It’s been half a century since Ziggy Stardust and Frank N Furter, two of glam rock’s most iconic characters, first graced the London stage. Their rise to fame might seem straightforward, even predestined, but delve a little deeper into their pasts and you’ll find that the births of Ziggy and Frank were far from simple or fortuitous. We could attribute their lasting impact to the shared mentor who inspired both icons, or perhaps it was the co-incidental appearance of the same creatives that shaped their artistic paths. In this article, we’ll unravel the threads that bind these enduring icons, exploring how they managed to transcend their era and genre.
Contents
October 20th, 1973. London. A duet, I Got You Babe, was crashing towards its climax. One performer was dressed as the front half of a nun, whilst the other resembled the Angel of Death. Apposite, really. As the applause faded, the Angel tottered from the stage marking the moment in rock and roll history as the last public appearance of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust.
Co-incidentally, on the same day, just three miles away from Ziggy’s last performance, The Rocky Horror Show’s triumphant run at the former Chelsea Picture Playhouse reaped the applause of its last audience. Tim Curry’s Frank N Furter exited the stage and walked past the bulldozers that were queuing to demolish the building.
Despite the seemingly simultaneous finality which happened fifty years ago, Ziggy and Frank survived to become two of glam rock’s most iconic characters. Yet the fascinating story of their creation is one of similarity and co-incidence.
The brutality of glam rock.
The sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll of the late 1960s continued to fuel creativity and open possibilities well into the 70s, leading to dramatic shifts in music, art and theatre. By 1973, the UK’s mainstream was an ever-evolving soundtrack of harsh rock riffs and stomping rhythms, performed by pastiche caricatures that blended flamboyant theatrics, outrageous makeup and traffic-stopping fashions. The result was a brief moment of heterogeneous pop-art-rock which eventually became known as glam rock, a brutal period, claiming the scalps of many music careers.
To create glam’s artifice required more than eye-liner and a glittery hat. Glam was about notoriety, stardom and greatness. It needed over-the-top brazen performances to blend music, fashion and art into a technicolour concoction which hooked the younger generation away from the blandness their parents endured. Glam also bulldozed established boundaries of sexuality, behaviour and authenticity. Many artistes who insincerely attempted to re-Glam their careers with only a slightly shinier costume were ridiculed, ignored and didn’t survive. Glam’s essence was a blend of music and theatrics, leading some of the movements most respected players to invoke characterisation and create domineering identities that overflowed with the multi-faceted decadence which the era required.
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Richard O’Brien’s Frank N Furter, share more than 1970s celebrity filled audiences. They thrived within glam’s structured mix of theatre, music and make-up, teasing the masses with an authoritarian pansexual power-play between the audience and the stage. Their creation was, arguably, experimental but fortunate enough to be executed with perfect timing. In short, Ziggy and Frank were the right characters, in the right place at the right time, but their success and subsequent longevity are much more than mere luck. Years before success hit, their foundations were forged by the same person, whose methods and techniques permeated directly into the originators of both characters. If it were possible to DNA test Ziggy Stardust and Frank N Furter, we’d discover that they were brothers.
The problematic births of Ziggy Stardust and Frank N Furter.
Chronologically, Ziggy is Frank’s older brother. He first appeared onstage on the 10th February 1972 at the Toby Jug pub, Tolworth London. Sixteen months later, on the 19th June 1973, while Ziggy was performing in Southhampton, Frank emerged for the first time in front of a paying audience at the Royal Court Theatre (Upstairs) in Sloane Square. To their respective audiences, Ziggy and Frank strutted around a stage with a domineering arrogance of sexual recklessness, backed by a throbbing band banging out hook leaden rock and roll tunes.
As with many of their glam contemporaries, Ziggy and Frank were a confluence of tropes from bygone decades. In a 2002 edition of MOJO magazine, David Bowie cited Vince Taylor as one of the dominant influences behind Ziggy, but others have suggested that Iggy Pop, himself a creation of James Osterberg, is as important. Over the years, Bowie would attribute Ziggy’s influences to many others, including Burroughs, Dada and Dietrich. Frank’s origins are less subtle. Science Fiction, Double Feature, Rocky Horror’s opener, is a B-Movie roll call of classic films of the genre, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Invisible Man and Flash Gordon. Richard O’Brien’s formative years were spent at a local cinema, absorbing diabolical science-fiction movies or nose down in comic books featuring Captain Marvel, Nick Fury and Dr Strange.
