I first met Patrick Lilley when I was writing a piece on gay ragga clubs for the Observer Music Monthly Magazine in the UK. He was fixing me up with the right people and driving me around London’s beautifully quiet night streets to the best clubs in town. But most importantly, he was filling me in on a whole history of gay clubland through stories, jokes and gossip. As an organiser of events, screenings and festivals, as well as being behind London’s longest-running gay night Queer Nation, he’s been involved in the movings and shakings of the capital for a long time now. Back in the 80s he was a publicist for Divine and Sinead O’Connor and when he went home after a long day’s work or a long night’s parties, it was to an infamous squat he shared with pre-Culture Club Boy George and a host of the city’s underground creatives. This is clearly a man with tales to tell, so read on for a taste of the juice, an epic tale in two parts, and listen to the soundtrack along the way.

Stuart Brumfitt: You had red hair back then?

Patrick Lilley: I had reddy-blonde hair I guess. It’s very difficult to remember what hair was like to be honest. It’s been a while.

SB: When did you start losing your hair?

PL: Going for the jugular there! My mum warned me that I would go bald if I continued to dye my hair every colour every different day and never a truer word was told to me.

SB: Did you dye it every colour under the sun?

PL: Well in the school holidays I’d dye it. In 1977 when I was 17 my mum had a small jewellery factory in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham. I’d go in at the weekend and do the cleaning. While I was there, I dyed my hair David Bowie red. I would go to the kitchen area and do some cleaning and I would stick some bleach on and then some colour. My mum said, “Well you can’t work for me with that colour”, so I went and had to bleach it. I had to go back to boarding school and it was meant to go back to its normal colour. My sister was a hairdresser and we tried to make it go back, but it didn’t. It went a muddy green-brown, which was worse than ever.

SB: So you experimented with your hair when you were on your school? Which school were you at?

PL: I went to a junior seminary called Cotton College I boarded from 11 to 18. They had a reputation for producing conservative bishops.

SB: So you were meant to be heading towards that?

PL: We were poor children who were sent there to have a better education with the help of the local authority and the local priest.

SB: Was there lots of hanky panky in the boarding school?

PL: None whatsoever. I was viciously bullied for being a poof. I remember being 13 and 14 - me and my best friends at school had just got into Bowie at the time. We used to act camp quite deliberately. There were three of us – me, Billy and John Flanagan. We used to do a Dick Emery “Oh you are awful, but I like you” line on each other continuously. Then one day one of them turned round and said, “You’re not pretending.”

SB: Oh shit

PL: You’re not kidding. The shit hit the fan then. And no sooner had that happened and stocks and shares in Patrick Lilley plummeted.

SB: So they were totally straight but were just playing along?

PL: We were all just acting camp. It wasn’t about sex, it was about acting camp. The idea of a practicing homosexual or a practicing heterosexual didn’t exist at this school. There was no sex, just an awful lot of paranoia. And the priests were more paranoid than anybody. (more…)