Dick Jewell on 'Kinky Gerlinky'
Article written by Lucy Kumara Moore
Britain in the early 1990s was in decline. The aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (she was Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) was a country with rising unemployment, inflation, recession and a capital city on alert due to the ongoing terrorist attacks by the Irish Republican Army. Against this backdrop of despondency, a cauldron of resilience was brewing in London, as vibrant new subcultures provided solace from the gloom.
Kinky Gerlinky, a hedonistic club night that ran from 1988-1993, was, says British artist Dick Jewell, born out of a desire to ‘bring some glamour back to London nightlife.’ Founded by the iconic husband-and-wife duo of the fashion demi-monde, Michael and Gerlinde Costiff, it was initially a party they threw for their friends, including designer Vivienne Westwood, whose raunchy, historical, gender-bending vision the Costiffs adored. Westwood joined the fray at Kinky Gerlinky on multiple occasions, and her work was the inspiration for the Night of the Leopards edition of the event in January 1992. In the previous year, Westwood judged the Kinky Gerlinky Models Ball fancy dress competition, awarding prizes to a man who called himself ‘The Transformer’ as well as the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery, who was a regular at the club (and who had founded his own short-lived but revolutionary polysexual happening Taboo in 1985).
Kinky Gerlinky soon grew into a major event, moving to the Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square in 1991, with ‘a couple of thousand capacity, and all the regalia of the revolving stage and huge dancefloor,’ says Dick. The night offered an otherworldly experience, a wild, unbridled and inclusive celebration of drag and queer culture as well as performative, musical and sartorial experimentation. Fashion writer James Anderson describes it as ‘a wild, dressed-up-to-the-max and polysexual event…[welcoming] drag queens, club kids, muscle boys, fetish freaks, butch dykes – and even minor European royalty from far and wide.’
Guests often made their own costumes, using what they had to hand and drawing on references from high and low culture. Dick says of the night’s evolution, ‘the notoriety had led to people flying in from France, from America, for the night. There was serious travelling going on…but there was still a strict door policy.’ Over its four-year history, guests and performers included Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, Bjork, Prince, Amanda Lear, Sinead O’ Connor, Banarama, Leigh Bowery, Ru Paul, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Boy George, Neneh Cherry, Nina Hagen, MC Kinky and Nick Kamen. Music was routinely provided by DJs Princess Julia, Martin Confusion and Rachel Auburn and the MC/compere was the self-proclaimed gender-illusionist Winston.
Dick had met Michael and Gerlinde in the 1980s and attended the first few Kinky Gerlinky parties. They soon invited him to film it, knowing this was something he’d been doing in other clubs. Using a newly invented Video8 camera, he captured each night from start to finish, not shying away from the extreme hedonism that came his way. It wasn’t long before clubbers began performing directly for the camera, and also asking to see the footage. In response, Dick would edit the reels from each night and make VHS cassette tapes that he put for sale at BOY and World, the two West End London boutiques where tickets for Kinky could be bought in advance.
It was a few decades before social media fully emerged, but Dick’s videos can be seen as a precursor to the sharing of video content and performative tendencies of Instagram and TikTok. Significantly, though, the sharing was controlled and anonymity could be maintained – videos couldn’t easily be copied and were mainly bought by those who’d already been to the club. This was a closed-circuit loop of shared radicality. And Dick and his small team were the only people in the whole place with a camera. ‘At one point we were three video crews with lighting, and we dragged up, my crew went as nurses. There’s a shot in one of the films where it looks like we’re performing some kind of operation!... There’s nothing like that now. It all felt quite natural. The acquaintances of Gerlinde – in fashion – with Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood judging the catwalk shows etc., at the same time because everybody made such an effort to get in, it was somewhere where celebrities could almost be anonymous, everyone would be there just partying along with everyone else’.
Press play and feel the joy.
