It’s difficult not to live a wasted life when you’re young and unemployed in these glorious Eighties, and who can blame anyone who becomes a villain or a zombie? Face it, the chances of ex-hidden talents are few indeed when you’re living on twopence-ha’penny a week. But sometimes, against all odds, people refuse to be crushed by their circumstances and manage to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear of a life. Like the Hackney Mob.
In some ways they’re nobody special -just a group of working class gay boys in their early twenties who’ve individually moved to London and found themselves living in hard-to-let housing in the middle of one of the capital’s poorest boroughs.
In other ways they’re special indeed, because they re-managing to circumvent the system that was set up to crush them. The first time I met a Hackney Mobber was in the back of a van that somersaulted three times on the M1 on the way up to a Lick, Stick & Promise gig in Newcastle.
It was early ’84, I was researching Men In Frocks and was fascinated to see a drag troupe comprising two real girls, Nikki and Sue, and a boy called Steven. I didn’t catch their gloriously vulgar drag panto that night, and instead found myself being dragged onto a wet verge by Steven’s friend, Martin. We all travelled back to London by foot, cab and train – laden with scenery, costumes and props – and I learned how LS&P, three drama students, had written the show themselves, choreographed it, hired the van arranged the bookings, made the set and costumes all with a little help from their unemployed friends, most of whom seem to live in Hackney.
Steven Keen has now gone on to bigger things and, as Sadie Stern, is presently a hot act in Amsterdam. But Martin still lives in Hackney, a moving force in Framework, a loosely-knit theatre co-operative which is also responsible for In one of the best new bands in town, the Vilettes. “Framework is a co-op that doesn’t just do plays – we do community projects, one-off festivals, street theatre. And now the band is integral too. I first got involved when I came to London after doing an MA in Drama and Theatre Arts in Yorkshire; Framework was a production company then, working on Suddenly Last Summer, a show part-financed by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball. When the original members drifted away, Louise- one of my flatmates – and I hung on. There was no money, so we held jumble sales locally and involved our friends in Framework, like Paul – our other flatmate-and started our own productions. We did street theatre and then began our pantos in ’83, which we take round schools.”
I saw this year’s Magic Christmas Pudding -a high camp affair with a lisping (male) Fairy Dizzywish and a loony cross- dressed heroine called Tilda, amongst a group of madly appreciative teeny-tots; by the end there wasn’t a dry seat in the house.
“Apart from Louise, the cast was all gay men,” explains Martin. “We don’t make a big issue out of being gay, we just are gay, and we did it how we wanted to -as mad as possible. The pantos are great fun and we try to avoid altogether that boys-and-girls, mums-and-dads, love-story, sexist crap. And of course the kids love it.
Somehow the group does it all on the dole, though they’ve squeezed money from the Greater London Enterprise Board to buy a van and tax it: “We were the first theatre company ever to get money from GLEB. Otherwise we keep going by using our contacts. We’re a member of a really helpful Cooperative Development Agency (CA), and we’re affiliated to anything in Hackney that can get you things free…Media Resources, Scrap Project…we’ve learned how to get our publicity done on a shoestring, to get expensive photographic material cheapIy.”
Martin, 24, is The Fixer of the group, an ace organiser. Solid, warm and dependable, he’s, on his own admission, inclined to be occasionally autocratic. (“When I’m directing a show I always say ‘no’ to anyone else’s suggestions, then go away and think about it.”) Welsh flatmate Paul, also 24, has a far dizzier exterior, though he’s not that dizzy because he’s the driver of the van which the whole group depends on. Paul came to London in ’79 from tiny Port Talbot to study dance and drama at Mountview Theatre School, which is where he met Steven – who introduced him to Martin. “I sussed I was gay early; my mum was always wanting to know where I was going and what I was doing, so l was desperate to get away. After Mountview I was in a dance duo, Scene Two: we were doing gigs at Heaven and the Embassy; but I was more interested in Framework.
did street theatre, panto and the sound and lighting for a production of Dario Fo’s A Woman Alone, which Martin directed. The next project we’re doing is our most adventurous so far, the first British production of Copi’s The Homosexual (or The Unloading Amy for the Panto Art of expressing Yourself. It’s a five-hander and we’re doing it with an all-male cast this month (May); we started planning it as far back as last April, but financing it was something we had to work on. It’ll be the culmination of a lot of energy and effort.”
The play will be more small-scale than the company would like and the most they expect financially is to break even. It’s an expensive and ambitious project – naturalistic set, period costume, heavy copyright fees (Martin: ” You have to bargain with the copyright people; it’s a Dance of the Scorpions, but I’m getting good at it.) But there again, nobody’s doing it for the money. “I’m not ambitious as such,” says Paul. “I enjoy what l’m doing and I’d like to see Framework do the things it wants to do, and ultimately I’d love to see us making a living out of it. But at present I’m very happy just being surrounded by a special group of people. We all work well together and we have a lot of talent and creativity to tap. There’s Simply no way it’s going to fail.”
Keith’s a wise-cracking, bleached blonde Geordie with a sandpaper voice who met Martin and Paul in September ’83 when he moved from Brixton into the same block and “popped down to borrow some Rizlas.” A queen of many talents: performer/singer (once swinging from a rope in Heaven in fishnets with a huge clown’s head singing the Eraserhead theme); artist (designing backcloths and publicity material); actor (panto to the upcoming Copil; and a fine lyricist. Music has always been an interest, but the Vilettes is the first time “the music is as solid as a rock.”
