Sink your teeth into Dick Jewell’s remastered Kinky Gerlinky archive

“There has never been anything like the nights of Kinky Gerlinky,” Vivienne Westwood once boasted to a reporter. “The entire ballroom filled with thousands [of people] having the time of their lives, looking like you never saw before on the flood tide of their fantasy of fabulous, over-the-top, fun dressing.”

Granted, the late dame of Brit fashion was pretty tight with the owners (and equally admired by the punters), but she was spot on here. Kinky Gerlinky was a singular clubbing experience, a unique coalescing of exquisite fashion, great tunes and grand exhibitionism held in the heart of London’s West End. “There was nothing like it around,” says filmmaker Dick Jewell, who has recently taken on the noble task of digitising his archival tapes of the debaucherous party, running from 1989 to 1994, which are now available to rent online for the first time ever. Having been approached repeatedly about his archive over the years, Jewell thought that granting the world a rare look into a bygone era of London’s queer clubbing history might be the perfect place to start.

Kinky Gerlinky was the brainchild of fashionable counterculture duo Gerlinde and Michael Costiff, who were keen to bring some of the hedonism overspilling from Susanne Bartsch’s infamous New York club nights to London. As noted by resident DJ Princess Julia, what made Kinky Gerlinky special was its wholehearted embrace of queer Harlem’s ball culture, providing a space for creative performance while also nurturing the UK capital’s flourishing drag and design scenes.

Aware of Jewell’s work chronicling subculture on the dancefloor, from body-poppers at Camden’s Jazz Cafe to the lithe breakdancing at Spatts, it was Gerlinde who invited him to capture the night’s festivities on film. Jewell had recently shot The Rise of Neneh Cherry (1989) and charmed by his new Video8 camera, which allowed far lengthier recording, he accepted her invitation. “It was a different approach because you were liberated from that three-minute reel,” says Jewell, “and nowhere was off limits in terms of filming.”

There was never any set plan for the series, nor the documentary that it spawned, Jewell tells me over the phone from his studio in Pimlico. “I just went along [to Kinky Gerlinky] with a friend to hold a light behind me, and immediately people were asking me, ‘Where can we buy the video?’”

Jewell quickly got to work editing the antics he’d captured underneath the disco ball, stocking his tapes in ticket-selling establishments such as BOY London on Old Compton Street, and Michael and Gerlinde’s own cult clothing store, World. “People would watch [the tapes] while they were getting ready for each Kinky,” says Jewell, “but what intrigued me was that people would respond directly to things said in the last episode. In that sense, it became a living document.”

Having shot well over 200 hours of footage during his three-year period chronicling the club, from balls judged by Jean Paul Gaultier, and impromptu catwalks served up by Naomi Campbell (in AW92 Alaia, no less) and Gerlinky’s energetic compère Winn Austin, to performances from the likes of Sinead O’Connor, Amanda Lear and RuPaul, you can only imagine what ended up on the cutting room floor. The original edit of Kinky’s Groovy Garden Party (Episode 15), for instance, had to do without all of its Pete Burns footage, per The Dead or Alive singer’s request after watching the tapes back. We’ll never know what irritated the admittedly image-conscious icon, but luckily for us Jewell has since returned the footage to its rightful place in the digitised cut.

For those unfamiliar with the famed club night, the filmmaker recommends jumping into the series halfway through. It was around this time that Jewell upped the ante with extra cameramen to catch all the revelry, editing the night exactly as it ensued – from trips to the powder room to hearts-to-hearts in the smokers – involved not as a voyeur but a clubber himself. “I’ve never liked fly-on-the-wall filming, that’s never been my approach,” he says. “I wouldn’t go and hassle people, they would come to me. At Kinky, people were desperate to be on camera.”

“I wouldn’t go and hassle people, they would come to me. At Kinky, people were desperate to be on camera” – Dick Jewell 

And in their finery, you can hardly blame them. The staircase leading into the ballroom was its own red carpet, and the first point of contact for Jewell and his crew when the night began. As clubbers passed through from the entrance, the most exhibitionistic of the bunch would flash barely-there undergarments at the cameras before disappearing into a sea of feather boas, bolshy S&M gear and imitation Gaultier cone bras. “There was a strict dress code,” says Jewell of the night’s reputation as a style hub, “if you weren’t dressed right, you didn’t get in. Though there were one or two exceptions to the rule.”

If you were to ask Jewell who he thought was the most stylish attendee, Leigh Bowery would take the cake every time, though you might notice he’s absent from all of this introductory peacocking. “Leigh would still be getting ready in the cab at the time,” Jewell laughs, “he was always one of the last to arrive.”

In its six-year reign, Kinky Gerlinky bounced all over the West End with residencies in Cafe De Paris and Shaftsbury’s, even making a pitstop inside the hallowed halls of The Haçienda in 1992. But the night found its true home in Leicester Square’s grand Empire Ballroom. Fit with a rotating stage, Europe’s largest dancefloor (at the time) and, according to Jewell, plenty of dark corners to get lost in, there was no better location for such a romp. Once the filmmaker even brought his one-year-old along with him, before a complaint was lodged with the management that put an abrupt stop to the nascent days of baby raving.

For all the exhibitionism on show, there are many moments of sincerity too. In the background of these strobe-lit frolics, Kinky Gerlinky was a haven for the queers of London dealing with life in the wake of Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, for which deaths and diagnoses wouldn’t peak in the UK until 1994. The empassioned MC Kinky reflects on the outrageous state of it all during the interview segment of Dazzle Ball, which used the night’s takings to raise funds for AIDS charities London Limehouse and London Landmark. But before things get a chance to turn too sombre, in walks Leigh Bowery dressed as a toilet lid, talking about the last time he’d been rimmed (which, funnily enough, was in the bogs at the previous Kinky Gerlinky).

“It was very much a fashion crowd,” says Jewell of the many famous faces, from Rifat Ozbek to Alexander McQueen and Sara Stockbridge, known to frequent the night. “But the other beautiful thing [was] a celebrity could almost feel anonymous within the club, because everybody else was dressed up to the nines. You’d have the cast of Coronation Street in there and [no one] would take a blind bit of notice, you know?”

At its peak, Gerlinky was attracting revellers from across the globe, from Essex to Australia, each clubber hungrier than the next to see what all the fuss was about. And though Kinky Gerlinky would shut its doors for good in 1994, following the sudden death of Gerlinde, its palpable energy still lives on in the memories of loyal patrons and an entirely new generation of curious clubgoers. Jewell too has worked hard to preserve the festivities, revisiting this glamorous world in artworks like London Snog (1995) and My Friends of My Kinky Gerlinky MySpace (2007), even going as far to carve out an entire loft space for his footage at a Margate exhibition entitled Dick’s In The House back in 2021.

“We’ve lost a lot of people since then, so that whole sense of nostalgia for others is something lovely to be able to give them,” Jewell says of the project’s bittersweet nature. “I just wish someone had been able to film me when I was a young clubber.” Who knows what they would’ve caught…

Dick Jewell’s Kinky Gerlinky series is available to rent and stream now on Vimeo.