by steve strange
Two weeks later we went back to the owner and said we could pack the club. He could have the drinks' profits and we would take the money on the door. It didn't occur to us for a moment that no on would turn up. We printed up flyers with the tantalising line, "Fame Fame Jump Aboard the Night / Fame, Fame, Fame. What's Your Name ?"
We opened in Autumn 1978 and very quickly we were successful. All the punks who were also closet David Bowie fans turned up. Soon it was a regular event known as Bowie Night. In the end though, it became ridiculous. Even though it was still an underground, word-of-mouth scene, more people were being turned away than we could fit into the club, which had a capacity of 250. Queues were stretching round the block. This was without any support from the press. There weren't any live bands sot he NME and other inky music papers weren't interested, and The Face and i-D hadn't been founded yet. We had tapped into something bigger than we had imagined.
There was cleary a like minded crowd for what we were doing. There were people who had created unique identities for themselves, like Philip Sallon, Boy George was there in his kimono, Stephen Linard in his tartan Culloden outfit, Marilyn, Claire the Hair and Tranny Paul. Pinkietessa, formerly known as Theresa Thurmer, was a secretary at the Daily Exppress by day, but by night she changed her name and dressed like an all-pink, home-made version of Bo Peep. The milline Stephen Jones was there. So was the designer Kim Bowen, and Melissa Caplan, Simon Withers and Lee Sheldrick. Influential stylist Michael Kostiff and his wife Gerlinda ( Kinky Gerlinde), who was since sadly died, would pop in. The film-maker John Maybury, who at the time was the boyfriend of the artist keven Whitney, was a regular. Everyone made an effort t look as different as possible, drawing insipiration for their looks from the unlikeliest of places.
One night David Claridge and Daniel James turned up as characters from Thunderbirds.
St. Martin's was at its height of creativity, and the bright sparks of the fashion department seemed to be using the club as its common room. People stood in the Soho rain in gold braid and pill box hats, waiting to get in. cossacks and queen mingled happily and narcissism ran riot. billys attracted a clique of outrageous people lik magnet. All these people were dressed like a royalty, while in reality they were just ex-punks running up the clothes on their mum's sewing machines at home in the suburbs or living in the nearby squats in Warren Street.
AT Billys wer were all clocking each other to see who was more outrageous. The people who turned up were a bit of a mish-mash, but what they all had in common was that they were fed up with punk, and had a love of David Bowie. Rusty, who DJ' d, tried no to play much punk music, so there was a lot of Bowie on the turntables, along with futuristic German music, Being Boiled by The Human League, Warm Leatherette by The Normal, the theme from Stingray and torch song from Marlene Dietrich. Rusty didn't think of himself as a DJ though. We was just the bloke who put the records on. As there wasn't much music to play he also played the electronic demos we had done with Midge Ure, which went down very well. "In the year of 2525" and "Eve of Destruction" were old songs, but they seemed to fit in with the mood of a gathering that was signalling the end of one era and the beginning of another. It was decadent, and evocative of Berlin cabaret in the thirties.
because the club wsa so busy, I stood at the entrance in my leather jodhpurs and german overcoat, deciding who could come in. I was strict on the door because once people were inside I didn't want them to feel they were in a goldfish bowl. I wanted them to feel they were in their own place amongst friends, and anything went. Just because guys were wearing more make-up and there were gay overtones, it didn't mean a guy as gay. Once inside the small, sweaty downstairs room, customers were greeted by an unusual atmosphere. The club was in the heart of Soho, and was still frequented by pimps and hookers. The hookers didn't creat bad vibes, but the pimps occasionally made people feel uncomfortable, because some of our crowd were scantily dressed and the pimps were intimidating. But apart from that, everyone mixed freely, there was rarely ant hassle. The only real problem came from the owner. We had kept our promise of filling his clup up, but after three months we realised it was time to move on because we needed bigger premises. Once the owner heard we were thinking of leaving, he threatened Rusty, because he wanted to keep the wimming fomula. Rusty got paranoid and went into hiding, but we had no choice but to make the move to somewhere bigger. The nightclub revolution had begun.
Steve Strange - Blitzed