The other day I was complimented on my clothes again. A young-ish – well, much younger than me, because most people are – man in the lift at Waitrose pointed out my neckerchief and said that you didn’t see many of those around these days, and that I carried it off very well. Now, leaving aside the gross breach of protocol by talking to a stranger in a lift, and discarding the possibility that he was chatting me up (I’d never seen anyone looking less gay, and also I am too old to be fancied any more), this was simply a very nice thing to say, I decided, after I’d got over the initial shock.
The thing is, this only happens in Brighton. Not often, but about once a year. I once stopped to give a homeless man a light and he looked at my tweed jacket – which is older than I am, as it happens – and he said: “Love the look. Very retro. You carry it off.”
Then there was the time I had just bought a new pair of glasses from Vision Express in Churchill Square. The lenses are the kind that go dark when it’s sunny, and that day was very bright. A young man about half my age said “nice glasses” as he passed me. He was halfway up the hill before the remark sank in. I remember vaguely what he looked like: dark skin, trimmed beard, black t-shirt, muscles. Despite the muscles I don’t think, again, he was gay. The thing is that the glasses were cool – think the Beatles on the back cover of Revolver, which all authorities agree was their coolest-looking period – and maybe something in my bearing suggested I knew this. I thought: this is going to happen every day I wear these. This is great.
It didn’t. But I did have someone say “wicked shoes, man” as they saw my multicoloured Converse with purple toecaps. Again, this has only happened once: but I’m grateful it has happened at all. And in case you think that this is because I am effortlessly stylish, I should say I have been mocked and even thumped because of my clothes.
The only other places I have lived in for appreciable periods of time are London, Paris, Cambridge and Scotland, and in all of them bar Scotland I have suffered mockery and abuse. The worst time was on the Metro in Paris, when a young man unticked my grandfather’s paisley scarf from my collar and went “tee hee hee.” It was 44 years ago but I still glow red with shame and anger when I think about it.
No, the only possible conclusion is that this is Brighton for you. A town whose main principle is tolerance is actually going to be pretty welcoming towards the eccentric. I would hesitate to wear those Converse in any other city on earth, and as for the countryside, forget it.
But thank you, Brighton. You may only compliment me once every two years, but that’s more than anywhere else has.
For the last nine years, Club Silencio has been staging extraordinary shows in various Brighton venues. I remember seeing my first one in a sex dungeon in Kemptown and feeling as if I had walked into one of the transgressive early films of John Waters. The next time I saw them they’d built a giant television set in the Phoenix Art Space, where they performed a surreal version of Blind Date, in which a water phobic contestant won a date with the Creature from Hove Lagoon. Then they turned the Arcobaleno bar into a pool party set in hell.
You can see Club Silencio yourself this December, in the Latest Music bar in Manchester St, performing My Bloody Pantomime (“Pantomime characters are quaking in their stilettos as a serial killer is picking them off one by one”). We are promised “gags, gore and a giant eyeball in this pantomime of epic proportions.” Stuart says this is the first Club Silencio show to feature panto characters: “However, most of them are dead!”
I asked Stuart how it all began. “Silencio was created back in 2015. I’d been spending some nights at Subline, at the time Brighton’s only men-only sex dungeon, with my friend John Tovey. We loved it down there and saw loads of possibility for the subterranean space. The idea was to subvert the space by making it a very classy night. Dressing up in fancy clothes was encouraged, and the space was dressed with frilly lamp shades. We had a toilet attendant, who recited poetry, and a gimp in a tuxedo who walked around with doughnuts on a silver tray. I booked friends – mostly female folk singers – to play, as they brought something unique to the dank and seedy space, and I dressed up as a clown, and sang songs between the acts. For the first show I didn’t really have many acts, so I made up sketches involving puppets, and got friends to wear masks and lip-sync to weird audio clips.”
