A seaside rendezvous
Next up, Deathline headline at The Railway Hotel, a lovely old vintage music venue and pub in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.
We'll be there all afternoon so why not come down early and join us for some cockles, whelks and eels on the seafront before retiring to the venue for some booze and fine music in the evening?
Deathline + The Violet Mind + more
Wednesday 3rd March, 2010.
Doors 8pm.
FREE ENTRY
The Railway Hotel,
Clifftown Road
Southend-on-Sea,
Essex, SS1 1AJ (map)
Right opposite Southend Central Rail
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Deathline
"Very cool punky and electric-dark rock duo - The Black Stripes!" - Rocklands
If you can't make it to Essex...
Our next gig in London is on March 23rd, at The Good Ship in Kilburn. See you there.
Connect with Deathline
Deathline are seeking bookings from late April 2010. We'll be rolling out more new material in preparation for recording the second album. If you want to book the band, contact us on this email address, or via any of the channels below.
» MySpace: myspace.com/thedeathline
» Facebook: facebook.deathline.co.uk
» Last.fm: last.fm/music/deathline
» Soundcloud: http://www.soundcloud.com/deathline
» Twitter: twitter.com/Deathline
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Stress Out and Die
Suggested by my bandmate Jennie at the gig on 24th Feb as an alternative to the popular wartime slogan poster...
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Deathline headline @ Zenith Bar, Wed 24 February
Oi oi, Deathline are headlining this one, and it's FREE entry so come down and make and take some noise!
There will be a brand new song unveiled, continuing the procession of new ones that have emerged over the last few gigs, and there will also be the resurrection of a very old song indeed. C'mon!
Details from the promoter:
Pretty Girls Make Graves Presents...
Deathline + Rubella + Cruella Ribbons + The Sarah Michelles + Paisley & Charlie
Wednesday 24th February, 2010.
Doors 8pm.
FREE ENTRY
Zenith Bar,
125 Packington Street
London
N1 7EA (map)
Tube: Angel
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Deathline
"Seriously unworldly electronica new wave, this is glamour at its darkest."
Rubella
Lyrically astute and musically provocative. Imminent big things are sure to happen for these girls.
Cruella Ribbons
Having played guitar in Theoretical Girl’s backing band “The Equations” for near on 2 years. Ribbons decided to give a go on her own.
The Sarah Michelles
Powerful Indie pop at its finest
Paisley & Charlie
Paisley and Charlie apply their enviable pop chemistry and redirect their sights and sounds to something more readily late 60’s west coast based
Photos from 93 Feet East
Photos from our last gig at 93 Feet East in January, by Emma from With the Band Photography.
Connect with Deathline
Deathline are seeking bookings from late April 2010. We'll be rolling out more new material in preparation for recording the second album. If you want to book the band, contact us on this email address, or via any of the channels below.
» MySpace: myspace.com/thedeathline
» Facebook: facebook.deathline.co.uk
» Last.fm: last.fm/music/deathline
» Soundcloud: http://www.soundcloud.com/deathline
» Twitter: twitter.com/Deathline
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Hiro(re)mix
I bought this new t-shirt from Top Shop yesterday and was trying it on with various outfits before going out, and decided to get the camera out. With my new determination to up the ante with my self portraits, I spent a moment planning the photos, clearing the space around two big pieces of art on the wall and rearranging the lighting.
I wanted to get big, colourful, harshly flash-lit compositions with casual, almost accidental framing and it worked out pretty well.
As I looked at the results, I realised that the images reminded me a lot of the work of the Japanese photographer Hiromix.
I came across her work quite accidentally about 10 years ago - I was walking round SoHo in New York and wandered into this art bookstore. Somewhere in the jumble of photography titles upstairs was a newly published collection of her work called simply Hiromix. I was instantly gripped by her canny mix of self-portraits (she's very pretty in that dissociated, alien-lookig way that I find so attractive and try and ape in my self portraits), urban nightscapes, cluttered interiors and throwaway portraits of friends and others.
There's something loose about her work which makes it extremely engaging. She has a magpie eye and a knack for colour and use of mixed light; her uncanny ability to frame herself in interesting ways is addictive. I bought that book in New York that day, and was pretty obsessed with it for a while, but it had been lying unopened on my shelf for a while until I had the sudden realisation yesterday as I was picking shots to upload.
Not only was my mix of self portraits and land and cityscapes pretty Hiromix-like (or perhaps Hiromix-lite), but that she's almost like a prototype for a certain type of (mainly) female vernacular self-photographer that you see all over the Internet these days.
I definitely fall into that category I think.
