Ladies Saloon Girl Red Medium

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I think being banned from Top Of The Pops did affect us commercially. We got banned from Italian TV, too, because I mooned (above) and I didn’t know the Pope was watching. All I was doing was making sure Barry White had a hard time on stage after me. At the time, I had this model girlfriend. The paparazzi were following me round trying to get a picture of the man who mooned the Pope. One climbed on the hotel balcony trying to take photos. It was crazy.” Paris in 1850 was buzzing with excitement. Theatres, comedy shows and public balls were booming. Some time after the emergence of the chahut, daring Parisian women decided to take up the frenzied dance as an outlet. At these events, one dancer made the news. Celeste Mogador, star of the Bal Mabille, set Parisian hearts aflutter with her unpretentious quadrille. She was an instant hit! The Can-Can dance was raucous and risqué, reaching its height of popularity in 1900 during the Belle Époque. Parisian cabarets promoted the dance and Jane Avril and La Goulue popularized it in the night clubs of Montmartre. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicted it in his famous painting, At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance. And, Jacques Offenbach left us with that joyful, if not nagging tune: da, da-da, da-da-da-da-da-da . . .. You know the rest. It remains one of my favourite appearances in the show’s long and rich history. In fact, I don’t recall anything as visually arresting as that on TOTP again until – be still irony – Divine’s headline-grabbing turn three years later with You Think You’re A Man. Bad Manners were always good fun to watch on TV, and one of the main reasons for the band’s notoriety was their outlandish, eccentric frontman Buster Bloodvessel.

The brilliant thing about Buster Bloodvessel was that, like Divine, he completely owned his obesity and made his fatness absolutely fabulous.Adrienne recognized the scene—it was the sketch Lautrec had sent to Grandmother—the one without the lady in pink. The one identified by the museum’s x-ray. This was, lest we forget, the man who went on to open a joyfully outsized hotel “for over-eaters” called Fatty Towers, complete with extra large beds and baths, an annual Belly Of The Year contest, and a restaurant whose specialities included the candidly-named Lard Arse Pudding. Here is the scene, in my time travel novella, The Can-Can girl and the mysterious woman in pink, where the protagonist, Adrienne, first arrives at the Moulin Rouge.

When writing The Can-Can Girl and the Mysterious Woman in Pink, I knew that I had to draw my readers into the amoral world of the Moulin Rouge. I needed to “paint with words” the ambiance of the dance hall – depicting not only the dancers, but the rowdy men, curious-but-tipsy women, the smell of unwashed bodies, and the musky odor of oil lamps and cigar smoke. The Can-Can Girl It was that entertaining don’t give a toss what people think attitude that puts Bad Manners in the Top Of The Pops hall of fame with an utterly hilarious performance of Can Can. The French Cancan dance is an eight-minute performance facing the audience, during which dancers measuring 5’7” tall lead the dance to a piece of music by Offenbach. It’s an art that requires Parisian cabaret dancers to have balance, flexibility, acrobatic ability and rhythm. They have to be able to do the splits and perform impressive moves like the “port d’armes”, the “cathedral” and the “military salute”.

Frenetic music, twirling petticoats, surprising acrobatics… the dancers of the Moulin Rouge know the art of the cancan. It’s a true phenomenon, but it hasn’t always been as it is now. It was a famous dancer known as La Goulue who established the definitive rules, which were then passed on orally until Nini Pattes En L’air (Nini Legs in the Air) decided to start a specialist school teaching the explosive quadrille. Released in June 1981, the kooky cover was Bad Manners’ sixth single and joint biggest hit, matching the number three peak of 1980’s Special Brew, though, unsurprisingly, the later wordless romp was their only record that did anything on the continent. Author Pamela B Eglinski studied the life and times of the can-can dancers in Paris and has written a fabulous book about it, a time travel romp through Belle Epoque Paris… The Moulin Rouge: Life among the can-can dancers