The Glasgow Short Film Festival will host the world premiere of The Disco – A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck, an experimental documentary about the founder of Scottish queer club night Hot Mess created by moving image artist Alex Hetherington. In his first work for cinema, Hetherington celebrates the queer nightlife staple, Hot Mess, and reflects on its status as a joyous, vital protest against digital technology, gentrification and an ever-widening chasm in the queer nightclub scene in Scotland.
GSFF contends that The Disco ‘finds its roots in the histories of disco from Trans, Latino, Black, Drag and Queer activism and collectivism, often defined and shaped by working-class, or excluded community, experiences.’ And in a time of such division, austerity and an ever-alarming dependence on digital media, the pleasure and catharsis queer nightlife brings has never felt more crucial. But the film serves, too, as a portrait of Hot Mess’ fascinating creator Simon, through which audiences are able to reflect on ‘the multitudes within d/Deaf lives and experience and considerations on radical forms of assembly through Queer dreaming, care, hapticality and joy.’ The soundtrack features a new improvised composition by David Toop, extracts from an improvised chamber work by Henri Pousseur as well as archival field recordings by Luke Fowler.
What drew you to Hot Mess as an attendee, and what pushed you to create a film with the event as its centerpiece?
When I worked in Edinburgh a long time ago, I was a curator and film programmer, and it was tough work. And I always found that Hot Mess was somewhere that I was really attracted to as a queer man, an artist, and a curator. It took me back vividly to places like San Francisco, New York and or London, places like Taboo. It was like this club Leigh Bowery ran. And for me, like Bowery, Simon seemed to emanate his personality into the space: the place was an expansion of Simon’s personality. And I really like the crowd. They’re very eclectic. There were a lot of women all dressed up. It felt like a party, like a celebration. I’d never had any intention of making a film about it, but I did approach Simon in 2020 about doing a series of portraits: single roles of film, portraits of queer mavericks or pioneers that I had an affinity for. But of course, this was 2020, so the pandemic took place, and everything stalled. And then I was offered a two person show with Scott Carruth at the CCA in Glasgow, and then as a Creative Lab, so the roll of film of Simon and a few other people just sat untouched. I thought I’d like to return to it as an expanded portrait.
I wanted to look at people’s lives again, especially post-pandemic, when connectivity with people was very brittle and broken, and I realised that Hot Mess was thriving again. This wee powerhouse of a club was surviving, flourishing, and people were returning to it. I’d also been working a lot with Luke Fowler, who’s a wonderful filmmaker based in Glasgow, who’s done queer portraits of people like Patrick Cowley, who was a DJ and sound pioneer pre-AIDS in San Francisco in the 1970s and 80s, and made a very famous record with Sylvester. And then he made a portrait of Martin Bartlett, a queer electronic musician based in Canada, and Margaret Tate. The thing for me was that Simon is alive and living in the moment.
So it sort of built up, and I came to the club with my little Bolex camera. Everything’s shot in 16mm. It’s quite discrete. Luke got involved, and then David Toop, the electronic musician, got involved, and asked lots of sound people to participate in this interpretation of Simon’s hearing. It came about very organically with this desire for me to celebrate someone in the margins who nevertheless was flourishing. Nowadays, gentrification, post-pandemic [life], the AIDS crisis, and austerity mean that the queer scene is shrinking and narrowing and being forced into smaller and smaller capacities. But here was Simon, just doing this work. I became fascinated by his musical memory. He DJs by memory because his hearing is so fragile and brittle that it felt like a performance, but also not a performance. I just became very inspired by and influenced by that.
I’m older now, so, as a filmmaker, I know what I’m looking at now. That was important as obviously there are cross generational queer experiences, and it sometimes takes someone like me to go, ‘Okay, I think I should, I think I need to make a film about this,’ because I want people to remember it. There are very few archives of queer nightlife, in Scotland in particular. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, it had a very flourishing scene, and lots and lots of different clubs, and most of them are gone now. So I met with a group of older, queer men and women who socialised, and socialising, pre technology, was very important to them. I wanted to capture something like that.
