Bourgeois and Maurice.

art
4/22/2009

Lily Savage this is not.


by Hynam Kendall


Bourgeois & Maurice’s balladeer, Georgeois Bourgeois, wanted to be an actor. He did voice-overs while still at school. His career high was a dubbed version of The Little Vampire, on German TV. Now, Jonny Woo-championed, he can be found in Shoreditch or Soho House, gimp bodysuit-clad, screeching “When I was tired of sucking cocks / I wore a dress down to Boombox,” his lungs gurgling prophetic tomes from MAC-red lips. As they themselves put it, "People pay for this filth?".

For all his bravado and fetishised glamour, my first meeting with Bourgeois & Maurice’s titular Georgeois Bourgeois, George Heyworth to friends after hours, is a somewhat sober affair. I might have expected a sea of glitter, a cabaret fanfare announcing two Bambi legs that rise to the heavens, a bounding figure on high heels, legs more than anything. I might have expected a leathery wisp of a man, a woman, an androgynous middle ground, limbs mass-produced by sexual congress, an oracle pissing candyfloss with every high kick. An entrance befitting any of Jonny Woo’s Bistroteque protégés. However, tonight, at an evening with John Waters at Hammersmith Apollo, George Heyworth cuts a dapper figure in a tailored end-to-end vintage blazer, perhaps moleskin, perhaps synthetic fibre, a finely stitched shirt with single thread count on the lining, an open collar, cigarette pant trousers and Cuban heeled brogues, a hushed mix of browns and greys. “Yeah I actually quite like plain clothes. I’m a bit schizophrenic with my style. Can I say schizophrenic? It’s not very PC is it?” he says, remembering our first meeting well. “I like a bit of contradiction between what a person wears and the way they behave,” he articulates on his rolling tongue, a vehicle for the queen’s English. Received pronunciation. An accent he’s learned both to cover a recently acquired stammer, and because he likes “How totally weird English language is when you over-enunciate ev.er.y.sin.gle.syll.a.ble.” He compares his dress-up-on-stage-dress-down-day-to-day habit to the recent Bash a Banker fiasco. “The bankers dressing in chinos and rugby shirts at the riots were brilliant because they totally failed to recognise what clothes could do for them,” he says in that slow, particular drawl he uses on stage as it gives him longer to think about what he’s going to say next. “In-Cog-Ni-To,” chimes cabaret cohort Maurice Maurice, or Livvy Morris off-duty, “When you’re as world famous as us, you need to keep hidden.” They laugh in unison: duly one then the other. 

I’m contemplating Monopoly upstairs in the Soho House bar by the glass-walled balcony the second time we meet. Physically confident, in the manner of an athlete, poised and posed, he enters one foot before the other, pointed gracefully like an animal bred for show. Balletic movements. Good toes, naughty toes. A nimbus of curly brown hair. A silken ensemble cinched at the waist. It is the arresting image I had previously expected: A donated pair of blue heels that match perfectly to the blue leather suit he bought in a charity shop in Limoges, delicate looking, hug both his feet, left and right. As he walks they smack the shit out of measured parquet flooring. Some size nine “borderline paedo” men’s black pumps adorned with bows are to hand. Wide and glassy, his eyes survey the room, his doting public, he smiles at them like Eva Peron on her balcony. And he is an oil painting: MAC for foundation and mascara. Barry M for their dazzle dust, because he can always find one to match an outfit. They both get through so much make up, particularly eyeliner, that tonight Georgeois and Maurice have done a trolley dash through Superdrug for whatever’s cheap. In a decent sized leather bag, there’s also Benefit’s You Rebel for after the show “Because it makes you look really healthy and not at all like you’ve just been caked in an inch of even-a-Goth-wouldn’t make-up.” His face is a composite of beautiful angles, razor sharp features born of androgyny, cheekbones - two triangles of porcine skin - cutting into a sloping tombstone jaw. Lips are concave trapezoids of ruby red. His face demands attention. He dresses it with jewellery that meets the three cabaret necessities: big, gold and cheap. Plastic bling sourced from Soho’s Berwick Street. His ears drip with oversized gold dollar signs, their new sheen sparkles when the light hits his face on numbers Ritalin and All The Boys. Hopefully they won’t turn his ears green like the last pair did. Maurice, on the balls of her size seven feet, thick heeled because a seven-inch or too-thin heel will be buggery for accessing the piano peddles, teeters fast behind in a made-to-measure number, face made of MAC, MAC, MAC. Some Dior lipstick to break up the complexion. She obviously wanted to get the London Look. Three songs into his set George bellows the lyrics of an operatic ode to those seeking fame, screams like an animal into his tightly-clasped mic, face-to-face with audience member, and recent 007 bedfellow, Gemma Arterton, he lists the pitfalls, warbling the vowels, chewing the consonants, until she ups and leaves to play Scrabble with her Hispanic boyfriend upstairs, tale between her Avon-endorsed legs. Though she hates the talk of skat, Maurice’s mother will later be seen, drink in hand, getting special treatment from front of house, excitedly musing,“I felt like Victoria Beckham’s mum.”  

