CLASSIC CLUBS: Taboo
Maximus, Leicester Square, London, 1985-1987
‘Taboo thrived in a period of right-wing politics, the Thatcher/Reagan years, and it’s proof of a basic human need to have something to kick against,’ said Boy George in 2002. ‘That’s what made it such fun. It completely upped the ante and convinced us that we were somehow being terribly, terribly naughty.’
By the mid-80s, the euphoria of the new romantic era had dissipated leaving its bloated remains to float in a sea of power ballads, alternative rock and Stock Aitken and Waterman. In actual fact, the truly radical phase of new romanticism had passed long before Duran Duran, Culture Club, Visage or any of the bands that followed in their slipstream even made it to Top of the Pops, forming a distinct lineage from those nascent days of enw romanticism through to the establishment of Taboo.
It all more or less started with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s Club for Heroes night at Billy’s in Soho’s Meard Street – once the infamous Mandrake, soon to become Gossip’s and just two doors down from 69 Dean Street’s Gargoyle Club. But in 1978, it was still Billy’s and when the pair were unceremoniously booted out after just a few months, they took up Tuesday night residency at Holborn’s Blitz wine bar and their circle moved with them. This was a new artistic crowd, turned on by the sounds of Roxy Music, Bowie, and bored by the nihilism of punk. While theirs was very much a DIY attitude, it was one that embraced colour, decadence and queerness concentrated on the art and fashion schools of London and the legendary Warren Street squats. This was the world of John Maybury, Jeremy Healy, Princess Julia, BodyMap and Judy Blame. Lesser household names than their musical contemporaries but all of whom went on to have an immeasurable impact on fashion and art throughout the 80s and 90s. ‘It was a mixture of people there,’ Julia, Blitz door boss, Taboo cloakroom attendant, DJ and all-round People’s Princess, told 10 Magazine in 2023. ‘People from the punk scene, rockabilly scene, soul scene, the gay disco scene. It was people who lived at the Warren Street squat, students from various fashion colleges. It was all word of mouth.’ But once the media began to infiltrate and the wannabe stars hit the big time, Blitz became a victim of its own success, losing its edge and leaving this alternative artistic community searching for a new home. It was the inimitable Leigh Bowery, waving the flag for queerness, decadence and hedonism, who answered the call.
Australian-born Bowery landed on these shores in 1980 armed with a sewing machine and hoping to make his way into the fashion business. He soon realised that his modern-day subversive dandy aesthetic was at odds with the mainstream and instead entrenched himself in London’s underground club scene using the dancefloor as his catwalk. Having missed the heyday of the Blitz, Bowery arrived in a flamboyant burst armed with a selection of headpieces, thick make-up and ludicrously high stilettos. ‘When he was hanging around with his friend Trojan, I thought they were a bit naff,’ said George in 2002. ‘I’d been painting my face blue years ago, darling! But I soon realised Leigh was taking things a lot further. He’d missed out on punk, he’d just missed the Blitz scene, so he knew that he was going to have to be extreme in order to make his mark. Well, he certainly did that!’
Bowery was not in the least interested in keeping things on the downlow and placed his and Tony Gordon’s new venture in the epicentre of the West End taking over Thursday night at Leicester Square’s Maximus. ‘London was going through a bit of a lull in terms of clubbing. Then Taboo opened. Leigh Bowery started it in 1985,’ George told Mark Ronson in Interview in 2008. ‘The first few weeks were no big deal. Then suddenly it was the place to be. There were queues outside.‘ Fat Tony agrees. ‘People go on about Taboo being amazing. Taboo was shit for months,’ he told DjHistory. ‘First three months, it was rubbish. No one went. There’d be about 20 or 30 of us there. And then suddenly what happened was it got in the papers and that was it. It went boom.’
Taboo embodied the very essence of what Bowery stood for and his maxim was ‘Dress as though your life depends on it or don’t bother’. ‘Most of the people who ran the night were gay, but the emphasis was on looking special,’ Dave Swindells told Archer magazine. ‘The meeter-greeter, Marc, would hold up a mirror and ask, ‘Would you let yourself in?’’ This was the gatekeeper disco aesthetic taken to the nth degree as polysexualism, queerness, diehard drug-taking and music all went hand in hand.
Bowery was of course the focal point, and his appearance was crucial to the reputation that he himself was generating. In the end, Bowery became the performance – ridding himself of his hair, his head acting as a canvas while his outfits became more extreme. ‘There was one peLana Pellayriod when my favourite fabric was flesh. Human flesh,’ said Bowery. ‘I didn’t wear any clothes for a while”. His fellow clubbers of course followed suit. ‘[They] didn’t just wear mad outfits,’ says Dave Haslam in Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues. ‘They became new people.’ Princess Julia was no stranger to subculture, but she remembers that Taboo was on the brink. ‘Even at the time, it felt quite insane, and I had this theory that it was something to do with Haley’s Comet.’
