Photographer and writer DAVE SWINDELLS has documented the social, polysexual and sartorial liberties taken in nightclubs for 25 years. He will exhibit a selection of his archive with an emphasis on masks, costume and assumed identities. Oh, and people recklessly rolling around the floor.
Was it acceptable in the ‘80s to get down and dirty on nightclub floors? Oh yes, so much so that it was pretty much a trend. Why did people roll around on the tacky carpets of West End discos? Why did they risk cavorting in the evil, never-washes-out gloop that forms when beer mixes with the ancient muck of Victorian warehouses, especially while they were proudly sporting the most of-the-moment Bodymap or Leigh Bowery clobber? It’s a rhetorical question of course. They were very likely off their face; drunk as Lords or royally spangled (or both), and it made perfect sense because they were perfectly insensible at the time.
It reminds me of the way sometime club host and man-about-town Tim Clark (RIP) once declined the verb ‘to be drunk’: ‘I get drunk. You get drunk…’ he said, ‘We fall over.’
At Taboo the supertrendies were falling over themselves to fall over. Maybe it was the ecstasy. Somebody had been to New York in 1985, discovered the thrill of new pills and, so the story went, brought back a whole suitcase full of MDMA (it was still legal in the States then, but barely known in the UK). It had an amazing effect. Leigh Bowery made a habit of lifting the diminutive Bodymap designer David Holah across his broad shoulders and spinning around the middle of the dancefloor like a wayward canon that might blast off at any moment. Result: mayhem. Sooner or later Leigh would trip or slip and land in a heap, which was the cue for anybody who fancied to fall or jump on top of them, piling up in a reckless, carefree human pyramid. That included the DJ Jeffrey Hinton too, which was why when the record finished the only sound apart form the screams and shouts emanating from the pile of people was the needle whooosh-whoooshing around the record mat. That happened time and again one night at Taboo. It was weird, so wrong it was right, and somehow utterly liberating.
Once Bowery and co had got into the habit of partying at ground level at Taboo they did it at other nights too, at i-D parties, at the Jungle, in one-off warehouse dos and who knows where else. Leigh was still rolling around the floor years later at Kinky Gerlinky, dragging Rachael Auburn down with him. Good ol’ habits die hard.
So it’s easy to see why ’80s clubs proved such an inspiration when London nightlife finally rediscovered the joys of dressing up and playing around with personal identity in the noughties, first at Kash Point, Nag Nag Nag and the electroclash capers, and later at nu-rave nights and clubs like Anti-Social, Nuke Them All and Bastard Batty Bass. Lord knows I’ve looked for them, but people don’t seem to fall about quite so much anymore…
