Breaking Taboo – Recalling the Spirit of Leigh Bowery’s London

The Untold Story of London’s Underground Gay Scene, 1984 – 1987

At what Queerguru hopes will be the start of a long and consequential co-operation, we asked Irish Queer Lit Editor Peter Paul Hartnett to  interview Biba Bibitch about her compelling new book on Leigh Bowery that will be published  this September 

PPH > London. The 80s. OK. Recording. 

BB > Before queer culture was out, loud and proud, before London’s gay history was collected, catalogued and curated, there was Taboo, the nightclub that couldn’t be controlled and wouldn’t be archived. Breaking Taboo revisits a lost chapter of London’s gay nightlife. The rebellious, radical and self-defeating moment that flared up between the end of the New Romantics and the dawn and drugs of Acid House. 

PPH > Yum. I can almost smell a dropped bottle of Rush.

BB > Between 1984 and 1987, fashion, style, became a form of resistance. The clubs turned chaotic with one-niters galore and a generation danced under the shadow of a growing epidemic.

There was a moment when London’s alternative gay scene broke loose from respectability and turned it into a warzone of glamour, defiance, sex and survival. Breaking Taboo spits the story of that moment. Set in the mid 1980s, this book captures a scene born from contradiction. Creative and self-destructive, furious and fabulous, ruled by style and stalked by fear.

PPH > Uh-huh.

BB > Clubland had become a yawn. Enter Leigh Bowery and his crew. A rogue spirit appeared. A new mood and mentality ruled the night air. It killed off The Blitz Kids and turned the 80s upside down. Cameras went crazy for the freak show, snapping key characters for consumption. The likes of i-D and The Face were all over it. 

Bowery’s crowd staged a disco playground dead-set on tearing down the pantomime of respectability and commercial values that came before. Hello Taboo.

This was an alt’ scene that didn’t last long, wasn’t meant to. From 1984 to 1987, Taboo and its satellites such as Anarchy and Sacrosanct became the site of a glorious, unstable collision. Beauty and brutality. Invention and burnout. Pleasure and death. It was a moment when a new kind of gay glamour took over the night and collapsed under its own speed.

PPH > Yh. The Special Needs free-for-all.

BB > The new demimonde were united in their taste for trouble and extreme exhibitionism. Their otherworldly clothing and sociopathic behaviour were a breath of fresh air that petrified the old guard. As startling images of them started to appear in style bibles, they lured a new generation to the West End of London. Self-possessed and high-minded, catwalking within these haunts, the new Court ruffled the likes of the New Romantics as never before. 

PPH > Steve Strange had never looked so normal.

BB > In an era of right-wing conservatism and social exclusion, the Court embraced exhibitionists of all genders, races and classes.

PPH > Go on, drop the names you netted for this collection of interviews.

BB > I selected 22 key voices of survivors from the period, all generously providing insights, telling the truth about those times. From David Holah of BodyMap, DJ Princess Julia, Mrs Nicola Bowery (now known as Nicola Rainbird) and designer Rachel Auburn to Mark Moore of S Express and you yourself, amongst others.

PPH > And? come on.

BB > Breaking Taboo also gives voice to those whose stories were nearly forgotten. The likes of Black Beauty, dolly dealer Julian Kalinowski and Matthew Glamorre, a spiritual and sartorial renegade, whose clash with Leigh Bowery within the Minty band symbolised the scene’s intensity, absurdity, and refusal to behave. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a reckoning, for everyone who knows queer history is still being rewritten.

PPH > With some really putting themselves at the centre of things whereas, so many were just extras within the Taboo picture.

And so many hitting the slab, going up the crem’ chimney. That’s what I found so sad about Fiontan Moran’s exhibition Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern, Summer 2025, so many of those shooting stars, coachloads of them, gone. 

BB > Um…

PPH > Biba, you were very much part of this eccentric Court, as you term it, with Kim Jones even making an appearance as a teenager. You went on to become a door whore, guarding the confines of key hell-holes, helping develop its customs and costumes. All that certainly furnished you with a unique perspective that shines bright withBreaking Taboo.

BB > I felt a need to seize control of the narrative as I witnessed many of the sublime characters being written out of the story, a story slanderously-staged by Boy George as Taboo the Musical, and being institutionalised this year at Tate Modern and the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, where a queer, hysterical and kinky culture whipped up by gays and faghags has been straightened out for the mainstream.

PPH > Shit sure does happen. Now the faghags have taken over. The surviving queens are now a queer coterie of hagfags, waddling about, COPD coughs at max, in the likes of Broadstairs, Dover, Margate, Hastings and St Leonard’s-on-Sea. Oh, I do hate to be beside the seaside.

BB > In order to unleash the spirit of the age, the book’s structure bends and twists impulsively in form, unlike the more linear histories of 20th century subculture by luminaries such as Dylan Jones and Paul Gorman. But, like their biographies of earlier nightlife eras, Breaking Taboo – Recalling the Spirit of Leigh Bowery’s London demonstrates that the court of disco sodomite Bowery, wasn’t so much an isolated phenomenon as the dying days of a glamorous demimonde that took root in the 70s, an alternative Miss World of Bowie, Ferry and Punk.

PPH > If I may say, Biba, your book is a valuable oral history of the rise and fall of a certain spirit in London club culture, composed of candid disclosures from interviews with ravers who are now, largely, pensioners – even though they are box ticking all the subjects! I admire, respect, the examining a very specific period and making a case for it being a warped scene that flowered briefly and soon withered – rather than some recognisable dear old queerfest incorporating rainbows and drag ‘n’ PReP. Thus making it something different and of immense interest. 

Author Biba Bibitch is a native London director, actor and playwright, whose credits include a coproduction and exhibition of a filmed play, In a Hole, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! with Penny Arcade at the ICA London. The Mint Tea Rooms with Minty at the ICA London, and touring. Repro Cake for The Fete Worse than Death, London 1994. Writing and touring with Riot Grrl outfit, I Love…Roses – hit productions, Just Desserts, Slagroom and The Toilet of Venus, across Europe and later at Fringe NYC. Breaking Taboo – Recalling the Spirit of Leigh Bowery’s London is her first published work of non-fiction.