ORIGINAL SKIN TWO ENDS BUT THE SCENE LIVES ON
PERFORMANCES at the original club were often spontaneously provided by audience ‘volunteers’ (photo: Krystina Kitsis)
Skin Two’s kink-focused music policy
While there are a few exceptions, these days you’d be pretty surprised if you attended a fetish night where some type of electronic dance music was not on the menu. Fetish audiences may like different dance music styles, but dance music of some kind is generally a basic expectation.
It was not always so. At the original Skin Two, in between some popular dancefloor tracks such as Bowie’s Fashion and Let’s Dance (Claridge was a massive Bowie fan), there was a strong focus on music chosen for titles or lyrics that had kink overtones, with ‘danceability’ of secondary concern.
This meant songs like Soft Cell’s The Girl With the Patent Leather Face, Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs and Devo’s Whip It! were among favourite choices to create the desired atmosphere in Stallions’ basement.
This preference for music that referenced pervery in some way was echoed for some years by the London fetish clubs that followed Skin Two. The big music game-changer came in the summer of 1989 with the launch by DJ Rubber Ron & co of Club Submission.
Fusing acid house attitude with fetish style, Submission could be said to have started what we now call the fetish dance scene. That lead was followed by Torture Garden which, arriving in 1990, soon became as well-known for its typical ‘bangin’ techno’ dancefloor environments as for its exhibitionist patrons, extreme fashion shows and outrageous performances.
No play space per se, but plenty of play
I always felt that Skin Two’s characterisation of itself as a ‘rubber club’ or ‘fetish club’ was not accidental. The term ‘fetish’ implied kink without too blatantly espousing the BDSM side of things that had more potential to create problems with law enforcement at that time.
Incidentally, in 1983 BDSM was not yet in use as an abbreviation. Rather, kinksters commonly used three separate terms to describe various related interests. These were: B&D (bondage and discipline), D&S or D/s (domination and submission) and S&M (sadism and masochism).
B&D… D&S… S&M… Only later, by dropping one ‘D’ and one ‘S’, were those three separate pairings conveniently condensed into the single initialism BDSM. Today, in general media usage, it is still relatively unusual to see BDSM correctly defined by its six component parts.
The original Skin Two club did not feature a dungeon or designated play space — there really wasn’t room in the venue to accommodate one, even if the hosts had wanted to. However, a fair amount of play did go on in nooks and crannies and various areas external to the main venue space.
And the club also featured performances that mostly depicted the BDSM end of things. These took place on the small dancefloor (there was no stage) and were provided not by professional artistes, as is common today, but by club regulars who would (so it seemed) emerge spontaneously from the crowd to enact some pervy encounter that might last up to 20 minutes.
These theatrical interludes weren’t completely spontaneous; they were always preceded and accompanied by the DJ (frequently Claridge himself) replacing whatever track had been spinning with mood-setting Gregorian chants.
(Similar aural atmospherics were later adopted by Torture Garden for the entrance staircase at Electrowerkz.)
British tabloids rat on Roland’s creator
ROLAND RAT: not surprising he took to wearing shades after his creator was outed by tabloids
Mere months into the life of the original Skin Two club, David Claridge learnt that Britain’s first breakfast television network, TV-am (which had begun broadcasting just a couple of days after Skin Two launched), wanted to add his puppet creation Roland Rat to its roster of ‘performers’ in the hope of boosting its ailing ratings.
Claridge had previously been behind successful children’s TV puppet character Mooncat (1981-83), and gladly accepted the TV-am gig, which saw Roland Rat debut on British TV screens in The Shedvision Show on Good Friday (April 1) 1983.
The cheeky rodent became a big success, massively boosting TV-am’s ratings from 100,000 to 1.8 million and becoming a star in his own right.
Did David believe it might be possible for him to safely continue as the figure behind London’s groundbreaking fetish club while also operating Britain’s most popular children’s TV puppet? I don’t know — but it wasn’t long before the decision was taken out of his hands.
Both The Sun and The Daily Star soon got hold of enough information about Claridge and girlfriend Leslie Herbert’s ‘extra-curricular’ clubbing activities (including photos) to run compromising exposés on the pair — which, of course, zeroed in on the ‘inappropriate’ association of fetish with kids’ TV.
To save his television career, David Claridge had no choice but to sever his connection with the club — even though one version of events has it that he’d put the club under Leslie’s name before the exposés were published.
Whatever the exact timeline was, the final outcome was that the club at Stallions ceased being Skin Two after about six months, and morphed into Maitresse, fronted by Arthur and Jacquie, under whose supervision it continued more or less as before.
(In another example of music biz crossover, Jacquie was Jacquie O’Sullivan, who later replaced Siobhan Fahey in Bananarama when Fahey left to form Shakespears Sister.)
What the Skin Two inner circle did next
DANIEL JAMES Goddess dress production version from his Maid in London catalogue (model: Tricia Ronane; photo: ©The Bob Carlos Clarke Estate)
Daniel James, now an established designer of latex fashion, became involved in a productive creative partnership with photographer Bob Carlos Clarke lasting more than five years.
Daniel made sophisticated, sexy latex clothes that Bob photographed for his books such as 1985’s Dark Summer, and in return, Bob provided free images for Daniel’s 1985 catalogue Maid In London.
The designer established a shop within Kensington’s famous Hyper-Hyper market, which attracted customers for his latex who included Cher and Madonna.
He outfitted many celebrities in rubber decades before today’s high-profile latex-loving celebs were even born. He later switched his focus to the custom shirts in conventional fabrics that he’s still known for today.
