Editors' Letter
London, late summer, 1985. Conspicuous among the flow of tourists in Leicester Square, a crowd is forming outside Maximus, a small, basement disco, where a new but already legendary club night is about to begin. Its name? Taboo.
The brainchild of Tony Gordon and Leigh Bowery – artist, performer, model, TV personality, fashion designer, musician – Taboo was the place to be in London’s subcultural club scene: a night renowned as much for its exacting door policy (‘dress as though your life depends on it’), as for its debauchery. Bowery was not just the promoter but also the public face of Taboo, and as such, reinvented himself every week, transforming his body into ‘an ever-changing, outlandish, living art piece’, writes one friend of the clubland icon.
To coincide with the opening of Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern this February, we have invited several figures connected to Taboo, and to Bowery, to share stories about that brief, brilliant era – and about an artist whose life left a distinct and undeniable mark on the art world. This issue provides a survey not just of Leigh Bowery’s London in the 1980s, but of the UK in that critical decade, where creativity, experimentation and transgression played out against a backdrop of austerity, political turbulence, race uprisings and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Writer and photographer Johny Pitts turns to music to explore his own formative years, and the vital visual language that developed in magazines and album covers of the time.
Elsewhere, we speak to three artists from Electric Dreams, newly opened at Tate Modern, about their artworks created at the dawn of the internet age; writer Susan Finlay reflects on three decades as a superfan of Mike Kelley, the art world’s most ‘inspiring failure’, and Jeffrey Hinton, one of Taboo’s original DJs, takes us back to Leicester Square, 1985, with a specially made mix.
Party on, Tate Etc.
