John Scarlett-Davis on Derek Jarman

A fascinating Derek Jarman talk and film at London's Farsight Gallery last month, featuring a 1984 LWT (London Weekend TV) documentary from the series 'South of Watford' about Jarman's life in London. It includes lots of great footage including Jarman on a boat going down the Thames pointing out the site of the warehouses he lived and worked in during the 1970s, including on the South Bank at Upper Ground,  at13 Bankside (St Magnus warehouse and at Butlers Wharf by Tower Bridge where he moved in 1973. There is a scene too of him going through the gates of the latter on a building where there is now a plaque to remember him. As mentioned in the film, Ken Russell visited him on the South Bank and invited him to design sets for his film 'The Devils' - the start of Jarman's involvement in the film industry.

The film was directed by Jarman's assistant John Scarlett-Davis, who introduced it and told some very entertaining stories, including about filming a scene of Sebastiene at Andrew Logan's warehouse space with Lindsay Kemp also at Butlers Wharf.  He recalled that at Jarman's Butlers Wharf studio the toilet was set up on a stage. Some people who were happy to take part in orgiastic parties apparently drew the line at going to the loo in front of everybody and a curtain was eventually put around it! Jarman and others had to move out of Butlers Wharf after a fire, one of a number in the area that some have observed were conveniently timed for property developers.  Scarlett-Davis remembers being dressed up in the Blitz nightclub when news of the fire came through.

Scarlett-Davis helped Jarman with his film and pop video work, including Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, and made many videos in his own right including for some of my favourite songs from that period such as This Mortal Coil's Song to the Siren, Cocteau Twins 'Pearly dewdrops drops' and Scritti Politti's 'The Word Girl' and 'Wood Beez' (featuring dancer Michael Clark).

Scarlett-Davis talked a bit about the connection between Jarman, William Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV, with the latter's Genesis P. Orridge featuring briefly int he LWT film. I was interested to hear that Scarlett-Davis and others had lived in another warehouse in Clink Street that later became a famous early acid house venue and later still a prison museum. John remembers Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle/Coil)  attending parties in the warehouse there. Coil later (1998) recorded their album Astral Disaster at an underground studio in Clink Street. 

Derek Jarman, William Burroughs, Marc Almond, Psychic TV and others took part in 'The Final Academy' event in Heaven, 1983.

The event was linked to the exhibition 'Derek Jarman: from Soho to the Fifth Continent' by Jane Palm-Gold at the Farsight Gallery which is at 4 Flitcroft St next to St Giles Church. The exhibition featured photos of Derek at Dungeness by Derek Ridgers as well as Jane's paintings featuring episodes from his life, particularly in the St Giles/Soho area where Jarman lived in a flat in Phoenix House from 1979.

Jane did a great job not just in bringing together the exhibition but in bringing together some of the people who were part of Jarman's life and creative work in London. The audience at the film show including Simon Fisher Turner (who composed music for several Jarman films), Jenny Runacre (who played the Queen in Jubilee) and several people who like Scarlett-Davis himself were naked Roman extras in Sebastiene. The event was hosted by Sean McLusky from Farsight Gallery, once promoter of legendary London clubs like Club UK and the Leisure Lounge as well as sometime drummer with JoBoxers.

John Scarlett-Davis should definitely write a book. He also has some very funny stories about working in the film/TV industry including sitting in the canteen in Elstree between Jack Nicholson and Molly Sugden when he was working on both 'The Shining' and TV sitcom 'Are you being served?'.

Jane Palm-Gold's painting of the 1993 OutRage Queer Carnival in Soho 1993, which was opened by Jarman and also featured the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

World AIDS Day: Piccadilly Palare 1991

Today is World AIDS Day, a day for everyone to reflect on the ongoing global health disaster that is HIV/AIDS. For me personally, a time to remember my time in the 'AIDS Wars' as a HIV worker and sometime activist in the early 1990s, when prejudice was at its height and medical treatments were in their early stages. A time too to remember those who haven't made it through, like 'Jane', one of the founders of Positively Women who I met at a World AIDS Day event I helped organise and died not long after.

On World AIDS Day 1991 (or to be precise, the Saturday before - November 30th), I took part in a demonstration at Piccadilly Circus. It was quite small - probably only about 100 people - but fairly lively, featuring the famous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence radical drag nuns. People sat down in the road and chanted, among other things, 'we're here, we're queer, we're not going shopping' before the police piled in.