After David Claridge renounced his Skin Two connection, Tim Woodward, who had discovered the club a little while after its launch, acquired the Skin Two name from Claridge for the fetish magazine that, inspired by the club, he planned to launch with photographer Grace Lau.
Bev aka Betty Page appeared as a model in several early editions of Skin Two magazine. She was photographed both by Peter Ashworth (including, with pal Gill, for the cover of Issue 2) and by Grace Lau, for Issues 4 and 5.
Her seamed-stockinged ankle and stiletto-heeled foot, as photographed by Chris Bell, became the cover of Issue 6 and also the dust jacket image for the hardback anthology Skin Two Retro 1: The First Six Issues.
Bev became Editor of Record Mirror before going on to work in editorial production roles on various Fleet Street newspapers. She currently works as a writer, editor, storyteller and communications trainer.
Issue 1 of Skin Two magazine appeared in 1984, and shortly after its publication, I was introduced to Tim as someone with editorial skills and appropriate interests who might be of use in producing future issues. I began contributing from Issue 2 onwards, initially under a pseudonym as I was still a full-time journalist on Sounds.
My association with the magazine and its various spin-offs (retail showroom, Rubber Ball etc) continued for 22 years. I was editor of the magazine from 1998’s Issue 25 until I left in spring 2006, prior to launching The Fetishistas in 2007.
David Claridge has distanced himself from anything or anyone kinky since the Roland Rat exposés. But I don’t think anyone who was part of the club or related scene ever blamed him for making that choice to save his career.
He was seen as very likeable and talented — a real enthusiast for everything he created or got involved in. None of us would have wanted him to find himself on the wrong end of a tabloid stitch-up.
Sadly his rodent creation’s characterisation as a ‘children’s puppet’ was a gift to the Fleet Street scandal merchants, making it easy to imply that behind his television work must also be some kind of ‘deviant motivation’.
Merely pointing out the existence of these two separate areas of his life was enough to leave him with no option but to quit Skin Two.
David’s own voice may be absent from this article. But no one who knows the real story of the original Skin Two would dispute the debt our community owes him for his pivotal role in the birth of the fetish scene we know today.
Krystina Kitsis: I took club photos for postgrad research
KRYSTINA WRITES:
My friend Sue Scadding, my then partner William and I were excited at the prospect of a new club called Skin Two being launched by Daniel James (whom we knew as Bill at that time) and David Claridge at the end of January 1983.
As lovers of night life we had followed Bill through his various club incarnations and the next launch, we envisioned, was going to be spectacular.
At that point I knew about fetish clubs only from doing postgrad research into fetish related material, and from seeing gay men wearing rubber at clubs like Heaven or punks in fetish-wear on the streets.
I was at the time doing a research degree on the connection between sexuality and fashion at the Royal College of Art, and I was particularly interested in subcultures.
My research looked at the way fetish was represented in the high class worlds of Helmut Newton and David Bailey, who used the edgy, seductive themes of fetish on beautiful women, dabbling with themes of master and slave to compose iconic images that were ultimately used to sell an idea and a product.
I also came across more underground images of ‘real’ people in the pages of AtomAge. Its subjects, posing in domestic settings, were not professional models. These images were more outrageous and bizarre to the untrained eye.
I wasn’t a participant at that stage. Skin Two opened my eyes to a whole, previously unknown world that would change the course of my life forever.
Descending the stairs down to gay club Stallions in Falconberg Court, where Skin Two was being launched, was like stepping into the pages of AtomAge.
The characters I had encountered while leafing through that magazine were there for real. I had my camera with me. I had
been photographing people in clubs for years as a way of documenting the events, but the photos were never published.
The atmosphere took me back to Berlin, where I had gone as a student at St Martins in 1978, and where I’d first encountered overtly outrageous transvestites. The trans contingent at Skin Two were initially less flamboyant — until the scene expanded.
I was astounded to see the diverse collection of people in catsuits, leather bodies, chaps, stilettos, fetish underwear… a phantasmagorical collection of fetish gear and all in black.
There were gays, straights, bisexuals and prodommes; there were ordinary people in fetish gear chatting to each other, dancing, or posing in the arches, at the bar or in the corridor by the cigarette machine.
The age range was vast and everyone was so friendly — not a threatening environment at all even though many were masked and black was de rigueur. (Basically, it was what most people wore, as it signified outsider status, the colour palette of rubber sheeting being very limited at that time.)
This was a very different subculture from those I had encountered while growing up — which had been defined by youth. At Skin Two, people from all ages and backgrounds were united by their shared interest in kinky clothing. Most people, I discovered, purchased their clothes from Sealwear, She An Me or Weathervain.
I initially attended wearing a leather outfit I’d made myself. I had yet to even think about making rubber clothes. Dress options were simpler: there was a lot of leather, PVC and only some latex, as the explosion in latex fashion was yet to come.
The fetish clothing scene and repertoire of clubs was tiny then, and ripe for a makeover. Daniel James set out to provide the scene with the style it had lacked, which was delivered through the beautiful images of Bob Carlos Clarke. The small collection of glamorous dresses Daniel produced significantly changed the appeal of rubber.
This piece by designer Krystina Kitsis is a condensed extract from a forthcoming full-length article she has written for The Fetishistas, not only about her experiences at the original Skin Two club but also about later co-hosting new-style Skin Two events with Tim Woodward, publisher of Skin Two magazine, and launching her own EctoMorph latex fashion brand.
BELOW: Inside the original Skin Two club, 1983 – 10 images by KRYSTINA KITSIS.
CLICK /TAP either preview to open its gallery, then click/tap any thumbnail to start slideshow
CONTRIBUTOR LINKS
Bev Glick
Daniel James
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Tags: Community, Fetish History, Fetish Pioneers, Skin Two
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