When Hiromix emerged in the 90's by winning the prestigious Canon New Cosmos prize (co-judged that year by another of my photographic heroes, Nobuyoshi Araki), she not only established herself, but started a massive craze for photography among Japanese urbanite girls who suddenly turned the national obsession for treasuring ephemeral snaps into a self-obsession and an artform. The trend was made particularly forceful by the emergence of digital photography, where Japan was, in the mid-90s several years ahead of the rest of the world.
Now, decades later, flickr seems to be the spiritual home for that type of photographer. The trend's gone global and Hiromix's pretenders have inherited it. I wrote a while ago about Nan Goldin being a prototype photo blogger. Now I realise that Hiromix is one branch further along the evolutionary tree, an embryo flickrista who was doing what we do ten years before anyone had flickr, or deviantart, Facebook or Picasa accounts.
So here's to you Toshikawa Hiromi, whatever you're doing now. These photos are a tribute to you. I'm one of you, without me, or you, ever realising it.
Reference:
- The whole hiro(re)mix set on flickr
- Hiromix (Wikipedia)
- Canon New Cosmos Award 1995
- Hiromix (Photoguide)
- Hiromix on MySpace
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Autoerotica
A few weeks ago, a colleague and friend messaged me on Facebook suggesting that I check out an article about the amateur photographer Yulia Gorodinski. She knew that I'd been feeling creatively exhausted of late and thought that it might:
"spark some inspiration for your self portraits..."
I was struck by several things when I read that piece, apart from the obvious fact that Yulia's self portraits are beautiful works, with that unsettling and paradoxical combination of unselfconsciousness / self-awareness that separate some from the morass of narcissism with which flickr and the blogosphere are awash.
The first was her attitude towards narcissism itself, which she acknowledges and then neatly simultaneously accepts and dismisses:
"I think people are drawn to self portraits because they are attracted to sincerity and genuineness that is in it... I agree that there is a bit of narcissism in self portraits, but people who think self portraits are solely about narcissism have a superficial view on it." Yulia Gorodinski: Retro Attack | IINSIGHT
I've often struggled with this aspect of my photographs of myself. But I found her statement on narcissism refreshing and if not conclusive, at least honest. And that's the second thing that struck me - a sense of honesty.
Now, I'm not going to claim that her photographs are documentary in intent or execution. Far from it. They're planned, staged, and exquisitely postprocessed tableaux. High artifice.
But nevertheless they strike me as extremely honest. Sincere depictions of how the artist sees herself and would like others to see her.
I found this passage in the interview particularly resonant as it matches exactly how I feel about my self portraiture:
"...I love acting and I love shooting. I have a complete control over the way I want a photograph to look like because I am the model and the photographer. I also want to have artistic pictures of myself, and because I can take a picture by myself I don't need to pay another photographer to do it for me. I often feel lonely; photography is my best friend, my medicine, and a game." (my emphasis for truth) Yulia Gorodinski: Retro Attack | IINSIGHT
The third thing I noticed was the styling and the lovely vintage feel of the images, and the fourth thing was how hot the photos are.
OK, that may not be the exact order in which I noticed things...
Sightings of the new decade
So, thanks to my friend's recomendation, I found myself inspired to set about taking the self portraits you see on this page. They're a sort of homage to Yulia's work if you like, if only in the sense that my self portraits have for the last year or so been converging on the sort of aesthetic I see in her work, and seeing her photos pushed me to explore that aesthetic more fully.
I took much greater care than I normally do in setting up the environment and lighting for these shots. I mean, it's the same space that has been seen time, time and time again, but I was never more meticulous in clearing away extraneous junk and arranging the detail of the space just so. Because getting detail wrong is what can turn a good photo into an ordinary one.
The lighting and framing were also interesting challenges. Like many self portrait photographers, I have the tendency to bluntly frame myself in the middle of a composition or to flatly light myself to try and capture all of me. Both these, I realise, have the effect of deadening the potential of the image.
On this shoot, I made more careful decisions. I was mixing several different light sources (one of which was daylight coming in from the two big windows of the room, which I wanted to use as a backlight or sidelight) and had the notion to illuminate the space rather than the subject so that I became an object in the space, rather than just the subject of the photo. Irregular and off centre compositions, especially using the rule of thirds, helped with this.
As the shoot progressed, the natural light dimmed slowly (it is winter after all) and became cooler, which started to change the tone of the images in an unanticipated way when mixed with the suddenly yellower (and relatively brighter) electric lights.