But I’m not a documentary filmmaker as such, so it’s an art film for cinema; it’s like an impression. It’s difficult to make a portrait of someone in such a short space of time, but also not overwhelm their lives. I didn’t want to interfere in any way with the equilibrium at Hot Mess. I wanted to be very discreet. And also I didn’t want to be a pain in the ass in Simon’s life! ‘Oh, God, this guy again!’ Not just showing up on his doorstep, because he has a very distinct and interesting life.
But I’m very interested in a line from DH Lawrence’s Women in Love about acknowledging the things that make you realise that you’ve lived. And then I think of Robert Ashley, an experimental composer, who wrote an opera where one of the great lines was, ‘Is it possible for you to discover that you’re someone other than who you think you are?’ That was a great influence on the making of this film: if Simon wants to be a DJ as well as an actor, as well as lots and lots of things, he seems to be able to do it and nourish all those aspects of his life. I think that’s a great method of being, isn’t it?
Simon seems like a fascinating person: did you know much about him before this experience, and was there anything that surprised you about him in the process of creating the film?
What surprised me was how delicate and vulnerable Simon is, and how willing he is to express those vulnerabilities. It’s like the opposite of ‘the DJ’: there’s a scene with him doing all that stuff, very alive and alert. But here was Simon being quite shy, even though it was filmed in his house with his ex-husband who lived in Edinburgh at the time. And that soft touch, that gentleness, really was what I thought was very beautiful, and it was something I wanted to carry on capturing.
It’s about a sensitive, extraordinarily complex form of masculinity that in this age we don’t see. We can see in the United States of America, particularly in someone like Elon Musk or JD Vance, people who are deeply troubled individuals because they just don’t understand how to control an aspect of themselves.
I would go along to Hot Mess when I was living in Edinburgh. But there was an incident in my life where I lost confidence in the gay scene itself. But I used to go along to Hot Mess, and I was like, ‘Oh God, this is salvation, isn’t it? This is the remedy.’ When you feel that you’re a bit broken-hearted or something really bad happens, the thing that people tend to do is crawl into themselves. I wasn’t going to do that, so I went out and socialised again and I was very struck by Simon’s posters, because they’re very visible.
So as an artist, I sent him a poster, got his address, and sent him a poster. And I think he was very touched by that, because it was an articulation of what it actually means to people and how important it is. I think Hot Mess is radical in the fact that it has this joy in resilience, and resilience isn’t this idea of seeking out or expecting the bleakest thing to happen. Queer identified people know the bleakest things that happen. We’ve been living with it for centuries. But what we do do is we unify and we collect together, and we generate incredible energy. I wanted to somehow express that as Simon embodies it. But it isn’t just a portrait of the whole community and all of the different people who go there; it’s also a portrait of me as an artist, thinking about the complexity of not shying away from the complexity.
I’m really curious about the music that plays during the throes of the Hot Mess event at the start of the film; how did you settle on that music, was it a conscious effort to differentiate from what one can typically expect there?
Yeah, I think it was very important for me not to try to capture everything. If you shoot on film, you have to record sound separately. I wasn’t trying to say, ‘well, this is what Hot Mess is like, and this is the music that you would hear.’ And filming the way that I was doing it would have been very disjointed in terms of the music that you would have heard: you’d get two or three seconds of one piece of music, and then two or three seconds or five seconds, and it would become really difficult to understand the night that way.
I felt that the sound could operate as a separate work of art in a way that you could listen to the film, or it could be a sound piece. And then I was very interested in this idea of music as a documentary. The music that I did choose with David was a piece by Henri Pousseur, as well as music from Luke Fowler.
David improvised a piece of flute music to the opening scene as he was watching it. And the more he watched it, the more his flutes were interacting with the movement. And there’s a line that Simon says about how there’s no flow to listen to people’s voices. So I thought the flute could be an interpretation of voices or the flow of other people’s voices. I didn’t particularly record other people’s conversations unless it was in the ambience of everything. It wasn’t like hearing someone’s conversation, but lots of people speaking. So the flute was a flow of voices.
There’s a breathiness to it, but there’s a melancholy to it as well, because there is a melancholy to Simon’s experience and so the chamber piece is based on the idea of an ephemeris, which is how the bodies move in astronomical terms.
If you look at an Ephemeris, you’ll be able to see how Mars is moving, or how the Earth moves. So there is this choreography, if you like, of movements between people, bodies and spaces. But somehow that piece of music really synchronised really well with the movements of people and their expressiveness, and some of the more gentle passages just seem to really resonate and quiet the film down. It isn’t all high energy and nor should it be.