As for the Silencio name, Stuart says, “I had been to Paris that year and really wanted to go to David Lynch’s nightclub, Club Silencio, named after the club in his film Mulholland Drive. However, it was very expensive to get in and I couldn’t afford it at the time. So, irked by the exclusiveness of it, when it came to picking a name for my own club night, I chose that as a bit of a screw you to David, because Brighton’s Club Silencio was going to be a cheap and more subversive space.
John was my chief in command, and he was brilliant at dressing the room. My friend Joe worked with me in a kitchen at the time, and I persuaded him to be the gimp for the night. My friend Louis was the toilet attendant, and Juno was happy to DJ. Another friend, Ralph, ate doughnuts slowly to a weird advert for Krispy Kreme I’d made (the joke was they were our sponsors). I loved the idea that anyone who wanted to get involved could. After that lots of amazing performers, musicians, actors and creatives have come and gone over the nine years that followed, but John, Misha, Kit, Damian, Tommy, Jon, and Juno, have been at the core of Silencio.”
Alongside Stuart, the main writer is the novelist and actress Juno Dawson. Juno played Dorothy in Club Silencio’s wonderful musical, Return Again to Oz, a hit show in last year’s fringe. You can listen to the songs from the show on Bandcamp.
The regular club host is Jon Griffin, who does an uncanny impression of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Jon writes his own satirical monologues for the shows, and is so good at being Death that he has since taken the character into stand-up comedy clubs. He’s a composer, like Stuart, and they co-write the songs for the shows.
For Pride in 2019, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Stuart and Juno created Equality of the Daleks. Juno, author of several Dr Who related books, got to play the doctor in a time travelling investigation of how the brick that started the riots was thrown. The brick thrower was a sexually confused dalek.
I wondered if the shows are a reaction to the way Brighton Pride has become corporate and mainstream? “Well, I thought the gay scene was crap, and Pride was just an extension of that. It had nothing to offer me and made me feel unwelcome because I didn’t conform to the idea of what a gay man should be like. I rejected it, and thus was an outsider from my tribe, so in the end I made my own tribe. Now queer outsiders are very in vogue, and there’s loads of great nights that cater to them.”
For the last nine years, Club Silencio’s magnificent sets, props and costumes have been made by Kit Yellery (Odd Fabrication on Instagram). Stuart says, “Kit is incredible and one of the things I always loved was arriving at the venue and seeing what amazing things she’d made. She really is a genius. Last year was her final show with us, and it feels very strange not to have her involved now.”
Club Silencio shows are inclusive, welcoming and immersive. Audience members are encouraged to dress up and take part in surreal games and competitions. There’s usually an interval, when the actors pose for life drawing sessions, with prizes at the end.
Next year will be Club Silencio’s tenth anniversary, and Stuart says he has big plans for the celebration: “I can say no more but it will be something special.” Meanwhile, we have My Bloody Pantomime to look forward too – guaranteed to be a highlight of the festive season.
Jane Bom-Bane plays the harmonium while wearing beautiful mechanical hats, which illustrate her songs, such as ‘I’ve Got A Goldfish Bowl On My Head’. She had the idea to open a café while running musical evenings at the Sanctuary in Hove with her then partner, the multi-instrumentalist, Nick Pynn. After she bought 24 George Street in March 2006, they spent six months restoring the building and creating the café.
“It was a wing and a prayer,” says Jane. “A lot we did ourselves. People who helped us were friends and gave us really good prices. For a lot of years after, we were giving people free sausage and mash.” Here she’s talking about stoemp and sausage, one of the café’s great Belgian dishes created by Andre Schmidt, the first chef. It’s still on the menu today.
Jane and Nick built seven mechanical tables inspired by table-related wordplay. These are the mirrored Tablerone, the Water Table (a model of the Palace Pier with working rides standing in a rippling sea) and two Aesop’s Tables, showing 1920s animal fable cartoons. The Uns-Table, the Turntable and the 27 Chimes Table all have delightful surprises which I leave to you to discover.
“Until the day before we opened, I still hadn’t worked out a way of putting water in the Water Table. I knew it had to be an oil because water would evaporate. I wanted a transparent oil, but the things I ordered on the net were yellow. And I was in Boots just around the corner and do you know what it was that I spotted? Baby oil! And that baby oil’s been in there for 18 years!”