This caused me to change my framing strategy and rethink the compositions I was working with. To avoid noise and keep sharpness, I had to be bigger in the frame and stiller. This led to an unexpectedly erotic series of images towards the cold end of the shoot:
The vintage feel of these images was sought in both styling (which I was more careful than normal about - I wanted to dress to find an ideal of a vintage erotica look that I dimly recall from my youth) and in post-production. I have a standard "cross processed style" set of curves that I've been applying to my images since some time last year. I was actually pointed towards the basis of the technique by Tinchika, a fellow flickr self portraitist and ran with it from there. It forms a good basis for the vintage look.
Landscapes of myself
Truth be told, I always feel lingering dissatisfaction with my self portraits when compared to my still life and landscape images.
I know that the latter types of image are far easier to shoot than photos of people, but what I also like about landscape photography in particular is the sense of atmosphere and emptiness that can be evoked. It's just an aesthetic I really relate to, especially, I guess, as I live slap bang in the middle of one of the biggest collections of people in the world.
The styles of composition and the sense of space kind of comes naturally for me when shooting "non-people"; the most satisfying thing about this set of self portraits was that I realised that with a bit of care, I could evoke that same sensation in images that featured me.
And that is a big breakthrough, really - one that I felt I needed to write about in order to find out what it meant to me.
And now I have, I just want to shoot more. But I'll take more time and care in the future. These are by no means brilliant photos. All I can see now are flaws in the compositions, lighting, my awkward posing. And I'd be a liar if I claimed to know anything profoundly technical about photography either.
But all those are things I can work on, which feels good. And that's what these photos make me do - feel good.
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Version 6
Hard to believe, but sometime this spring of 2010, it will be 15 years since Miss K first birthed, blinking and confused, onto the Internet. Back in 1995 I was a design junior, first jobbing at one of the UK's very earliest web design companies and, as a trial project during my probation period, did the first "Miss K" web page as an entry for some online beauty contest.
I wasn't called Miss K at the time, so that could only really be considered a prototype, a straw (wo)man as it were. It's long since gone, though I suspect I have it on an archive somewhere. I'm an obsessive digital hoarder and have pretty much everything I ever made on some backup drive.
My gender identity had of course been fluid way before it was given wider permission to roam in '95. I'd been "different" since childhood, in commmon with many in our community that spans the transgendered spectrum. My particular tale is familiar from a million similar stories of childish dressing, discovery, crushes, obsessions, shame, humiliation and adolescent purge cycles followed by some form of acceptance. I won't bore you of it in this piece, but some of the later, teenage experiences inform some of my fictional pieces, so reading those may give you an inkling.
But 1995, fifteen years ago was an important time for me as it really marked a proper widening of my horizons, a full outing as it were. Soon after the first web venture mentioned above, I joined Six Inch Killaz and gave myself the handle "Miss K". It then seemed logical to give that persona a permanent presence on the web, and I designed and built my very first proper webpage, which soon developed into Version 1 of the draGnet with pictures and everything! Version 2 soon followed, starring the short lived cartoon Miss K...
Mutations
Ever since then I've mutated, shifted and morphed alongside successive versions of my web persona. Version 3 of the draGnet, which is where I started picking up a big following online, roughly coincided with the 1999 breakup of the Killaz, as well as the onset of digital photography. I had a radical reboot of my personal image at the same time, ushering in the beginning of the "blonde years" and a much more pornographic style of self-presentation. Some who write to me via my various networks clearly feel that these were my best years, but time marches on and a change is as good as a rest.
So after a brief hiatus, 2004 saw the launch of the more serious, less blonde me, with draGnet v4.0, a scattershot yet very, very popular weblog which regularly got close to 10,000 page impressions a month (I do about a fifth of that now). It was part of the early wave of transgender blogs in the UK, which almost amounted to a movement, with Siobhan Curran's now defunct Tranniefesto and Becky Enverité's still just alive Becky's T-Blog very much leading the way. I always felt pressure to keep up and probably posted too much of too little consequence during the three and a bit years that that blog was alive. Nevertheless it was popular and even got noticed by the normals once or twice.
But eventually v4.0 gave into the fact of its own irrelevance and I shut it down, replacing it a year later in 2008 with the one you're now reading.
v 5.0
Version 5.0 has been, up until now, a sort of "greatest hits" compilation. Just somewhere I wanted to preserve what I consider to be the best of the writing that I've produced over the decades, as well as completing pieces that were left unfinished last time. The draGnet now spans two centuires (and in fact millennia!), three decades, and fifteen years. That not only makes me a very old transgender z-list sleb, but also, theoretically at least, a very wise one, as one of the few original pieces written for v5.0 pointed out. And the wise old tranny in me knows not to expend too much effort when you can repost stuff from the past.