Cultural influences aside, there is also a truth that both Ziggy and Frank were just another attempt by Bowie and O’Brien to find work. Until the early 70s, David Bowie’s career trajectory had weaved from music to acting and back again. He’d been in a band, fronted a band, in a duo, in a trio, ditched, hired, re-ditched and re-hired, all whilst releasing around 17 UK singles. Although Bowie experimented with various musical identities, none had given him the success that he craved. Ironically, two of Bowie’s four pre-Ziggy albums, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, would eventually become beloved by fans and critics, but were largely ignored until after Ziggy had conquered the world. If the Ziggy experiment had failed, we would remember Bowie as the one-hit-wonder guy who sang Space Oddity.
Similarly, Richard O’Brien arrived back in England in 1964 after growing up in New Zealand. His first acting role, technically as a stuntman because of his ability to handle a horse, was in Carry on Cowboy in 1965. In the day, he’d work jobs as a dustman or barber to earn the money to attend evening acting classes, which earned him a small part in the 1967 Bond spoof, Casino Royale. He appeared in the original London production of Hair in 1968, touring the show extensively before appearing in several other forgettable productions. He joined the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972 and disaster struck, as described by O’Brien in 1987:
“At one point, they asked me to take over as Herod, but I knew I was wrong for the role. I went on for one night and was fired”.
At the dawn of the 70s, neither Bowie nor O’Brien were certain of their futures. Each tried conventional and convoluted approaches to their art forms, but success remained tantalisingly beyond their reach.
Ziggy, Frank and The Maids
O’Brien’s director in Jesus Christ Superstar was Jim Sharman, who left the production to stage the first London production of The Unseen Hand by Sam Shepard. A love of horror, B-movies and comic books inspired Shepard’s play, leading Sharman to ask sci-fi fanatic O’Brien to play the roll of Willie, the alien traveller from another galaxy. Jim Sharman was gaining a reputation for staging theatrical productions which were experimental. By the age of 21, he’d already staged Don Giovanni on a huge chess board and an avant-garde production of The Maids by Jean Genet.
The Maids is a thread which runs through the genesis of both Ziggy Stardust and Frank N Furter. It’s based on the true story of the Papin sisters, who were convicted of murdering their employer in 1933. In Genet’s play, the maids, named Claire and Solange, engage in a nightly ritual where they plot fantastical schemes to murder their mistress, The Madame. The thread began with Sharman’s production, staged at Potts Point, Australia back in 1966, but continued ten thousand miles away at Glasgow’s Citizen’s Theatre in October 1971. That production of The Maids wasn’t directed by Sharman, but a pioneering dancer, performer and mime called Lindsay Kemp.
Lindsay Kemp: The father of Ziggy Stardust?
Kemp had always danced, training with Hilde Holger, the famous pioneer of expressionist dance and legendary mime artist, Marcel Marceau. Years before his 1971 production of The Maids, he formed his own dance company and staged many productions around the country. By 1967, Kemp’s career was blossoming with a desire to create his own shows and form creative collaborations. He began teaching at London’s Dance Centre and one of his early students was David Bowie.
In 1967, Bowie was bouncing around, trying to find a gimmick which worked. On 1st June, he released his modestly titled debut album, David Bowie, with typical bad timing. Five days earlier, The Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and no other act stood a chance. The bizarre blend of tracks on Bowie’s album includes a mix of music hall stories, baroque-pop fusion and macabre spoken word. Thematically, they’re a series of characterisations covering themes of childhood reminiscence before descending into drug abuse, cannibalism and totalitarianism.
Bowie told Q Magazine in 1990:
Lyrically I guess it was striving to be something, the short story teller. Musically, it’s quite bizarre. I don’t know where I was at. It seemed to have its roots all over the place, in rock and vaudeville and music hall and I don’t know what. I didn’t know if I was Max Miller or Elvis Presley.
In David Bowie : A life by Dylan Jones, Lindsay Kemp said:
He was considering giving up music altogether and going out to a monastery on the borders of Scotland. He had been studying Buddhism very seriously for a few years. He really thought that music had given him up. He wasn’t getting anywhere when I met him.
Accounts of how Bowie and Kemp’s relationship developed over the years are often contradictory, but what’s true is that Bowie became the pupil to Kemp’s master, learning the art of performance, dance and mime which culminated in a production of Pierrot In Turquoise at Oxford New Theatre before a short UK tour, for which Bowie wrote a handful of songs.
