Unpurge (engendering euphoria)

I've decided that there are far too many ordinary, ugly or just badly photographed pictures of myself in my flickr photostream, so I'm going to go through them ruthlessly and cull everything over a year or so old except for a few of my own faves.

Now before anyone gets carried away, this isn't a purge.

It's primarily an aesthetic decision. As I said, there's a lot of accumulated dross in there. Overposting, repetiton, out of focus self-timer shots, under / overexposure rescued for the sake of narcissitic impulses. I guess I overpost because of the vanity-anxiety complex I described a few weeks ago that afflicts me and many other transgendered people I think.

So it's just a correction. Not a purge. For the unitiated "purging" is a condition where transvestites will rid themselves of the clothes and other trappings of our habit in a misguided atempt to "get over it". Being a reaction formed from guilt, It almost always fails. And if there's one thing I never feel about trannying, it's guilt. Not now, not ever.

Range-finding

I've only ever purged once, and that was way back when I was 17, I think - I forget exactly. I spent a whole long summer living almost full time "as a girl" while my parents were away in Japan with a dying relative.

The day before they flew back, I destroyed everything, in a rather grandiose and dramatic teenage way, by lighting a huge bonfire in the garden. And I really mean dramatic and teenage - I actually tore the pages out of my journal one by one and threw them on the flames.

Even then, I was thinking, "what the fuck are you doing? You don't mean this," and I didn't. I was dressing again in a couple of days.

Within a year, I'd moved out and was starting to transition. But that's another story entirely.

(I wrote a short story very loosely based on the events of that summer. It's here if you want to read it.)

The point is that those types of extreme reaction are not normal in my tranny "make-up". Perhaps I was troubled at the time, that I should deny my transdom, then polarize into the opposite direction and start to transition so soon afterwards.

But hey, I was a teenager. I was allowed to be a bit fucked up.

And the truth was, I soon after stopped transitioning when I realised my path lay somewhere in between, where I was happy with myself as a non specifically transgendered person.

And here I am still, right now.

Mix and match

See, what I think is that I, like many of us, inhabit some sort of gender continuum that I'm very content to slide along - sometimes I feel intensely feminine, and at other times rather blokey. It doesn't change who I think I am. In fact it defines who I am, this shifting gender identity.

The gender positions that I adopt are part of myself. And I don't feel shame, guilt, or the need to deny any aspect of myself.

Instead, I feel pride.

All of that is why I don't think I suffer from gender dysphoria.

Instead, I'm happy-proud to have gender euphoria.

Meaning that whatever my gender posiiton is at any one time, I love it. And that "my transgenderism" is all about the freedom to slide along the trans curve willy nilly.

And before you start getting up in arms, this condition describes me, and me only. I'm quite aware that everyone's different, and there are people out there who are genuinely devastated by the gender that biology has forced on them. I'm not in any way denying that (like I said, I once thought I was transsexual, after all).

New crop

So the great non-purge starts today. Really, had I not (in writing this post) declared this was occurring, no one would've noticed the difference. So really the very action of writing this blog post is in itself attention seeking and narcissistic. Haha. I can't fucking win. Anyway, I want people to know that this is what I am doing, and why.

So a number of pictures that I've come to realise I dislike will disappear from my allotment on the Internet. But while I'm taking away with one hand, rest assured, I will however be giving back with the other as I continue to take inanely narcissistic shots of myself, like these from earlier this mercilessly slow Bank Holiday weekend...

Note:

Written with the help of myself of two years ago, who first wrote about "Gender Euphoria" in May 2007, on draGnet 4.0.

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Life, 24fps

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Six Inch Killaz: Shoot to Kill #8

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• 8
• 9
• Apocrypha

End = Nigh

Approaching the end now but, writing this, it amazes me how much we packed into the last year. As usual I publish this in the knowledge that my memory gets hazier day by day, so if anyone has any recollections, contradictions or embellishments from over ten years ago, I will, as in past instalments, add them. So email me!

Updates:
20th August 09: comments from Luis and additions from me.
22nd August 09: comments from Mona.

Part 8: On the dancefloor till the music stops

Things seemed to accelerate out of control as Six Inch Killaz dived deep into 1998, deep into the end times. And out of the blue, and seemingly simultaneously, a plethora of stuff began happening.

First came the end of the Killaz flat in York Way Court.

Our longtime refuge, where Jasmine and Holly lived and where we met, talked, watched videos, smoked, drank and rehearsed, was scheduled to be torn down and rebuilt and so the girls were given their marching orders, abruptly relocated Eastwards across the borough of Islington to the infamously dodgy Marquess Estate on the Essex Road.

The old flat on the corner of York Way and Copenhagen Street, despite its manky surroundings, had been a haven, warm, cosy and lived in for years by the two friends who'd, as I'd mentioned before, moulded it with their character, plastering every inch of wall space with glamorous images. The new place was, by comparison, cold, dark, hollow and depressingly bare. We still gathered now and then to work quietly on new material but the place made me (and the others, I'm sure) feel withdrawn and sombre. Holly and Jasmine too were, by that time, becoming alienated from each other, their friendship crumbling under the stresses caused by Jasmine's heroin habit and so the flat never really became a home. Within less than a year it would be vacated.

Miss K says:

OK, I got this chronology a bit wrong. Luis kindly wrote to correct me and to point out that Holly and Jasmine had 'broken up' way before Essex Road...

Luis says:

Holly, she'd long gone - in fact, I think it must've been since autumn/winter of 1997, as when I asked Holly why she was no longer living with Jasmine (at York Way Court - K), Holly replied that she went to stay with Pearl during the winter months, as it was just too cold in York Way (Holly was right, too, 'cause I'd been living with Jasmine since September when I started at Sussex Uni - I lasted all of three weeks!) Jasmine and I were thrown out (along with all the other occupants) of York Way Court in March ... and Holly didn't return...

(So,) Essex Road? Holly never lived there - hell, Pauline (formerly close to Jasmine, but by then Luis' partner, now wife - K) and I tried living there for a few months; but in the end we gave up, as Jasmine's jealousy was too much to bear...

Miss K says:

I was so pleased when you got into that film course at Uni. Such a shame it never worked out.

Unable to practice at volume in the new flat (the neighbours in York Way Court had been far more accommodating and far less frightening), we were, for the first time in ages, forced to look for studio space in which to rehearse. We went back to Scar in Camden for a while, then managed to find somewhere even cheaper and more makeshift. Mona found it - I think it might have been at the suggestion of Rob from The Cheetahs - but anyway, from that summer to the end, the inappropriately named High Hi Fashion Music Collective on Brewery Road, N7, became home to us on a weekly basis.

It was a weird place. Undeniably cheap, it was run by a group of Afro-Caribbean people who'd taken over a big old sewing machine factory (there was still a battered sign outside) at the York Way end of the street that connects at the other end with Caledonian Road, and which, perhaps appropriately, has long been home to massively professional rehearsal rooms and top class facilities hire for bands touring London.