The front wall of Bom-Bane’s has a bust of Jane with a revolving tray on her head with its own story to tell. Made in 2007 by her brother-in-law, Johnny Justin, it was stolen in 2012, later found in a student garden, minus its hat, and restored in 2017.
Go down the spiral stairway and you reach the basement, the main performance space, its walls covered with paintings and instruments. Although there’s only room for 25 people, it’s a room performers love. Stewart Lee, Bridget Christie, Jerry Dammers and Rich Hall are among the many who have played here.
Bom-Bane’s has a tradition of singing staff, beginning in 2008 with the waitresses Rosi Lalor and Candy Hilton, who Jane discovered were wonderful harmony singers. “I thought I’ve got to harness this, and so I wrote a musical. It was all about the café and how we cooked things, and how I got parsley and coriander mixed up.”
This was the start of the Bom-Bane’s Family Players, who would perform a folk musical written by Jane every May fringe and at Christmas. These often used the whole building, with an audience of just five following a promenade performance from the attic to the basement.
Puppeteer Daisy Jordan, fresh from art college, joined Bom-Bane’s as a dishwasher in 2010, and soon found herself singing and performing puppetry as a member of the family players. Today she says, “I wonder if I would be a performer/puppeteer if it weren’t for Bom-Bane’s.”
Isobel Smith, another puppeteer, had only made one puppet when Jane invited her to put on her first show here. Rosi Lalor, encouraged by Jane to write and perform her songs, has gone on to make two solo albums.
To celebrate the centenary of the crossword in 2013, Jane turned the building into a big crossword puzzle, 5 Down and 20 Across. Her sister, the crossword setter Pegleg, wrote puzzles which were placed on the building’s 20 doors, which had all been turned into black and white paintings by different artists.
I painted one of the doors with the story of the explorer Sir John Franklin’s mysterious disappearance in the Arctic in 1845. By a curious coincidence (or Bom-Bane magic?), Sir John’s ship was discovered a year after I did the painting. This led to me hosting a series of Franklin Disaster Mystery evenings, with Arctic food, Inuit testimony, whale song and Jane as Sir John’s widow singing Franklin ballads.
The current chef is the singer-songwriter, Eliza Skelton. Unlike the waitresses who became singers, she was a singer to begin with. She performs here in the musicals, which she now co-writes, and as a member of the Silver Swans, a madrigal group with Jane and Emma Kilbey. She learned to be a great chef by working in Bom-Bane’s.
In 2008, Eliza and David Bramwell first staged Sing-a-long-a-Wickerman here. Audience members, invited to dress in character, were given a ‘Pagan Hymn Book’, which allowed them to sing along with the songs from the film. Eliza and David take this to festivals and theatres around the country, and still host Folk Horror film screenings in Bom-Bane’s.
Today, Jane spends midweek with her mum in Coventry, and so the café is only open at weekends. It’s staffed by Jane, Eliza and recent recruit Kate Holden. Jane says, “Kate is helping me in the kitchen. She says she’s not musical, but I’m teaching her to play the guitar, and I think she can sing. Most people can sing.” That very evening Kate made her stage debut, accompanying Jane in a song.
We ended by talking about plans for the future. On the anniversary, 1 September, there’s a coming-of-age celebration, with 18 songs sung by Jane and her family of players. “There was a couple in last week who I got talking to. Somehow we got talking about when we first opened here and he said, “Was there anything that you planned to do that you didn’t do?” And I said “Yes, I wanted to make a tap with water music so that when you turned the tap on music came out with your water, but I never got around to it.” And he said, “I’ll do that for you!””
I tell Jane that I think the cultural impact of this little building has been massive. “When you look at it like that, yes, it’s been a springboard for a lot of people that normally wouldn’t do it. It’s because it’s so little and friendly, and that’s what Brighton’s like, isn’t it? It catches you if you fall.”
The Whistler 