In his infamous 1972 interview with Michael Watts in Melody Maker, Bowie said of his meeting with Kemp,
“It was as magical as Buddhism, and I completely sold out and became a city creature. I suppose that’s when my interest in image really blossomed”.
Kemp himself had many aesthetic influences, but the one that intrigued Bowie was Kabuki, a form of theatre from Japan. Kemp showed that Kabuki’s blend of stylised performance, lavish costuming and elaborate make-up could be adapted and incorporated into contemporary staging, leading Bowie to later describe Kabuki as:
“The most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life”.
In his time with Kemp, Bowie learned it was possible to combine disparate artistic disciplines and project these to an audience through characterisation and performance.
Bowie continued to perform mime based showcases around the country, eventually taking his leave of Kemp’s tutelage to form a mixed-media troupe with Hermione Farthingale and John Hutchinson called Feathers. When Bowie’s manager decided it was time to restart his music career, a 30 minute promo was filmed to showcase his versatility. 1968’s Love You Till Tuesday features video shorts to accompany many of the tracks from the failed David Bowie album in addition to new ones from Feathers, Space Oddity and a Kemp-inspired mime performance called, The Mask. Once again, Bowie’s career didn’t take off, but there’s no denying his character-based theatricality and presentation was drawing on the skills he’d learned from Lindsay Kemp.
Lindsay Kemp: The father of Frank N Furter?
Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre was a venue infamous for its controversial stagings. In 1970, a production of Hamlet caused outrage for its nudity and naturally, not an empty seat was to be found for the entire run. Kemp’s acceptance to direct the 1971 production of The Maids was on the condition that he could hand-pick his actors from the Citizens’ rep company. He cast Rupert Frazer as The Madame, James Aubrey as Claire and a relatively unknown actor as Solange, Tim Curry.
Genet’s directions state that the three characters are played as grotesques and Kemp’s methods on the actors were revelatory. In his memoir, Relative Times, Rupert Frazer recalls:
This immersion in Lindsay’s world took transformation to another level. Kicking and screaming, the woman inside me was born. She was a monster – cruel, ambitious, beautiful. I had – and still have – no idea from whence she came but Lindsay had seen her, lurking, all along.
Assisting Kemp with theatrical design was Sue Blane. She combined Genet’s requirements for grotesque with Kemp’s directions for sexual misadventure and murder, creating costumes of patched PVC and safety pins to complement the actor’s make-up smeared faces. For Solange, they dressed Curry in a basque, put on in reverse, with a discoloured towel around his upper arm as a drug-addicts tourniquet. This sat below a tattoo of a heart being pierced by a dagger, symbolic of the love Solange can never have. Although the Citizen’s production of The Maids only ran for a few weeks, its legacy would last decades.
How Genet’s Solange became Curry’s Frank N Furter
During the run of the Unseen Hand, O’Brien spoke to Jim Sharman about his idea for a rock musical. Co-incidentally, Sharman had already written and directed a 1972 movie called Shirley Thompson vs. The Aliens, which explores the topics of aliens invading the earth in true B-movie fashion. O’Brien’s musical idea, They Came from Denton High, was of great interest to Sharman. Together they persuaded theatre producer Michael White to put up the money and it was booked into the same space as the Unseen Hand, the Royal Court Theatre (Upstairs).
O’Brien began writing songs and lacing the script with references to the comic books, horror files and B-movies that both he and Sharman adored. They renamed the production as The Rocky Horror Show and casting began. In April 1973, O’Brien bumped into Tim Curry, a fellow Hair alumnus and pitched Rocky. Curry auditioned for Sharman, singing Tutti Frutti by Little Richard and was immediately offered the lead role, not the titular Rocky, but the mysterious Dr Frank N Furter. Frank intrigued Curry. He told After Dark in 1975:
“It takes a certain amount of courage to play Frank. But the only thing I’m sure about as a performer is that you have to be dangerous. If you’re going to take a risk, take a big one. Give as much blood as you can.”
The look of Frank initially caused problems. Curry’s hair was dyed blue and he gave Frank an American accent, which everyone agreed, just didn’t work. Then fate intervened. Jim Sharman had persuaded an up-and-coming costume designer to join The Rocky Horror Show. It was Sue Blane, from Kemp’s production of The Maids. Instinctively, she knew what needed to be done:
Jim and I got along like a house on fire. While he was outlining the plot we got incredibly drunk and then went around to the Royal Court Theatre. When I realised that Tim Curry and some other friends of mine were going to be in it, I thought, ‘Oh, this is beginning to sound like a wonderful idea.’