'High Hi Fashion' wasn't one of those types of places. Once you negotiated the musty and rubble strewn stairwell, you'd come to a big, parquet-floored area (the old factory floor, gutted of furniture and equipment) where steel bands and dance troupes would be found rehearsing for Carnival and the like. In a corridor off from this was a bunch of offices that had been turned into rehearsal rooms, sort of. I say sort of, because nothing had really been done to them as such. There was no soundproofing and I think we had to lug our own amps there to some degree. They were pretty much just empty offices with crappy carpet tiles and fluoresent tubes, some working, most fizzing, that you could play in at considerable volume, as the rest of the building was half derelict and unoccupied, though the sound leak from adjoining rooms was terrible if (as occasionally happened) another band was in at the same time. I don't think that there was even a proper PA for the vocals and we had to use our own mikes through some kind of improvised mixer-amp-speaker setup. The place was probably squatted by the owners; I don't know. Obviously it's not there any more. I think it's one of those self storage places now.

Still, we were able to rehearse there and it was cheap, like I said. I remember the dreadlocked guys who ran the place always looked bemused by us. Bemused, but kind of amused too. Well, you can probably imagine how baffling we must have appeared, with our plucked brows and long nails, flouncing around in a grump once a week, making our appalling racket. I remember Luis and I bursting into the main room once looking for the guy in charge and scaring the life out of a bunch of teenage kids rehearsing on the steel drums. Alien worlds colliding, it was.

Mona says:

I found Hi-Fashion on the phone book. I think Cheetahs started there after us, but can't be sure. They eventually had their own PA in one of the rooms - I think it was an old WEM one from the early 70s - looked like the control panel from a space ship.

Late night variety show

Out of the blue during this period of turmoil and change, I was contacted via our brand new website by Kate Copstick, the producer of an ITV/Carlton TV show called "The Warehouse", a late night variety show which set out to give undiscovered London based performers a platform to showcase themselves. She was tentatively interested in booking us for a show in the next series.

She was offering hitherto unheard of riches (for us) of £400 for the appearance! Remember that as an unsigned, virtually unknown band, the fees we'd normally be used to getting from a gig ranged fom zero to £50 on a really good day. So we quickly sent her the Toe Rag demo (at that point the most 'professional' recording we had) and waited for a reply, which duly came a week later when I spoke to Kate and she said she was concerned that we were just too rough and unprofessional sounding for a mainstream TV show. She still, bless her, seemed keen to give us a chance so we agreed to do a short audition for her at the now sadly defunct Backstreet Studio under the arches at Holloway Road station.

So, for the first time that I can really remember, we really put our guts into trying to make it sound "tight". We rehearsed and rehearsed running up to the audition night, going over a small group of songs, including Trashola which we decided was the one we were going to play if we got the gig.

We spent what amounted to a fortune for us (given our normal studio fees) that evening on one of the bigger rooms at Backstreet. I was pretty nervous. We had time to run though the stuff a couple of times before she arrived, and I remember thinking that I was awful and that we sounded terrible and that we were wasting our time and hers.

Then this diminutive Scottish woman walked in and introduced herself. For some reason, Luis seemed to find her appearance inappropriately hilarious and spent the whole time smirking and on the verge of giggles. We settled down and played. It was weird. The room was too big really. Just huge and boomy and lacking in atmosphere, especially as we were playing to one person (well, technically, I think we'd done that once before, at The Laurel Tree in Camden).

But do you know, we were really good. We suddenly lost the nerves and locked into the songs and produced, as I recall, an amazingly tight and confident performance. Adrenaline often causes this to happen in live situations that are, for some reason, "extra live", like this one.

Afterwards, Kate was all smiles and produced a contract for us to look at, sign and return to her. She hadn't even noticed Luis' bizarre semi-hysteria at her appearance.

Later, as we drank in the pub next to the station and tried to calm down, he told us that he recognised her from some kids comedy show which also featured papier-mache headed Northern comic Frank Sidebottom. Actually, she's a very interesting character. Performer, producer, writer and former editor of The Erotic Review. And perhaps her greatest claim to fame would now be for booking Six Inch Killaz on The Warehouse...

Maybe.

Luis says:

I was delighted to meet Kate Copstick, as she was the original Mrs. Merton! That is, Frank Sidebottom (who I was a big fan of - he's made a comeback over the last year, by the way) created the character and asked Kate to play her on his records! Caroline Aherene took over the role after a while, however, and ended up ripping off the character for her own purposes...

Spunk Hat

The Warehouse was taped in a huge, well, y'know, warehouse (converted into a TV studio), over near Bromley-by-Bow, off the Old Ford Road bypass in a scuzzy corner of the East End. We arrived fairly early on a damp, grey late April day as they wanted all the 'artists' onsite pretty early - I think they were filming three shows back to back that day meaning they had a lot of acts to shuffle on and off the stage in rapid succession so they couldn't afford to wait around waiting for unreliable 'talent' to arrive and get ready.

So we pitched up at the large portakabin that was serving as the green room. It was like a zoo full of variety acts of all shapes, colours and sizes. Sure there were a couple of other bands, but the majority were standups, jugglers, sword swallowers and the like, all desultorily picking their way through assorted crisps and related nibbles, weak booze and other bottles of pop.

We glowered at them and plonked ourselves and our bags full of outfits, wigs and makeup into some plastic chairs in the corner. Jasmine and Holly unpacked the trademark 2L bottles of vodka and coke and we prepared to wait.

We had several hours to while away as we were on pretty much last so there wasn't much point in doing anything like getting ready. To avoid getting hopelessly drunk, I think I actually went for a walk. There wasn't much around there though, derelict factories and warehouses. A muddy runoff from the river full of plastic bags and overturned trolleys from the big Tesco that dominated the surroundings, where I bought something to eat. My memory of these times is generally hazy, but I remember that walk particularly vividly. Tuna and sweetcorn in brown bread, munching in the drizzle as I wandered the grey streets. Hours to kill until I'd find myself getting changed with the other back in the smoke filled green room of tedium...

I'd had a stage costume made by a fashion designer friend of mine, Roger Craig-Searle. We'd concocted this idea of trying to make a kind of Studio 59 disco era trouser suit. He'd been particularly enthused by Seventeen and thought it appropriate that I should dress like a dark avatar of the disco era. While I was at his house having a final fitting and trying to make it cover my fatness (I was pretty chubby around that time) I spotted a fantastic black cowboy hat with SPUNK in 3D gold letters along the top of the brim. It belonged to Sean, his flatmate and film costumier and I begged to borrow it. With a couple of crow feathers in the brim, the Studio Seventeen trouser suit, a net top and heels, how could I fail to look amazing??

I realised the horrible truth a few weeks later when we received the tape of the programme - with my tinted shades and guitar I looked like some sort of hideous amalgam of Bono and The Edge, in drag. AAARGH. All I can say is I'm as appalled as you, dear reader. I should have known better and I deserve to be punished. I am so so so sorry...

