Handbag
In 1975, glam trio Handbag recorded an album for Jet Records, home to the Electric Light Orchestra and Ozzy Osbourne. Yet the LP, Whore’s Handbag, would remain in the can for almost five decades, thought lost forever until the band’s leader released them to streaming sites this week, as Handbag The Jet Sessions 1975.
Handbag were the first openly gay rock group to be signed to a major record label in Britain. They were also the first out-gay band ever to perform in a British prison, entertaining the inmates at H.M.P. Wandsworth on two occasions. Yet the name would mean little to anyone today. ‘Handbag came together with my coming out,’ recalls bassist, singer and songwriter Paul South. ‘I wanted to be a musician and in those days you needed to be somewhere like London. I also wanted to be open about my homosexuality.’ The 19-year-old Southwell left his family home in Accrington and headed for the bright lights. It was 1971.
At that time London’s gay scene consisted of a selection of seedy pubs, after-hours basement drinking dens and regular discos organised by the Gay Liberation Front, which had formed the previous October. But none of the bands playing GLF events were ‘out’, and most of the entertainment was supplied by decidedly ‘straight’ bands. ‘I thought it was a bit weird that there were these bands playing that were very heterosexual, but I soon realised that there were a lot of gay people in the music business, but they all kept it quiet. They didn’t embrace gay liberation, they kept that at arm’s length.’
Handbag would change that: the gay trio quickly built a following, playing GLF benefits and other LGBTQ events, as well as the busy pub rock circuit. It would not be long before labels began to show an interest in signing the act. Don Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne and known to use intimidation to keep his acts in check, was one of the best known impresarios in the business. His son, David, saw Handbag – Paul, Dave Jenkins and Alan Jordan – playing one night at London’s Speakeasy and signed them to Don’s company, Jet Records. ‘Everybody was trying to sign us,’ says Paul. ‘But we went with Don Arden, which was the worst thing we could have done. Even then he had a reputation for being a bastard! But they were offering nice things, and we wanted to believe that they were nice people. We were a bit naïve really!’
Surprisingly for the time, the label made the most of the gay tag. ‘Handbag are, well, queers! Queens!’ David Arden told Beat Instrumental magazine. ‘Handbag are 100 percent gay. They are three “chaps” who look fabulous, whose music is outrageous… right out in the open.’
Handbag recorded the album at De Lane Lea Studios in Wembley (were artists including Queen, Wishbone Ash and Bette Davis also recorded), during time booked by Jet for their other acts. ‘The sessions went on for approximately two months,’ Southwell reveals. ‘We used to get all the sessions that the ELO weren’t using, sometimes at the drop of a hat. Sometimes sessions were cancelled at short notice when one of the other Jet acts needed to get into the studio; I remember one session being cancelled for Lynsey De Paul. It took quite a long time to record and mix.’. Arden brought in superstar photographer Mick Rock to shoot the cover – ‘The designer wanted it to look like a handbag. It was going to be a gatefold sleeve, and inside the handbag were lots of things you wouldn’t really expect to find there, like dildos and condoms and other outrageous things,’ – but the company dropped them shortly after the recording sessions and the record remained unreleased until now.
The album is a revelation: a power-pop romp with blistering guitar work and lyrics – especially on the LGBTQ-themed ‘Leather Boys’ and ‘Closet Queen’ – that were years ahead of their time. It would be another eight years before Frankie Goes to Hollywood – a band fronted by two out-gay men – would sign their own contract, and nine before Bronski Beat, the first out-gay trio in British chart history – would sign theirs. If Jet had not shelved the album, the whole history of LGBTQ music would have been different.
‘We could have been the first gay rock band to go out on TV and have a record out,’ Southwell notes. ‘One minute you’re being told that you’re going to be launched and that you’re going to be a star, and then suddenly it’s goodbye.’
Although Jet refused to issue the album, they retained the copyright to Southwell’s songs; Handbag could perform them live, but were prevented from re-recording any of the material languishing in Jet’s vault. ‘I’d been writing the songs, we’d rehearsed them, we’d taken them on the road and we’d got them to a standard where they were interesting record companies and suddenly we’d got no songs! We were back to square one. It was incredibly disappointing.’ Luckily Paul managed to take reference copies of the tapes before they were locked out of the studio, and it is those that have been used for the new digital transfer. Why now? ‘I just seemed to have time,’ he says.