Blane dashed back to Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, returning to London with Curry’s Solange costume from The Maids. This time, the basque was fitted correctly with Blane’s sequined embellishments to add some pizazz. Curry’s natural hair was kept, as was the stained tourniquet. On Frank’s arm, Solange’s heart and dagger tattoo was recreated and, as Rupert Frazer’s memoir states, the link from Kemp’s Solange to Curry’s origination of O’Brien’s Frank N Furter is undeniable.
“Tim Curry is on record as saying that playing Solange in The Maids, paved the way for his Frank N Furter, just one year later, in the worldwide hit The Rocky Horror Show. Without the one, he said, there couldn’t have been the other.”
Relative Times, by Rupert Frazer.
Although Ziggy and Frank are characters and perhaps even caricatures, they operated in different ways. Ziggy Stardust was a Bowie creation, performed by Bowie whereas Frank N Furter’s creation belongs to O’Brien but the origination was by Tim Curry. Both Bowie and Curry were schooled in performative arts by Lindsay Kemp and they used his teaching to bring Ziggy and Frank to life. Ziggy’s stage presence was a continuous movement of dance, theatre and mime. Bowie introduced elements of Kabuki into Ziggy’s shows, particularly hikinuki, the technique of changing costume whilst on-stage, before the live audience. Celebrated Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto was commissioned to design exotic yet purposeful stage costumes to facilitate Ziggy’s hikinuki transitions in order to continually mesmerise the audience with a daring array of costumes whilst keeping Bowie centre stage for the maximum amount of time.
When Curry hit the stage as Frank, he used Kemp’s Solange to home in on the egotist, the sexual misdemeanours and abuse of others which O’Brien had characterised. The original Rocky production wasn’t staged under a proscenium arch, but on a thrust-stage setup, like a rock concert. Curry worked the crowd, smashed the 4th wall and embodied the domineering madness of O’Brien’s creation whilst performing some of the most enduring songs ever heard in musical theatre. It’s telling that the later incarnations of Frank N Furter, staged in productions around the world, are still imitations of Curry’s original characterisation. Somewhere tonight, in a production of The Rocky Horror Show, the spectre of Kemp’s 1971 Solange is dominating a stage.
Ziggy Stardust and Lindsay Kemp reunite at The Rainbow.
By 1972, the Ziggy concept was working and delivering the rewards and recognition that Bowie had sought for almost a decade. He’d perfected Ziggy’s vestige to ensure that he looked like no other. Make-up was managed by himself or Angie Bowie. Freddie Buretti, ensured Ziggy was rarely seen twice in the same outfit whilst Suzi Fussey maintained the signature fire-engine red mullet. Ziggy’s on-stage performance was a showcase for the skills which Bowie had absorbed from his time with Lindsay Kemp and their creative relationship was yet to take its last bow.
In August 1972, Bowie played the 3000 seat Finsbury Park Astoria Cinema, more famously known as The Rainbow Theatre. Paul Trynka’s book, Starman, explains what was planned:
He had planned a series of innovations: choreography by Lindsay Kemp, a multi-level set and Warhol-style projections. David’s focus was unrelenting; he’d selected the venue, the look of the lighting and staging, using techniques he’d seen employed in Cabaret. The look seamlessly incorporated Warhol, Jean Genet and Jailhouse Rock.
On the night, Ziggy Stardust and Lindsay Kemp performed alongside one another once again. Kemp’s archivist, Suzanne Skelton mentioned to me about another link into the past which was worn that night. Kemp’s costume:
[It’s] The Madame in The Maids and Divine in Flowers. Basically [he] wore the same costume. In the Kemp company, things were very fluid.
Bizarrely, the very costume worn by Rupert Frazer in Kemp’s The Maids in Glasgow, which had played alongside Curry’s Solange, was worn by Lindsey Kemp alongside Bowie’s Ziggy.
Behind the scenes, Bowie’s management MainMan was already working on breaking Ziggy in the USA. The plan was to create the most expensive and elaborate artwork for Bowie’s next album, Aladdin Sane. For the plan to work, Ziggy’s look needed to evolve and the architect chosen to take on the task was the French make-up designer, Pierre La Roche.
