Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (13 page)

At one point we were invited to perform at a huge fetish event in London, and after doing ‘Pearl Harbor’ on a stage in the middle of a crowded warehouse, we finished with the cake performance. However, this time we upped the ante with an impressively large candle – the end of which we carved so Niall could accommodate it – and after I had somewhat roughly shoved it into a caught-off-guard Niall, I momentarily turned my back to
get the lighter to light it. When I turned back, lighter in hand, Niall was there on all fours, covered with curdling cream, looking at me with big eyes … There was no sign of the enormous candle. I looked around in a panic only to realise that, the moment I had turned my back, Niall had spasmed: it had shot out of his ass, flown over the front row and taken out a latex-clad hairdresser from Leeds.

I never asked the bouncers if the story about the IRA was true but, whether it was or wasn’t, they took everything in their stride, watching it all with an air of bemused amusement. It was an easy gig for them, of course. The fetish crowd tend to be a very relaxed, polite, live-and-let-live bunch, the club-kids and the gays were just out for a fun time, and the transvestites were just thrilled finally not to be the weird ones in the room. There was never any trouble. The head bouncer, a big shaven-headed older bloke, had an avuncular air about him and late one night after we’d closed I found him – office stapler and black plastic bin bags in hand – stapling together a basic outfit onto a fully naked older drunk guy, who had somehow managed to lose all his clothes. Then, pointing him in the direction of the city centre, he stood and watched, like a concerned parent sending their kid off to school on their own for the first time, as Naked Guy wobbled and rustled his way along the quays in his shiny new bin-bag couture.

Dublin had never seen anything like it, and we were the talk of the town. Half the stories people heard
weren’t true, of course, but we weren’t going to disabuse anyone of their fevered notions. In a bar one evening a guy told us that he’d heard ‘on very good authority’ that Claire Crosby had had to get the ceilings in her house reinforced because of all the sex contraptions she was hanging from them. She loved that.

All the talk and fevered gossip was good for business but eventually it started to bring us unwanted attention. The tabloids started to write salacious
faux
-shocked stories, culminating with the British
Sunday People
splashing a breathless front-page story, ‘DUBLIN SEX ORGY SENSATION!’, complete with ‘RED HOT PICTURES INSIDE!’. The press attention brought closer scrutiny from the gardaí, who didn’t seem to know exactly what they should do about us, if anything. Eventually, though, notoriety started to make things more difficult, so when the building looked like it was going to be sold, as the Celtic Tiger got its teeth into the Docklands, it seemed a good time to move on and do something new.

We approached John Reynolds, the owner of Pod (where I had been hostessing and performing), about doing an old-school, sweaty-dance-floor gay night on Fridays. He was open to it, but first he had another suggestion. Building work was nearing completion on a big new venue in the old railway station above Pod, and though it had been designed as a live venue with a huge, high main room, a big stage, and a large balcony, John was interested to see if and how it might be used as a
club space. He would give us Friday nights in Pod’s old railway tunnels if, first, we did something large-scale in the new venue – and that sounded fun to us.

A big space like that was going to need a lot of people to fill it, so we had to do something with broader appeal than a straight-up fetish party. Basically we decided on a more colourful, lighter version of GAG. We would keep some of the elements that made it fun – the dressing-up, the performances, the mixed crowd, the sexiness and the silliness, and throw glitter on them. We would put GAG in drag, and call it Powderbubble.

Powderbubble would be a much bigger project but there was no shortage of young and creative people wanting to get involved. Soon it wasn’t just Niall and me but a growing family of people who liked to make stuff and do things. It was still early in the boom years, before everybody had full-time jobs and go-getting careers and couldn’t stop, gotta go, chat soon, because there was money to make and even more to borrow. There were still plenty of poor students and underemployed young people, with the time, energy and inclination to get involved in stuff just for the fun.

