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| copyright Iona Dee Photography |
Artist, performer, songwriter and charismatic frontman, Oli
Spleen has been making music for two decades now, as a solo artist and in bands
including The Flesh Happening, Spleen and Pink Narcissus. You’d probably class most of
his discography as Queercore: it’s an uncompromising style of music whose
brutality makes it nigh on impossible to get radio play, but it’s one that is
honest, intelligent and playful. Always a contrarian he is currently working on
a new album, to be called Gaslight
Illuminations, which will be more at home with fans of Marc Almond, Bertolt
Brecht, Scott Walker and Jacques Brel.
Oli’s first release (as Oliva Spleen) was the track Formaldehyde, Thalidomide, Hermaphrodite,
from the 1999 spoken word collection Saltpetre 1. That was followed by a brace of cuts on the 2001 compilation Drowning By The Sea, and a further track
on the various artists collection Trains
Across the Sea the same year. “While I would write poems and songs
as a child and teen it was a near death brush with AIDS on the millennium that
drove me to feel compelled to express my pain and frustration through music,”
he explains.
The first incarnation of The Flesh Happening formed in the
summer of 2003, around the same time that Oli launched his first novel,
Depravikazi. “My idea was to create a band that combined all the in-your-face
confrontational energy of punk with the performance and theatrics of glam as
well as taking influence from performance artists such as Leigh Bowery,” he
says. With a repertoire that included songs with titles such as Anal Joy, Shit on Me and Hitler and
Jesus, and a propensity to strip that would have embarrassed the Red Hot
Chili Peppers, The Flesh Happening were never going to find mainstream success,
something Oli himself realised after meeting a PR specialist. “The first thing
she said to me was ‘the most important thing is to be yourself,’ and then, when
I mentioned I was gay, she said, ‘Oh, I don’t think you should be gay’!” The
band split up in the summer of 2008 after issuing a CD EP and the 7” single Kamikaze/Waste. Several of the songs written by The Flesh Happening were
later re-recorded by Oli for his 2008 album Spleen & The Flesh Machine.
Soon after the band split, Oli met guitarist Paddy Longlegs,
and a new group, Pink Narcissus, was born. “The Flesh Happening had mostly
explicitly queer subject matter: with Pink Narcissus I made the decision to
write songs that weren’t specific to gender or sexuality. This decision was as
much a response to my sexuality and gender identity as the songs with queer
specific subject matter were,” Oli says.
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| copyright Iona Dee Photography |
Oli’s sexuality is central to his work. “I don’t think I
would be making music at all if I wasn’t queer,” he tells me. “If I were
straight I wouldn’t have had to question my existence so fundamentally or gone
through everything that lead me toward music in the first place. I’d imagine I
would have had a far more conventional path. While I tend to identify more with
women I don’t have a problem with the fact that I am perceived as male. It was
my friend, trans activist Fox Fisher who first made me aware that non-binary
was even a thing. Whilst the definition fits how I perceive myself I don’t
enforce non-binary pronouns, it is simply how I feel inside.
“I have felt far more welcomed and understood by the trans
community than I ever did in the more mainstream gay scene. Last year Pink
Narcissus got to perform Brighton’s Trans Pride but the regular Brighton Pride
has shown no interest in what I do whatsoever and doesn’t seem to support and
nurture local live music at all.” It was this lack of acceptance that led him
and a friend to launch Fag Machine, an LGBTQ club night in Brighton, showcasing
acts that fall outside of the mainstream, or that have been marginalised by the
commercialisation of the city’s gay scene. “The trans community seem to
intrinsically understand the importance of giving a platform to authentic local
talent: Fag Machine was a big hit with that crowd.”
Identifying as non-binary, or gender neutral, growing up in
Hastings, on the south coast of England, his earliest musical influences were a
little unusual. “The first record I owned was the album for Jim Henson’s
Fraggle Rock, my favourite TV show as a child,” he says. “Fraggles were an
underground species of colourful bohemian Muppets who had a deep connection to
music. In those formative years Fraggles were my friends, culture, and religion.
All I wanted to be when I grew up was a Fraggle.
“Then when I was thirteen Nirvana broke big and I discovered
Jane’s Addiction, a band that resonated with me as I felt they had Fraggle-like
sensibilities. Both of these bands opened the doors for me to discover other
music, from Leadbelly to Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Bowie, Iggy, The
Velvet Underground and many more.
He was often beaten up for being ‘different’, as he
explained on his own blog: “As a child at school under Thatcher’s Section 28
[the hateful, anti-gay legislation which came in to law 30 years ago this week],
I was always told that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’. Subsequently I thought
that there must be something terribly wrong with me.
“I was spat at daily throughout secondary school and as a
teen I was repeatedly beaten up on Hastings’ streets. Looking androgynous as I
did back then it wasn’t safe to go out at night, if I wasn’t attacked by gangs
of youths I would often be stopped and searched by police who bizarrely thought
I was trying to solicit clients as a male prostitute whilst wearing a dress.
Throughout those years I was deeply unhappy and repeated attempted suicide.”
Luckily those years are long behind him, and his next album
promises to show listeners another side of the multi-faceted artist. “It's going
to be very different… but I think it's the album I always wanted to make,” Oli says
of Gaslight Illuminations, which he
is recording with current collaborator Mishkin Fitzgerald, of Brighton-based
indie rock band Birdeatsbaby. “The title references a theme that runs through
many of the tracks. My ex was addicted to crystal meth and would do that
gaslighting thing where he would accuse me of things (which he himself was doing)
and make me question my own sanity. The ‘Illuminations’ part is inspired by
cabalistic notions of light and dark, how the darkness of the themes within the
songs is turned into the light of inspiration in the form of the songs
themselves.” The album will be available soon on both vinyl and CD.
Here's the video for Time,
from Pig Miracle Day. You can listen
to the whole album, or, better still, pay for a copy, at https://pinknarcissus.bandcamp.com/
And here is Tranquillised Lives, from Oli’s solo album Fag Machine, available to download at https://olispleen.bandcamp.com/
You can see more of Oli's videos at https://www.youtube.com/user/OliSpleen
Photos of Oli by Iona Dee. Copyright Iona Dee Photography https://ionadee.com/
All rights reserved: used by permission.
Love this and love Oli!!
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