The interior was tacky with ‘[t]atty red velour banquettes, mirrors everywhere, strange light effects on the walls, three bars and a central dance floor with several cheap lights and a mirror ball,’ according to performance artist, Taboo cashier and close friend of Bowery, Sue Tilley as reported by Sofia Vranou. Check out the music clip of trans artist Lana Pellay’s ‘Pistol In My Pocket’, which was filmed on the premises. Dancing was strictly encouraged. Choreographer Michael Clark and David La Chapelle could be found go-go dancing. ‘Space Princess, Mark Lawrence and Mark Time who used to be in Hot Gossip and Jeffrey would do these dance routines at home,’ Mark Moore told DjHistory. ‘Teach it to a few friends so once they got into the club they’d take over the dancefloor and do this formation dancing to anyone willing to join in.’ And part of the appeal was its egalitarian approach. ‘At the time, the people were just as important as the club, as the DJs, as the music, they were the stars as much as anyone else,’ says Moore. That’s not to say there wasn’t a degree of celeb presence though, Janet Street Porter, John Galliano, Martin Fry and Fiona Russell Powell, journo from The Face all to be found on the Taboo dancefloor.
And what about the actual music? ‘All I can remember is Jeffrey [Hinton] playing everything he could get his hands on,’ Tallulah told DjHistory. ‘Including the slipmat.’ No genre was out of bounds as Hinton, Rachel Auburn, Princess Julia and others all took to the decks. Progressive for a time when female DJs were not a common feature. ‘It was totally cheesy, hi-NRG, Italo, some of it great, some of it atrocious but once you’d been in there and you were drunk or on ecstasy, it was fuckin’ amazing!’ said Moore. ‘I think what made it so great was Jeffrey would do his own edits where he would elongate the best bits with these mad sound effects over the top.’ Hinton agrees. ‘I loved sound effects at that time (I still do) so I would chop and mix up videos (video scratching they named it, I didn’t though),’ he told Taboo descendent Dalston Superstore. ‘I edited everything together: porn, Abba, operations, TV and film from around the world and my own stuff. I would project it over the dancefloor and mix it in with the music. Also, I would have tape cassettes playing sound effects and mix that into the music as well. The music would be quite random too. The whole effects was nuts, but then the club was nuts too.’ It was the dancefloor’s answer to John Waters. ‘Taboo was kind of celebrating trash, the kind of records you secretly loved, like ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, by Baccara, things that you probably shouldn’t like,’ George told Mark Ronson. ‘They weren’t credible records, but they worked. A lot of Donna Summer and things that maybe weren’t trendy anymore or weren’t hip in gay clubs, but you’d hear them at Taboo.’
Ecstasy had also really begun to find its feet on the dancefloor. ‘I didn’t realise at the time it was so crazy because of the ecstasy, but in hindsight that makes sense,’ says Moore. ‘People would come back from New York – again a mixture of high life and low life – loaded with ecstasy and give them out to people.’ George agreed. ‘People were taking copious amounts of ecstasy, which had filtered over from New York,’ he told Ronson, ’and at a certain point you were more likely to spend most of the night in the toilets at the club’. Hinton himself was also a big fan of acid as he remembers one particularly eventful night. ‘I actually thought I was in my bedroom, I was easily believing the club was my home,’ he told Hero magazine. ‘I was playing the slipmat of the deck for about 20 minutes with headphones plugged into it – it was just making this awful grinding noise. Nobody batted an eyelid though! They just carried on dancing, they were used to unusual sounds and experiences on those nights.’
But alongside the euphoria of ecstasy came the blackness of heroin. There was a lot of self-destructive behaviour,’ said George in 2002. ‘It was all about extremes, outdoing each other. We tried every drug going.’ Fat Tony remembers how smack shut the whole thing down. ‘It was busy every week. Busy busy busy. Then it ended! Cos everyone was on heroin at that point – it was right in the deepest, darkest point. So Mark died who used to do the door. He died of a heroin overdose. Mark Lawrence died. Everyone who used to go there was popping off one by one.’ Aids was also really starting to hit hard. ‘I think we all went a little mad then, some people died after all that,’ said Princess Julia in 2010. ‘Aids was getting very ‘real’, death sentence, an air of inevitability. ’85, ’86. Drugs too, MDMA, heroine [sic] jack up.’
Eventually thanks to exposure in i-D magazine, the tabloids got wind of what was going on and drilled down hard on the drug use and what they deemed to be highly indecent behaviour. Management got scared and took away the key. Tony Gordon tried to move the party on, but Bowery wasn’t interested and so eighteen months after opening, Taboo was no more. ‘For me, Taboo had a major impact, not so much because of the music (though there were ace DJs) but because the collision of club cultures and personalities marked it out as a sort of highpoint of mid-’80s hedonism,’ said Dave Swindells. ‘They were happy to end up in a pile of vomit and booze at the end of the night. It was antifashion, in a sense,’ George told Ronson. Bowery died aged 33 of Aids but left an immeasurable legacy. Taboo was a bridge between the dying embers of the Blitz scene and a dawn of a new wave of underground alternative clubs including the Daisy Chain, Torture Garden and Kinky Gerlinky. And Bowery’s spirit lives on in today’s underground dancefloor culture with the words ‘if you label me, you negate me’ never more relevant.
