Suicide Girls asked me to DJ the Canadian leg of their Blackheart Burlesque tour. Don't know who Suicide Girls are? If your head’s been in the oven for the last 13 years, it’s the pinnacle online community for alternative pin-up modelling. Having toured the States a few times, opening for Courtney Love, Guns N’ Roses and pretty much every European festival you can think of, you soon come to realise that you’re not in for a traditional burlesque show. Tongue-in-cheek, geeky humour mixed together with Jack Daniel's and, of course, some sex appeal gives you The Blackheart Burlesque, with stripteases and dances based on Link (imagine if Link was a hot girl, ok?), Game Of Thrones, Star Wars and Donnie Darko. Yeah... you’re beginning to get the gist. So when I was given this opportunity to travel a new country with them and kick some arses, obviously it was a no-brainer.
Before this shindig even started, I flew direct from London Heathrow to Vancouver. That shit was long; I landed and was bundled straight into a cab to our first show. Now, there is no greater jet lag cure than being hurled on to stage in front of a ton of people to play tunes. As the tour DJ I felt as if it was my job to stamp out the stereotype that metal music and lifestyle is only for big burly men with a motorbike and beards that make Gandalf moist… and us girls together were stamping out any tedious stereotypes about attractive girls bring vacuous with no personality, (we’d party you under the table, FYI).
I kept the place pumping, dropping Slayer, Metallica, Pantera, Mötley Crüe and Limp Bizkit to name a few (Canadians fucking love Slayer and Pantera), and I lived the dream of most men’s fantasies by spending the majority of my time in confined spaces with half naked, hot, tattooed chicks. Imagine there being nothing better to do than just sink shots and lay up in smoke. Sometimes we’d be driving for 10 hours at a time – what a shame, eh?
Calgary was -13 degrees, which was the perfect excuse to warm up on some whiskey, and there is no greater way to keep toasty than to have a little party – or a lot of party – all night until the next day at the next show.
We hit Edmonton pretty early on, so decided to do some exploring and discovered a mall that had its own entire water park with roller coasters that ripped around the entire building. Ontario, on the other hand, was some cross-bred Canadian/London love child. I’m a city girl at heart, y’see. If you go, there’s this food place called The Early Bird, where I finally got my hands and mouth around some decent Poutine, the décor of the place was Slayer posters, badass sculptures and classic rock ‘n’ roll vinyls etched to the walls. When we rolled up in Ottawa they had sold the show out twice over, literally. We had one show followed by another on the same stage in the same building – bottles were quickly cleared from the floor and we got to start it all over again! No rest for the wicked…
