

After last weekend's jaunt up to Liverpool, me and TSB were all up for taking it easy this weekend: not straying too much from the pleasantly familiar routine of lunch, alcohol, Duckie, bed, lunch, alcohol, bed. In that order, obvieusement.

Saturday evening, though, we paid a flying pre-RVT visit to the Bread & Roses in Clapham, for our friend S's 30th birthday drinks. Getting off the Tube surrounded by slightly braying white boys in shirtsleeves, I was reminded of that tendency of straight people to band together in large, loud, underdressed packs the better to wander the High Streets of Britain. Hadn't seen S for ages and he'd put on weight but in the right way: always a looker, he now has an appealing upper body solidity. Yum. He'd been in the pub since 5pm but amazingly wasn't trashed. I remembered turning thirty and actually feeling quite good about the whole thing - like suddenly the pressure was off me to pay lip service to fashion or know what was Number 1 or whatever. I was free to indulge my incipient fogeyness.

Got to Duckie a little after 10. Only two of the Six there, Amy and Simon, making us somewhat apprehensive. Simon lovely as ever, though (his Movember 'tache noticeably bushier), chatting to us about Liverpool Is Burning and asking after the "beautiful woman" who'd accompanied me there, ho ho. Later, Amy acknowledged us from the stage as "hardcore" for having trekked up north and back. We felt duly smug. Our hostess was looking particularly good, in a long floaty blue-and-white ensemble, the Virgin Amy:



DJ Lush was standing in for the Wifes. I've said it before but it's true enough to bear repetition: the Readers Wifes really have spoiled us for other DJs. Lush is better than most and, if I'd never heard Kim Phaggs and Chelsea Kelsey, I'd probably be an enthusiastic, committed fan. She plays pretty decent stuff really, last night's selection a distinct improvement on the last time she DJed at Duckie, but her timing was wrong, somehow. With the Wifes, there's a sense of momentum steadily building throughout the evening - some songs are unfamiliar but consistent within the whole - whereas DJ Lush's choices seemed more random and, at times, misjudged. She played Starman really early in the evening and it was wasted on a not-yet-drunk-enough-to-sing-along audience. Ditto The Boy With The Thorn In His Side. There was a tendency toward recent indie rather than the from-any-era oddities characteristic of the Wifes, and she had a greater tolerance for longer, atmosphere-sapping tracks like Siouxsie & the Banshees' Monitor, which seemed to go on for a thousand years. I wouldn't even have known what it was if Gareth hadn't cheated by using Shazam. Suffice to say the pacing didn't really work for me.

I dunno, it feels a bit unfair to criticise a DJ for not being the same as the Wifes. On the other hand, Gareth left early and we followed shortly afterwards, around 1.15, only the second time ever we've left Duckie before the end. It just wasn't happening with the music and the crowd was an unusual one, too. A brace of scary blonde women had dumped their coats on the activity island (the new cloakroom?), a group of directionally-hairdoed Baby Gays were crowding us from the direction of the stage (for reasons which will become apparent in a moment) and the throng seemed more difficult than usual to push through to bar or toilet.

But! But but but! The cabaret was really rather good, with a thematic consistency uncommon to Duckie, that theme being mess. Ick. Gunk. Stickiness. Eww.

First up, one John Joseph Bibby, auburn-tressed beauty in an intricate frock apparently made entirely of paper. White paper had been taped over the whole stage, too (some tit spilt their drink on it earlier and several sheets had to be replaced with fresh ones).



Bibby began to sing, while an attractively monobrowed Frieda Kahlo lookalike daubed him with various colours of poster paint.



She finished up by tipping whole pots over him. By this time, we were being pinned against the activity island by the cowering Baby Gays. Paint is a nightmare to get out of one's Abercrombie & Fitch.



