Even better than the Real Thing

THE RUSTLE of chiffon, the tapping of stiletto heels, the glow of lip gloss, the sheen of glistening ebony tresses – the apparition before me may sound glamorous but it’s anything but, primarily because the bloke in the chiffon, the heels, the lip gloss and the ebony tresses is freezing his balls off and trying to slam some life into the smallest two bar electric heater that I’ve ever seen.

Come to the cabaret, old chum. It’s a bitterly cold February night and Mr. Pussy, “Ireland’s Most Misleading Lady,” is in his star dressing room, a desolate hallspace at the very back of The Cuckoo’s Nest pub in Tallaght. A hardened survivor of many such “dressing rooms”, Mr. Pussy has taken the wise precaution of donning his costume before he left his house. But there are still finishing touches to be added such as the dabbing of more make-up on his shaven chest to create a cleavage effect. This procedure is continually interrupted, however, by bar boys barrelling through the hall, to and from the outside cellar, with crates in their hands. Most avert their eyes from the décolletage-applying diva, one bursts out laughing.

For the record, tonight Mr. Pussy is clad in a black micro skirt, a low-cut black cashmere top and swathes of black chiffon. The man shivering beneath this rig out is Alan Amsby who this year is celebrating twenty-five years as Ireland’s best known drag queen. Right now, however, he’s beginning to wonder if celebrating is the appropriate word.

Paddy aka Amsby’s fellow cabaret star, Paddy Dracula, is filling in tonight as Mr. Pussy’s driver and minder. He pops in with a welcome Scotch and the unwelcome news that, in a unique design statement, the stage is actually at the other side of the pub from the backstage area. Pussy (as those who know him call him) is going to have to crawl out underneath the bar counter and then negotiate his way through a minefield of tables and boisterous punters – and all on six inch heels.

“Oh Jesus,” Pussy says as he sips some whiskey and gives yet another shiver. “This ain’t no way to treat a lady.”

To a taped fanfare of generic strippers’ music, Mr. Pussy struts out from behind the bar, takes a wrong turn towards the middle of the floor and then has to totter all the way back around to the stageside. He makes it just as his bump ’n’ grind intro begins to fade but then his mike starts to act up and his opening lines are lost beneath squalls of feedback. A look of weary irritation crumples his heavily powdered face but he soldiers on.

After a few moments, something approaching sound clarity prevails and we hear Mr. Pussy scold his first heckler. “Listen sunshine,” he says, hips thrust forward, “if you put your hand up my skirt, you’ll feel a right prick.”

Mr. Pussy is not a subtle comic. His material, he insists, is not blue, it’s “risqué.” He’s a great fan and admirer of Brendan O’Carroll but believes that the kind of language he uses would be deemed extremely shocking and offensive if it were to come from Pussy’s lips. So instead, he prefers to rely on that traditional music hall mainstay, the double entendre (fnaar, fnaar).

Essentially, it’s schoolboy stuff with the odd flash of inspiration but some of the jokes are so infantile they should only be delivered with a forceps and the help of an epidural.

“I had the chickenpox recently,” purrs Pussy and then points to a young bloke sitting near the stage. “There’s the chicken who gave it to me.

“A friend of mine used to wear a poppy up her backside,” he continues. “She said it was in memory of those who had died at the front.”

Over by the bar, a middle-aged woman gets up to go to the loo. “I like your hair,” Mr. Pussy tells her. “Did you get it set? What time is it due to go off?”

Later, a toilet-bound man gets similar treatment. “Are you going for a wank, dear?” Pussy asks. “I know him, he comes from a very poor family. If he didn’t wake up on Christmas morning with a hard-on he had nothing to play with all day.”

Elsewhere, there are impromptu lessons in Japanese (“What’s the Japanese for knickers? Sak-a-nookie!”), Chinese (“What’s the Chinese for the 69 position? Chumanchu!”) and much fun mined from such hilarious Oriental names as Wan Hung Low, Pu King and Foo King. There’s also a liberal helping of gags about prostitutes, door-to-door salesmen and comedy vegetables (“I bought a cucumber in Moore Street the other day. The woman asked if I wanted it sliced. I said ‘What do you think I am, a slot-machine?’”).

