Some Gigs From Memory

I first met Mail Art Superstar Mark Pawson in the mid 1990s in Camden Town, where I found myself record shopping for Handbag House 12"s, disappointed that Jazzman Gerald in the Stables Market didn't have anything by Jon Pleased Wimmin but only some old Sun Ra LPs. Empty handed and with a tenner burning a hole in my pocket, I spied a rack of postcards, gaudy comic books and hastily photocopied and stapled pamphlets. I came home to my parent's house, bereft of handbag house but bearing a trove of ephemera thst would lead me inexorably into both inexhaustible pathways, invisible networks as well as momentarily fascinating dead ends: a micro-history of plug diagrams, a community based space program, a gazeteer of kinder egg toys, weird psychogeographies that remapped places and spaces I believed familiar.  While the digital realm felt, in the heady pre-millennial fervor of the late 1990s, that it would be the apotheosis of connection and liberation, has from this more somber v...

Sometimes knowing people want you to fail spurs you on to succeed, the obverse of that being when you realise quite how far you've internalised their diminished expectations of you and how far their hatred, rather than being something that motivates you to carry on if only to spite them, has just been feeding the same emptiness that drew you to them in the first place.

On Easter 2014 I learned I got AHRC funding for my PhD and decided that what I really needed to do with my newfound financial autonomy would be gender transition. Obviously I barely had to mention the word 'dysphoria' to my GP before he prescribed my hormones pronto and fast tracked me for surgery, and so here I am now.  Looking back at pictures from the Sue Perkins years no longer fills me with horror. I'm clearly sad and desperate but there's the slightest flare of optimism behind my eyes that wasn't there before.  We holidayed in Portugal and I noticed hospitality staff were gendering me female. I was still trying to be invisible, going by my given name, dressing in gender neutral shades of grey and so this microaffirmation gave me some glimmer of hope that I that I might be able to live in the world being seen by others the way I had just started to allow myself.  In 2014 I was still also pretending to be an artist. We did workshops at the Tate and the V&A, ...

This is a project space, not a gallery. We don't expect outcomes, just for you to use our space discursively in a spirit of creative enquiry. I was on a decommissioned light ship moored in the Medway, about to embark on a two week artists' residency. I had no idea what I was doing.  As the spare half of a one-person art collective I felt bewildered at being granted the autonomy to actually make art. At once excited at this *enviable opportunity* and astonished that happenstance had allowed this, I clutched my laptop, my Zoom HD recorder and microphones and climbed the ladder to the lookout quarters and cried.  At the inaugral meeting we discussed community engagement and creative collaboration while the familiar mantras of inadequacy circled in my brain and my eyes glazed over. They didn't seem to notice. Perhaps dissociation is a common survival mechanism for other community artists too, lost in the voices chastising themselves for reifying a neoliberal idea of community, ...

I think it was the week before Diana died. I was kind of an amateur drinker and stuck to drinking gin and tonics. I was accustomed to the gassiness of beer letting me know when to stop. Walking home I confided to Sarah, giddy and nauseous, that I was never drinking again.  I can picture her vividly but don't remember her name. She was tall and clearly anorexic and I looked like a child. We gravitated to the same table and talked about art, film, fashion. It felt like having a co-conspirator in outsiderdom, as it does when you're 22. We exchanged numbers and she called me a few days later and we met in some woods. She had friends in London, she wanted to make it in fashion design. She made wry jokes about her self evident anorexia, I was absolutely overawed by her humility, the kind that only gets cultivated by pain.  We didn't have a second date and we never spoke again. Two years later I would move into London, empowered by an inheritance of five grand which I quickly piss...

Patrick Cowley – Mechanical Fantasy Box (Dark Entries Press  9781942884545) Not merely the progenitor of the amyl nitrate pulse of Hi-NRG: the high octane synthetic disco that soundtracked cruising spots and backrooms from the Castro to the East Village to Soho (long before the fiercely gay and sleekly minimal electro sound was domesticated into the teen pop of Stock Aitken and Waterman); Patrick Cowley - teenage synth pioneer, soundtrack producer for such under-the-counter gems as ' Afternooners ' and ' Muscle Up ', and eventually producer of sublime anthems to queer ecstasy by Sylvester, Paul Parker and perhaps most famously his mind bending 20 minute psychedelic excursion on Donna Summer's ecstatic paean to the erotic sublime ' I Feel Love ' - was also, as we discover thanks to the archival efforts of Dark Entries press, the leading documentarist of fast flings, group fucks, stolen glances and silent meetings in the backrooms of the leather bars, saunas...