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Bishi Bhattacharya (Bishnupriya Bhattacharya)
Bishi Bhattacharya was interviewed by Chardine Taylor-Stone for the Museum of Youth Culture, and talks about growing up in London as a queer teenager in the 1990s, navigating the underground music scene
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About
Bishi Bhattacharya was born in Hammersmith to Bengali immigrant parents. She describes her experience as a queer teenager in the late 1990s, navigating London's post-Britpop scene, socializing with YBAs, club kids and drag queens in Soho. Bishi also shares how she launched a queer club night, Cash Point, and DJed at various queer and fetish clubs. She discusses the dangers of being queer during that time, and the challenges she faced as a South Asian woman competing with white female artists for South Asian representation in the industry.
This interview was conducted as part of the ‘Alternative Subcultural Voices’ project, led by the Museum of Youth Culture. Chardine Taylor-Stone conducted the interview, and the full collection of project interviews is available online with the Museum. The Museum of Youth Culture is the world’s first museum dedicated to the story of teenagers and young people, collecting the scenes, styles and social movements forged by youth over the last century.
Listen to Bishi talking about the queer music and club scenes in London, 1990s to 2000s.
Interview conducted by Chardine Taylor-Stone.
BB: Sure. My name is Bishi, short for Bishnupriya Bhattacharya. I'm the daughter of two Bengali immigrants who moved over from the '70s, and I was born in Hammersmith. Sort of grew up in west London. But I did my youth culture moment very much in east London, at a very interesting moment of east London. And I did a lot of my teenage years growing up and going out in Soho in the LGBTQ community. So it was a really interesting time to be a young, well, a child of colour.
CT: Tell us about that actually, that sort of...that queer Soho moving to east London. Because east London was a little bit late on the sort of LGBT, so you were like there, you know, when really kind of at the beginning of it.
BB: Yeah. Well, so...okay. So, at the age of 14, I was, quote unquote, discovered by a really radical queer performance art band called Minty, who had been founded by performance artist Leigh Bowery. Leigh Bowery had just passed away as I entered into the scene through my...he was my boyfriend at the time. And I was also...I taught myself how to play the bass guitar, so I'd also been a bassist and a backing singer. I did my first gig upstairs at the Garage, aged 14. Yeah, 14, 15, this was a very...like, this is my real discovery of Bishi the artist. I had an older sister who was very into riot grrrl, so where I should have been getting into the Spice Girls, I'd already learned about Hole and PJ Harvey and the Breeders. And, you know, there was a big rock, indie thing happening. Yeah, that Britpop that gets such a bad name, but there was tons of great music. So I entered into this post-Britpop underground, essentially. And the people who were hanging out in Soho at the time were like the YBAs, but they were all like...you know, every year you go to Shoreditch, someone's like, oh, Shoreditch is really over this year. By the time I moved to Shoreditch in 2000 right...yeah, 2001, so that's when I would have been finishing my A-levels. And even then, it was like a barren wasteland. You came out of Old Street tube and there were a couple of plastic bags blowing around in the wind. There...you know, there was nothing, there was absolutely nothing. And even then, people were telling me that, you know, Shoreditch is over, and it was like a barren land. But what I remember from Soho, certainly late '90s Soho, was that there were lots of these underground basements. My drag father, my disco dad, a club promoter and sort of club visionary called Matthew Glammore, he knew everybody, so he would knock on these doors and then a door would open. And you just felt like you were in a David Lynch film, you know? The concept that...you know, there was...there's always been a very mainstream gay and that's, you know, the gay who loves Kylie and goes to GAY, so that archetype, the Will and Grace gay, that archetype has already...always existed. But the bit of the gay scene that I was involved in is what we would call queer now, but queer was a really bad word for those people. But it was all of the people who were around Leigh Bowery and Michael Clark and Taboo, they would have been sort of the children...you know, they were the club children who had been post-punk and post-New Romantic, but who would have come into their youth and sort of early adulthood around acid house. So lots of ex-ravers and dance music people, but really like the weird...you know, the very artsy, weird end. So, you know, people who would have worked with Derek Jarman, the Pet Shop Boys, everybody knew Boy George. When I finished my A-levels, one of the big parties I went to...I know, lol, one of the big parties I went to was Boy George's 40th. And me and my friend, we got some sheets from the Poundland in Kentish Town and he put them through his sewing machine, and we lied and told everyone it was Issey Miyake and it wasn't, it was just us in this...
CT: That’s so funny.
BB: So, yeah, this very...you know, and then I had a set of friends who were based in and around Bethnal Green, and they were really into Can and Kraftwerk and Neu! and there was...you know, we were really into Woo...records and kind of electronic, you know...it...you know, I went to Aphex Twin raves, you know, and it was...you know, it was...I was really...well, my friends were a lot older, and they really looked after me. And it was dangerous, you know? And so this was just, you know, the new bit of the internet so I was looking this up yesterday in preparation for...to talking to you and...so, I'm basically a millennial, but there's a sub-brand called Xenial which is...basically means analogue childhood and then internet teenhood.
CT: Yeah, I'm exactly the same.
B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, I got away with this wildly bohemian, almost double life that I led, because I was a swot at school, and I had really good grades. And I was a really good liar as well, so I can just...
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Entry credit
Anya Amlani
