THEY SHALL NOT PASS: Leslie on the front desk of the original Skin Two club at Stallions, 1983 (photo: Derek Ridgers)
Original Skin Two: real story of the club that launched the scene
APRIL COVER STORY: The original Skin Two club opened in Soho on January 31 1983, kickstarting the modern fetish scene. But the real origin story of the club only had its first airing 40 years later, when Tony Mitchell and two other original Skin Two insiders – club co-founder and latex designer Daniel James, and Bev Glick aka journalist Betty Page – gave a talk for the Institute of SM Studies which was filmed for posterity. Editing of the film is making good progress, but in the meantime, The Fetishistas publishes the first in a series of Original Skin Two articles, featuring images of the 1983 club by Derek Ridgers and Krystina Kitsis, many of which are being shown here for the first time. Our banner is from the original publicity photography for Skin Two (©Peter Ashworth 1982), featuring Lesley Beaumont modelling Daniel’s very first experiment in latex dressmaking
London’s original Skin Two club, which opened in a Soho basement in January 1983, is widely credited with launching the fetish scene as we know it today. However, the true story of that first iteration of Skin Two (before Skin Two magazine existed) has become somewhat blurred in its retelling. So this year, the 40th anniversary of the original club, seems like a good time to put its real origin story on the record. I was involved both in the original club and in the later organisation headed by Tim Woodward, who acquired the Skin Two name after the original club changed its name and ownership. So I feel reasonably well-placed to tell that origin story. This article is the first in a Skin Two 40th Anniversary series planned for this year as a complement to and extension of the ISMS talk I gave in January at the Bishopsgate Institute about the origins of Skin Two (see teaser from the film of the talk, below). That presentation featured two guest speakers from the original Skin Two days who are also quoted in this article. They are designer Daniel James, the club’s co-founder and pioneer of latex fashion; and music journalist Bev Glick, my girlfriend at the time, who then wrote under the pen-name Betty Page and was, like me, part of the ‘inner circle’ helping to get the first Skin Two club off the ground. Both contributed generously to the background research and memory-jogging that enabled the talk to take place and this article series to be conceived. The series will include separate articles in which both give their own takes on that pioneering period of fetish culture. Another companion article in preparation will present an overview of the kink influences that became increasingly visible in British culture during the decade preceding the launch of Skin Two. It will discuss the idea that the rise of such a club in London in the early ’80s was pretty much inevitable, given what had taken place in the ten preceding years. But returning to this first article: to illustrate it, two rich veins of imagery from the original club have been unearthed. They come courtesy of legendary youth subculture photo-journalist Derek Ridgers, and from Krystina Kitsis, who took photographs at Skin Two for her RCA postgraduate thesis. She later went on to found latex fashion label EctoMorph in 1985 and co-host a second generation of Skin Two-branded events with Tim Woodward. Both have contributed texts recalling their memories of photographing at the original club. You’ll find Derek’s recollections on Page 2 of this article and Krystina’s — extracted from a forthcoming article in this series, about her wider Skin Two involvement — on Page 3. A SNEAKY PEEK at Tony, Bev and Daniel giving their ISMS talk about the original Skin Two club (Cameras: Jan Fetishclubpix. Sound: Tina Stormcaller. Editing: Cole Black/LatexFashionTV) Let’s begin with a bit of background on the two people who founded the original Skin Two club at Stallions, both of whom were denizens of the London clubbing scene that followed on from the punk scene. If you’ve previously encountered — but perhaps dismissed as unlikely — the story that Skin Two was the brainchild of the man who invented the popular British television puppet character Roland Rat, I’ve got news for you. Because David Claridge — actor, record label boss, ex-Blitz Kid and, yes, the puppeteer behind that television rodent — was indeed the man whose 1982 lightbulb moment led to the launch of Skin Two on January 31 1983. His partner in this venture was to be a theatrical costumier, make-up artist, mask-maker and clubbing compadre originally known as Bill or Billy, but later better known as Daniel James, the man who ‘invented fetish fashion’. (To avoid potential confusion, I will refer to him as Bill when talking about events before he ‘rebranded’ as Daniel James, and as Daniel thereafter.) David and Bill had both been part of the fashionable late ’70s/early ’80s London clubbing scene — including Billy’s (where David had DJ’d) and the famous Blitz Club that, with its focus on androgyny, dressing-up and synth-based music, became the birthplace of the New Romantic movement. The pair had gone on to co-host their own events, including Thunderbirds Are Go at Legends, and Skin Two’s immediate forerunner, The Great Wall, a celebration of the New Music scenes in Japan and other points East. At the time, my girlfriend Bev and I were both music journalists — I on the music weekly Sounds and Bev on Sounds’ glossy magazine spin-off Noise. We were both enthusiastic supporters of the Japanese Technopop scene spearheaded by Yellow Magic Orchestra. We had become friends with Claridge through this shared taste, and through our interest in his Mobile Suit concept of roving club nights to promote such music, and his record label Mobile Suit Corporation, which put out a Japanese sampler album and later had a hit single with Monsoon’s Ever So Lonely. It was over a lunch sometime in autumn 1982 that I learnt from David that he intended to start a fetish club in London. He knew this would interest me and Bev, given her pen-name, the significance of which was not then widely recognised — but if you knew, you knew. As Daniel remembers it, Claridge’s epiphany had been triggered by a visit to a notorious New York S&M club in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. “David called me to say this place he’d been to was amazing, and we should do a fetish club in London,” says Daniel. So that’s what they decided to do. Over that same lunch, David told me he’d shortlisted three possible names for the new venture, all referencing the role latex played in fetish fantasy, which was central to the image he wanted to create for the club. These were Second Skin, Skin Two and Under Three Layers (referencing the title of a cult film about latex fetishism by AtomAge founder John Sutcliffe). Skin Two, as a word-play on ‘Skin. 2.’ — his English dictionary’s second definition of ‘skin’ — conveyed the idea of the latex ‘second skin’ in a verbally and visually elegant way. But to my eternal shame, I didn’t at first think it was the best of the three options! However, common sense (if not mine) prevailed and the club would indeed go ahead as Skin Two, albeit in a venue as yet to be finalised. Daniel reveals that he and David’s first thought was to hold the club in the Oxford Street venue that had hosted The Great Wall. But the venue felt an S&M club (as they saw it) was too hardcore for them, and suggested gay club Stallions in Soho’s Falconberg Court as a more suitable alternative. Stallions, it turned out, was happy to give the new event weekly slots on what would otherwise be quiet Monday nights. So the location and date of the opening night were set, which just left the small matter of advance publicity. This was pre-internet, so promotion was down to printed flyers, perhaps some small ads in ‘alt-friendly’ publications, and word of mouth. Eminent music and style photographer Peter Ashworth was engaged to shoot Skin Two’s first promo images. Photography would be at Claridge’s flat, and Bev and I were among the support team invited to attend. I think at this point we felt we were officially a part of the Skin Two ‘inner circle’. The models would be Bill’s girlfriend Lesley Beaumont and model/performer Sue Scadding, who worked as a Debbie Harry lookalike. To reflect what had been chosen as Skin Two’s signature look, the outfits would be latex — or rubber, as we emphatically preferred to call it then! The rubber dress Lesley wore was the very first one Bill created, before he ‘rebranded’ as Daniel James. Sue, meanwhile, wore a catsuit accessorised with steel handcuffs and a red leather pet leash — two items I’d thoughtfully brought along as props. The photos were shot, flyers etc were designed and printed, and everything was finally ready for the opening night. Well, almost everything. There was the small question of what some of us were going to wear at the launch. The general feeling was that it really should be rubber, to properly honour the spirit of the event we were all endeavouring to create. At that time, there were only a few suppliers of rubber clothing in the UK, who generally promoted their wares through coyly-worded small ads in the Sunday newspapers or in the weekly classifieds bible Exchange & Mart. These suppliers all specialised in mail order, but some also had small showrooms holding stock for visitors on by-appointment shopping trips. In the London area there were two mackintosh specialists: Weathervain in Richmond, Surrey (still going strong in Kew); and South Bucks Rainwear (whose initials also conveniently suggested ‘shiny black rubber’) in Iver, Buckinghamshire. Further away were two firms that offered large ranges of what was, more blatantly, rubber fetishwear. These were Kastley in Blackburn, Lancashire (still going strong) and Sealwear in Bournemouth, on the Dorset coast. Thus it was that on a Sunday afternoon sometime before the January 1983 opening date of Skin Two, I and three others — Bev, Bill and Bev’s pal Gill (aka journalist Nancy Culp) — drove down to Sealwear in Bournemouth, having first ensured the owner would open up for us if we made the trip. But oh dear. Our party’s two style-conscious women from the London music scene were not at all impressed to discover Sealwear’s sole nod to ‘fashion’: some Lady Di-style knee-length breeches in cream latex. Consequently, only I left with an outfit — a catsuit — that would provide full latex coverage. Driving back from Bournemouth, we stopped at roadside services for coffee. Bill said he thought the latex that Sealwear used looked cheap, and not suitable for the sort of rubber fashion he envisaged. So, fashionable ambitions largely frustrated, Bev, Bill and I sketched out on a napkin a dress that we would have liked to find at somewhere such as Sealwear. Bill took that sketch — of a tight, high-neck dress with three straps across a full-length front zip, and a full-length lace-up back — and made a dress based on it for Bev. It was his second-ever rubber dress, later refined to become the first official Daniel James dress — the Goddess style in his 1985 Maid in London catalogue, photographed on Tricia Ronane by Bob Carlos Clarke (see page 3). For the actual Skin Two opening night, though, Bev’s outfit was a mixture of rubber (including gloves and stockings) and leather — in the shape of a leather waspie I’d made for her, using steel umbrella ribs as boning. Oh yes, we had to be resourceful in those early days!Introduction by original Skin Two clubber Tony Mitchell
IT ALL STARTED WITH BLITZ KID’S LIGHTBULB MOMENT
Two ’80s ‘club kids’ with ambitions
Claridge floats his fetish club idea
DAVID CLARIDGE flyer for Mobile Suit concept of roving club nights featuring Japanese musicAshworth shoots the first promo pix
Shopping for first-night latex outfits
BEV/BETTY in prototype Daniel James Goddess dress, right, with Daniel and Lesley at Skin Two
Tags: Community, Fetish History, Fetish Pioneers, Skin Two
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
