Scandinavia Has Been Good To Me

All of my “Big Three” solo performance shows were like autobiographies wrapped up with social history and art. “Scandinavia Has Been Good To Me” was the third of them. It was produced for the Homotopia Festival and got its only two performances as part of that Festival. If it was a set of landscapes they included (naturally) Scandinavia (mainly 1990’s Sweden), Liverpool in the era of regeneration and the clubbing revolution, Czechoslovakia and Budapest in the 1990’s, and St Helens in the late 1980’s. As autobiography it went deep and intimate. As performance it was the most conventional of the three shows – it stood still and had only one screen for projections – but the sound was gorgeously done, I learned to vogue for it and the rainbow dress had one of its best stage outings. There’s a full film of the show (which I have currently lost) and a shortened film trailer, which is on this site separately. Even watching excerpts I plunge back into both the difficult 20-teens when it was made, and the heady, hedonistic and country-hopping 90’s when I – all of us it sometimes seemed – were running full-tilt at the Millennium – and I come up for air, gasping at the epic of it all. I hope that some of this comes across from this selection of text and image from the show.