“At first the Vilettes was going to be Paul and I in drag cabaret, but the furthest we got was getting pissed out of our heads in heels, so I decided to go solo using my own lyrics to present politics-with-a-dress-on. Very androgynous, sort of grey flannels with pearls. Another Martyn, a gay mad-professor musician, and I were to be Vilette and Friend with him dressed up like an undertaker playing pots and pans and synths. Then one day l went into the shed at the end of the balcony with Leroy – my heterosexual friend next door – and we started singing into a tape-recorder and he began doing percussion and back-up vocals. From there the band grew to six, with Leroy sharing vocals, Marty’s half-brother Steve on bass and his girlfriend Jane on trumpet, and finally Martin doubling as trumpet player and manager.
“With three poufs in the band, the gay thing is obviously one of our ‘issues’ though we’re not an ‘issue band’ in that way. We sing about everything that touches our lives – alcohol, the Asylum, the addict in the family. The sound’s ska, funk, reggae, pure pop… a wicked melange, and something quite original too. A Vilettes sound.” The V’s are beginning to gig regularly; check them now at this coarse, rough-edged stage. They’re special, with a sweaty excitement that’s attracting a nicely mixed audience; black and white, gay and straight, male and female, boppers and boffins. And Keith sure knows how to get an audience to eat…
The Vilettes and Framework are interdependent: “Some of us work in both the band and on the acting side, which means crossover,” says Martin. “The band’s quite theatrical, say, while Martyn is now beginning to write a soundtrack for the Copi play. They feed off each other. And of course we can use Framework’s contacts on the cooperative network for the band. That’s how we got into a studio and laid down four tracks on demo tape. Heart and Soul, the studio, are based at the same CDA as us and we got free studio time by earning it. We laboured for them, helping them build a garage, and in return we got four free days in the studio.” “‘And now they’ve heard us,” drawls Keith, “we’re going on their compilation album, and mint do a single. All for a bit of shits ling!”
Robert, Keith’s boyfriend, came from the south of France to avoid conscription in 1980 and squatted with Keith and moved to Brixton and then moved to Hackney with him, where he found the Frameworkers to be “amazingly positive people. They bring out things in you. I’ve never been artistic, but this way of working together has encouraged me. I built the set for A Woman Alone and I’m working on the Copi, I helped make the costumes and the backdrop for the first panto and even acted in the last one, playing a Christmas pudding! Everyday is fun. I’m still much more practical than artistic – I’ve just taken over Framework’s admin – but I feel more fulfilled than ever before because I’m involved with creative things. Yeah we’re always broke – but I’m learning firsthand if you’re ready to sacrifice a few things that probably don’t matter anyway, and share you can get by.”
Martyn the musician is the most recent addition to the family. He came to London from a sleepy Kent village two years ago because he’d run out of people to play with. Since I got a guitar for my seventh birthday I’ve wanted to be a musician. I was writing very basic songs at 19, and I’ve been in bands ever since. Through brother Steve he met Keith and Robert in the Brixton squat. (“I was very rural in outlook and saw being gay as an isolated intellectual thing. They quite shocked me at first.”) He now lives near the others’ flats, in a damp-ridden Housing Association building, the top room of which has been turned into a rehearsal studio by the enterprising Keith, who lined the walls with egg boxes.
“I’ve always thought that if I could have the choice of a vocalist, it’d be keith. We were working as a duo, with his lyrics and my music, and I didn’t see it as a band; but everyone who has floated in has contributed so much, and I’m fascinated by the possibilities that we six have. We all contribute a lot, it’s natural collectivism!” Probably most of the material originates from Steve and I at the moment because of the instruments we play, but everyone writes their own parts and the songs are definitely written by The Vilettes. How far will we go? Well, I’m not really interested in carrots waved in front of me. Flashing lights don’t appeal. I’ve never really been interested in achievement in that way, but personal achievement – yes. And that’s beginning to happen.”
Martyn and Paul are now lovers. “I think maybe the fact that the nucleus is gay has something to do with our close knittedness of ourselves and the people around us. The amount of support and caring between the gay members sets the tone. I’m sure there are pockets of people like us dotted around. Creative people tend to attract people who are compatible with themselves,” says Martyn “and the people around them are encouraged to use their talents. I just don’t happen to know another group of people like us.”
Of course the Hackney Mob or even Framework don’t comprise only the people we’ve spoken to. There are others like David, another gay friend, who has designed the Copi set (“I’d never done any theater design before. It stretched me”); also part of the bundle of energy is Louise, a long-term Framework member who is presently doing work on her own. The non-gay Villettes are operating on the same wavelength. Others are not so lucky. There are plenty of young people around with lots of creativity and talent who unlike Hackney Mob, don’t have something like the Alternative Gay Grapevine to put them in touch with each other in the first place.
It’s ironic that the dog-eat-dog mentality which is at present so much encouraged by this country is freezing young people out of the rat-race and obliging many of them to create non-competitive life-styles. Values change as people are obliged to share poverty; communal living and cooperation, the antithesis of the Me Generation, are nurtured as a positive alternative to scratching out an existence alone. The Hackney Mob are some of those who not only survive, but thrive.
For LGBT History Month 2022, we are publishing four historic GAY TIMES Magazine features from our archives and making it available on our digital channels for the first time ever.
It follows the groundbreaking campaign from SKITTLES®, GAY TIMES, Switchboard and Queer Britain last summer – titled Recolour The Rainbow – which breathed new life into archive imagery from Pride’s past to acknowledge and celebrate those who have come before us in the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation.