Act No.2 was a couple of Duckieites turned performers - according to Amy, a not uncommon trajectory - Justin Sweets and Caramel Miranda. The stage was set with all manner of sugary sprinkles, chews, hundreds & thousands... and a beeyoootiful high-calorie titfer was contrived:



The ickiness? Well, the tower of sundae glasses was glued together with liberal applications of lurid technicolour goo, squeezed from an icing bag. As with Bibby's paint, it went all over her hair. TSB, who's mildly phobic about such things, shuddered by my side.



There were occasional pauses to throw confectionery into the audience. I felt my tummy rumble and my fillings squeal.



"What," teased Amy, "could possibly follow that?"

A genuine(ish) beauty queen, Miss Teen South Carolina:



Apparently this was the burlesque performer Gypsy Wood, doing a word-perfect pisstake of this famous moment in beauty pageant history:



Poor (real) Miss Teen South Carolina...

A quick costume change later, our own Duckie version then proceeded to launch into her own dance interpretation of Whitney Houston's high Glycaemic Index gloopathon, The Greatest Love Of All (before she discovered crack, one assumes):



This in itself would've been funny enough - she managed to hit just the right note of hilarious almost-sincerity, without lapsing into all-out slapstick - but, all of a sudden, the crotch of Miss Teen South Carolina's pristine leotard began to well crimson...



... and blood seeped out and down her legs. This would've been shocking in any context (blood-red on white just is, presumably tapping into some ancient OMGbleedingtodeath reflex) but, happening in a roomful of (mostly) gay males, there was a collective gasp of horror as we were all reminded of womeny bits that bleed. Misogyny? Perhaps, but at least this act made me examine my own instinctive gay male "urgh" and it did so in an amusing way.

Miss Teen South Carolina slopped around in her own menstruum, finishing up blood-streaked and triumphant, Carrie-turned-cheerleader, to huge applause.



I was reminded of Amy's occasional scary headmistress persona, though, when a drunken arsewipe from the back of the room threw a piece of ice up onto the stage. Amy looked daggers into the audience, identifying the culprit; after the act's conclusion, she publicly invited him outside. Barred? Presumably. Throwing stuff at the performers is a definite Duckie no-no. Unless they invite it.

So... yeah. A Duckie where the cabaret was markedly better than the music. Not often that happens.

All of the boys and the girls

(I started something I couldn't finish - well, not for almost a week. It's the picture-adding that's been particularly time-consuming. Here's my spiel pretty much verbatim, though.)

I'm writing this from the First Class compartment of a Virgin train, speeding back to Euston from Liverpool. I've always had a bit of a weakness for the Weekend First option whereby one can upgrade a Standard ticket and acquire, for the princely sum of 15, additional legroom, attractively Tripodsesque table lighting and unlimited tea, coffee and biscuits. I particularly associate the Weekend First option with Sundays, as during the year TSB and I were apart (2001-02, I think) one of us commuted every weekend - and that 15 upgrade was a real comforter during the depressing Sunday journey away from one's partner and back toward the working week.

I'm sipping my second half-bottle of Hardy's Nottage Hill Chardonnay 2007 and listening to Uptown Top Ranking, part of TSB's gym playlist on a borrowed ipod, the better to drown out a large woman with a larger voice, which is cutting through the privileged calm of Carriage J. Why is it that some people's voices seem to carry, particularly? It's not always about volume. American accents carry but our fellow passenger isn't American. TSB reckons it's about bass notes but I reckon it's about hardness/softness: I've experienced shrill or cut-glass accents that are equally hard to block out.

But! Blocked out she is, and I am enjoying a pleasingly mellow return trip to London Euston after the phantasmogoria that was this weekend's Duckie Grand Vogue Ball side-project, Liverpool Is Burning. A half-hour's scrubbing has (mostly) removed the Rimmel Gold polish from my nails but I'm very aware that I still have glitter in my beard...

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's go through it all in order. Firstoff, we arrived in Liverpool early afternoon on Saturday, having got up for what felt like an incredibly early Saturday 09.17 King's Cross train. Nice countryside but I'm not used to Saturday before midday and slept through about a third of it. Another intrusive voice on the way there but Liverpool-accented and thus a taster of things to come.

