Spotify Sundays: Stewart Home on BDSM and Art School Orgies
By Stewart Home
January 2023
Prolific London writer-publisher Stewart Home offers some fetish-themed musical context to accompany his latest novel, Art School Orgy. Stand by for Covent Gardening, stinky stocks, and a hitherto-unconfessed obsession with white boots, as he traces his interest in kink back to the culture of his childhood and teens.
Wayne County and the Electric Chairs – Toilet Love
When I first got into punk rock in the summer of 1976, at the age of 14, I didn’t realise how well popular culture had prepared me for the punk look and attitude. Nonetheless, from superheroes in BDSM drag to the masochism of James Bond, sixties films and TV had set the stage for what I subsequently consumed. While tracks like ‘Venus In Furs’ by The Velvet Underground and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ by The Stooges paved the way for a rock & roll take on fetishism, Wayne (now Jayne) County brought it up to date for me. The Electric Chairs’ 1977 ‘Stuck On You’ exhibited a gay sensibility and interest in fetish than continued with releases like 1978’s Blatantly Offensive EP, which contained ‘Toilet Love’.
Another band whose records were frequently on my stereo when I was in my mid-teens were The Pork Dukes, who specialised in lyrical filth. Their first release ‘Bend & Flush’ trades on the same interests as ‘Toilet Love’. I’m not sure that as an adolescent I fully understood that some people really got off on this stuff: I just thought it was funny. I came across multiple copies of the rubber fetishists’ magazine Atomage in a skip in Covent Garden, which provided me with hours of fun trying to figure out if people really were turned on by the pictures. My main aid in this endeavour was knowing the words to the early Adam and the Ants song ‘Rubber People’.
Adam and the Ants – Whip In My Valise
Sado-masochism and bondage were a key visual influence on the late-seventies London punk look; but many punk songs whose titles suggest they might be addressing fetishes are at best pretty oblique. Think ‘Submission’ by The Sex Pistols, ‘Bondage’ by The Suburban Studs or ‘Feel The Pain’ by The Damned. That said, the original Adam and the Ants were straight down the line with their BDSM words and imagery, as this tune shows. In 1978/1979 they were the best live act regularly playing in London, and I’d go all over the place to see them, sometimes catching them two or even more nights in a row. When they became a pop sensation in the 1980s, I was amused that they filled up the B-sides of their hit records with naughty tunes from their punk rock days.
X-Ray Spex – Oh Bondage Up Yours
Approaching bondage in a similar way to the many reggae tunes that took the Bible as a starting point for their lyrics, X-Ray Spex created a song with more energy and attack than either ‘Whips & Furs’ by The Vibrators or ‘Chains & Leather’ by The Depressions. Spex memorably blew The Clash off stage at the Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park, Hackney, in 1978. Around that time, some friends of mine in a very minor punk band called Revolt were doing this number as ‘Oh Tyndall, Up Yours’, the lyrics changed to an attack on the then leader of the fascist National Front, John Tyndall.
The Sick Things were clearly a lot more into bondage than X-Ray Spex, but from a femdom perspective. I never saw this band live, but I had the track on the 1977 Raw Deal! compilation LP, and span it repeatedly in the late Seventies. I was also repeat-playing songs like ‘Be My Prisoner’ by The Lurkers – and by coincidence the old versions of both The Lurkers and Adam and The Ants played their last gigs on the same bill at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, at the end of 1979. I was, of course, there.
Drug Addix – Gay Boys In Bondage
I snapped up a lot of the vinyl released by Chiswick Records when I was at school, so no surprise I grabbed myself a copy of the EP The Drug Addix Make A Record when it came out, with this as lead track. It was the first record to feature Kirsty McColl (billed as Mandy Doubt) and while it’s supposed to be a Lou Reed parody, the tune sounds suspiciously like Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’. That didn’t stop me from listening to it frequently, aged 16. It took me a lot closer to where I’m going in my most recent work than the femdom lyrics and imagery that were more common then in London punk rock.
Pure Hell – These Boots Are Made For Walking
What impressed me most about all-black Philadelphian punk rock band Pure Hell when I caught them live in London (1978), was that the singer went into a tripod headstand and pushed up into a handstand as part of the act. It must have been at the back of my mind when I decided to liven up the readings I was doing to promote my books by reciting while standing on my head. That said, even before I heard this version, I realised the tune linked up with songs like ‘Kinky Boots’ by Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman. For me ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ always had something to do with foot fetishes, as well as a bit of crossover into stinky sock and sneaker worship!
Oral – Gas Masks, Vicars & Priests
I came across the mini-album Sex, which features this track, while going through a bargain bin back in the Eighties. What attracted my attention was not so much the fetish wear the band were geared up in as the fact one of them was wearing white boots. Confession time: I’ve always had a thing for go-go dancers in white boots. Metal – even pop metal – isn’t really my thing. I bought this Oral release solely for the photo of their drummer in white boots on the cover. But then I found myself getting into their tunes, especially this one.
Adrian Street and the Pile Drivers – Sadist In Sequins
Another big influence on me as a kid was the wrestling on TV’s World Of Sport. Taking up from where Gorgeous George left off, exotic Adrian Street drew out its barely-hidden sexual aspects, and with his junk-shop glam songs exposed the grappling game as having as much to do with BDSM as sport. Street didn’t get around to recording music until the 1980s, which is surprising because he had the glam rock image way before that. And, skipping back a track, the first volume of his autobiography was entitled My Pink Gas Mask.
Ping Pong Bitches – Beat You Up
It was all this Seventies material that really put me on the path to writing my new BDSM extravaganza, Art School Orgy. But, bringing things a bit more up to date, I love the lead track on the Ping Pong Bitches’ first EP (2001), a tune that might be taken as a femdom anthem.
By this time I was in my late-thirties, and my white-boots thing already set in stone – so ‘Beat You Up’ had no real influence on its development. Still: on the cover there they were, geared up in fetish clobber; and once again it was a pair of white boots that caught my attention…
Stewart Home’s ‘literary anti-classic’ Art School Orgy is available now, in no good bookshops. The ‘sickest novel ever published’, it was rejected as too scandalous by all independent publishers, before eventually being released, uncut and uncensored, by New Reality Records.