Dublin in the mid to late nineties was a city falling in love with itself. The boom was beginning to steam out of the station, picking up speed as it went and pulling everyone behind it in its draught. There was a sense of possibility about the place and a confidence we’d never had before. The city was changing before our very eyes –
shiny new buildings were going up everywhere, bridges were being built, rail links were being planned – and we were changing with it. The mad rush to get off the island had stopped because, for the first time ever, we actually believed it was as good as anywhere else. We stopped looking across the water at London or Barcelona or New York, and stopped apologising for being from Dublin. Sure wasn’t the whole world Riverdancing.

Of course, in time the country would lose the run of itself and we’d get our comeuppance for daring to believe things were going to work out, but for a few innocent years it really did feel like it was all going to end happily ever after.

From the beginning Powderbubble was a success, and roughly every month through 1997–8 Niall would design a beautiful, expensive, unusually shaped flier, and come up with a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek grand vision for the next event: ‘ELASTICK FUTURE PLASTICK FANTASTICK, THE FUTURE TESTAMENT, FUTURE FROSTED FLESH FANTASY, FUTURE HARVEST …’ We were very big on ‘the future’. Apart from ‘not being boring’, our other constant refrain was ‘Never look back, only forward!’ And I mean that literally. We actually used to say it all the time.

Someone would have an idea for a performance or club decor and someone else would shoot it down, saying, ‘No! Never look back!’ It was our obsession with looking to the future that made us violently anti-draping.
We were always covering things – stages, scaffolding, balconies, doors – but we refused to drape anything. We lived in horror of draping! When we covered things (usually with shiny coloured PVC) we stretched it tight, neatly stapled down the corners and obsessed over hard edges. Soft draping was for the fusty, stuck-in-the-mud, sexually repressed Victorians:
we
were thrusting into a shiny, glowing, straight-lined pansexual future. Or something like that, anyway.

There was a group of maybe ten of us, but on the day of a Powderbubble lots of volunteers would turn up – students, gays, club-kids – happy to help out in return for nothing more than guest list and maybe a few beers. All day we’d build scaffolding, wrap (not drape!) furniture, build installations, hang projectors, mount screens, and struggle with huge inflatables. We knew every hardware store in town intimately: we were never without a cable-tie, we had a favourite brand of gaffer tape, and someone was always shouting over the noise of the power drill, ‘Who took the good stapler?’ Driven by Niall’s perfectionism, we obsessed over everything being
exactly
right. We developed communal OCD. A couple of people would spend the whole day on their backs on top of a scaffold slowly hanging a perfect grid of leaping inflatable dolphins (spray-painted silver, of course) on cat-gut from the ceiling over the whole venue, and if even one of the shiny cetaceans was as much as a couple of inches too high or too low, everyone would
look quietly disappointed and wonder who was going to mention it. Eventually they moved the scaffolding, climbed back up, and adjusted the rogue plastic bottlenose.

No idea was too big to consider. For one party we decided to turn the whole venue into a forest so we tracked down a tree surgeon and a truck and got a few trees, which we then installed in the venue. It was beautiful, more magical than we’d even imagined – until the fire officer turned up an hour before we opened and practically had a stroke.

‘You’ve basically filled the whole place with firewood! Someone could die.’

‘Well, at least they’d die somewhere pretty!’

We were made to take the whole thing down, which we thought was an outrage. These jobsworths just didn’t understand art!

And, of course, there were performances and ‘happenings’. There were drag queens riding giant inflatables or rolling across the floor in huge clear plastic balls. There were people in papier-mâché heads making cakes, and mermaids manning nail bars. I sang with a rock band made up of teenagers in their school uniforms, and threw a bloody pig’s heart at Shirley Temple Bar while we both danced on crutches and sang ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’.

For one of the parties we decided to do a homage to the famous photograph of Bianca Jagger riding a white
horse into Studio 54. First we had to find a horse but a few phone calls later that turned out to be easier than we’d imagined. On the day, a cheery woman turned up with the white horse and assured us that the animal would be fine to walk into the club through the side doors and onto the dance floor with Panti on its back. We did a rehearsal, with the woman leading the horse, and I doing my best Lady Godiva, wearing little more than a few ivy vines and a lot of hair, and the horse acted as if it wandered through nightclubs all the time.