I'm a bit funny with accents. When I first came to London, it took me a while to get over the novelty of hearing accents I'd sort of considered fictional: for a few weeks at least, I felt like I was living in an episode of Eastenders. Same thing this weekend, except Brookside. Or Brooochhsayyyde.

Another stereotype was confirmed for me when the Adelphi Hotel - our accommodation and venue for Liverpool Is Burning - seemed full of people in cheap nylon shellsuits. Harry Enfield's moustachioed Scousers leapt to mind ("caaalm down") but it transpired that these were actually Russian (and/or East European) folk. At one point, a trio of giggly nylon-suited chaps tried, very ineptly, to take my and TSB's photos in the hotel lift, as we headed back to our rooms at a little after 1am. "If you want, we're happy to pose," I offered, slightly bemused at the fact that they were taking our photos when there'd been a wealth of much weirder and more wonderful creatures to goggle at, just a room or two away from Reception.

So... yes, we arrived at the Adelphi (wasn't it in some sort of hotel-based reality series a few years ago - The Hotel or something?), dumped our things in the room (comfortable bed but generally unimpressive for the price - no wi-fi, tacky marble-effect linoleum on the bathroom walls, chewing gum on the ceiling and a general sense of stickiness) and decided to explore Liverpool a little. Bumped into Ms Lame in Reception; she was in search of nail polish.

I liked Liverpool, what I saw of it. I seem instinctively to like or dislike cities and it had a good buzz, although it seemed peculiarly Caucasian (after London, almost everywhere seems jarringly white). We wandered down to the Albert Docks and ate at a rather impressively converted building called The Old Pumphouse (or something similarly faintly innuendo-suggestive). I'd got it into my head that I needed a black silk hanky to complete my outfit (it's all about the details, sweetie) and we couldn't find a pocket square anywhere - but eventually found a shinyish cotton handkerchief in Next.

Back at the Adelphi, things were hotting up. The public areas were much sexier than our bedroom, and we wandered through the grand atrium to the ballroom behind. Duckie's Simon was busy setting up a catwalk and lighting rig (the lighting was one of the best things about the show) but recognised us and took a moment to thank us for coming. Sweetie. He looked very cute later, in top-to-toe white with a Movember 'tache:



Meant to snooze - needed to snooze, really - but too excited about preparations and decided to run a bath and paint my nails. First time I've ever done it, but I think I did an okay job - it's not that different from painting window frames. The hair mascara (Copper and Gold) I'd bought to make my beard glittery was less successful: too subtle by half; I wanted something that'd make my face furniture shine like burnished bullion and it just looked like blonde highlights, not that metallic at all.

(Some odd noises outside our room while we were getting ready: sounded like someone in the corridor making grunting sounds while doing martial arts, or perhaps doing a David Brent style hip hop-inspired dance. Or maybe vogueing. Disconcerting.)

We'd spent aaages planning our outfits for Liverpool Is Burning. TSB had bought a rather lovely gold cocktail dress from Marks & Spencer and had been carb-bashing to fit it (in the event, he popped all three buttons over the the course of the evening). He'd rediscovered a dark bobbed wig we bought for Hallowe'en two years ago (when he was Clarice Starling and I Hannibal Lecter) and I'd bought him a black velvet pillbox hat with veil. His niece had got into the spirit, gifting him some wonderful black opera gloves and he'd decided on a sort of Jackie O vibe, buying a clutch bag, shades and jewellery to match. Make-up being something of an undiscovered country for both of us, he'd only bought lipstick (which became wilder and more Divine David as the night progressed).

