Tom Armstrong chews the fat with one of London's most eminent alternative icons.
“Sometimes it would be easier to work in Lidl” laughs Scottee, celebrated performance artist and creative director of the notoriously decadent variety show 'Eat Your Heart Out'. I've come to his first floor studio above the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London’s epicentre for gay and alternative nightlife, to pick the brains of a man described as a modern day Leigh Bowery and “London's most out-there performer”.
“At school I was always a show off. It was a way to get friends” he starts, stirring a cup-a-soup with a pair of scissors, “then I accidentally fell into fringe theatre. I started working for The Roundhouse and The Hampstead Theatre. I was still only 16 and in a band called ‘Your Mum Your Dad’, we thought we were really cool because we wore binbags and spat at each other, (laughs) but it was a really good way to get attention. Then as soon as I started going out clubbing it was like 'wow you can go out and be as mental as you like and no one cares!”.
That libertarian attitude is easy to see in Eat Your Heart Out, his variety show which usually involves a cacophony of bodily fluids, real and fake, with audience members normally within showering distance of the various unnamed substances. As entertaining as it is, it's difficult to imagine a half-naked Scottee at the Royal Variety Show vomiting into the Queen's lap, so where exactly does his act fit in to the modern entertainment scene? “We get put in the cabaret box because of Eat Your Heart Out, but we’re not really interested in what cabaret is doing,” he adds, “I think cabaret is a bit shit. It's all a bit burlesquey, a bit 'ooh look aren't we 1930s isn't that funny!' Well no, it’s kind of a bit sad. I think cabaret was originally a good tool for talking about sex and taboo, and I suppose what we’re trying to do with Eat Your Heart Out is take those origins and change it around to what taboos are relevant to us now. It's like trying to deliver high art, but in a Wetherspoons environment.”
With flamboyant costumes which would best be described as comically dark, often bordering on the disturbing, it's easy to see where the Leigh Bowery comparisons come from, however Scottee reveals his fashion icons are closer to home than may first be apparent, “I think I’m just amplifying what the girls in Yates’ Bar are wearing. I’ve seen women in those bars wear more outrageous things than me, which only encourages me. Programmes like ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’ just make me think ‘must try harder!'” He also cites his early influences as “largely fat women, people like Hattie Jacques and Dawn French. They showed that you can be fat and not be upset, because I suppose in my head I thought that’s how you had to be.”
This week sees the start of Scottee's latest project, Burger Queen, a self styled “beauty pageant game show for fat people” which runs for four weeks at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. “It’s a reactionary event against these television shows like Supersize vs Superskinny in which we look at fat people and think they’re broken and something needs to be fixed and that we need a makeover to be happy. We’re basically saying there’s nothing wrong with fat people, we’re quite happy”
Scottee smiles eagerly and takes a sip of distinctly watery vegetable soup, part of his own self-experimental piece running alongside Burger Queen which will see him undertake three crash diets for the first three weeks of the pageant. “A lot of those programmes encourage these kinds of diets, so I want to see what effect they have on my body, and more importantly on my mental health. I suppose it’s a reverse diet, I’m someone who is happy in my body but I’m changing that to fit in with society.” It's an interesting idea, and if nothing else a refreshing attitude in a society controlled by advertising and marketing men who thrive on feelings of inadequacy.
An act as controversial as his isn't going to be popular with everybody. In fact, Scottee has had run ins with the police due to the content of his show, when I ask him about it he laughs and remembers, “there were literally loads of them. They must have turned up thinking they were going to encounter a riot, because they were all in full gear! They were asking who Scottee was, I was shitting myself, but they were basically questioning me because some journalist had written about there being live mastectomies etc. When people go to see Frankenstein at the West End they don’t expect to see real people being chopped up on stage, but the police seemed to think I was really chopping people’s breasts off.” He chuckles, after all, police attention is never bad for a performers reputation, even if they do go out of their way to offend you “I’d had this review in Time Out, the police officer said she'd read it and it wasn’t a very good! I was like ‘it got four stars you cow!’ (laughs).”
Burger Queen heats run each Wednesday at the RVT. The grand final takes place on 22nd June. More at burger-queen.info
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