Leigh And Me

In January of 1984, Leigh Bowery moved into his glamorous new home in east London. Farrell House was an unforgiving block of council flats in Ronald Street, Stepney, but his place was high enough up to afford splendid views, and inside it contained, among other things, a commodious hall and three bedrooms. Lots of room to dress up. He was joined by Trojan (né Gary Barnes), a strangely beautiful young man who looked like a Medieval priest with his long face and staring eyes. Leigh was besotted with him, but Trojan preferred to keep their relationship platonic. I suspect that he took a dim view of me.

He always seemed to be lurking in the background and gave me very short shrift whenever he saw me. I imagine he thought I was grander than in fact I was. Leigh was far friendlier, although his sweetness came with an edge. He called me Miss Beaton, a homage to dear Cecil, whom I idolised. I was wildly flattered.

Leigh had arrived in Britain three years earlier. He had worked in a local Burger King to make ends meet, and before long he had discovered the Cha-Cha Club (at the back of the gay club Heaven, underneath Charing Cross station) and the égérie, Scarlett Cannon, who looked like an Otto Dix and who guarded the door. Leigh hailed from Sunshine, a conservative suburb of Melbourne in the hot, forgotten plains of Australia. He couldn’t wait to get out of there. His rather strange accent did its best to disguise his roots. Leigh wanted to be ‘the Andy Warhol of London’, as his friend David Walls has said, and a stint at Burger King was but one stepping-stone to his goal. He had lived in a house on the grottier end of Ladbroke Grove divided into bedsits, each one let, rather intriguingly (for me), to a different gay guy. After staying there he squatted in Clerkenwell, where he was joined by Trojan and David Walls. Trojan was fiercely uncomfortable in the squat. In truth, they all were; it had one bedroom and there were three of them living there. So he set fire to his unhappy surroundings, with the three of them inside, which paved the way for the authorities to relocate them posthaste to the council tower in Stepney.

Leigh and Trojan made David’s life a misery, and within six weeks he had moved out. Now the three-bed- room flat on the 11th floor (of 15) was the two men’s palace. The extra bedroom was transformed into a cutting room for Leigh and duly painted lilac. He was engaged on costumes for Michael Clark’s ballets (Flippin ’eck Oh Thweet Mythtery of Life and New Puritans, both 1984, were his first balletic adventures) and on his unbelievable ensembles, which eventually he created for himself alone, instead of including others, as he had done in 1984 for The Performing Clothes Show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

In January 1985, Leigh launched Taboo, a club in the heart of London, just off Leicester Square. Lasting only a year, it became a decade-transcending holy grail for nightclubbers. Leigh held court in his extraordinary ensembles there every Thursday. Nicola Bateman, a doting friend whom Leigh had met at the event, would eventually be sewing his creations in his cutting room. (He would ‘give birth’ to Nicola, as part of his performance art, which was a sight for sore eyes. He performed once in the Brixton Fridge. I did too. I was dressed up in a late 1950s lady’s ensemble and a hat from the Royal College of Art student Philip Treacy. I thought it was rather fetching until after my turn, when Leigh let rip. He would eventually marry Miss Bateman.)

Meanwhile, Leigh was ensconced in Stepney. It was there, in the mid-1980s, that I was bidden to see his latest creations. I must say, it was quite an adventure to visit him. The lift was frankly urinous and there was much clutching of pearls as bovver boys and other menacing types got on or off during my journey skywards. The doorbell sounded to a tape of porn stars in the throes of delight, and the door opened to Leigh standing before a decorating ensemble in the final stages of ecstasy. It was just a little hard to bear. Trojan was skulking in the background (I had met him when Leigh was living on Ladbroke Grove and he was never far away).

They had clearly had a great deal of fun with the new establishment. Finding local decorating shops – Dee Jay Decor in Watney Market for one – they had trawled them for gaudy bits of what some might have called tat, but when it was arranged it became a set piece. A Star Trek paper, composed of intergalactic aircraft and discombobulated heads against a background of darkest-blue skies, lined the sitting-room walls, framed the serving hatch and covered the ceiling too. Trojan’s paintings were dotted hither and yon (including his bedroom, to which I was not privy; it was apparently painted an apricot gloss). These works were a curious mixture of childlike naivety and unbearable sophistication, complete with elaborate frames that somehow became part of the image. Trojan had success with these pictures when he travelled with Leigh to Japan for Susanne Bartsch’s London Goes to Tokyo collective show in 1984.

Sue Tilley, Leigh’s friend, who was then working at the dole office, produced a delightfully matter-of-fact biography, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon (1997), and it charts his quite unbelievable life. In one telling aside, she describes his attempts to amuse Trojan: ‘He walked into the front room naked except for a handbag hanging on his erection,’ she writes. ‘That was a quiet night in at Farrell House.’ In August 1986, Trojan, who vowed that he would not live past 21, died of an overdose. Leigh had other lives. He became a sitter for Lucian Freud (like Tilley), completely covering the Star Trek wallpaper (apart from the ceiling) with a shroud made from Freud’s painting cloths. He became an extraordinary performer, and a pop singer (with Raw Sewage and Minty), and then he sickened from Aids and died, quietly, in 1994.

‘Leigh Bowery!’ is at Tate Modern, London until 31 Aug. tate.org.uk

A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers

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