But now, with the completion of the Six Inch Killaz story, I'm pretty much done with the necroposting and I need to look forward again. There are still plenty of things to be written about, and at least one thing that needs finishing. So it never ends.
You'll notice that I've redesigned the site. I guess this marks the end of the looking backward and the start of new writing. It will be irregular, but I hope it will be good. And yes, it will still be interspersed regularly with plugs for Deathline, my band. Plus ça change.
Version 6
By the way, this is still version 5. Version 6 will be something completely different. Oh yes...
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Shoot to Kill: Apocrypha
For the completists among you, here's a bunch of additional material, images and links that you may find of interest once you've completed the whole story. It includes a full transcript of the Flipside interview I mentioned in the final instalment, as well as Luis' statement on the band's breakup. Enjoy!
Contents
- Links
- Six Inch Killaz timeline (everything we remember in chorono(il)logicalorder)
- Shoot to Kill - the map (where it all happened)
- Cock family tree (with apologies to Pete Frame)
- The King Cheetah - Six Inch Killaz (video)
- Flipside interview transcript
- Clicky-Zoomy Wall of Flyers (because you're worth it)
- Luis has the last word...
Links
↑ back to topThis isn't a comprehensive list of links to Killaz stuff on the web. You can find that at the Six Inch Killaz official homepage. Rather it's a supplementary reading list that may be of interest if you're one of the masochists who've read and enjoyed the whole series so far.
- Six Inch Killaz: The beginning
Luis' detailed account of the birth of Six Inch Killaz which should fill in the gaps before I joined, and my own account starts. - Six Inch Killaz and The Pop Moment
A rather good short piece on the Killaz' genesis and meaning by Mona. Written originally when the band was still together, published in Mona's 'zine "Girly", and subsequently rescued by Luis. - Mona on Six Inch Killaz
Written after the breakup, this sober, short, retrospective contrasts with the manifesto-like piece above. - An interview with Holly Cock
Holly, who doesn't have much of a voice in my account, "Shoot to Kill', is represented here via a rather good interview on Luis' site which was conducted by Luis' partner Pauline sometime after the band's breakup. - Tell 'em the Killaz are here
via the Wayback Machine, a piece by Mona / Simon's partner Charlotte that I always liked. It told the story of what we were like, straight and honestly. - Kitsch Bitch - The Queen of Clubs
again via the Wayback Machine, a fantastic article by Rob "Cheetah" Mune about Kitsch Bitch, our home in the end times.
Six Inch Killaz timeline
↑ back to topPieced together with the help of Luis and Mona, here's a timeline of gigs and other significant events as we recall them. Click the event marker or text to read more. The band at the bottom allows you to scroll rapidly through years. Double-click to center the timeline where you clicked. Where available, there are links to photos, recordings, videos and flyers.
Due to a WebKit bug, you may need to reload this page to get the timeline to show in Safari and Google Chrome. Apologies!
Shoot to Kill - the map
↑ back to topCock family tree
↑ back to top
This was done as a bit of fun back in August 2005 on the draGnet v4, inspired by Pete Frame's Rock Family Trees. Since then, several inaccuracies have emerged, developed or been pointed out:
- Simon / Mona's partner Charlotte was quick to point out the incomepleteness of Simon's ongoing story:
Charlotte Cooper (Aug 2005):
...You might also want to mention the pretend band that Sime, me and Kay have, called The 123s, and also a short-lived band in about 1998 called The Lesbian and Gay Community, which was him, me, and Jason Barker (who was then Jewels Barker, and who went on to play in a band called Trunk in about 2001/2002 ish)...
- It now appears that Jasmine did not actually die...
- Sexton Ming was never a member. He was offered the drummer (not 2nd guitarist) role but turned it down after one meeting.
- I'm now in Deathline, which emerged from the Electric Shocks' split.
It's quite probable, dear reader, that by the time you read this, the whole thing will be proven completely false!
The King Cheetah - Six Inch Killaz
↑ back to topIf you read Shoot to Kill in full, you'll know that the band Cheetahs were among our best friends and most strident supporters. A few years after we broke up, Mona gave me a CD which contained some brilliant studio demos that the band, now relocated to Los Angeles and renamed The King Cheetah, had recorded.
One of the songs was called Six Inch Killaz and was about us. I was deeply touched, especially as it was a fiery and brilliant punk rock anthem that literally takes you in its hands and shakes you cold and hot. Later, slightly rearranged, it became the lead single off their debut album, The King Cheetah LP (buy it at iTunes. It's good). Here's the video for that single, featuring intercut footage of us in our prime.