Anyway...

The performance was fine. We came out of the green room into a massive space full of audience people, where we were introduced by the floor manager to a flustered looking but very enthusiastic MC. We were nicely drunk so were generally fairly docile and good-natured, though I seem to remember Mona being in a grump about something. I was a little concerned that they would have a problem with SPUNK hat but it was a late night show and they didn't seem to care. It actually barely appears. I think (though I don't recall) that there was time for one run through. Or it might have been that we'd sound checked when we arrived. Yes, that seems more likely now I put my mind to trying to remember.

It being a recorded show, there were lots of stops and starts and pauses and rethinks, but eventually Mona was able to kick Dr Rhythm into gear and we launched into Trashola. Two and a bit minutes later the audience, which was dotted with friends who'd made the journey out there, were applauding and it was all over.

Luis says:

To the best of my memory, there was no soundcheck! I remember we came onstage, the drum machine started up - but it was too damn quiet! Just before you and Mona kicked off, I yelled at the sound guy to stop and turn it up... He did so, and started it up once more - and we performed the song in one take, without a hitch... :)

Miss K adds:

Yeah, I do remember that now. It was something of a miracle that it worked out so well. But we were phenomenally well-rehearsed for us, pretty much all that year.

At the gantry bar at the back of the studio afterwards, there were plenty of wellwishers. My punk rock loving friend who had been critical ("that were shite, mate") of our 'non performance' at The Hope & Anchor the year before was gratifyingly impressed and I also hooked up for the first time with Jamie (aka Mr Jam), the photographer who would shoot Deathline almost exactly ten years later at the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane.

After a while, and as is normal in these tales, booze-induced amnesia set in, but maybe we all cabbed it to some club or other later. Who knows? At any rate we were pleased with our day's work and were looking forward to seeing the broadcast version, which turned out to be pretty good. See for yourself courtesy of Luis' YouTube channel.

Miss K adds:

We seemed to make a good impression on Copstick. I've just been rummaging in the shoe box I keep full of Killaz memorabilia and have found a letter from her, on Carlton letterhead:

Kate Copstick (letter dated 6 May 1998):

Well, it is all tweaked, glossed, tucked, lifted and lovingly put to bed. You look fab. Fab is an all purpose television term meaning... well... FAB!

I hope you enjoyed doing the show as much as we enjoyed having you on it. It is all rather kick, bollock and scramble out there in No Man's Land by Bow isn't it? But we all thought you coped brilliantly.

Our publicity guru Murray is hard at work sending out press releases on everyone involved, so fingers crossed for some media interest! But then you know what the media are like...

Please stay in touch - let us know about gigs... we'll come! I will get in touch if anything comes up after the show... people wanting to book you or ask about albums or anything... you'll know about five minutes after I do!

Once again, thanks for being part of The Warehouse. All the very, very best for the future and please do remember us when you're famous! Trash becomes an art form! Thanks for everything!

All the best,

Copstick

Miss K adds:

Nothing really ever did come of it. And we never saw her again, but it's a nice letter and she "got" us, I think...

Loose

But that was over two months off and we were still gigging and writing. I know I've persistently presented this period as a sort of twilight for the band but in reality, while our demise was imminent, our output and workrate was pretty high throughout the year, prompted as we were by our Kitsch Bitch / Cheetahs friends, about whom I wrote in depth last time, and who were always urging us on to do more stuff, and, more importantly, because of their support, getting us opportunities to play.

In this period of our career the sets were built round the trio of late songs which I still consider to be among our best. Coincidentally all starting with the letter "S", Schizoid and Superstar, which I introduced last time, were soon joined by my composition Seventeen.

As I noted previously, I think I was trying to craft a radio hit at this time, and I think this song was the culmination of that effort. Structured around a repetitive disco beat and a scratchy, circular bottom-E riff played by Mona, Seventeen is a fatalistic, cynical but curiously triumphal ("screw the poor and fuck the rich") and catchy song about the descent of a movie starlet into drug abuse and prostitution. It's simultaneously glam, rocking and very poppy and partly based on the trajectory taken by a friend of mine at the time (though she pulled back from the abyss unlike the heroine of the song). It didn't take long to become a standard song on our set though I think at times we performed it poorly.

I still play Seventeen today with Deathline; I like it. It was also one of the few Killaz songs that was well realised as a professional quality recording. But more on that later.

Mona says:

I wrote some more songs at this time but they didn't make the grade - one was called Speed Queen, after a laundrette in Holloway and another was called Toilet Duck, about the desire to rid the brain/memory of useless crap.

Miss K says:

I remember we had a vague obsession with that launderette. I think we talked vaguely of shooting an album cover there if we ever got one together. I was particularly enamoured of the logo. I don't ever recall your song though, nor Toilet Duck.

Despite my fondness for the material from this time, I'll hold my hand up and admit that I don't recall a great deal about the gigs we played in the late spring and summer of that year. Rob and the rest of the Cheetahs were often present though, either sharing a bill with us or enthusiastically supporting us from the audience. Like I said, we owed them our lives that year and I hope we repaid them somehow. They definitely seemed to enjoy watching us play and hanging out with us. Technically as well as musically and passionately, they were a fantastic band and it meant a lot to be held in such high regard by them.

Rob especially seemed to see qualities in us that no one else did. He spoke excitedly about our "looseness". For him, it was an irreproduceable and undefinable quality that he perceived in us and greatly admired, and which he equated with the improvisational verve he heard from the jazz music he'd encountered in childhood through his father. I'd always put our looseness (or rather lack of tightness) it down to bad technique on our part, but I think somehow we'd stumbled upon something chaotic and energetic that he valued.

Mona says:

Gavin (Cheetahs bassist - K) wrote an obit of the band in the Cheetahs zine Big Bad Pig where he said we were like watching an airplane crash (in a good way, somehow). I think Rob liked what he perceived to be our 'guts' and a kind of rocknroll OCD reality.

When you perform, you desperately need your audience to react and produce energy for you to feed on. That feedback loop's what keeps your performance from falling flat and dying. When it happens with a large crowd of people, it's the most incredible feeling in the world. You feel invincible. I've felt it with Deathline and Electric Shocks, but rarely with Six Inch Killaz, except in this period of our career. Rob was like the generator driving that energy feedback. And we gave him and his friends and their followers the energy that they amplified and chucked back at us. It was a great time. We played tiny shoeboxes like the Red Eye on Copenhagen Street, supporting Cheetahs, and bigger venues like Club Kitten at HQ Club on Camden Lock. I'm pretty sure I missed a couple too, or at least one more Alcohol club night, this time somewhere else in Shoreditch.

But no matter, the beast was moving again. There was, as I explained last time, a palpable buzz about the whole Kitsch Bitch "scene" and we felt like we could all get on board and step up to the next storey.