My outfit was simpler, as it was defined by TSB's: I'd dressed as a sort of pimptastic companion, in coordinating black and gold. And, er, beige - lacking a white suit and hat, I had to make do with a cream suit and fawn-coloured Borsalino fedora, with my two-tone shoes and a sequined black shirt. Actually, the suit made me look vaguely '70s-seedy (especially with aviator shades), which was good. I pretended that's what I'd meant all along. TSB reckoned I looked like August Darnell (Kid Creole to me and you).

Gussied up to the nines, we moseyed down to Reception and the ballroom itself. It took a while for the place itself to open so we hung about, downed a couple of G&Ts and had our photos taken. When the ballroom opened there was something of a rush but we managed to secure catwalkside seats. This, it turned out, was a mixed blessing. We were excellently placed for maximal posing (especially if I used my camera flash - voguers quickly realised this was a good direction in which to strrrike a pose) but also seemed prime attractors for all manner of detritus from the stage: various grades of glitter, pages from a book (scattered by a most becoming Naked Civil Servant) and, memorably, a jacket kicked by Rikki Beadle-Blair almost directly into TSB's face. I don't think he meant to do this - he disrobed and I think he meant to dramatically dropkick his clothing over our heads into the crowd but, what with being a gay and therefore automatically rubbish at sport, went low - but it was shocking nonetheless. TSB's pillbox/fascinator went flying and had to be retrieved.

Beadle-Blair wasn't bad, actually. I've not really followed his career and tend to associate him with Metrosexuality, which was confusing to the point of unwatchability (although it included some sexy men, especially the motorcycle courier...). He was a good Master of Ceremonies for Liverpool Is Burning, mouthy enough to cover all eventualities.



Amy was leading the panel of judges, and did her job well. Other than Amy, Simon, the Readers Wifes and a few of the performers, I didn't recognise any Duckie regulars - an unusual situation. Amy was as glammed up as ever.



I tried to get a decent photo of the Readers Wifes but 'twas hard to get both looking in the same direction, engrossed as they were with the sound decks.



Vogueing. Other than the Madonna single and what little I'd gleaned about its subject, I knew nothing at all. I mean, I got the gist about it being a dance/performance craze among (mainly poor) black kids in the '80s, co-opted by Lady M. I hadn't realised it had endured, apparently developing and metamorphosing into different forms. I liked the idea of different Houses (very Harry Potter) competing in a number of sub-categories.

What I hadn't bargained for was the sheer bloody fabulousness of it all. Me being the one in charge of the camera, I wanted to photograph all of it. I had several camera crises in the course of the evening, the biggest being when I managed to fill a 1GB chip only around one quarter into the show. 317 high-res photos, me getting a tad snap-happy. I had to retire to the loos and delete a whole load to make space. We were perched down near the front of the wide bit of the catwalk and I soon realised that, in contrast to Duckie where using the flash can distract the performers, our beautiful voguers actively gravitated toward camera flashes, spinning on their heels and giving good face. I felt like a fashionista in the front row of a Paris collection, particularly with bearded Anna Wintour at my side.

TSB was very ladylike, sitting primly with legs together and clapping politely (whereas I, fingers festooned with cheap jewellery, found that, by the end of the night, I'd applauded so vigorously that I'd actually smashed the low-grade metal Gothrings out of shape and had some difficulty pulling them off the knuckles).



I was interested in how weirdly protective I felt of TSB en femme: I bought the drinks all evening and had to fight the impulse to hold doors open for him. Introjected chauvinism.

The show itself was opened by a live act and a performance from the House of Suarez. Even I realised the titular Darren Suarez's choreography was top-notch.





The categories themselves... First was WAGs: a cavalcade of shopping bags, mobile 'phones, tiny dogs and general blinginess. Enjoyable but, after a while, a little samey.



This category was won by the wonderfully exuberant (too much so for a decent pic) Gateau Chocolat.

Next was Retrosexual, any outfit from any period in history. This was a gorgeous section, featuring Wildean and Crispean dandies...



... and what was, for me, the most impressive procession of the evening (and not just because it featured beardy czars in uniform) from the House of Romanov, lead by Rasputin (looking not unlike Alan Moore)...





