"I first met Leigh when he made some stage clothes for me. Of course, I’d seen him and Trojan around the clubs. How could you miss them? I went over to Leigh’s kitsch council flat in the East End. It was surreal. Leigh was in his Benny Hill day look: shop dummy wig and child molester clothes, surrounded by all this swirling 1970s bad taste. I had heard that he was an evil witch but thought he was a doll. Actually, I was in awe of him. Leigh made me two floor-length A-line coats. One was covered in gold hairgrips and the other had huge angel wings jutting out the back. They made me look fatter, which was probably deliberate. Leigh didn’t have the same size prejudices as the rest of us. He celebrated his fleshy proportions and turned them into a gorgeous fashion statement.
"I think that’s what I loved about him most: he pushed it in your face. Like the night he swanned into Daisy Chain in a puff-ball face mask, sequined boots with a matching push-up bra. Except for those garish trimmings, he was butt naked. A fake vagina rug hid his manhood, which I am told was substantial. Rachel Auburn said it was like a huge bruised banana. I remember staring at his big butt and thinking how brave he was and that he was quite sexy because of it. There is no question that Leigh was hiding himself behind all that spook drag, but still it was revolutionary. The rest of us used drag and makeup to disguise our blemishes and physical defects. Leigh made them the focal point of his art.
"I suppose some people thought of him as a ridiculous attention seeker, which he was, but there was so much more. He was a brilliant fashion designer, art director and master of disguise. When he played the role of a prostitute in my video Generations of Love, directed by Baillie Walsh, he became the part. I know he could have been an outstanding actor if he had desired. Leigh hadn’t even begun to tap into his creative potential. That’s why he has to be remembered. A journalist at The Guardian once asked me if Leigh could seriously be called art. I said that if a pile of bricks can be called art, then Leigh most definitely can.
"How perfect that he died – a visual high. Refusing to be just another AIDS statistic, Leigh ordered his close friends to tell the world that he wasn’t in the hospital but has gone to farm pigs in Bolivia or gone on holiday to New Guinea – no Darwin death-bed turnarounds for Leigh Bowery. When I heard Leigh had died, I cried. Just like I cried when my teenage idol Marc Bolan hit that tree. The world had lost another couture icon, another mirror ball.
"Goodbye, butterfly. Goodbye, Satan’s child." – Boy George
from the album "Cheapness and Beauty"
Look at you you’re insecure
Running down the street
Screaming for attention
Jokers lips and padded hips
Everybody’s laughing
But you don’t care
You’re sick and you’re twisted
Irreverent, so beautiful
Look at me don’t stare
I’m already out there
Goodbye butterfly
Goodbye Satan’s child
Ah look at you you’ve got no shame
Enemas, blood, cocaine
Caviar and piss
Disco monster terrorist
Hanging in the Tate with
Turner and Van Gogh
Tell me pretty fat boy
Is there something you don’t show
Look at me don’t stare
I’m already out there
Goodbye butterfly
Goodbye Satan’s child
We love the big girls
With tattoos on their wrist
Sweet toys with lost eyes
And big red lips
Give me sadness and badness
Don’t ever bring me round
Elevator going up
Reality is a come down
Goodbye butterfly
Goodbye Satan’s child
Goodbye
• March 1961 Born in Sunshine, Australia, the son of Tom and Evelyn Bowery.
• 1966-1978 Attends Sunshine Primary at Junior Schools, Sunshine West High School and Melbourne High School
• 1978-1979 Studies fashion design at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology October.
• 1980 Moves to London.
• January 1981 Visits first London nightclub (Blitz).
• Spring 1981-1982 Works the nightshift at Burger King, The Strand.
• 1982 Meets Trojan (Guy Barnes). Cerith Wyn Evans, Baillie Walsh, John Maybury and Richard Torry; with Trojan, moves into a council flat In London’s East End: sells clothes at Kensington Market.
• 1983 Performs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, as part of Performing Clothes Week
• 1983-1984 Travels to New York and Japan to present his clothes in fashion shows organized by Susanne Bartsch.
• 1984 Performs for the first time (with Trojan) at Hall Mary Club, London.
• September 1984 Appears (with Trojan) in i-D magazine for the first time.
• 1983/1984 Meets Boy George: meets dancer and choreographer Michael Clark at club night Circus.