The evening’s current affairs content is supplied by references to the Gillian Taylforth saga. “The actual incident happened in a pervertmobile – the hood stays up but the passenger goes down,” Pussy proclaims. “When the policeman arrived, he asked what they were doing and she said they were necking. The policeman then told her boyfriend to put his neck back in his trousers.”

Between the jokes, there are songs. With backing tape accompaniment, Mr. Pussy treats us to his own unique renditions of ‘Hello Dolly’, ‘Mack The Knife’ (“I know his brother, Dick The Chopper’) and ‘Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me’ for which he engages the assistance of a bald gent from the audience whom he strips to the waist and mock-fondles feverishly. When it transpires that the guy’s name is Mickey, you can almost hear the gears meshing in Mr. Pussy’s head. “Mickey and Pussy, eh,” he miaows. “Well, how convenient.”

The Cuckoo’s Nest is one of those sprawling suburban pubs that take up more groundspace than the average republic in Eastern Europe. Tonight, however, it’s stuffed to the gills. This show has been organised to raise money to send a local terminally ill father-of-nine on a trip to Lourdes (nobody involved seems to find any irony in the financing of a religious pilgrimage with the help of a bawdy drag queen, but then that’s what things have come to now that Fr. Michael Cleary has retired from the national gigging circuit – he was never bawdy).

Mr. Pussy finished his act to enthusiastic applause. His finale, a raucous version of ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van And Don’t Dilly Dally On The Way’, has dozens of people on their feet, holding hands and singing along. Standing to one side of the stage with a notebook in hand naturally makes me a focus for discontent, however, and I’m approached by a number of older women who are less than happy. “I saw him twenty years ago and he was the exact same,” says one. “He hasn’t changed. Jesus, you’d think he’d come up with something new.” “He’s not as funny as Brendan O’Carroll,” offers another. “He’s not dirty enough.” (This woman also asked me if I was Maeve Binchy in disguise but that’s another story entirely).

Curiously enough, it is with the younger members of the audience that tonight’s act seems to go down (fnaar fnaar) best. Certainly, the fifty odd twentysomethings seated closest to the stage are the most vocal group in terms of their appreciation of and participation in Mr. Pussy’s performance.

“After twenty-five years, it’s like being reborn to a whole new audience,” he muses while sipping an après gig Scotch. “Son of Pussy!”

Sitting amid the genteel old-world finery of his Drumcondra home where he lives alone apart from his pet terrier, Lily, Alan Amsby cuts a very different figure from his feline alter ego. Resplendent in a bright pink jumpsuit, he is a more courteous and reserved individual than you might expect the person who wears the trousers in the Pussy household to be. Like many stage divas, he is reluctant to reveal his age but if you add his twenty-five years in Irish showbusiness to the twenty-five plus years he spent in London beforehand, you can hazard a reasonable guess at the number of calendars he’s been through.

Born and raised in Camberwell in South London, Amsby followed his mother into the professional wig making business when he left school. For several years, he wove hair with Wig Creations, a prestigious firm which listed Marlene Dietrich among its clients. In 1967, the young Amsby was given the task of making the false moustaches which The Beatles would wear on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“I actually got to know Ringo quite well through that,” he recalls. “We met lots of times and he used to come and see me on stage when I started performing. But I loved working with wigs. I met some great people. Dietrich used to actually come in for fittings and I was the one who looked after her. Making wigs is actually something I’d like to go back to some day. There’s definitely a demand for somewhere like Wig Creations in Dublin. Even RTE has to send to England for wigs and that adds an extra £200 or £300 to the price. I wouldn’t mind setting up my own wig business. Maybe that’s where Mr. Pussy will retire to.”

