Here’s the the first look at the X FACTOR finalists house.
We’ve managed to get a sneak peak inside the X FACTOR finalists’ house, thanks to Zoopla. The 7 bedroom £7 Million house features a swimming pool, cinema room and car lift. So the lucky 12 finalists will be living in the lap of luxury.
Located in one of Barnet’s most sought-after streets, Zoopla can reveal that the property was previously put on the market for £7million when it was last up for sale in 2013.
Launching this autumn, club night Bump is being revived in Camden. Chris Amos, who formely owned Manbar, launched BUMP in Leicester Square early 2014 to much acclaim and buzz but unfortunately the building was shut down for a regeneration project. So it is with much excitement the team is back together, this includes DJs Gretta Gargola, Ale Amaral and Wesley Marilio.
Promoter Chris Amos explains why he is bringing this sexy party back: “There has been a lot of discussion about London’s gay scene eroding, with chemsex parties, dating apps and venue closures. But to be honest I think there has been a lack of inspiration in putting parties on too. Nights like Brut and Bang are proof there is still an appetite for fun parties in London. After seeing Bloc Bar, I knew straight away this is somewhere the scene is going to love to party. So it made sense to bring BUMP back to this venue. Plus the circuit party music vibe we have going on will make BUMP stand out from other nights. See you there!”
When: Saturday 14th November 2015 >>> 9pm to 3am
Entry Price: £8 / £5 concession list
Circuit party vibes. BUMP is back at Bloc Bar in Camden on Saturday 14th November 2015. Disc jocks Ale Amaral, Gretta Gargola & Wesley Marilio are bringing the best of Brazilian and Spanish tribal sounds to the yard. Plus London’s friendly door hosts naturally… JJ Clark & Cain Jennings! Get on the concession guest list by RSVPing at the Facebook event.
Pop legend Anastacia has unveiled the latest track taken from her forthcoming ‘Ultimate Collection’, a cover of Christina Aguilera’s ‘Army Of Me’. Army Of Me appeared on Xtina’s 2012 album Lotus.
This follows her new single ‘Take This Chance’, also taken from the album, out November 6th.
Showbiz Simon is set to go head to head for the coveted Christmas Number 1 slot and will be up against, with almost certainty, whoever wins this year’s X FACTOR. Simon has thrown his showbiz cap into the ring and we’re, yes we’re backing him for that number one spot. It’s super camp and super Christmasy and has been written by gay scene stalwart Jason Prince. And yes he screams Showbiz, quite a bit.
The entertainer, is hoping his single with proceeds going to the charity for the homeless, Centre Point, will make a mark on the UK charts, when its released in a few days on iTunes.
Sixteen-year-old Simon’s life is turned upside down when his mother announces that she’s met and is marrying her new partner. ★
Gay clubbing experience Trade is throwing its final club night tonight as another landmark gay space closes in the UK’s capital. Having opened its doors in 1990, Trade was the first club in the UK to be granted a 24 hour license.
Starting life in Turnmills in Clerkenwell, Trade was a weekly event for those on the LGBT scene who liked to continue their partying from 3AM until the afternoon the night after.
A fave with the fashion, media, art and music crowd, Trade has had fans like Bjork, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Boy George, Kylie Morillo, Rupert Everett and Erick Morillo. It is rumoured to have turned Madonna away at the door.
To celebrate its impact on the London night life scene and gay culture since the 1990s the “Trade: Often Copied, Never Equalled” Exhibition is at the Islington Museum, London until January 16th 2016.
TRADE: THE FINAL will take place on Sunday the 25th October from 2PM to 9AM the following day at EGG London.
Another chance for the weird and wonderful to grace our TV screens with glittery performances and outrageous outfits. There has been many a camp moment over the years and this year will no different. Now we take a look back at some of the great, and not so great contestants and their camp moments during the last 12 years.
It’s Chico time…You can’t have a camp list without Chico and his time. So naturally his campest moment is Chico Time from week 6. But it comes to something when you can’t even beat the dull as dishwater Andy Abraham who finished second eventually.
Well what can one say about the eternally smiling, incredibly close, brother and sister duo Same Difference, who every week the viewers had to be reminded were brother and sister. Their constantly upbeat and sparkly performances really puts them in the camp category, but I would have to say their campest moment would be the performance of “Blame it on the Boogie”.