It’s still a mystery to Paul why they were dropped. ‘I tried to find out why they wouldn’t do it, but of course nobody would ever tell me. You would hear rumours, whispers, but I never found out why they wouldn’t put it out. If Jet had gone with Handbag and put that album out there would have been so much publicity that even if it only sold 5,000 copies it still would have broken ground,’ he sighs. ‘Why go to all that trouble, spend all that money and then do nothing?’
Music was changing, punk was taking over and LGBTQ venues became the favoured hang-outs for many nascent punk superstars. In December 1976 gay night club Chaguaramas, in Covent Garden’s Neal Street, became The Roxy, and not long after it opened [in fact it was some 15 months after – Punk77], Handbag took on a residency, hosting the venue’s weekly gay rock night. Handbag played all of London’s regular punk venues, including Dingwalls, the Marquee and the Hope and Anchor, as well as hundreds of other paid gigs and just about every benefit they were asked to.
Above – the last days of The Roxy Club WC2 in 1978
Earlier that year Tom Robinson had written the song which became ‘(Sing If You’re) Glad To Be Gay’: issued by EMI in early 1978, it was the first gay-themed song performed by an out-gay singer to chart in Britain. At about the same time that ‘Glad To Be Gay’ hit the charts, an album by Handbag finally appeared. ‘About two years after we had been dropped by Jet we got another offer. We didn’t sign anything; we did some demos, then it all went kind of quiet. Suddenly this record – Snatchin’ by Handbag – came out in Italy! They were the demos. They weren’t supposed to be released, we needed to re-record them in the studio with better production… but anyway it came out and then, about a year later it was re-released under the title The Aggressive Style Punk Rock – punk had taken over the world, and the Italians must have thought, “this is a bit punky, we’ll market this”! I would never have let that go out, with someone on the cover with a swastika on his face, but I had no control over it.’
‘I don’t know if I ever really saw us as punk, but once the Sex Pistols had taken over the world if you weren’t punk then you didn’t get any work. So Handbag had to be punk, and that’s when we started playing the Roxy and all the punk venues.’
Feeling that the band’s name was holding them back Handbag became Dino, Daz and the Machine, and continued to play the occasional benefit before splitting after five years at the coalface. Paul donated two Handbag songs to be used on the soundtrack for a movie, David is Homosexual, and he issued a self-financed solo E.P, but with little promotion and even less availability it went nowhere. ‘By this time it was the early 80s,’ says Paul ruefully. ‘I was coming up to 30 and I took a serious look at my life and asked myself, “am I going to carry this on?” Tom Robinson had had a hit, loads of my contemporaries – people that we had played with were making money, and we weren’t… so I decided to call it a day.
David Is Homosexual – 1978 drama documentary film made by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality
‘By then AIDS had reared its ugly head and I put my energies into looking after my friends. That’s the reason I veered away from music. London at that time, in 83 and 84, was just terrible. That’s when I went back to university: I signed on and did my degree and went into teaching and academia. I was working at Morley College [near Waterloo in Central London] when Section 28 came out. Section 28 did a lot of damage to education. We had just got to the point where teachers could come out, you know, where teachers could talk about gay things, and then suddenly you could be sacked for it. Clause 28 gave the homophobes and bullies a green light to stop any gay youth work, removing positive role models and taking away any chance of our voice being heard in a school setting. This stopped kids getting a real opportunity of seeing role models or any opportunity to see that being gay was good and normal and you could lead a happy and fulfilled life. It did push back the cause years and of course happened during the height of the AIDS epidemic adding to even more stress to the LBGT community.’
‘AIDS sapped everybody’s energy,’ says Paul Southwell. ‘It was just so devastating, but we fought through and we got through and, eventually, we got through Section 28 as well.’
Paul now lives with his husband in Australia. Although officially retired he still plays bass and sings with his current band, Area13. ‘Looking back I don’t suppose that any of the gay songs would have been hits,’ he says. ‘However, we shall never know. I do think that Handbag did break down some barriers and I do think that we would have been remembered as the first gay rock band had they had the guts to launch us. But we shall never know. It might have just died a death like Jobriath. I think one of the problems was that because we were gay, gay people were coming to see us expecting us to play disco music. We didn’t; we weren’t really playing the right kind of music for a gay audience.’
© Darryl W. Bulock: an edited version of this article first appeared in the Guardian, December 2022
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