Mr. Pussy was actually born as the result of a dare. In the evenings of those heady Wig Creations days, Amsby used to drink in a pub called The Vauxhall Tavern with featured drag shows. Astounded by how ropey many of them were, he boasted to the landlady that he could do better and she decided to call what she thought was his bluff.

“A friend of mine teamed up with me and we made up an act,” he says. “We did a couple of shows and pretty quickly we became very popular in London. We called ourselves Pussy and Bow and it seemed to work very well. Ringo Starr used to come and see us, like I said, but so too did people like Hayley Mills and other sixties’ stars. One night, Judy Garland came to see us. She was with Johnny Ray at the time.”

After only a brief taste of success, however, Pussy and Bow unravelled as a result of “a personal falling out.” At the time of the split, they still had one booking in their diary – a week in Belfast. Amsby did the stint on his own, under the name ‘Mr. Pussy’, and was retained for a further two and a half months. He then travelled down to Dublin where he secured more work. That was the summer of ’69, and he’s been based in Ireland ever since.

“My mother is from Ennis and I’d been in Dublin when I was a kid so I wanted to see it again,” he explains. “When I came to Dublin, I met Charlie McGettigan from the Baggot Inn. He had a room upstairs over the Baggot and I asked if I could take it over which I did. I called it Pussy’s Parlour and it became very popular. I did The Late Late the first week I was here and then I went on to do a two and a half year residency in The Baggot Inn, six nights a week and I never missed a night. That was the start of The Baggot as a regular concert venue. I was the very first.”

Among his most devoted fans in those early days was a large contingent from Dail Eireann including one Charlie Haughey. This was a turbulent era for Haughey what with his sacking from government and the subsequent Arms Trial. I wondered if perhaps it was regular visits to Pussy’s Parlour that fortified the beleaguered Boss during the height of his troubles but, unfortunately, Amsby makes no such claims.

“I was introduced to Charlie alright,” he states, “but I didn’t really know who he was at the time. It was only later that I knew he was someone important. Other regulars at that time were people like Noel Pearson, Pat Quinn, Des Wooton, all that crew. People like Andy Devereux, Aiden Doyle, Maxi, Dick and Twink, lots of the showband people. It was one of the places to go to in Dublin at the time.”

By the early seventies, Mr. Pussy had become a prominent feature in the pantheon of Irish cabaret and was in constant demand for everything from hen nights to panto. Building an audience outside Dublin was a gradual business at first but was soon speeded up considerably thanks to the Irish hierarchy.

“I was condemned off the pulpit by a bishop in Longford,” Amsby chuckles. “I was playing in the town that night and he warned people not to go. It was great ’cause I had a bigger crowd in that night than he had. They were queueing up. And word must’ve spread because I started doing really well all over the country after that. Some of my best audiences are still down the country. I forget that bishop’s name but I should probably find out and then send him a thank you card for his help in ensuring that I’d be here for twenty-five years.”

Alan Amsby is keen to stress that he is not a transvestite. For him, women’s clothes are a costume not a sexual indulgence. The paint never slops over the edge of the frame. Beneath the minis, hot pants and stockings there is always a pair of jocks.

“I have my money in one boob and my jewellery in the other,” he laughs. “No, I don’t believe in all that dressing underneath to get into character. It’s ridiculous. I just wear three or four pairs of tights and a nice girdle to hold my belly in, that’s all. It’s an illusion. For me, the most important part of the whole costume is my false eyelashes. Until I put them on, I still feel like a man, and they’re the last things I put on.”

Mr. Pussy is a drag act in the traditional sense that the effect is achieved by playing on an audience’s awareness that he is a man impersonating a woman. During a performance, he regularly lapses into a gruff male voice and his male traits are never fully submerged in the character. Nevertheless, there have been times when he has successfully passed himself off as a fully fledged woman.

