[Introspective] article mentions Neil

[Carlos E Restrepo]

This article mentions Neil Tennant....

Sunday Times (London)

April 20, 2003, Sunday
SECTION: Features; Style; 14
LENGTH: 1069 words
HEADLINE: Welcome to electroclash!
BYLINE: Johnny Davis

BODY:
We've had house, we've had techno, we've had garage. Now there's a new craze sweeping clubland. One warning: you need serious wardrobe attitude, says Johnny Davis

You join us a little before midnight in a converted sex club below London's Charing Cross Road. The Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant props up the bar, his arm slung drunkenly around the gallery owner Jay Jopling. Jay's wife, the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, is on the dancefloor, shaking a well-heeled leg with Blur's Alex James. Boy George shuffles in, dressed as the 1980s club icon Leigh Bowery, straight from his musical, Taboo. He coos at the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who, in response, executes a peculiar pirouette. 

If you think things sound weird so far, you should see the state of the people who aren't so famous. The man dancing next to me is naked from the waist up, save for one leather glove and a home-made Spider-Man mask. He's also wearing 6in white stilettos. It's a Wednesday evening.

But it's all in a night's merriment down at Nag Nag Nag, London's most exciting, fabulous and gossip-worthy club of the past six months. Kate Moss, Bjork and Stella McCartney have all sashayed through its doors, though Justin Timberlake didn't make it, turned away as he had "too big a posse" with him.

It's the club the celebs adore: first, because everyone here is so outrageously dressed that nobody really pays them any attention, and second, because of the music. It's the unofficial home of electroclash, the offshoot of dance music that takes the 1980s electropop of Donna Summer and New Order as its starting point, then amps up the camp, adding saucy ooo-er lyrics and an arsenal of synthesizer effects that even Jean Michel Jarre would consider a bit much.

Electroclash actually surfaced a year ago, trumpeted by the pop media as the next big thing to cross over from the underground to the mainstream. The darlings of the scene were the band Fischerspooner, a pair of flamboyantly dressed New Yorkers who signed an extortionate record deal on the back of one magnificent single, Emerge. When their album limped into the charts at a less-than-magnificent 172, the media dropped electroclash faster than Michael Barrymore. Which is where things got interesting.

"Fischerspooner had huge hype and then didn't sell any records," says Tennant.

"But the important thing was that they opened the door for people who wanted permission to dress up and be different. Because they failed, it meant electroclash went back underground, to the clubs. And I'm not surprised it became a dirty word. 'Electroclash' is a terrible name."

You only need to give the queues outside Nag Nag Nag - and like-minded club nights Kash Point, Cocadisco and the attractively named The Cock - the once over to conclude that reports of electroclash's death have been greatly exaggerated.

There is something genuinely new and exciting going on out there, something that's about more than just music: it's about a lifestyle, too.

Much of this is down to the fact that electroclash allows - hell, demands - that people dress up to the nines before they go out and have a good time. Not since the boom in early 1990s "handbag house" clubs such as Pushca and Miss Moneypenny's have so many spent so long getting ready to rave. The anything-goes style of electroclash, however, has more in common with seminal 1980s clubs such as Taboo and Blitz, home to beautiful misfits, fashionistas and the biggest show-offs in the capital, back when gay culture led the field.

It's little wonder Tennant is such a fan, or that Pete Burns from 1980s glamourpusses Dead or Alive is back on the chat-show circuit, flogging an electroclash remix of his biggest hit, You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).

"We decided to dress up because, when we started, everything was so dull," says Casey Spooner, of Fischerspooner. "Fashion was all beige, bland, fake modernist.

There was not much difference between Prada and the clothes from Kmart. So why not go crazy? It's testament to the times we're living in. We're all thinking about life and death. People just want to indulge themselves."

And nobody is indulging himself more than Jonny Slut, Nag Nag Nag's DJ and promoter. "I started Nag Nag Nag because there was no club I was interested in attending myself," he says. "I wanted somewhere that was full of crazy, flamboyant nonsense. Now we're a healthy cross section of kooky St Martins students, ambiguous bottle blondes and celebrities who should know better. There's a whole generation of kids who don't remember the new-romantic period. I hope it'll inspire a few boys and girls to raid their mum's wardrobe and run away to London to start doing something new."

Electroclash might have failed to set the charts on fire, but that wasn't really its job. The Top 40 is welcome to today's sorry parade of pop moppets and badly Xeroxed cover versions. Electroclash has done something much more important: brought sex, glamour and a daft sense of humour back to clubbing. Which, of course, was the whole point in going out in the first place. Make no mistake, it's a genre that has become as important to clubland as house or garage was before it. Who knows where it will go next?

On the dancefloor at Nag Nag Nag, the man in the home-made Spider-Man mask doesn't know, and he doesn't care. He's enjoying himself so much, he's taken off his trousers. Underneath, for all the club to see, he's proudly wearing a pair of Spider-Man underpants. You don't get that down the Ministry of Sound.

HADLEY HUDSON/MARKUS INTERACTIVE.COM, JAMIE REID

HOW TO DO IT!

Behave: like a screaming queen, whatever your sexual orientation.

Make: your own clothes.

Badly shave: one side of your head. Dress up: so ridiculously that even your best mate says, "you're not going out like that." Then go out like that.

Choose heroes like: Siobhan Fahey from Bananarama (girls). Toyah Wilcox (boys and girls), the moog synthesizer.

Drop: the names of a couple of electro tracks, the sillier, the better. Perspex Sex by Freeform Five should do the trick.

Say: "Wolfgang Tillmans just took my picture"; "Actually, I'm polysexual."

Network: like crazy.

Remember: you're a star, baby!

Spend: Saturday shopping at Soho's Pineal Eye for an asymmetric sweatshirt before getting a tattoo and going home to Siouxsie and the Banshees videos.