Thing is, how many more flights of stairs would there be? Those heels were killers...

In the footsteps of Meat Loaf (or Mr Loaf to his friends)

Well, Cheetahs and Six Inch Killaz were both unsigned and unreleased and we'd been wondering if it was time to do something about it. Remember that this was a time before MP3s were commonly available, there were probably only a couple of portable players (who remembers the Rio?) out there. Sites like MySpace we're just a glint in a future entrepreneur's eye. The only way to distribute music was on vinyl or CD. We were all quite into the idea of the two bands announcing themselves onto the music screne with a split 7" single to capitalise on the buzz surrounding Kitsch Bitch. Rob 'Cheetah' Mune was to produce the Six Inch Killaz side of the single.

We were lucky enough that Rob was good friends with Martin 'Overdog' Eden, musician, engineer and co-owner of Big Fucking Digital, a state of the art digital recording studio on Britannia Row, just off Essex Road (the other end from the flat) and we were, sometime in June, able to book in for some weekend downtime recording there. This was a very different recording experience to what we'd encountered before. Not only was everything going down onto ProTools on Apple Macs (no tape!), but we had Rob and Martin (as Producer and Engineer) carefully crafting the sound on our behalf, telling us what to do and suggesting enhancements and additions that might make the songs better. I found it fascinating and things I learnt that day kind of inform the way I record stuff now.

It was also an unusually good atmosphere for a Killaz recording session. We were among friends and it chugged along easily from late morning into the night with no commercially imposed time limit. In between takes Martin would regale us with studio stories such as the time just before we were there when Meat Loaf came in to put down vocals over a pre-recorded orchestral backing track, but was unable to sing in tune, and, in a superb piece of celeb huffishness, stormed out claiming that it was the whole orchestra, not himself that was out of tune.

We recorded three songs with a view to picking the strongest for the single. Of the later work, we laid down Seventeen and Superstar, balancing their poppiness with the fieriest and rockingest of the early songs, in the process making P.I.G. probably the most recorded of all the Killaz songs.

We started with Seventeen and it worked well, Rob and Martin using lots of studio trickery, overdubs and layering to make what's actually quite a sparse song feel full and powerful. Late in the mix, Rob decided that the final bars of the chorus and the outro needed a bit of Roxy-Musification and phoned a friend who brought in her sax to lay down a bit of reed to counterpoint the guitars. It really worked.

P.I.G. was slightly retooled in the mix, Rob bringing my lead line to the fore and pushing Mona's rhythm part down into the backing (perhaps a little too far, as the song misses some of the drive, though I understood why he did it - bringing out the punky top end). When I came out of the booth after recording my lead part, Rob paid me the unexpected compliment that "it was like listening to fucking Johnny Thunders in there", which was nice. Overall it's a really good, pumping rendition of the song, perhaps missing some of the raw power of earlier recordings.

Superstar wasn't a success. We spent the least time on this third track and it sounds rushed as a result. It's a few tricks short of working and rather than being majestic, soaring and glamorous, the recording comes over as ponderous and flat (in the dual sense of 'without energy' and 'out of tune'). You heard better demos of this song in the last instalment.

Martin's digital trickery was used to cover up a multitude of minor sins, including my inability to keep time when playing the piano part in Seventeen, to Jasmine's minor tuning issues in Superstar (see, it's not just Meat Loaf), and the session ended pretty positively with two really strong tracks in the can for use on the hopefully forthcoming release. Easily the Killaz' most successful studio session, in my opinion.

Amped Autumn

As autumn swung round, we continued to work on new material and book more gigs as the Six Inch Killaz / Cheetahs / Kitsch Bitch axis grew in momentum and reputation. However while it seemed that things were rosy from a "career" perspective, the tensions in the band were quietly tearing us apart. Holly, almost unable to look Jasmine in the eye any more, had already (I think) moved out of Essex Road to go and live with our long time friend Pearl (aka Dolly). Jasmine herself was becoming more and more unstable in the grips of heroin and was just unpleasant to be around, with unpredictable mood swings, missing rehearsals, flakiness which when she'd turn up late for gigs and fluff songs that she was meant to carry, and the incessant chasing of money which made us fear even for the safety of our own gear.

Something would break, and soon, but there was still time for a last hurrah as Six Inch Killaz entered the final amphetamine-boosted straight of our wayward race. As I'd said, somewhat presciently, in the interview with D>Tour magazine a year previously, we wanted to be "loud, idolised and dethroned".

And so it was coming to pass...

Mona says:

I don't know how you remember this stuff, maybe if I was hypnotised I could add some more. You seem to remember me being grumpy a lot... I wasn't totally despondent and grumpy, but when we started rehearsing properly again problems came to the surface more.

Miss K says:

I have to dig really deep to pull some of it out. It comes back in flashes which then start to join up and I try and write things down when I have these moments (although clearly the flashes sometimes join up in the wrong order as Luis pointed out above). LIke I said before it's becoming an increasing struggle as we near the end. It's Luis' almost crystal clear recall that amazes me the most.

I do remember you being generally unhappy towards the end. You often mentioned afterwards that you felt it should have ended sooner but that Kitsch Bitch kept us going. To be honest you took most of the responsibility of holding the disintegrating mess together so I'm not surprised you were down. But there were some good times in that last year.

NEXT TIME:

Not just the beginning of the end, but the end of the end, as the Six Inch Killaz story draws to a close...

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One of those lives

It all started quietly, a long time ago. Back then, I was what I called an editorial "odd job man". You know, the sort of bread and butter guy who could just as easily write a 200-word piece about Thai food in the style of Britney Spears as sub a 35,000-word telephone system manual. I was working in the editorial department of a magazine publisher in West London who specialized in bringing out those glossy loyalty mags that you get sent if you'd bought a certain brand of car, or mobile phone. Essentially a marketing job - it paid well for the publishing industry, was unchallenging and kept me off the streets.

Well, one day, Greg, the guy in charge of their biggest-circulation publication, a supermarket in-house magazine - the kind you can pick up free at the till with your loyalty card - got me into a meeting room and asked me whether I could write a problem page for the magazine. Well, asked me isn't quite the right word. His exact words were: "mate, we're in the shit cos Lucy broke her leg last night and the client's wanting to see the copy for the new problem column tomorrow morning. You don't mind staying late and working on it do you. Cheers mate, if you need me I'll be on my mobile." Then he was off to watch the England game in the boozer. Bastard.

They'd invented the character already - a rather saucy looking young cartoon woman called "Trudi Tell". The feature bore the deathless title, (wait for it) "Tell Trudi..." Greg and the others had put together some rather limp questions along the lines of:

Dear Trudi, my boyfriend has been seeing a Greek girl he met on holiday. Should I leave him? Signed Harriet from Harrow"

That kind of thing. My mission, should I choose to accept it, was to come up with Trudi's answers. Actually, I had no choice, so I sat down with a notebook and set to work.