Flipside transcript
↑ back to top
Miss K says:
The interview, ironically conducted just before we split up for good in 1999, is probably one of the most coherent and representative of our philosphy and mindset. I thought it was worth posting a transcript here. I now hand over to Graham, the interviewer...
Six Inch Killaz are four highly-politicized self-made women in revolt armed with a transgender rock'n'roll vision and a drum machine. There used to be five of them but then Jasmine suffered a nervous breakdown and quit the band - let's not go there. They're based in London but spiritually they're a New York band. They look and sound like they've absorbed every word of Please Kill Me and England's Dreaming directly into their blood streams and now they're ready to cut that smirk off your face, punk. Think of the Killaz as a sort of Bride of Frankenstein monster stitched together from grainy old Andy Warhol films, Max's Kansas City-era American punk, radical Situationist manifestos and a bilious attitude.
We met in their natural habitat, Kitsch Bitch, London's best punk club, prior to their gig there. It's the kind of club where half the women look like Deborah Harry and so do a lot of the men. Once a month the Kitsch Bitch crew take over the normally plush red velvet cabaret venue Madame JoJo's in Soho, West London and drag it down to their level for their Night of a Thousand Sluts club night. It was in the dressing room there that I interrogated the lipstick killers while Madame JoJo's own resident drag queen hostesses jostled us to use the make-up mirrors.
Six Inch Killaz are: Mona Compleine: Guitars & Vocals; Luis Hatred: Bass & Vocals; Holly: Lead Vocals; Miss K: Guitars & Vocals
Interview by Graham Russell. Photos (original article) by Johnny Volcano.
Graham: Let's start by talking about the whole drag angle. Dragging up is not just something you do onstage, it's something you really live and is part of your identity.
Mona Compleine: When we started the band that wasn't a big deal for us. We just wanted to be in a band, so we were in a band and that's about it, really. It just makes it more difficult for us to get gigs. We can't play upstairs in some pub in Camden so easily.
Luis Hatred: We don't want to do the whole pub toilet circuit anyway.
Mona: And we don't want to support some crap band and play The Dublin Castle. Those places are too hot, anyway. Our make up would melt.
Graham: Comparisons to Wayne/Jayne County & The Electric Chairs would seem inevitable.
Luis: We like them but we've got our own ideas and our own attitude and our own way of doing things. We're not exact copies of The New York Dolls either.
Mona: People keep comparing us to The New York Dolls and we're not anything like them musically at all.
Luis: We just are who we are.
Mona: But we do love Jayne County.
Graham: For a British band your influences are very American.
Luis: We love the whole Warhol thing and The New York Dolls and The Ramones, and Holly loves Blondie (Gestures towards Holly, who's wearing Debbie Harry t-shirt). And The Velvet Underground.
Mona: We're a New York band, really.
Luis: With a dash of Cleveland.
Graham: With what?
Luis: Cleveland.
Holly: Cleavage! Cleavage!
Graham: You're a very Max's Kansas City type of band.
Mona: Do you know the club Squeeze Box in New York? If we were in New York we'd play at Squeeze Box. There's nowhere else to play here besides Kitsch Bitch.
Graham: I know you all love the Warhol drag queen Superstars like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis. What is it about them that appeals to you?
Luis: First of all they looked great. They had a nice "Life is Art" way of approaching things. It's not like they did the art. Their life is the art - the documentation is the thing. The books you get on them. The films were just them going about their business, filmed by Warhol. The documentation of their lives is actually the art form.
Mona: And they didn't have any choice. They couldn't do anything else. In 1969 in New York what else could they do?
Miss K: They sacrificed their whole lives to glamour. And it was unintentional - they just got caught up in it.
Graham: To play devil's advocate, they're not the healthiest role models in the world. They lived pretty desperate lives.
Luis: I don't go out deciding I'm going to have a death wish. I can only be the person that I am. I've thought a great deal about who I am and who I want to be, but I'm certainly not going to fabricate anything or be contrived in any way. I can only be me and wherever it takes me, that's where it takes me. Like Johnny Thunders says, I'm going to live until I die - isn't it?
Mona: We like to keep it real.
Miss K: It's about being for real in the most artificial way possible.
Luis: As a matter of interest, we made a film called Trashola. It's basically a film of a day in the life of The Six Inch Killaz in our wonderful Warholian apartment in Kings Cross.
Graham: So what is a typical day in the life of The Six Inch Killaz?
