Crafting Ideas: Creating Culture
Sunday 4 May, 4-11pm, Islington Mill Gallery
Club Brenda is back, blending performance art, bands and cabaret to celebrate SFTOC 20th birthday!
Line-up:
1980 and the underground LGBTQIA scene I was part of was about to go stratospherically overground. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t bravely defiant before, my memories are it was confidently happy not being seen. What did we owe heteronormative hegemony anyway? When it came to bestowing social favours it was violently greedy, wanting nothing for us and everything for itself.
My best friend Brian and I had already been members of The Everyman Youth Theatre and together we found Liverpool’s Club Masquerade. Brian would be christened with the camp named ‘Brenda’. Sadly, I didn’t get a camp name.
Theatre and dancing, audiences for both and two effete Scouse ingenues, camping and nightly lapping it up. Seriously, as far I was concerned, it could never get better.
Then AIDS, then Clause 28. It wasn’t good enough for the overground we were agonisingly dying, they wanted us wiped out of history as well. Remind you of anything? Sadly, cultural devastation has an ugly way of resurfacing.
There were lots of things keeping us going, political lobbying being the most important. Romantically though (I am a poet after all), we never stopped dancing. As an emerging counterculture, we never stopped being seen. There’s nothing pissing off an enemy more than clocking the other side wildly dancing.
In 1995, my best friend Brian would die of AIDS. The worst moment certainly of mine, but also, so many other people’s lives. It was unforgivably heavy and we collectively grieved… but you know something? We never stopped dancing, we never stopped being confidently seen.
In Manchester of 1999 and after a fortuitous meeting with Jayne Compton, we decided to create an underground/countercultural club night. Looking for a name and in honouring Brian, we would call it Club Brenda. So at the legendary Star and Garter, rising from its earthy spit and sawdust, the transformative Club Brenda was born. An eclectic fusion of New York musicality and Mancunian anarchy, ‘Brenda’, like Brian, was an instant hit.
So dance, be confidently seen.
Do this together.
Gather, play and perform.
Feed each other with who you are and what you could be.
As individuals, get all gregariously gestalt on yourselves.
Get more Brenda.
And as Chloe Poems, the mercurial host of Club Brenda would say
‘It’s a world, things happen!’
It’s your world too, never stop making it happen.’
Gerry Potter
In 1999 Brenda was born at The Star and Garter. In 2005, Brenda christened the Islington Mill Events Space, doing many memorable shows there, and in Berlin, Moho Live and Kraak until 2012.
Club Brenda was at the Rovers Return, Sounds From The Other City 2006-2008.