I had a good look at Trudi's cartoon, which had been done by a famous illustrator better known for having invented a comic book heroine who specialized in driving round the Aussie outback in a huge armoured vehicle and blowing the shit out of anything that moved. Let's just say that Trudi looked... feisty. She had short dark hair with pink highlights in it, a tight, stripey top and flared jeans. She had a pen clamped in her mouth like a cigar, glasses perched on top of her head, and a somewhat sarcastic (OK, very sarcastic) expression on her face. As I looked at the illustration, Trudi began to speak her mind in my head...

"Dear Harriet. Greek food is all very well when you're abroad, coming as it does with lashings of Retsina and limitless Aegean sunshine, but someone caught eating large quantities of tsatsiki once they've come home should always be treated with suspicion. If he won't leave the houmous on the side of the plate, then you should switch to another less greasy type of food. Think of your complexion! Out, damn spot!"

This was easy.

"Dear Trudi. My boyfriend spends more time with his mates on his PlayStation than with me. I'm at my wits' end. What should I do? Anna from Manchester."

"Anna. Are you sure his Station's all they're Playing with? Next time, peek into the den and see if his mates are clustered around his joystick all having a good pull. Remember, the sort of men who love to come together of an evening may make wonderful friends for a girl, but they aren't likely to push all the buttons on your joypad. Beware!"

Actually, Greg loved it, though he thought it far too racy to present the client. In the event, however, we had no choice, and the client found Trudi funny too. With a bit of toning down, my Trudi column became a hit in what was a successful store magazine.

---

That was four years ago, the time of Euro 96. Since then, the magazine has closed and I've moved on from job to job, writing all manner of everything from offers copy for DIY superstores, to websites for pet food manufacturers, to a rather good column (I even got commended by the Press Association in their annual gongs) for one of the lower circulation Sunday broadsheets (OK, The Independent on Sunday). Then a year ago, Greg, who'd moved onto a rather cushy job editing one of the glossy lads mags, gave me a call and asked me whether I wanted to resurrect Trudi for him. He'd bought the rights for the character for a nominal fee from our previous employer because he thought she would work really well as a very bitchy advice guru.

After allowing him to buy me lunch (it's a tough job being a struggling whore, I mean hack), I graciously agreed, so long as he took me onto the staff part time as "writer at large". Christ, those lad mag boys knew how to party. I spent the next few weeks almost permanently drunk. I remember a particularly enjoyable day in a photographer's studio shooting the model who was playing Trudi for the new column (clearance fees meant we couldn't use the cartoon any more). She was a rather attractive young Estonian glamour model called "Moose" or something. She had obvious talents and the proverbial "big things in front of her". I remember I spent the whole afternoon trying to convince "Moose" (or something) that as I was her "mind", so to speak, that we should perhaps come to a more intimate spiritual understanding between ourselves as mature adults. "Moose", who was the spit of the cartoon Trudi, right down to the rather sardonic twinkle in her lovely green eyes, smiled coyly up at me, then went back to pouting for the camera, shaking the pink highlights in her head and adjusting the doctor's white coat that did little to cover her nudity beneath, nor the aforementioned "big things". I never did get to continue our philosophical discussion.

So Trudi Mark II debuted in living colour in the July 1999 issue and I quickly began to look forward to writing this piece every month. The questions were real this time, emailed to Trudi's "personal" email address, which I collected on my Mac at home. Given the looser morals of this publication, I was able to be far lewder and baser this time round, and the column began to get a loyal readership because it was genuinely funny. Well, it made me and the editorial boys laugh tears and snort beer through our noses sometimes anyway.

Interesting thing was that Trudi almost became a real person within my head. I guess that it was natural given the amount of time that she'd inhabited my mind, but I truly felt that she sometimes took over when writing the column, sometimes coming over quite tender towards some unfortunate fella's predicament. No, I'm not like that, thank you. But strange. It was.

Then there were the fans. Attracted, no doubt by the admittedly ravishing picture of "Moose" (or something) that appeared at the head of the column, many unfortunates ended up mailing me frank declarations of their undying respect and admiration. Others told me that they'd go down on me any time, any place. Which was nice. I guess it was to be expected. Trudi was a classic "virgin-whore" with a dash of "evil-vampire-bitch" thrown in. Fuck, I was excited by the idea of her, and I bloody well invented her.

---

So there I was, in my basement flat in Kentish Town, 'working' on the November issue. I was sat on the wooden floor with my Powerbook, logged into the net and browsing some car sites. My cat Mitch was asleep by the radiator and I had just opened a rather nice bottle of Shiraz. All in all, things were looking good.

My Outlook pinged and I switched to it to check my mail. One was an email from Greg reminding me about a party tomorrow evening. The second was one to Trudi from someone who called himself "Crowe". I'd had a couple of these before - he was a classic "Trudi botherer". It amazed me that these men thought that they'd have any chance with the girl, even if she had been real.

I was about to hit "delete" but my eyes wandered down and I read it anyway.

    From: "Crowe" (crowe722@hotmail.com)
    To: "Trudi Tell" (trudi@upfrontmag.co.uk)
    Subject: i know...
    dear trudi... i know you want me... i know you need my loving 
    .... i know you will reply to my mail because i know where 
    you live...
    xx crowe xx

OK. That was creepy.

For a moment I thought that "Crowe" might have located "Moose" (the mind boggles). Maybe I should try and warn her or something. To be honest though, I had long since stopped taking these crank mails seriously. I deleted Crowe's mail and went on with my work.

The next day, I got three more mails from the persistent "Crowe". Each purported to know where Trudi lived and that he was somehow tracking her.

At the October launch party that night in the Alphabet Bar on Beak Street, I told Greg about it, but he told me that "Moose" (or something) had moved to New York. I did point out to him that this "Crowe" could be in New York as well cos we had no way of telling. But by then we were several pints of Stella down and our conversation soon deteriorated into incoherent and somewhat vague mumblings about Spurs, George Graham and the failings of the 4-4-2 system.

---

Sometime in the small hours, I awoke with a dry, hideous tasting mouth. My landline was ringing. I dragged myself out of bed and fell on the floor, startling Mitch who yowled and sloped sulkily out of the bedroom. Fighting the desire to puke, I gulped down the water in a jug next to my bed then reached over to answer the phone.

"Hello," I mumbled.

There was no reply except for an even breathing and a distant, hollow ticking noise.

"Hello, who is this? Hello?"

With a click, the caller hung up.

When I woke up again much later, I tried 1471 but the number had been withheld.

---

    From: "Crowe" (crowe722@hotmail.com)
    To: "Trudi Tell" (trudi@upfrontmag.co.uk)
    Subject: i know...
    dear trudi... i know where you live... i know you will become... 
    mine... cu... soon...
    xx crowe xx

I pressed delete. I knew that there couldn't possibly be any connection between the phone call that morning and these emails, but I couldn't deny that they had started to get to me. I tried to get back to work but couldn't concentrate, so I put my coat on and left the house, picking up a birthday card I needed to post to my mum on the way out.

