The Space-3 Show
The second proper Dirty Slut show ended up as one of my all time favourite live gigs being simply so bloody unexpected and chaotic and funny. A show where I blew up the sound system, put a girl in hospital and the whole audience ended up covered in instant whipped cream.
The gig was actually an art showing. The warehouse I was living in, the Projectroom, had been offered the chance of a group show after some artist booked at Space 3 had pulled out, and Sumu ended up kinda curating the thing. We all blew dust of some wacky ideas we had had for a while and pulled a bunch of shit together for it. My contribution, relatively unannounced, was the Slut show - but this time with Girls!!!
Space 3 is a grand old lady of a building, quite a big room with a gorgeous high ceiling lots of ornate doilies amongst the cracking and peeling plaster. Right on the corner of regent St and Cleveland it has a unique history of arts and underground cultural happenings since forever. Perfect ambience for some unexpected assault booty.
By this time my musical tastes had wandered somewhat and I was, at the time, totally enthralled by the sound of 'Booty techno' which had been coming out of the States for years, almost completely unacknowledged outside of perhaps a dozen clubs in about three or four cities in the U.S. Booty techno, for newbies, is fast, funny, hard beats, often 808 flavoured but completely schizophrenic in stylistic embellishments, which features lots of cut up and sped up repetitive vocals - all singularly focussed around 'tits and ass, pussy, get your pussy on the dancefloor, let me see you shake that thing etc....'. It's great stuff (for about 40 minutes - then you wanna kill some-one).
This, of course, fitted in beautifully with the whole Slut thing, so i decided that a Gender ambiguous self-proclaimed techno thumping superstar such as the Slut needs a bevy of beautiful and funky women to provide the correct ambience for such a gathering. Putting this together turned out to be surprisingly easy, a few beers and a brainstorming session with some spunky friends, a quick trip to the Cooper street area for 6 tight red T-shirts, Sumu to come up with a 'Dirty' logo and get it printed on the shirts, and the girls to all provide their own hotpants, stockings and wigs and presto. Instant Dirty Dancing, Booty girl action. The honour role of that particular gig is here:
Michaela
Jasmine
Cath
Katie
Alex
I borrowed and humped in (with the ever-helpful Sumu's aid) Lee's sound system. This consists of two black oversized and enormously heavy beaten up full range cabinets, a rack and some foldback. Since it was designed as an installation as much as anything else, I stacked the two speakers up on top of each other in a corner (wanted to get as much bottom end as I could too...) and pointed this ominous looking tower out into the room. I set up a little table, complete with red velvet, roses and my sampler to one side and covered the wall behind me with Porno Postcards advertising a staggering range of erotic services - collected painstaking and obsessively from a summer in London.
Then, as the usual funky young art gallery folk gathered around outside in the gallery, glass of wine in hand, checking out the offerings on display, we crowded upstairs into the tiny little landing and bathroom to don outfits, get tipsy on cheap champagne and generally prepare ourselves for the events ahead. A true pleasure, and one that must be treated very sensitively, is the preparation stage of such an event. Tiny backstage areas, lots of spunky girls changing, sharing makeup, squeals of delight as the look comes together, and being able to participate in this - donning women’s clothes and make-up; these were, and are, warm, sensuous and bonding moments.
Finally we were ready to go. The girls all in matching outfits, rendered unattainably beautiful with the aid of the wigs and make-up and me in all the blonde, black and chain finery of 'the Slut'. Whispered instructions through a crack in the door, and the sound system emits it's first moan of the CD intro - sparse porno moans into a big echoes and delays, a minute or so to build the tension, and then - Showtime.
Two girls ahead of me, pushing their way through the crowd - I lurched out the door. With the sound of orgasmic noises and moans and slurps from the sound system now swelling to a crescendo, and with a girl on either arm, I stagger into the throng - riding crop in one hand, half bottle of champagne in the other. We do a full lap of the space, with people just slack jawed. I approach and mumble pretty obscenities into the ears of a cute punter or two before the girls drag me away into the next lurching, shambling encounter. Then, after a minute or so, I head back to the table, the girls position themselves in front and I hit play. Into what has been a rarefied atmosphere of the usual art gallery nonsense suddenly the Sound system leaps to life. BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG -DIRTY SLUT! And the girls start gyrating madly to the rhythms. Some-one hits the lights and the whole place is plunged into semi darkness, the only light left being a Red covered Gel in the corner of the room covering all in an eerie red glow. Within a minute the girls have something of a dancefloor happening and are dragging punters into the center, necking which each other and generally sexing the hell out of all and sundry. I move from one jam to the next, going harder now, and dropping the big baselines which illicit stamps of approval and cries from the crowd. Originally intended as a 15 minute piece, within 5 minutes the place is chaos. By 10 minutes the girls have a full dance floor, and then finally reveal Whipped Cream canisters and proceed to coat the punters and each other in sweet, sticky, foaming white gak. Immediately the floor is rendered completely slippery and Cath suddenly takes a fall, plunging to hit her head on the wooded floorboards before being hoisted to her feet and continuing in the frenzy. Suddenly I notice the hats on the last jam aren't working. I flick through a few pages into my sampler to quickly try and determine the fault but find nothing that looks wrong. Hold on a minute, nothing has any top end anymore - fuck. The tops on the boxes are gone. I grab the tempo dial and wind up the BPM's - up and up till the sound system is issuing a Washing machine like Cacophony before hitting... stop. Silence. I lurch away from the table and suddenly the room is alive with whoops and screams of approval. The girls gather, and catching me, help me in staggering out of the room and back into the stair well.
A good gig.
The Sound system cost me $1500 to fix and Cath had to get stitches above her eye. We still have great footage of her, sitting backstage, in post-show langour, covered in whipped cream remnants and with blood pouring down here gorgeous face. She faces the camera, draws on her cigarette and says:
'ah it's nothing; a little blood.'