Even fiercely kiss your inner, self-hating, subconscious bigot? Join the club. It’s a deliberate, artistic strategy stunningly deployed by stellar gay stars Penny Arcade and Franko B, the spectacular collision of two opposing points of view.
Arguably first expressed in literature by Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Imp Of The Perverse’ and refined as ‘DoubleSpeak’ by George Orwell’s 1984, it’s contrarianism writ large as art. Which is where manic, barely-sane comic Dina Martina – the probable incest brat of Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin and Ronald McDonald – comes storming in.
Hailing from Seattle, USA, she’s 301 pounds of deeply skewed fun, a human CGI ball of deeply silly putty.
So why mention her size? Because it’s the raw material of her art, darlings, Dina’s comic rocket-fuel, like Jack Dee’s trademark misery. ‘I stick to a high-sodium diet for that lush, larger-than-life look’, she giggles, her huge, plus-size clown’s mouth dilating like a gynaecologist’s nightmare.
Think Heath Ledger’s Joker squeezed in a ball-gown cursed with Michael Jackson’s falsetto, and you too might run screaming for the exit. But wait; this funky assassin in a fright-wig only has one, single target, her own, all-too-willing self. Zoning in on personal pain with the exquisite virtuosity of the Saw torture-flick franchise, Dina masterfully misleads us from moment one.
‘I live a life without purpose’ she sadly observes, but who could possibly take this cosy, human cupcake seriously? And that’s precisely the point; we’re being taken for a brilliantly contrary ride by a Wizard of Oz Munchkin with the super-shrewd crowd perception of Sigmund Freud.
But even with hindsight, it’s hard to adequately conjure Dina’s utterly demented stage entrance. Grinning like a slaughtered, Hallowe’en pumpkin, all Sergeant Pepper frock-coat and ballooning flesh, she pipes out inane, disco lyrics like a hooker on helium.
How do we take her? At face value? Not quite. See, no matter how twisted you are, there’s always someone more extreme. Take dog poo; amateurs eat it dumped and stale, but dedicated gourmets suck it straight out. Just like comedy, in fact, and Dina’s surgically precise freak-show.
And I’m in awe. Frankly, she’s attempting – and pulling off – a knife-edge balance of audience sympathies, by deliberately playing gay public poison Number One, the mincing, often self-loathing cliché. Never met one? Then check out John Inman and Larry Grayson on vintage TV. Still guaranteed to give gay rights activists instant heart attacks, Inman, Grayson and company were the utterly bland, acceptable face of homosexuality for heterosexuals.
Try that now, and you’ll be as ostracised as white actors in blackface playing to Afro-Caribbean audiences. But remarkably, Dina embodies that fluffy, yucky stereotype – the target of mass straight derision – and still melts modern-day gay heartstrings.
And mercifully, Dina’s Sitting Ovations is utterly removed from the vile, exploitative voyeurism of Soho’s deeply morally dubious Box club. Instead, she’s conceptually elegant, a drag Noel Coward of devastating double-takes and exquisitely dry, social dissections. ‘I am currently single’ she quips, ‘due to an unspoken agreement between me and men’.
Okay, so the subtlety’s often swamped in a pell-mell parade of costume changes and video clips of spoof 1980s pop tunes, but it bites. Dina’s cracked, sectioned-on-glee-pills voice sweetly trills of infants raised on booze-filled pacifiers, and middle-aged housewives memorably disfigured by ‘Necrospheres’, facial fillers harvested from spoiled corpses. In other words, USA today through a gorgeously dark, twisted gay looking-glass Oscar Wilde would’ve killed to glance at.
But there’s far more to ‘Sitting Ovations’ than faux-naive vignettes of the grotesque, distasteful and gaggingly twee. Arguably most memorable is a moody, extended reminiscence of an encounter with a (frustratingly unnamed) vintage Hollywood legend. Young, gauche and dumb, Dina’s fabulously dismissed by the aged, but still super-chic madam stabbing a prawn in her cocktail and holding it aloft.
‘This empty husk of a formerly vital creature’ she hisses to a suddenly tomb-silent room, ‘reminds me of you’. Just like anyone rash enough to risk Dina’s quick, eviscerating, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde wit, in fact. Me, I’m shrewd enough to stay way out the firing line; Dina’s an ongoing, monster talent steam-rolling any unwary opposition, and sometimes – like many reluctant celibates – it’s best to just say yes.
At the Soho Theatre until 24th October 2015