My hangover had gone but as I walked up Torriano Avenue, I felt tired and dry in the mouth. I walked down Leighton Road then cut up a few side streets till I came out at the high street. It was already dusk and only 5pm. The nights were drawing in fast now. I went to the Costcutter, blinking in the harsh fluorescent light and bought twenty Silk Cut and a big bottle of Volvic. Something about this morning was bothering me, but I couldn't place what it was.

I stepped out onto the street and walked back up to Leighton, taking the back way up to Lady Margaret Street. I put the cigarette out and reached into my pocket for my keys and cursed. I'd forgotten to post the card. I shrugged and went back in. It was almost pitch black outside now and it had got a lot colder suddenly.

I went inside, rubbing my hands together and turned the light on. "Mitch?" I called. I needed to feed him. I looked around but he wasn't to be found. Must be outside. I went to the kitchen and turned the heating on, shivering.

I went back to the living room and woke the Mac from sleep mode. I was about to carry on writing but a horrible compulsion seized me. I opened up remote access and connected to the net. While the modem was squealing about its business, I lit another cigarette and tried to recall the reason for my sense of unease about this morning. But nothing came.

With a sense of dread I clicked the "send and receive" button on Outlook. Three mails appeared in my Inbox. The third was from "Crowe".

    From: "Crowe" (crowe722@hotmail.com)
    To: "Trudi Tell" (trudi@upfrontmag.co.uk)
    Subject: i know...
    i know you got my message this morning...
    xx crowe xx

Suddenly, my mobile bleeped. I jumped, and went to pick it up. Someone had just texted me. I read the message.

    CHEK YR EMAIL. xxCxx

I went back to the Mac and checked the mail again. Another mail arrived.

    From: "Crowe" (crowe722@hotmail.com)
    To: "Trudi Tell" (trudi@upfrontmag.co.uk)
    Subject: look...
    behind you.
    xx crowe xx

A voice said "HELLO TRUDI" behind me. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, or even if it was human, because it was distorted and electronic, like it was coming through a vocoder. Strangely, I thought of the Cybermen from Doctor Who.

I slowly turned my head. Behind me was a figure, entirely dressed in black, with a black balaclava on its head. Through the eyeholes I could see glittering mad eyes and I suddenly remembered why I'd felt so uneasy this morning. I had awoken from a dream of being held down to see this face above me, a needle in the right hand, stabbing down.

Then I saw a strange gun in the figure's hand. The figure pulled the trigger and two wires shot out from the end and hit me on my chest. A feeling quite unlike anything I'd ever felt before filled me and I went rigid, totally unable to move.

Then I collapsed twitching from the electric shock. "Crowe" bounded forward like a monkey and pulled my trousers down, injecting me in my bottom. "Ak-" I said.

As I began to pass out, I remembered two things. I'd forgotten to post my mum's birthday card, and I hadn't fed Mitch his dinner.

---

I woke up after a dreamless sleep.

I wasn't feeling dizzy, not even a little nauseous. I felt absolutely fine. But I was so weak I couldn't move a muscle.

I was lying in a simple, white room. No windows and only one door to my right. The room was just big enough for the length of the single bed I was lying in and just wide enough to fit two more in, one on either side. To my left was a white ceramic washbasin with a hook for a towel and a small, round mirror above. I was covered in a light white cotton cover.

The room was lit by a couple of dim lights that gave the room a calm tranquil feel. That's it. I'm telling you this because I would be spending the next year in this room and I felt it only fair to give a full description of it.

I lay on the bed and speculated dully about what might have happened to me. After a while I nodded off.

---

I next awoke to see those eyes looking down at me. It's hard to describe those eyes in that balaclava hood. Glittering, almost tearful. Full of unfathomable emotion. Utterly alien.

I felt a stab in my arm and glanced down to see the hypodermic in the figure's hand and a clear liquid draining into my vein.

I nodded off again.

---

I began to welcome the figure's visits. The long intervals were so barren that I would exhaust myself waiting for him to come back. He came with food, which he would tenderly feed me, or more of the injections. Sometimes I'd wake and see him looking into me, and the strange vocoder voice trilling, "MY TRUDI" as he stroked my face with his leather gloved hand.

"Crowe" was kind to me and after a while I looked forward to the visits. The food. The injections. They became my life. My existence had simplified down to a straight line in this small, white room. A line that led only to my inevitable becoming.

Trudi...

---

"LOVELY TRUDI."

I woke again to see those ravaged eyes staring down at my face and I realized that I must be lovely to this "Crowe" creature who had come into my house and hunted me down. Enslaved me. I found myself smiling up at him and I realized I could move. I reached up with my hand and noticed with a start how my arm had lost all the muscle that I remembered. Wasted away. I touched the balaclava and stroked it, smiling up at "Crowe".

It was impossible to tell how long "Crowe" had had me trapped in here, but as I tried to sit up, I could see that time had done its job. I was raggedy thin and as weak as a baby. I could barely move now and "Crowe" had to help me up. I gasped as he pulled the catheter from my limp penis, then I collapsed back on the bed. "Crowe" raised me up and I pointed weakly to the washbasin. The mirror.

Gently, he carried me over to the basin and let me wash myself and I looked at myself. "Crowe's" face appeared next to mine, stroking my hair, which had grown down my back. My hollow face, which was undeniably feminine, gaunt, drawn, but pretty. The little taut buds of my nascent breasts. My strange, hairless body and shriveled hairless genitals. "MY TRUDI". He said sadly.

I nodded.

---

As I fed myself up in the white room, "Crowe" let me have pretty clothes, and magazines and books to read. As my body filled out into new, womanly curves, I avidly read the fashion features and fantasized about wearing the gorgeous clothes that the models wore in their heady world of beautiful people, pop stars, movie starlets.

I began to mould myself into the shape of Trudi, and I began to realize that ever since that first day, the spirit of Trudi had taken me over and began pushing me towards these last moments. I began to feel a love for "Crowe" that I found hard to explain even to myself, seeing him as my liberator, my enabler, my catalyst. My soulmate. Oh my God.

Like a phoenix from the ashes, Trudi had emerged.

I was really proud of my breasts. I would sit and admire them for hours. They were all my own work, and that's why I felt good. They were not large - a size B cup at best, but they were perfect. I loved so many of the new feelings. Slipping on a lacy bra and feeling the tight support of the cups. Pulling a pair of opaque tights onto my shapely smooth legs and softly rubbing them together. That wonderful warm, moist caress of lipstick on my mouth. Feeling the draft up my short skirt and the curve of my arch on my high heels. Ohh.. So many lovely, sensuous feelings. No wonder I felt so hot all the time since I'd become Trudi.

I finished dressing and looked at myself in my new full-length mirror. I was Trudi. The hair wasn't right. Not quite, but otherwise, I'd made myself into the template. Not like "Moose" but like the cartoon that we'd started with, Greg and I. I had become a pouting cartoon temptress who would make men livid with anxiety and desire.