Pierre La Roche and Brian Duffy turn Ziggy Stardust into Aladdin Sane.
In January 1973, at the photography studio of Brian Duffy, the team set to work on Ziggy 2.0. It was here that the iconic red and blue lightning scar was first used. One story was that they copied it from the logo on a rice cooker in Duffy’s kitchen. Another version is that Duffy sketched it onto Bowie’s face in frustration. The truth is somewhere in the middle, but irrefutably; it was Pierre La Roche that made it work, spending over an hour plastering Bowie’s face with lipstick and paint. After the shots were taken, Philip Castle airbrushed the molten metal nestling in Ziggy’s collar bone. It’s no understatement to say that everything was riding on the success of Aladdin Sane as it was the first album Bowie had made since garnering any sort of following.
This album is correctly regarded as Ziggy goes to America, and to make sure it sold in the USA, MainMan animated the photography into 30 second and 60 second TV packages, something never done before. We now know that the plan worked and Pierre La Roche’s lightning-bolted version of Bowie became the definitive image of Ziggy Stardust.
Frank N Furter hits the big screen.
By 1974, Frank was also finding success in America. Rocky Horror had transferred to the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles and once again, Tim Curry was back in the heels. A deal was done with 20th Century Fox to create the movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jim Sharman remained as director, Sue Blane was retained to continue her work with Tim Curry but to give Frank added glamour and a Hollywood sheen, the producers wanted his make-up to have a radical make-over. The obvious man for the job was Pierre La Roche. As we’ve seen, La Roche’s transformation of Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane is iconic and we should consider his metamorphosis of stage-Frank to movie-Frank to be of equal significance.
Until then, Frank’s make-up had been a glittery version of Kemp’s Solange, a kind of seedy glamour that few would associate with the later version of the character. La Roche’s beautiful design accentuated Curry’s features, allowing his face to emote and mime the comedy and tragedy demanded by the role. Mick Rock captured the movie’s production having been given full access to the cast and set. Rock’s iconic imagery of Pierre La Roche’s Frank is equal to his celebrated works featuring Queen, Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Lindsay Kemp and, of course, David Bowie.
Mick Rock and Pierre La Roche take Ziggy back to Mars.
Around the time that Frank was debuting on the London stage in 1973, Bowie was squeezing everything he could from Ziggy Stardust and brought Mick Rock and Pierre La Roche to another part of the city, Ladbrook Grove, to film the music video to an old song, Life on Mars? Originally released in 1971 but garnering little airplay or acknowledgment, Bowie’s management had decided to capitalise on Ziggy’s success and re-release the track. The video, directed and filmed by Mick Rock, features Ziggy Stardust resplendent in a turquoise suit made by Freddie Burretti and stunning makeup provided by La Roche. Mick Rock later said in The Moonage Daydream Collection:
Life on Mars was the final in a quartet of 16mm promo films I produced and directed for Bowie. David was happy to let me make all the shooting and editing decisions. It’s important to note two special ingredients which made Life On Mars? such a memorable promo. The dazzling turquoise suit made by longtime Bowie confidant and clothes designer Freddie Burretti (David never wore the suit again), and the exquisite make up rendered by glammeister Pierre La Roche, the man who applied the lighting bolt motif on Aladdin Sane.
Ziggy was nearing the pinnacle of his fame, and just a few weeks later, it would all be over.
Well, almost.
Floorshows and Finales
“The three unexpected guests shall entertain us with a floor show – which I shall direct.”
The Rocky Horror Show Libretto
Ziggy and Frank are performance characters, coming to life when they’re presented to various manifestations of an audience. Frank was originally envisaged as a forgettable character in a short London run, but Richard O’Brien’s brilliant concept and script allowed Tim Curry to repurpose Lindsay Kemp’s Solange, whilst Sue Blane’s hastily improvised design became the Pierre La Roche tinted icon still strutting on stage today. Likewise, Bowie used his time with Kemp to learn how to perform, injecting dance, kabuki, mime and interpretative movement directly into Ziggy. Pierre La Roche’s make-up and lightning bolt are as synonymous with Ziggy as Bowie is and Mick Rock saw both, captured and immortalised them at their magnificent best.
Bowie famously ended Ziggy’s career on the 3rd July 1973 at London’s Hammersmith Odeon:
Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.