“There’s paedophiles on every corner / Stay inside lock up your daughter / If anyone’s gonna hurt her bad / it may as well be mum and dad,” he sings, dressed in his favourite outfit, a wraparound dress with massive ruffs along the arms and neck made of green, silver and gold pleated lamé. The ruff comes up to his nose and wraps around his entire head so he has to pull it down to get the microphone in to sing. Designer Julian Smith had said that George needed a bigger look for their first song and came up with a design he described as a cross between Henry VIII and The Supremes. Gold, green and fucking huge. In fact, couturist Julian plays a dominant role in Bourgeois and Maurice’s cabaret. He created other outfits that will premier tonight such as The Pink Polka Dot Catsuit that fit’s George like a second skin, along with the dress that marries Maurice’s lithe body, that will arch for nearly an hour at the piano. With Maurice it’s all about big on top. It’s understandable. She is sitting at a piano for 90 per cent of the time. Who knows what goes on below the waist. As such, shoulders, collars and beehives are the fashion laws for Maurice. The dress she wears, a Julian original of course, is a weird contradiction of materials and ideas. A tight fitted dress in pinstripe wool, lined in satin, it bears the shape of a tails jacket, with huge faux crocodile PVC shoulders and collar, and a long kinky gold zip all the way down the front, a zip we wont see until later when a drunken audience member heckles, in his Stella-tinged discourse, urging Maurice to see his hip-height tattoo. She shuffles from her piano, looks down the denim waistband and deadpans into the mic, “It’s true, he has a tattoo. It’s of a penis.” Maurice’s voice is perfect for deadpan cynicism. It’s gruff, like Marianne Faithful after a splurge on cigarettes at Heathrow duty free. [“What are you saying? That I sound like a man? It’s all lies. I was born this way,” she laughs.] Julian’s boyfriend Gustavo takes photos of the duo. Funnily enough they met in Ponystep Editor Richard Mortimer’s now defunct club night Boombox about 3 years ago. George started working with Julian and Gustavo just taking photos and styling for a project they were working on, before Bourgeois & Maurice were born. During this project George met Andrew Gallimore, who designed the lashes George now wears as Bourgeois. “Funny how things work out,” George now laughs.  

The show is slick. “Don't miss their wonderful repertoire” says Time Out. “Words failed us” says The Londonist. It’s come a long way from their first show at Madame Jojo’s. They did four songs as part of a cabaret night they have there. Very ad hoc. “All we had were the songs, we didn’t have any idea what kind of characters we’d become on stage, or what we’d say between songs,” says George. He forgot the words a couple of times. Both he and Maurice had had a couple of drinks to keep the nerves in check, though they both rarely drink before a show these days. Maurice went mute. Mainly because she hadn’t played he piano or sung on stage for about ten years. Maurice ad libbed, mumbling “total bollocks” between songs. “We really just did it because we were bored, in fairly mundane jobs, and needing some kind of outlet I think,” says George. Now the cabaret act is their job… which leads us to their latest gig, a week long sting at the Soho Theatre starting April 25. “We did a show there in March and it went rather well so they’ve invited us to bring it back,” says Maurice. Modest as ever. It went so well it was a sell-out. One saturated with superlative praise at that. As gay as it sounds, Fabulous seems the only way to properly describe it. “Well, it’s definitely not pared-down minimalist chic,” laughs George. “The new show is about an hour long, and consists of 13 songs, multiple costumes, some amazing films, made by the utterly brilliant Reuben Cook, some good old fashioned advice, and given that it’s a theatre we have some good lighting too! We’ve described it as ‘a whistle-stop tour through the peculiarities of a nation on the edge, and a fabulous homage to the century we live in’,” says Maurice, the perfect publicist. You can expect the same degree of melancholy that has come to be a calling card for the pair, the humour never veering into ‘Carry On’ territory, as they write their songs “as songs, and not as jokes.” There are no camp asides or nudge-nudge wink-winks to the audience. In fact, lyrically it’s dark and unflinching. At times George sings as though writhing in pain, a thing that feels but does not think. A permanently wounded beast. A scar with legs. He’ll sing about the most audaciously grotesque acts as though waiting for a lover lost at sea, his tight-wrung lungs cracking on the high register. The new show inevitably shows a little influence from those ‘music and banter’ acts that have gone before them – Noel Coward, Max Miller, Hinge & Bracket – but seems much more comparable to George’s hero Klaus Nomi, Bourgeois and Maurice’s music having the same kind of rock-baroque grandeur to it as Klaus’. It’s not traditional cabaret. “No - it’s not traditional cabaret,” agrees George. Of this you can be sure. The new show borders more into ‘alternative performance’. A very stylised affair that wrenches the heartstrings with epitaphs on the pitfalls of fame and the lives of art students, club kids and general try-hards, all during a succession of elaborate costumes, including a bespotted gimp suit, being ripped from George‘s torso mid-song. Lily Savage it is not. “Yes, the mood can be very dark,” agrees George. “How dark is too dark for cabaret? We’ve not hit on any topics that are out of bounds, although I did write a lyric about Jersey child molesters which Maurice overruled.” “Yes, but we kept in the part about parental abuse, which is nice. It’s fun!” punctuates Maurice Maurice in her perfect deadpan. 

“Do come.” Bourgeois & Maurice begin their week long stint at the Soho Theatre April 25. 

http://www.bourgeoisandmaurice.co.uk/ 

http://www.myspace.com/bourgeoisandmaurice 

http://www.sohotheatre.com/

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