I heard the door open behind me I turned to watch as "Crowe" stepped in. "AHHHH" he sighed happily as he looked at me.

"I'm ready." I said as I stepped up to him. I was the same height as him in my heels. I felt beautiful. Confident. Never more ready.

"MY TRUDI." He said in his strange voice.

I nodded again. "I'm ready".

He nodded and bent down as I pulled off the balaclava. Greg was smiling under it as he pulled the voice changing device from his mouth.

"Trudi." He whispered.

I closed my eyes for a moment. I knew. I had known. I felt strange. Like my world was expanding suddenly. Becoming thin and airless. I should have been angry. But I couldn't be. I suddenly realised I loved him.

I opened my eyes. "You really did it, didn't you," I said to him, wrapping my slim arms around his taut waist. Greg put his strong, cool hands on my bottom and started stroking. "You were determined that Trudi was in here," I breathed, slitting my eyes in happiness, "weren't you?"

"So were you", he whispered. "You just had to be shown how." His hand had gone down below the short hem of my skirt and was fondling the inside of my thighs, a slow hand, you know where. I could hardly bear it and squirmed, giggling and biting my lower lip with the intensity of the sensation. Then suddenly we found ourselves looking straight into each other's eyes.

His eyes weren't mad at all. Just loving. Loving me. He brushed his lips on mine, then, BANG, we came together. The kiss was like a pin dropping into a vast, deep dark well. It lasted longer than my life in this white room.

I was Greg's girl now. I had been right from that night in 1996 when he'd planted the glamour on me and gone to watch the football. Just like a man.

---

Later that week, I saw the light for the first time in a year. It was now September 2001. I walked out of Greg's house in Little Venice and went up to a little salon on Warwick Avenue where he'd booked an appointment for me.

I wondered about Greg's life during this year. How he'd felt all this time, just going into work, knowing his butterfly was maturing in his cellar. He must have had to handle things when I'd "disappeared" too. So much left undone. My job. My flat. My mum and dad. Yet all seemingly meaningless now. I was imprinted on Greg. He had become my life.

He'd rescued Mitch though. I kissed him especially hard when he reintroduced me to my beloved kitty.

I entered the perfumed warmth of the salon. As the pretty blonde receptionist greeted me and made me a cup of tea, I realized this world of beauty and pampering was mine as well now. I felt warm and happy as I leafed through Vogue, legs crossed like a proper lady. There I had the final parts of Trudi completed. The hair cut into a short, spiky assymetric bob, the pink highlights put in and my nails manicured into perfect half inch rounded rectangles with the polish to match my new highlights.

A spray of Eau D'Issey and then I got a cab to Knightsbridge and maxed my new credit card on beautiful, beautiful clothes before enjoying a light lunch on the Fifth Floor of Harvey Nicks. I was going to make Greg into the happiest man in the world as his new trophy bird for him to show off on his arm at the most gorgeous openings, the coolest bars and the most exclusive restaurants.

For a while, they wouldn't be able to get us off the celebrity pages and of course I would be the new girl on all the covers. Elle or Vogue would probably adopt me as the new "It" girl for a while and we would be London's hottest couple. Him, Greg Black, the former editor of UpFront, now CEO of The hot new Black Mags empire. Me, Trudi Tell, mysterious and gorgeous leggy beauty with the trademark pink strands in my hair. I would top the polls for most beautiful woman in Britain in both the men's and women's mags and would soon be modeling for Gucci in Milan and attend parties where I'd outdrink, outsnort and outbitch Kate, Amber, Naomi and all the others. Then there would be the stop-start music career followed by a critically acclaimed appearance in a low budget independent movie written by Charlie Kaufman. Then we'd go quiet after a while before I emerged again with a book (I'm still a great writer!) and a film project for Greg's new production company on the go. Marlon Brando would come out of retirement and ask to make a movie with me. I'd write and direct and it would be an unexpected critical success but we'd be snubbed at the Oscars. Puff Daddy would try and get off with me at a party in Monaco. But he'd fail.

---

When I arrived home, Greg was waiting for me as I glid in on my new black Gucci heels, on bare legs that stre-e-e-tched miles up to an outrageously short ripped denim Chloe skirt that barely covered my bottom and an asymmetric pink slashed top from Versace Jeans Couture.

My hair and face were probably better than he'd ever seen them and I could tell from the big shit-eating grin on his face that he was ever so pleased with himself.

He picked up a champagne flute from the table and filled it with Cristal, walking over and handing it to me as he slipped a firm hand round my waist. We kissed, sucking passionately on each other's entwined tongues before pulling apart.

"It's going to be one of those nights, isn't it, my darling Trudi," he said.

I sipped my champagne, enjoying myself as it cut a cold line down to the pit of my stomach. I thought back over the events that had brought me to this day, this moment, here and now.

I smiled, placing one hand down there and squeezing, gently. "Darling, it's going to be one of those lives."

This short story was originally written in 2001. I was obviously reading a lot of Fictionmania and Michael Marshall Smith back then...

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The new lipstick lesbians

I came across this interesting Italian ad for Campari. It's alluring and full of intrigue but is problematic in a few ways...

The genderqueer view for example would point to to the heteronormative reveal: "oh, phew, it's OK, they're a straight girl and boy, really, so don't worry - they're not going to destroy your way of life by being weird or anything!"

It also seems to me that it plays upon the stereotype of trans-identified people as carnally obsessed polysexual animals who are just out for the next interesting shag (actually that doesn't sound so bad...)

But for me the biggest problem is that they so totally copped out on the transguy. I mean for fuck's sake, she's obviously a girl!

How much more radical might it have been if they'd used a really sexy butch transguy with a beard and a bulge? I think the culture-in-general feels unready, sadly for that. But why is that?

It seems that while the culture has become accustomed to seeing male to female transgendered people as attractive and glamorous and the acceptable face of gendershock, they're not quite ready to grasp the other side. A bit like how "society at large" was eager to accept lesbianism before male homosexuality (as long as the dykes were pretty and well groomed).

Hmm. Are we the new lipstick lesbians?

There are degrees of acceptability these days and if they'd turned out to be a lesbian couple indulging in some fun pursuit / roleplay, then they probably would have gone further (and yes, the ad probably would have had the same effect - except I wouldn't have written about it).

Still, the ad isn't particularly judgmental, which I guess is a sort of semi positive, I just feel it could go further, which is why it stops short of being transformative and is merely well made and interesting.

But I think maybe the creative team who had the concept got stuck between radicalisation (Hey, let's have them be trannies) and safety (the client will dilute most risky stuff in these cases) and we ended up with a handsome but half baked execution.