That wasn’t quite true. It’s well documented that Bowie had aspirations to write a Ziggy musical but abandoned the plans as perhaps the beloved character had served its purpose. The only remnants of the Ziggy musical are two songs, Rebel Rebel and Rock n Roll with Me (co-written by Bowie’s best mate and absolutely-not-bowies-mystery-guest, Geoff MacCormack) which were both repurposed for the album Diamond Dogs, itself written after Bowie was refused the rights to create a musical based on George Orwell’s 1984. Bowie’s American aspirations stopped him from sending Ziggy into Frank’s on-stage territory, but even after Hammersmith, Ziggy wasn’t yet quite finished.
In October 1973, Bowie filmed the 1980 Floor Show, which was part of NBC’s Midnight Special series in the USA. A small studio audience watched Ziggy strut around in some of Yamamoto’s and Burretti’s most controversial costumes, whilst Bowie hammered out tracks from Aladdin Sane, Pin Ups and Diamond Dogs. One of the night’s most revealing costumes, co-incidentally worn during Bowie’s performance of Jean Genie (a titular allusion to Jean Genet), was adapted by designer Natasha Korniloff. It was a re-imagining of the spider-web outfits she’d earlier created for Lindsay Kemp and the dancers during the Ziggy Stardust shows at the Rainbow in August 1972. Kemp wore a much earlier version of this costume during a production at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1965, so once again, a direct and deliberate connection between Ziggy Stardust and Lindsay Kemp had manifested onto a London stage.
For three days, Bowie and the fired Spiders from Mars band members that were still talking to him, filmed at London’s Marquee Club. This TV special was conceived to be shown only in America to generate hype for Bowie’s forthcoming assault on the USA. Once the three days of filming were complete, Ziggy Stardust was never seen in person again.
As Ziggy Stardust finished with a floorshow, so does The Rocky Horror Show.
The finale is a lavish egocentric stage show created by Frank to exert cruelty, inject jealousy and extract passion out of those he’s enslaved. Frank’s narcissistic fantasy mirror’s Solange’s masochistic desire to kill The Madame. Frank’s floorshow ends, with the demise of the character.
The End?
Bowie never needed to perform as Ziggy Stardust after The 1980 Floorshow. The character was the experiment which finally worked, gifting Bowie global stardom. Ziggy’s function had been fulfilled, leaving Bowie free to play other characters as his musical desires demanded. Yet Bowie never forgot the teachings of Lindsay Kemp in theatrics, movement and mime. Bowie’s last video, Lazarus, shot only a few months before he died in 2016, is an avant-garde tour de force, worthy of Kemp himself.
2023 marks 50 years since Frank debuted on a London stage and the character remains as alive and as potent as ever. During those years, The Rocky Horror Show has been re-worked, re-staged and re-imagined countless times, yet the enduring character of Frank still exudes the potent grotesque that Kemp and Curry extracted from Genet’s script. Sue Blane has been the constant figure in subsequent productions of Rocky Horror, which is why, even in the most recent productions for stage and screen, Solange’s basque with heart and dagger tattoo remain part of Frank’s character.
Ziggy Stardust and Frank N Furter are glam rock’s most iconic characters and have become enduring icons. They were forged by the same hands to entertain their audiences during the jacked-up awakening of the UK’s burgeoning glam scene. Fifty years later, we can still marvel at their performances, appreciate their opulent decadence and lust for adoration, all whist listening to some bloody fantastic music.
“We are beautiful, joyous, drunk and free!”
Solange, The Maids by Jean Genet.
Thanks and acknowledgements
My thanks go to Suzanne Skelton, who is the Associate Designer and Archivist for The Lindsay Kemp company. She’s also a performer, costume designer, improviser and talented creative who not only performed alongside Lindsay Kemp many times but designed his 1990 production of Onnagata.
Suzanne was also part of a mid 80s cabaret act called The Liquorice Allsorts, who often finished their act with numbers from The Rocky Horror Show.
In the photo above, Suzanne played Magenta as well as designing and creating many of the costumes used by The Liquorice Allsorts.
My thanks also go to Barry Collins for the fabulous artwork at the head of the article and a couple of other original pieces scatted throughout. Barry is one of the world’s most respected tech-writers, a superb photographer and an extremely talented AI artist. I think you’ll agree that his imagining of what a bend of Frank and Ziggy would be makes for a striking composition.
Also, thanks to you for getting this far. You deserve a medal.
