Douglas Dare.
Notes From The Underground.
Douglas Dare has just taken possession of a brand new piano, which has been carefully manoeuvred up a winding stairwell and safely installed in his second-floor flat in East London. A proper piano – acoustic, where hammers strike strings, as opposed to a keyboard – this is the instrument he needs to write his songs, the elegiac ballads he sings with the heart-wrenching voice of a wounded angel. (The Dorset-born performer’s music is, as he observes several times in our conversation, ‘melancholic’, although don’t let that lead you to any assumptions about Douglas’s disposition off stage: ‘I am generally a very euphoric person,’ he laughs.) The piano that he previously used, in a studio across town, has remained out of bounds since England’s third lockdown was introduced at the end of last year. This was only the latest in a string of obstacles presented by the pandemic. The tour to promote his latest album Milkteeth, scheduled to start on 12 March 2020, was one of the first to be cancelled as the prospect of lockdown loomed over spring.
With an uncertain year ahead, he improvised. His plans for a series of music videos to accompany Milkteeth were scaled back. For the solemnly joyful ‘I Am Free’, he ventured up to the rooftop of his block and filmed himself hula-hooping against a clear blue sky on his phone. ‘I just worked with what I had.’ He sold T-shirts designed for the postponed tour online, hand-dyed by Douglas for a personal touch. ‘Of course, the first instinct was to do performances online, which I did, and that was great.’ And then, to mix things up a bit, he decided to introduce his drag persona, Visa Reasons, to his songs. Till this point he’d been keen to keep these aspects of his life apart. ‘My music is quite melancholy, and I take it seriously. Whereas drag has always been a way for me NOT to take myself seriously and be the opposite of melancholy.’ But, with so many people online opening windows into their personal environments to get around the isolation of lockdown, now felt like the right time to reveal Visa to Douglas Dare’s followers. ‘So I set up the phone and showed the whole three-hour process of putting on the make-up and getting into the wig. And I did a Q+A with people who wanted to ask me about what it meant to me to do that.’
He has always liked to dress in an androgynous way, he notes, but this performance encouraged him to take a more extravagant direction with his stage looks. For the video for his track ‘Heavenly Bodies’ – filmed with a string quartet in a Hackney church, in that pause between lockdowns in September – he wore a deconstructed, collage-like ensemble by the young Barcelona designer Gabriel Silva Barros, dominated by a voluminous gown that looked equal parts ecclesiastical and bridal as he walked up the aisle. ‘Having introduced my drag a bit more, I think it’s freed me up a little bit: “Oh, maybe I will play with colour and make-up and jewellery, and bring that in more.” Because truthfully that is a huge part of me. And that’s come all the way through to doing this project with Perfect and Gucci, where I’ve been able to be authentically myself, which is feminine and masculine and all these things combined. I feel really good about that.’
From the spring/summer Gucci collection he chose a flamboyant embellished suit coupled with jewelled earrings. His track for this project, ‘Silly Games’, is a fresh arrangement of a track on Milkteeth, which he plays on acoustic guitar. ‘Coupled with the flared velvet suit, it’s got this kind of… glam Western feel.’ He laughs. ‘It’s reinvigorated the song for me, and I hope for people listening as well.’ The shoot took place in his flat; he says he might film further new interpretations from Milkteeth while we all wait at home for lockdown to end. And then, finally, he’ll be free to re-embark on his postponed tour. In the meantime, he can now set to work composing brand new material on his brand new piano.