Luis: We get up and start snorting cocaine out of our corn flakes. And then we all shoot up before we go out. And the water's been cut off so we have to get water out of the toilet bowl.
Mona: And we experiment with make-up.
Miss K: We just lurch from one ridiculous situation to another.
Holly: (Gesturing towards Luis) She's hardcore and we're just little girls. I'm only 13!
Graham: There's a very political/Situationist aspect to the band. Everything you do comes wrapped in all these philosophies and mission statements and slogans. Like "Blow It Up, Burn It Down", "Fuck Shit Up", "Screw The Poor and Fuck the Rich", "Drugs Not Jobs", "Riots Not Jobs"...
Holly: No, "Riots Not Diets"! Do you like my shoes? (Holds up foot dangling white plastic and clear Perspex 1960s mules). My auntie gave them to me.
Mona: "Bake a cake, make a bomb," that's another one. That's basically down to me. It's stuff I'm interested in, but it's not meant to be taken completely seriously. But it's obviously some part of what we're about.
Luis: It's just that attitude that you can be the person that you want to be. People might say that's clich.d, but some things are only clich.d because they are true, not just because people say them all the time.
Mona: We're obsessed with the Weather Underground, the Angry Brigade, the SLA, the Baader-Meinhof gang...
Holly: Glamorous people!
Mona: Glamorous people and revolutionaries. And our favourite film is probably If..., isn't it? (All agree).
Luis: And Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith. Do you know his film Blonde Cobra? As a matter of fact I made my own reworking of that, I was so into it.
Miss K: Someone once said to me we'd never get anywhere because we're too ironic.
Graham: But you're not an ironic band. You're certainly not a kitsch band or a joke band.
Luis: I don't like irony.
Miss K: I like ironing.
Luis: Something I hate at the moment is bringing back this retro '70s thing. All this shit, but by lining it with fake fur and putting it in inverted commas and calling it irony, that makes it acceptable.
Graham: Tell me more about the origins of the band. You formed about four years ago at a transvestite night club in the West End called Way Out.
Mona: Luis willed the band into being.
Luis: Basically the guy who does Way Out asked me if I could do something for this talent show case he was organising for the club. So the first thing I had to do was find a guitarist, so I found Mona and he said, I've got a drum machine. So the only thing left to do is find a singer, because I was going to play bass. The week before the contest I went up to Holly and said, Will you be in the group? And she said, Ah, but I can't sing. And I said, That's wonderful.
Graham: Yeah, but Holly was wearing a Sid Vicious t-shirt at the time.
Holly: Ooh, I like Sid.
Luis: No, that had been weeks before. That's how I got to know Holly in the first place. And that was how I discovered rock'n'roll. I didn't know anything about rock'n'roll before that.
Graham: What were you listening to before that?
Luis: Hip hop. Rap music. But Holly's Sid Vicious l-shirt really did start it all off for me.
Graham: How much in common did you have with the other drag acts in the talent contest?
Mona: Nothing at all. But we did it because we thought wouldn't it be funny to make them shriek in horror at us? It was a wind-up at first.
Luis: I was throwing dog food and ketchup around onstage. Shit like that. I couldn't play a note.
Graham: Did you chose the bass to be like Sid?
Luis: No, just because it's easier to play than guitar. I'm not a musical person at all.
Graham: What were the other drag acts doing in the talent contest - lip-synching to records?
Luis: It wasn't really a talent contest. It was more just a showcase for different trannie acts. Bloody disaster. There were lip-synchs and dance acts and well, that's all been done before. You're certainly not going to make a statement or offend people by doing a mime act.
Graham: The first song you ever wrote was for that occasion, Teenage Whores.
Luis: It was basically Belsen Was a Gas by The Sex Pistols and it was originally called Way Out Was a Horse, about the Way Out club. Then we changed it to Teenage Whores.
Graham: Tell me about the decision to use the drum machine instead of a flesh and blood drummer.
Luis: It's a hell of a lot easier. We once had a drummer for a short time but he was an arsehole. Never again.
Miss K: Moe Tucker from The Velvet Underground is like a drum machine anyway. Our drum machine is our little Moe Tucker.
Luis: No cymbals. Lou Reed said that cymbals eat guitars and he's quite right.
Mona: And it's hard to play drums in stilettos as well.
Holly: (Lecherous) I like drummers! We like straight men. We could get a straight man as a drummer and we could intimidate him all day.
Graham: Would you ever get a boy drummer who didn't dress up if you had to?
Mona: It's not a huge issue. We wouldn't say you couldn't be in the band.
Luis: We're pretty loose. Whatever anybody wants to do. It's anybody's group. There's certainly no leader in the group.