I guess this ad, troublesome though it is, is still a quantum leap forward from the up till now usual portrayal of transgender people in advertising, where the predominant emotional outcome is disappoinment and revulsion. "Fuck. She's a HE!" Famous examples of the genre include the Levi's ad, "Taxi" featuring the beautiful New York designer and model Zaldy Goco and the Sauza Tequila ad with out(ed) model Caroline Cossey.

We still have some way to go...

And with advertising being the most insidious and reactionary of all the media industries, it's an ideal bellweather for how the culture-at-large perceives us.

Speed Angels Go!

I actually became personally involved in a potentially messy brush between advertising and transgender a few years ago.

I was initially approached back in 2001 by a film production company called DarkFibre. They were working with the backing of the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) to develop a television series called Speed Angels.

It seemed that BBH were looking at new revenue streams and felt for some reason that producing a standalone property which stood independently of their marketing activities might be lucrative. Mark and Ishbel from DarkFibre, who made commercials and pop promos and were also developing a science fiction feature, had been commissioned to develop and realise the idea.

And the idea was quite fascinating - an edgy sci-fi comedy adventure series featuring five piratical transgendered heroines swashbuckling their way through space in a stolen spaceship, fighting an ongoing guerilla war against an oppressive religious fundamentalist galactic empire. Yeah, exactly what I thought - Blake's Seven with t-girls. :)

The incentive for BBH was that there would be revenues from product placement, merchandising and related activity as Speed Angels would also be a dance rock band and would be recording music to release simultaneously with the TV show.

So, they were in initial casting for it and wanted to see me about possibly auditioning for one of the lead roles.

Now, I'm not sure they were expecting anyone quite so shabby or male-looking as me when I turned up. I was in the last week of my work at the marketing agency I was working for and I was very dishevelled and tired when I fetched up late to see Marc and Ishbel at BBH in Soho, straight from our office in Fulham - so I hadn't had time to do anything with my appearance.

But we really hit it off and had a long and interesting meeting where they pitched me the idea and we talked through what I might be able to offer them. I was particularly interested in playing a mutant/cybernetic character who sounded like a cross between the Borg and Dita von Teese.

it would have been interesting to see how far I would have been willing to go in altering my appearance to play such a character, as I got the impression that Marc in particular was interested in performers who were further transitioned than I was.

I also talked them through my music and design skills so I walked out of the first meeting with the commisison to do some conceptual art to go with the show's first treatment and some talk about developing the Six inch Killaz song Seventeen for use in the show.

We met quite regularly after that. Marc and Ishbel are creatively very open, and let me suggest character ideas as well - I developed an outline for a villainess who leads the pursuit of the girls for the Empire, and who, during the series, is gradually revealed to be a sixth Speed Angel, who sold them out and defected to the other side.

During these meetings we also agreed that I would stay and help them "behind the camera" - due both to my (surgically unaltered) appearance and lack of performance experience. They started properly casting while I began work on the concept artwork, focusing on creating visualisations of the five main characters and their battered spaceship.

Too good to be true

OK, at this stage, anyone with any experience of television or the advertising industry would tell you that Speed Angels was never NEVER EVER going to work out. This bird would not fly!

But at the time, after a successful initial presentation to investors, in which my concept art played a part, Marc and Ishbel, working on nervous energy, went pell mell into pre production and started flying around the world, casting for the most beautiful transsexuals they could find. I'd get messages from the increasingly frayed duo from Thailand, Milan, California, New York as they assembled their band of sisters.

Soon Speed Angels was cast, though immediately thay had to get rid of the blonde Californian girl, Seren, who had proved too much of a handful and recast that one, and the five girls were flying over to London for a photocall and costume fittings.

The project was taking its toll on Marc in particular; marshalling a bunch of transsexual performers, prostitutes, kickboxers and models and trying to make sure they're all in the same place at the same time and doing what you want them to do must have been a nightmare, and Marc was suffering from kidney stones (I've had them and believe me, it's fucking AGONY). He'd frequently have to check himself into the Whittington Hospital in Archway and get doesd up with Morphine before carrying on.

So the girls were all over here and it all looked unbelievably like it was about to be greenlit for the making of the pilot.

And that was where it ended. I wasn't closely involved by this stage, but I think what happened is that senior people at BBH took one look at what DarkFibre were doing and recoiled in horror, pulling the plug. It was really too good to be true.

ishbel and Marc persisted with the concept, hoping to launch Speed Angels as a pop act only and they looked bloody amazing and sounded pretty good, but eventually even that fizzled out. I do know that one of the girls has now got a pretty successful solo singing career back in New York and she is really talented.

I don't know what happened to the others, exept for Miriam, whose banned Sky TV reality show Ishbel and Marc exec produced. I had strongly mixed feelings about this programme's premise, whose format involved duping a bunch of men into trying to seduce Miriam, only to reveal that she was actually a pre-op.

For me it appears to take the genuinely transgressive potential of an idea like Speed Angels and turns it back into something as familiar and ugly as a reality show that relied on the revulsion reveal for its impact. But having never seen it I can't comment further.

And it's totally not ironic that it was this format they were able to get into production and not the other.

Ishbel and Mark went on to produce the amazing David Lachapelle film Rize, about the underground dance craze in South Central LA called "clowning".

The message

I think the point I'm trying to make is that if you want to produce anything edgy, trangressive and ground breaking you can absolutely forget about doing it in the marble halls of the ad agencies. This is why all the ads I've cited fail and why they disservice our community - because we are by nature a radicalised community of people simply by dint of what we do and how we are.

And the suits don't want any part of that as it destabilises their hegemony.

Ad agencies exist to uphold the staus quo. For years now they've been looking over their shoulders, nervous at the free and open media revolution of the Internet. And you know what? We'll end them one day. Yes we will. Or change them into something smaller and better and more beautiful.

I felt for Ishbel and Marc as they were really trying to do something cool and different and positive for the image of transgendered people and it almost killed them. But I don't feel as sorry for them as I do for all the poor as shit transgendered people in the cities they went for their castings, whom the status quo kills, day by day, as surely as if the CEO pulled the trigger with his manicured hand.

Notes:

I originally wrote this over 11-13 August 2006 on draGnet 4.0. At that time I'd lost touch with Ishbel and Marc, but since then we've become happily reconnected.

They've done some extraordinary work of late, including Living Goddess, a beautiful and harrowing documentary feature about the troubles in Nepal, seen through the eyes of three child goddesses who are adored with simple devotion by their followers but are powerless to stop the rise of a militaristic new Nepal. Also, a brilliant and horrific series of anti-torture shorts for Amnesty International, including Waiting for the Guards.

One day I hope they'll keep their loose agreement to make a promo for my band. They're among my favourite people, creative, passionate, visionary and uncompromising. You can see more at the Darkfibre webite.

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I'm a Musician, writer, photographer, designer, transgendered z-list celebrity. Insomniac's boyfriend. Tragic glamour and sleepless nights are my fellow travellers. Skinny jeans and pointy shoes are my mode-us operandi. I like cats. Especially the ones who talk. Oh, and David Lynch.

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