... with a massively crinolined Catherine the Great bringing up the rear, skirts sweeping the entire width of the catwalk:



The Retrosexual prize went to the hugely popular Miss High Leg Kick, whose fringe-peeping Diana (complete with camera-flashing paparazzi on tricycles) went down a storm. Gays and the People's Princess, eh? There was a collective rush to the stage, a reaching out to touch Diana's hand, as if she were the real thing. A deserved win.



Duckie performers were pretty well represented, really. Kicking off the Choreography round was a betailed, fandancing (and slightly Martin Degvillesque) Wee Lee.



Johnny Woo's House of Egypt built an impressive pyramid of sphinxes. Sturdy arm muscles on the bottom tier, there:



Femme Realness seems an odd concept to me, given the glorious unreality of the whole shebang generally, but apparently this is an authentic harking-back to the voguing contests of the '80s. To our delight (and despite stiff competition from local girl Beyonce), the prize went to another Duckie face, the lovely, statuesque Maur:



Beadle-Blair worshipped her. And rightfully so.



An honourable mention must go to the effervescent Miss High Leg Kick again, flashing glimpses of the scarily tumescent kapok cock beneath her frock.



I love Miss High Leg Kick. Everything she does has a twist, one in which she subverts expectations/stereotypes. She's effortlessly elegant but absolutely ready to put herself in performance situations which are anything but. After the show itself, she wandered around in little but a wig, heels, a comedy merkin and some alarmingly profuse sproutings of synthetic armpit hair.

The "Scally's Mum" category made me slightly uncomfortable. It's not that I've never laughed at Duckie cabaret acts which poke fun at Teh Working Classes but somehow, when act after act relies on the inherent funniness of badly-dressed "slags", smoking, drinking and smacking their kids up, it all starts to wear a little thin. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the scrunchietastic winner, making us all duck for cover by whirling her child-on-a-leash in a wide circle over the heads of the audience.



The sexiest member of the judging panel, a Brandoesque Mr Roy, complained that the Fantasia category wasn't fantastic enough, and I'd have to agree. I was hoping for marvellous transhuman creatures aplenty and, in fact, it wasn't much different from Retrosexual. A few high points, though:







After Fantasia, a break then Orphans, a category for those individuals or groups unaffiliated with a particular House. Mr Roy gave a masterful demonstration of catwalking both masculine and feminine...





The Orphans were entertaining enough in a sort of Kids From Fame way. Highlights included a rather tasty piece of acrobatic manflesh close-up...







A suitably jazzhands finale (which was consistent with my general impression that, at least in Liverpool itself, many of those at the forefront of vogueing seem to be young and straight) and it all finally rolled to a stop. We'd been wondering all evening what would happen for the hour or so afterwards: would it switch abruptly to Duckie-at-the-Adelphi? Nope. It wasn't the Readers Wifes who took over but a chap from Horse Meat Disco, who continued in the same vein of (what I assumed to be) more-or-less authentic '70s/'80s New York disco. On the one hand, I felt a little disappointed that it wasn't the Duckie blend I know and love; on the other, the Readers Wifes' usual fare might've jarred after an evening in which the soundtrack was very much secondary to the visuals. That said, it did make me hanker for Duckie Classic choonz to dance (as opposed to vogue) to.

Here's a video of some of the performers preparing



and an excellently shot photo-montage here.

A not-too-horribly-drunken hotel room photo session later and we tumbled into bed. Got up in time to wander through a rainy Armistice Sunday Liverpool. Felt vaguely embarrassed not to be wearing a poppy.



The previous night's images still hanging in my head, there were moments when I'd clock a handsome man in an elaborate uniform and think for a split-second "ooh, he was in the Csar's parade!" before realising he was a bona fide member of today's armed forces...

A fabulous weekend. And, on the way back, no-one came and charged us extra for sitting in First. Hah!