The Devil Rides Out – Paul O’Grady

I’ve just been reading Paul O’Grady’s Biography, which is broken down into 3 books. There’s some very interesting recollections of the RVT. The part below is from the second book ‘The Devil Rides Out’ when Paul was performing as part of the drag group ‘The Glamazons’.

“At the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, in what felt like a rough part of sarf London, the acts who performed there worked on the bar. Some of them shot up and down it fearlessly on roller skates, whereas I was a little more cautious and tottered gingerly along in my saloon girl’s outfit, miming to Madeline Kahn’s ‘I’m Tired’ from Blazing Saddles. There was a bit of a Wild West saloon feel to the place anyway. The crowd were rough and readyand looked as if they were more than capable of eating their young alive.

The dressing room was a rat-hole and if you didn’t fancy strutting your stuff atop the bar then there was a swing for you to show off on. It was exhilarating swinging higher and higher over the heads of the crowd, and above the noise I could hear Joyce from behind the curtain muttering to our dresser, ‘She’s going to kill herself out there’…

…”Although it’s built on the site of what was the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens the tavern has no such romantic past, starting out as a humble lorry-drivers’ pub until the sixties, when the landlady jumped on the drag boom bandwagon and started putting on acts to entertain the mainly heterosexual working-class audience. It hadn’t changed much since then apart from the audience, who, while still be very working-class, were now mostly passengers on the lavender bus.”