Graham: Tell me more about your songs. You do a song called Jackie O, which is a one-minute summary of the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Mona: I wrote that one myself. It was just after she'd died and I just wanted to express how fabulous she was - in a minute and a half.
Graham: She's quite a capitalist, conspicuous consumption symbol, though.
Holly: She's a cunt! (Raucous laughter). Well, I think she was a cunt.
Mona: But she looked really good. Especially those pictures of her at JFK's funeral. That Warhol print of her.
Holly: No. Not at the funeral. She wasn't a cunt at the funeral.
Graham: Your song Straitjacket is based on the 1964 William Castle-directed exploitation film. That is such a great film: Joan Crawford as an axe murderer.
Mona: It's vaguely about Straitjacket and vaguely about the movie Wise Blood, where this Gothic Southern preacher decides he's going to start up a new church, The Church of No God. There's a reference to that. It's about a drag queen who's obsessed with Joan Crawford and goes mad.
Graham: You cover Blondie's Rip Her To Shreds.
Luis: That was one of the first songs we learned.
Holly: I love Blondie. I love Debbie Harry.
Mona: We wanted to do one of Blondie's songs and that was the only one we could agree on. It was obviously the best song of theirs we could possibly do. We haven't been able to agree on a cover version since.
Holly: I wanted to do Joan Jett.
Mona: We wanted to do I Love Rock'n'Roll, but then we kept hearing it every week at Kitsch Bitch.
(I ask them what they thought of the recent Blondie reunion, inadvertently sparking a heated debate amongst the band. Mona says she thought their comeback album was lame. Holly shrieks that she'll never speak to her again).Luis: We also covered Sister Ray by The Velvet Underground. And The Dust Blows Forward and The Dust Blows Back by Captain Beefheart. And No Nonsense by The Electric Eels.
Graham: Your songs like Superstar and PIGS reflect your interest in the Warhol Superstars. (The concept of PIGS was swiped from the early '70s Warhol film Women In Revolt, in which Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn establish their own militant feminist faction PIGS, which stands for Politically Involved Girls). And you are politically involved girls as well.
Mona: Definitely. Agent provocateurs.
Luis: Our song New York City is also all about Warhol and the New York scene.
Mona: It's about everything we love about New York. It's a list song.
Luis: "A train/D train/I don't mind/Up to Lexington/125/Feel sick and dirty/More dead than alive."
Graham: You stole those lines from The Velvet Underground.
Luis: There's nothing wrong with that!
Miss K: We don't steal lines. We steal couplets.
Mona: I wrote a whole song called End Times just so I could have the words "I don't know, but I've been told." And it turned out to be a not very good song, but I still wanted to use those two lines.
Holly: Ooh, I like that song.
Mona: It goes "Let the end times roll." It's about enjoying the apocalypse while you still can.
Graham: Trashola is sort of your theme song.
Mona: Trashola is just about stupid stuff that we like. "I want to live like Jayne Mansfield/I want to live in the Pink Palace..." What else is it about?
Luis: (Singing/chanting the lyrics) "Cop killer beauty queen/ Trashola/Soap opera on the screen/Trashola/Everywhere we've ever been/Trashola/Want to live like Jayne Mansfield/Trashola/Pink Palace drug deals/Oh, yeah/Trashola/Aliens abducted me/Trashola/ Sold my story for a fee/Trashola/Don't you wish that you were me?/Trashola/Fuck forever/Wait and see/Trashola." Then I make a reference to The Rebel by Camus.
Graham: I still think that Seventeen is your best song. (It's on their demo tape and features their most cutting lyrics, filthy fuzzed-out guitars and Stooges I Wanna Be Your Dog-style piano).
Miss K: It's about this ex-friend of mine. She was an aspiring actress and she got into really stupid bad shit and her life became this big comedy. She just wanted to be an actress but became a club scene queen.
Graham: Does she know the song's about her?
Miss K: I don't know. I haven't spoken to her for years.
Graham: Does the band actually all live together? Because when the fetish magazine Ritual did an article on you it implied that you all lived together in Kings Cross, but in Mona's zine Girlie she says, "It's not as if we all live together or anything."
Luis: I lived for a while with Holly and Jasmine in a flat in Kings Cross. And then Holly left and the whole place got torn down.
Holly: (In a gleeful, lunatic Divine-like voice) As soon as I left the whole place got torn down! I arranged that! I turned up with the bulldozer and they had to get out fast. We'd kill each other if we lived together, wouldn't we?
Graham: You opened for Pansy Division when they last played over here. That must've been the biggest crowd you've ever played in front of.