• 1984-1986 Creates costumes for Michael Clark’s Flipin ‘eck Oh Thweet Mythery of Life, New Puritan, Our Coca Phoney H and No Fire Escape in Hell.
• 31 January 1985 With club entrepreneur Tony Gordon, opens Taboo in Leicester Square, London.
• 1985 At Taboo, meets Nicola Bateman, who begins to work for Bowery on his designs. South of Watford, a 30-minute television documentary about Bowery, is broadcast. Trojan moves in with filmmaker John Maybury; customizes Levi’s jacket for a charity auction to the Victoria at Albert Museum, London.
• 1986 Angus Cook introduces Bowery to painter Lucian Freud at Taboo; Taboo closes down; Trojan dies of an accidental drug overdose.
• September 1986 Performs at Riverside Studios In Hey Luciano by The Falls Mark E, Smith.
• February 1987 Returns to Australia for the first time as a member of Michael Clark’s dance company in Because We Must, Melbourne Town Hall.
• 1988 Meets master corset maker Pearl (nee Marc Erskine-Pullen); performs in the window of Parco department store Tokyo, wearing a different costume each day; performs in John Maybury’s short film Read Only Memory performs (with Nicola Bateman and Pearl) at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and presents a weeklong solo performance at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery; London Bowery is diagnosed HIV positive; meets photographer Fergus Greer and begins six-year collaboration on studio portraits.
• 1989 Performs in Michael Clark’s Heterospectlve at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London; Bowery again meets Lucian Freud.
• 1990 Begins to model for Freud, appears as a prostitute in the video for Boy George’s single Generations of Love, directed by Baillie Walsh; art directs the video for Massive Attack’s single Unfinished Sympathy.
• 1992 Performs at the club Kinky Gerlinky, London, and in Michael Clark’s mmm (or Michael Clark’s Modern Masterpiece) King’s Cross, London; appears as a dancer on BBC Television’s Top of the Pops (with Nicola Bateman); forms pop group The Quality Street Wrappers with Stella Stein and Sheila Tequila, which performs at the Iceni, The Fridge and then, as Raw Sewage, at the Cafe de Paris, London; assists Cerith Wyn Evans teaching at the Architectural Association, London.
• 1992 Begins to collaborate on videos with New York artist and filmmaker Charles Atlas, a long-time collaborator with Michael Clark.
• 1993 Raw Sewage performs at the Love Ball. Amsterdam; Bowery performs (with Nicola Bateman) in New York at the Wigstock Festival and at the club Jackie 60; portrays Madame Garbo in The Homosexual (or The Difficulty of Sexpressing Oneself) by Copi at Bagley’s Studio, King’s Cross, London, and The Tramway, Glasgow; appears at loshua Compston’s Fete Worse Than Death, Hoxton Square, London (with Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst).
• 1993 Forms the band Minty (with Richard Torry, Nicola Bateman and Matthew Glammore), which performs at Smashing, London, and The Tunnel, Glasgow, including the infamous birth performance.
• 1993-1994 Works with fashion designer Rifat Ozbek.
• 1994 Performs with Richard Torry and Nicola Bateman at Fort Asperen, Holland.
• May 13, 1994 Marries Nicola Bateman.
• 1994 Minty performs at the Love Ball, Amsterdam, and at loshua Compston’s second Fete Worse Than Death, Hoxton Square, London.
• November 24, 1994 Minty plays the first night of a two-week residency at The Freedom Cafe, Wardour Street, London
• November 25, 1994 Minty residency is cancelled by Westminster Council.
• December 31, 1994 Bowery dies in Middlesex Hospital, London; soon after, he is buried in Australia alongside his mother.
• 1995 Memorial exhibition is held at the Fine Arts Society, New Bond Street. London, organized by Johnnie Shand Kydd.
• 1997 Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, a biography by Bowery’s close friend Sue Tilley, is published by Hodder Stoughton, London.
• March 20, 1998 A profile of Bowery by Hilton Als is published in The New Yorker.
• July 1998 Leigh Bowery, An Illustrated Monograph, is published by Violette Editions, London.
• 2000-2001 Charles Atlas films and directs a documentary about Bowery .
• January 2002 Taboo, a musical by Boy George about the 1980s London club scene, opens and includes Leigh Bowery among its characters.
• Summer 2002 A touring exhibition of Fergus Greer’s portrait photographs of Leigh Bowery opens in London. – Excerpted from the book Looks by Fergus Greer