The following report by Nicola Field was published in the magazine Mainliners (for drug users with HIV), Issue 18, January 1992:

'On November 30th I went along to a peaceful demonstration in central London marking this year’s World AIDS Day. Organised by the London AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), the London Bisexual Women’s Group and the National Union of Students, the demo aimed to draw attention to the scandalous lack of information surrounding treatment, healthcare and safer sex/ drug use in this country. The action was interrupted by a violent and brutal attack by the police - more of this later...

Anyway, it was good to gather together in Piccadilly, around the statue of Eros. the Greek god of love, and inject a bit of sanity and reality into the chaos of Christmas consumerism. Quite a few passers-by hung around to read our leaflets. Wildly warpainted Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from Britain and the US looked brilliant and kept everyone buoyant as a number of people spoke to the crowd about the need to fight back against ignorance, hatred, censorship and intolerance. What stuck in my mind was an American activist forcefully reminding us that we have to take drastic direct action, targeting the institutions which control our access to information and new treatments. Alison Thomas of the London Bisexual Women’s Group told how the media went to Moral Town after the death of Freddie Mercury: as you probably know, Freddie was accused of being a ‘vigorous bisexual’ (!), of living a depraved lifestyle - because he loved men and blamed for his own illness and death. She demanded that the government ensures we are given proper information about safer sex so that we can make our own choices. The number and gender of our partners is irrelevant when it comes to HIV prevention, so long as we take care not to exchange blood, semen and vaginal fluids.

After the speeches the crowd decided we needed to make a bit more impact and so we started an impromptu march down Haymarket, determined to make as much noise as possible about the fact that we and our friends and lovers are being sentenced to death by poor healthcare and education. I was about to plunge into the centre of the crowd, which had stopped the traffic by sitting in the road, when I was suddenly shoved aside by a flying policeman. Reeling against the railings, I watched in amazement as uniformed bully-boys charged in droves, their faces contorted by fear and hate, down to where the protestors chanted ‘People with AIDS under attack -fight back!” Motor vehicles, filled no doubt with good citizens devoting themselves to the sacred ritual of shopping, beeped and shuffled forward. One bus drove inexorably into the crowd, acting as a convenient battering-ram for the police. People were snatching their loved ones out of the way. Like a drowning woman I saw my life flash before me and I recalled my part in supporting transport workers’ actions against low pay and poor safety standards. Where is that solidarity now? Is AIDS not a working class issue? Six police vans had by now screeched on to the scene at breakneck speed.

Now we all knew that the police were out to break up the demo without so much as a moment’s dialogue. Things moved very fast. Officers began shoving marchers on to the pavement. Many people were grabbed and wrenched from their friends and thrown violently into the back of the vans. A woman came towards me crying. She had just watched as a man was handcuffed from behind, thrown face down on to the road screaming and his head repeatedly smashed on to the tarmac. I and others stood helplessly and horrified by the side of the road, terrified to move as officers barged about arresting people brutally and sadistically. One man was arrested for a1legedly swearing at a vanload of police. As he was thrown like a sack of potatoes into the van, five or six policemen hurled themselves on top of him. We stood crying out as the door slammed shut and the van sped away. I myself was too scared to take photographs, fearing violence. I wish I had been brave enough; I wish we as a community knew how to fight back.

Twelve protestors were arrested, others assaulted, many more were hurt and bruised and everyone was terrorised. The attack was nothing more than a legal exercise in bashing the ‘queers’. At a time when murders of lesbians and gay men are reaching persecution proportions, it makes you wonder whether violence against lesbians and gays, Black people, drug users and people with HIV and AIDS will ever be treated seriously as crime. It’s particularly ironic that this event took place whilst ‘leaders’ of the lesbian and gay communities are trying to meet with the Metropolitan Police to appeal to them to protect us.

But the police arrest us for showing love and affection in public, for standing up for our rights, for trying to show people what we are suffering, and for trying to warn the public about the dangers of HIV infection. They shut us up, no questions asked. So when I read that we should explain to the police what we are going through, and ask for their help, I say: Who’s fucking listening?'

See also World AIDS Day: we salute the disco dead (1) and World AIDS Day: we salute the disco dead (2).

(top two images from 1991 flyer; bottom two from Mainliners January 1992 - click on images to enlarge)