Go and see ‘Leigh Bowery!’ at Tate Modern

I know it won’t come as a surprise to regular readers, but yes, I do think it is worth going to the Leigh Bowery! exhibition at Tate Modern at the moment, not least because, besides Bowery’s stuff being amazing, it comes with a sizeable dollop of the Fall right in the middle of it.

One of the rooms is playing “Hail the New Puritan (excerpts)” by Charles Atlas, which features music from the Fall, dancing by Michael Clark, and clips of Mark E Smith and Brix from 1985-6. You can’t go wrong with a bit of Copped It playing out loud on a loop in an art gallery in the year of our lord 2025.

Still, maybe the thing I enjoyed most about the Leigh Bowery exhibition is that it is imbued with an appropriate sense of mischief. All of this creativity was going on at a time of Section 28 in Thatcher’s Britain, and it makes me laugh in 2025 that this c-word bit of the exhibition is out in the open …

… but the immersive installation “???Taboooo???” by Jeffrey Hinton is behind trigger warnings as not being suitable for children, and is the only bit that explicitly has the prime minister who introduced that shameful anti-LGBTQ+ repressive legislation on-screen.