The Suicide Girls Burlesque Show At The Download Festival

Back in 2004, the Suicide Girls alt. pin-up/glamour project was arguably at its peak. Having launched in 2001, the website was the right idea at the right time – a Gen X punk rock alternative to standard ideas of glamour and eroticism, featuring models with tattoos, piercings and what were generally outsider looks and attitude – common-place now but still very much the exception in mainstream modelling and adult entertainment at the time. Inspired by the classic work of photographers like Irving Klaw, Bunny Yaeger and Russ Meyer, the Suicide Girls vibe was female empowerment before that became a clichéd defence for those in the adult entertainment world and was perfectly timed to be part of a cultural scene that included the burlesque revival, the popular peak of Nu-Metal and the second golden age of porno-chic. It was also a place where the models were – ostensibly – in control, creating their own images and running their own pages in an early incarnation of social media.

In the wake of the Suicide Girls, numerous imitators emerged – The Satanic Sluts, God’s Girls, Gothic Sluts, Barely Evil and the like. The ethos of the project – doing it for yourself, challenging conventional ideas of beauty – eventually filtered into the mainstream. No one bats an eye at models with body art (indeed, finding adult stars without tattoos is increasingly difficult) and all those alternative models owe a great deal to the pioneering efforts of the Suicide Girls.

Of course, it wouldn’t last – before long, accusations of financial exploitation from disgruntled models and pre-#metoo claims would sour the freewheeling attitudes and as the 2000s went on, the new age of puritanism made this sort of thing seem less cool – the music magazines that once featured Suicide Girls quietly removed their presence, the regular club night at London’s Electric Ballroom seems to have vanished around 2016 and the whole thing became more marginalised. The site remains active but is not the omnipresent cultural phenomenon that it once was.

But, back to 2004. The Download Festival was in its second year and was already becoming one of the UK’s leading festivals (though then, as now, it was widely ignored by the mainstream media). The festival set out to show that it was more than just a metal/punk event, instead exploring all sorts of ‘alternative’ music across its different stages. So while Linkin Park and Metallica headlined the main stage, the smaller Barfly Stage had Peaches topping the bill on Saturday and The Suicide Girls Burlesque Show as the main act on Sunday. For those of us who’d caught Metallica’s secret show on the smaller stage the year before, watching them playing on the vast main stage was less appealing than it might have been otherwise – the sound at festivals is often awful, with the open-air setting and huge spaces allowing the music to float away rather than pummel you into submission and I’m generally more interested in exploring the smaller spaces where you find the odder, more interesting and less-likely-to-ever-see-again bands. As it turned out, this was the year that Lars Ulrich was ‘indisposed’ and Metallica drafted in Slipknot’s Joey Jordison as a replacement – so the show might have been worth catching after all. But we were unaware of that, instead opting to watch – and film – the Suicide Girls show.

As you can imagine, filming in a packed tent was challenging, regardless of our camera pass. But we managed to grab most of the show, which was a solid burlesque performance – this was still a year or two before the burlesque scene in the UK exploded and so it was still quite a novel experience for most. The footage has sat unseen for 20 years. Until now. For obvious reasons, this isn’t going on our YouTube page – I might struggle even to use the word ‘Suicide’ on that site, regardless of context. So enjoy this 14-minute slice of nostalgia as a Desperate Living subscriber exclusive.

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