Miss K: They weren't really into us to start with. They were very cautious but after two or three songs they started getting into us.
Graham: You won them over.
Mona: I think more people would like us if they got to hear us. It's sad.
Graham: More recently you played a gig at a club night at The Institute of Contemporary Art and the fire alarm went off in the middle of your set.
Luis: I don't know what happened.
Mona: We were hoping to get some publicity out of that. It would've been good to say we nearly burnt the ICA down. We can always milk it for the mythology later on.
Graham: Mona, tell me about your zine Girlie and about DJing at Kitsch Bitch.
Mona: I've been involved in DIY culture for some time and done zines and published my own comics and Girlie is a vehicle for me to spout my opinions. I've been doing it for about four or five years now. It's things that I'm interested in, things about drag, about terrorists, about films I like, about the band, about Kitsch Bitch. Luis writes for it sometimes as well. The club Kitsch Bitch really saved the band. At one point the people at Kitsch Bitch were our only fans. They were the only people coming up to us and telling us we were fabulous, so obviously we became friends. (Other like-minded up and coming bands aligned with Kitsch Bitch include The Cheetahs and Cherry 2000). I have lots of records so from there I got invited to DJ. If I'm doing an early set I'll play The Electric Eels and obscure things and quite a lot of stupid '60s things I like, and Elvis Presley and Little Richard. If I'm doing a later set I'll do a more trad Kitsch Bitch set, like Sonic Reducer and Television, maybe The New York Dolls, maybe Blondie and The Ramones. But not the really well known ones. Like instead of Blitzkreig Bop I'll play Oh, Oh I Love Her So if I'm playing The Ramones. Stooges. All that good stuff. Kitsch Bitch really is the Killaz's place. They really saved us.
Miss K: 'Cause we were just disintegrating.
Graham: The club is your spiritual home. OK, I know people like Jayne Mansfield and Candy Darling and Angelyne are sort of like fetish objects for the band. They all shared this obsession with fame. How desperate are Six Inch Killaz to be famous? Do you share this obsession?
Mona: I don't think so. We vicariously want to be famous. We identify with their need to be famous.
Luis: Oh, dear, no. I want to be a success. I want to live.
Miss K: You've got to take into account we're fucking lazy.
Luis: We're lazy but we're dedicated.
Clicky-Zoomy Wall of Flyers
↑ back to topLuis gets the last word
Miss K says:
After I published the final part of Shoot to Kill, Luis emailed me his usual list of corrections and comments which I duly wove into the piece as normal. However, having read and tried to fit this final bit in, I decided instead to leave it for the very end.
It's his commentary on my analysis of the decision to break the band up. I thought it only fair that Luis, as the person who gave birth to Six Inch Killaz, and at times kept it alive by sheer force of will alone, should, as he always did when we were together - except at that final, fateful meeting, so it turns out - get the last word.
(You say that) ...the night we broke up I "gave in with only a small fight". Okay - I can talk about it now, as it's years later and it hardly matters anymore - but I felt as if I'd been presented with a fait accompli. And the shock was so severe that I could barely speak. Pauline was extremely worried, I went so long without saying anything! And looking back, I bitterly regret not putting up more of a fight.
My feelings have always remained the same: all this talk about the band "running its course" is, to put it politely as possible, utter nonsense. Such talk makes us sound as if we had no will of our own, that the very concept of a band had been dropped on us from above, and that we had gone along with it purely cause we lacked the willpower to do otherwise. If only we had held on another six months, or a year at most, I am convinced we would have had our break, and with it, the strength and will to continue.
And even if it didn't happen - so what?
We were doing what we had come together to do - make great fucking music, and do it with as much style and humour as possible. Six Inch Killaz was a fantastic group - a synergy, in its truest sense, of wonderfully talented people. That was what I loved about it most - working with such witty, talented, intelligent people! And in all honesty, I don't think any of us can expect ever again to be part of such a brilliant group of people; different, yet at the same time similar enough to be able to work together and fuse all their powers into one coherent, brilliant, inseparable whole.
This isn't just talk, by the way - I really mean it! This concept of the synergy - it successfully showed up in the work we produced, so that to my mind, it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense picking holes in our playing abilities, while ignoring the performances and appearance in which they were clothed. Or debating the good and bad qualities of our punk-Warhol design and general worldview, while ignoring the wit and intelligence of the people who performed on such a stage.
A synergy - something you very rarely find in pop music - and when the product is this great, and this memorable, who can possibly argue otherwise?
We were something else.
Luis Hatred, founder of Six Inch Killaz
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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.