I worried that the horse might not be so relaxed later when the club was full of people and noise, but the owner assured me that this horse was virtually unspookable. And she was right. Later that night the horse seemed almost bored as it carried me through the loading doors from the car park, around the bar, across the dance floor of startled clubbers and to the front of the stage, where I dismounted and launched into a number.

In fact, it all went so smoothly and calmly that the following Christmas we decided to do it again, this time with Panti dressed as the Virgin Mary on a donkey. Some phone calls were made, a donkey was procured, the rehearsal went smoothly, and our confidence was high – until showtime. The club’s side doors were opened with a dramatic flourish and fifteen hundred expectant clubbers turned to see what was going on, only to discover Panti atop a donkey that had decided to act in accordance with its species’ reputation. It dug in its hoofs and refused to
budge a single inch as its handler pulled it and coaxed it, and I tried to jiggle it forward while clasping a swaddled Baby Jesus to my bosom. After a minute or two, when it was clear that the donkey was not to be persuaded, and the fifteen hundred clubbers were now more bemused than expectant, I slid off its back and, with whatever drunken dignity I could muster, walked into the club.

While Powderbubble continued roughly once a month in the old railway station, Niall and I started our weekly gay night in the tunnels underneath it. H.A.M. was a music-driven, cruisy, sweaty, old-school gay night and it paid my rent for the next eight years. Of course we were, as ever, very concerned with how it looked, so every Friday Niall and I, with DJ Tonie Walsh and our friend Karim, would spend the day turning the tunnels into various visual gags – one week the place would be the inside of an aeroplane cabin and the next it would be a sexy/kitschy farm. Its first incarnation was as a butcher’s abattoir and we hung huge pieces of ‘meat’ and heavy plastic freezer curtains everywhere while Niall, Karim and I walked around wearing nothing but white rubber butcher’s aprons, white rubber boots and lots of fake blood. We went round the city tagging everything with big stickers that said ‘BUTCHER QUEERS’, which we thought was a clever word play but which horrified two American tourists. They started lambasting us, thinking we were organised queer-bashers. In another incarnation, we mischievously and defiantly turned the
place into a pharmacy with huge foam capsules of AZT (the infamous HIV drug) hanging from the roof.

Eight years is an eternity in Clubland, and a whole generation of gay Dubliners grew up on the dance floor at H.A.M. People fell in and out of love there, they shagged and argued there, they danced and drank and took ecstasy there, they made new best friends and remembered old ones, they laughed and cried and fought and stormed off in a huff and kissed and made up. They lost wallets and dignities and virginities and minds there.

One night we were looking after the Spice Girls, who turned up at the height of their fame, and the next week we were trying to stop a very angry African guy beating up one of the street ‘girls’: it wasn’t till she brought him into the club and into a toilet cubicle that he discovered to his (hard to believe) surprise that ‘She has a pen! She has a pen!’

Over the next ten years or so I was involved in a long and varied list of clubs and parties as a promoter, hostess or performer, and usually as some combination of all three. Some were long-running, others short-lived; some were big club events, others small midweek get-togethers. Even though Niall moved to London, he continued to design the graphics for every one.

For a couple of years at H.A.M. we ran a cabaret called Gristle earlier in the night as a pre-club entertainment. I emceed and performed, and every week was joined by various queens from what was the first wave of drag
performers, who were emerging and creating a new Dublin drag scene: people like Shirley Temple Bar, Veda Beaux Reves, Dizzy Dyin’forit, Dolly Grip, Katherine Lynch, Annie Balls, Siobhan Broadway and more. It was at Gristle that I first started to push my stage act into storytelling and stand-up. Up till then my act had been almost entirely visual, designed for noisy nightclubs with makeshift stages and easily distracted drunk patrons with short attention spans. My club act was drawn with broad brushstrokes, all dramatic lip-syncing, visual gags and wild energy, and although I loved it, it had begun to feel limiting. In a sense I was trapped by the pre-recorded soundtrack, unable to veer from the original plan or react to the unexpected in a
live
way. In a sense the audience members were passive viewers, watching my show like a cinema audience, and I was like an actor on a movie screen, following the script even if a fire broke out in the stalls.