“During the sixties, I did some modelling in Carnaby Street as a woman and nobody ever knew that I wasn’t,” he insists. “I modelled mini-skirts, all the fashionable gear, on the ramps and in magazines. At one stage, there were life-size pictures of me in Carnaby St. and still nobody noticed. I couldn’t get away with that kind of thing now but I’ve done it a few times over the years. I remember one night in Dundalk, a long time ago, I heard this guy at the door saying that he wouldn’t pay to see an act like Mr. Pussy. So, I came out and gave him the eye and he paid for the two of us in. He even bought me a drink before he realised that I was the act.”

How would Amsby describe Mr. Pussy as a character?

“A bit of a slut,” he asserts. “One of the boys. The type of bird most fellows would like to go out with and the type of bird most women would like to be. As I say to the hecklers and troublemakers sometimes, ‘I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be and more of a woman than you’ll ever get’.”

Does he attract groupies?

“Not really groupies,” says Amsby. “I used to get people following me around. I used to call them The Lurchers. Women, mostly. They used to hide behind cars in car parks after shows and wait for me to come out. Then, they’d pounce. They were just curious really to see what I looked like as a fellow. They’d want to talk for ages too. Especially down the country. I was a real novelty at one stage.”

In recent years as the Irish cabaret scene has spluttered to its inevitable demise, work has become a lot thinner on the ground for Mr. Pussy. He’s gotten used to living for a couple of weeks on one good night’s paycheck but there have been times when even that has been difficult to come by. Indeed, six years ago, he almost hit rock bottom.

“Times had been hard for a while before that and I’d decided to leave Ireland and live in Malta,” he recalls. “I had a cousin who lived there and I liked the place but it fell through. I came back to Ireland eventually but I now had nowhere to live so I moved into the Waldorf on the quays. I worked there just to pay for my accommodation but I’d wake up in the morning and genuinely not know where my next meal was coming from.

“In desperation, I just got the finger out and every morning I set out walking around Dublin. I walked into bar after bar, asking if they had a cancellation and saying ‘give me a gig, give me a gig’. It was pretty humiliating, after working in the business for twenty years but I got some work and managed to survive. If I hadn’t done that, I don’t know what would’ve happened.”

In his act, Mr. Pussy tells us that one of his sexual fantasies is to sit on Pinnochio’s face and scream ‘Lie to me, lie to me, lie to me’.

Alan Amsby is considerably more circumspect about his fantasies. The gay scene in Dublin has never really interested him very much and he has preferred to socialise with friends from the showbusiness world. He’s close to fellow drag queens such as Danny La Rue and Paul ‘Lily’ Savage after whom he named his dog. Dancer Wayne Sleep is another regular guest at his home.

When he moved into his current abode in Drumcondra over four years ago, he fulfilled a lifelong ambition by converting his basement into his very own nightclub – and hosting all night parties has since become his major hobby.

In recent years, he and Gavin Friday have become friends. When Gavin got married last year, Mr. Pussy performed at his reception in The Kitchen. “I did my act as a wedding present,” Amsby says. “I got Bono up as my assistant for ‘Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me’ and stripped him of his jacket and shirt. I think he really enjoyed it.” Meanwhile, Gavin has written a song about Mr. Pussy which he may record on his next album.

In terms of work, Amsby hopes to do more straight acting. He did have a small part as a prisoner in Jim Sheridan’s In The Name Of The Father but his performance ended up, virtually in its entirety, as a curl on the cutting room floor. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the experience – and the money – so much that he would like to get back before the cameras as soon as possible.

For Mr. Pussy’s twenty-fifth year, he plans extensive touring and some television appearancse (as of now, his only regular “telly” is two stints per year on Play The Game – once on the girls team and once on the boys). He and his friend, Yvonne Costello, are currently working on scripts for a sit-com idea of theirs.

“I know I’m not going to get away with doing Mr. Pussy for ever,” says Amsby. “I know that. But I still look good on stage. I still do the act, and I’ll continue doing it until I look in the mirror and see that it’s gone. After twenty-five years, however, Pussy still looks pretty damn good under those lights, doesn’t she?”