The Scotsman
06 January 2006
IT’S 11:30pm on the sort of evening when your warmest coat doesn’t keep out the chill. Outside a nightclub on Edinburgh’s Blair Street, however, stands a shivering queue of Playboy bunnies and women in vintage cocktail frocks, snaking its way out of sight along the Cowgate.
This is the launch of Club Noir in Edinburgh, a night that promises to be rather different from the average crowd of casually dressed students and twentysomething clubbers.
Entering the basement club, I pass a sultry girl with a feather boa and cigarette holder, chatting to a boy in a classic 1970s tux. Further down, a middle-aged couple in matching black leather outfits prop up the bar.
I’ve come to find out why Britain’s clubbing scene is enjoying a return not just to glamour but to the saucy, retro glamour of burlesque. I head to the performers’ dressing room, where things are getting more interesting by the minute. Vanity Kills, whose stage act involves elegantly pouring Champagne down her naked but strategically bejewelled body, is energetically applying body glitter. She looks up and compliments fellow performer Missy Malone on the Agent Provocateur peephole bra she’s wearing. “Thanks,” Missy replies. “But I can’t get my nipple tassels to stick on now! I put baby oil on first without thinking.”
Vanity rolls her eyes and gives a knowing nod: baby oil and tit tape do not work together. Alongside Missy, twin sisters Tina and Bunny are getting ready to appear on stage.
Tina is dressed as a saucy cigarette-vendor in a pink latex dress, and heads off to mingle with the gathering crowd, leaving her sister to squeeze into a black rubber outfit.
Ian Single, Club Noir’s organiser, is overseeing proceedings. He describes Club Noir as a mix of “playful eroticism, comic theatre and performance art”. But before anyone gets the wrong impression, he says, brandishing a diamanté-studded whip, “the tease should always outweigh the sleaze”.
Single has been amazed at the popularity of his burlesque night, with crowds of 850 turning out for the existing Club Noir night in Glasgow: “We get a real mix of people - everyone is welcome. The important thing is to have fun. We get a lot of thirty and fortysomethings who thought their clubbing days were over, but come to our nights because they love the music and an excuse to really dress up.”
Trainers and jeans are banned here. Apart from that, anything goes. To keep the colourful mix of lounge lizards and retro fans happy, the playlist is eclectic - as we wait for the stage show to begin, a Goldfrapp track slides into a 1950s Rat Pack number.
The live acts begin with a rubber-clad pussycat, followed by a stripping prom queen and a French maid on stilts.
“We want it to be sexy, without being taken too seriously,” says Single. And therein lies the difference between burlesque and straightforward stripping acts. Where one is blatant nudity, the other is slap-and-tickle playful with style and humour.
Miss Lily White has been performing burlesque since 1999, and says anyone who thinks it’s smutty and aimed only at men is missing the point. “The word ‘burlesque’ means to send up or parody, and burlesque has always included a certain element of humour.”
White thinks women love the sheer sauciness of the show, and the fact that all body shapes and sizes are celebrated.
London-based Lily, 33, who performs regularly at the hugely successful Whoopee Club in there, frequently gets her corset and fishnets on for Scottish club nights, such as Vegas or Edinburgh Festival revues. “Scotland has always been really up for this sort of thing. 2005 was a massive year for burlesque: there were four burlesque shows in the Fringe.”
She says the recent surge in interest is a response to what she describes as “in-your-face sex - lapdancing bars and [the like]“, and the fact audiences associate burlesque with a bygone era: “Burlesque nights tend to be pretty classy affairs, with cocktails and elegance. It’s pure escapism.”
Burlesque began in the Victorian era, as a backlash to the seedier, more overt strip acts being performed in America and Europe at the end of the 1800s.
The Moulin Rouge, the world’s oldest and perhaps most famous cabaret, opened in 1889 to fill a gap in the market. It offered a titillating blend of leggy ladies and elaborate costumes as an alternative to brazen stripshows in the bars nearby. The audience enjoyed a bit of entertainment and teasing, and often preferred it when the dancers stayed covered up with tassels or frills.
By the 1920s, the artform had grown legs, so to speak. Gypsy Rose Lee’s coy and comic dance routines put the tease into stripping. Where previously the humour was smutty and lowbrow, Lee’s gimmick was to draw out her act, peppering it with witty one-liners. Her motto was: “Make ‘em beg for more. Then don’t give ‘em it.”
Berlin’s cabaret scene flourished in the 1930s, followed by Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 40s and 50s. It was the heyday for burlesque stars such as Bettie Page, Tempest Storm and Lili St Cyr, who all shot to stardom with killer pouts and wasp-like waists.
But by the 1960s burlesque was all but over. “Sex was suddenly everywhere,” explains White. “Men didn’t have to pay to see legs and boobs any more.”
Sexual liberation and free love sounded the death knell for burlesque, and the nipple tassels and frilly knickers were confined to the back of the wardrobe.
But over the last five years, thanks to films such as Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, the hit stage musical Chicago and Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour, burlesque has been enjoying a renaissance.
“When I started out, and was trying to get my act into clubs, no-one knew what burlesque was,” says White. “Now, every magazine I pick up has something about burlesque.”
One of the flag-fliers for old-fashioned pin-up glamour is Dita Von Teese - the curvy brunette bride of Marilyn Manson - whose sex-kitten style has made her one of America’s most successful modern burlesque artistes. Her tribute to striptease dancer Lili St Cyr, where she takes a Champagne bath in a see-through tub, is now her trademark. Then came the Pussycat Dolls, the pop sirens who started out as burlesque dancers. And the new film Mrs Henderson Presents shows Judi Dench as the owner of London’s Windmill Theatre, which became famous in the 1930s for its sexy nude revues. Nostalgia, it seems, is very much of the moment.
Although Single and his business partner, Tina Warren - the latex twin from the Club Noir dressing room - didn’t set out to cash in on the zeitgeist for old-fashioned glamour, they admit the timing has been perfect.
“We’d seen burlesque clubs in London about two years ago, and thought it was a shame there was nothing like this going on in Scotland,” says Warren. “Even we have been totally taken aback by how popular the club is.”
At last - a place where it’s perfectly acceptable to wear a fur coat and nae knickers.
For more information on Club Noir, see clubnoir.co.uk