One of my favorite moments in the film was when I was just reloading my camera, and I just caught these two men at the bar. It’s almost the end of the night for them, and there’s just this lovely flute playing again that just seemed to sum up their interactions. There is disco music in there, but again, it’s not the focus of the film. The focus of the film is not the music but the dynamic that the music creates.
I attend an amazing queer disco every month in the south side, and have what we call our ‘disco family,’ and I was struck by how quickly it took me to recognise people I know in the film. How would you describe the sense of community you came across while creating the film? How vital are spaces and events like Hot Mess in sustaining these very specific (and very queer) forms of community?
Well, I think Simon and Colin, who’s the other DJ, really helped out. I think Hot Mess has a lot of traffic, people come and go. But we had a lot of ideas about consent. We had lots of social media posts to let people know I’d be there. I was very keen on consent. I asked Simon himself to communicate to the community on Instagram, particularly. And then I also talked about this idea of being an artist in residence there, because it was shot over a year. I only went four times, so that means I’m not punching a hole through the fabric of it.
There was a guy from Spain who asked me if I was queer, and I was like, ‘Yes, I’m queer.’ I was very inspired by a documentary filmmaker, an artist called RaMell Ross, who made a film called Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Hill County is the place that it’s filmed, and it is based on a novel by the black queer writer James Baldwin. He was filming within his own community. And you know, being a punter is important, as well as then picking up a camera and saying, ‘Okay, I’m here to film this.’
And then I got a bit psychic: I could understand someone who just didn’t want to be filmed, I would just know. There are a few scenes where you see me with the camera, and there were two guys in particular that came out, and they were obviously seducing each other. And I’m like, ‘Okay, I want to see a moment of that, but the rest of it’s up to them.’ And there were a few people who communicated to me online that they didn’t want to be filmed in the space itself. But they just very quickly embraced me. That force of energy just takes over, and people just don’t care.
It must be hard striking that balance between observing and then encouraging people to release inhibitions and, as you say, have that liberty to be exactly who they are in this space. Did you find people were performative? Or do you find that they were on or were they able to forget the camera was there?
Yeah, I think they forgot the camera was there. In the scenes at the end, there’s a few people who are really posing. And then there’s the woman who looks like she’s from an Almodovar film. I think she’s French. She really was alert to the camera, and I was alert to her, wanting to be alert to the camera. So I don’t think I encouraged anyone to do anything.
The one thing that I did do was shoot a lot of things very quickly, and in my films, that tends not to happen. Usually, I stay on a scene. But I shot a lot of single frames. I really responded to the energy of the night. It’s really difficult to film and focusing is sometimes really impossible, so you just have to trust it.
You know, the viewfinder in my old Bolex 1961 is really tiny, so I just had to do these little calculations in my head and go, ‘Well, that’s going to be in focus, and if it’s not, then who cares?’ So I just went with it. I don’t feel like I was an outsider there, and I don’t feel like I was on the margins. But neither do I think that’s a bad thing.
I think being in the margins, even within a place like that, is absolutely and perfectly right. You know, this is a place where it allows you to be in the margins. Some people will navigate themselves towards the camera, and some people will communicate with me in some way that they don’t want me to navigate towards them. I’ve learned a lot from that experience, because it’s very new filmmaking for me. I think of the opening scene with David Toop’s improvised music, and that is one whole roll of film from the first beat to the last, from the lights going up, and the last shot on Simon to the left of the screen. I just thought, ‘this is perfect.’ It was really beautiful. So that is an indication of how well I was in the fluidity of the space.
Some people have said to me, ‘you’re making a film about a disco, well, how interesting can that be?’ It’s deeply interesting because it’s deeply human. It’s all about deeply human interactions, and there is an extraordinariness. There’s a politics running through the film, which I hope is evident. I think about Stuart Marshall, the AIDS activist filmmaker who died of AIDS in the 90s, and the constraints that lots of queer people have on their lives. You can see when people come into the club, you know, there’s a doorway, a cloak room, and all of the horrors of the world just seem to fade away. And I thought, God, that is really beautiful. That’s extraordinary.
Glasgow Short Film Festival premieres The Disco – A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck at 8.30pm, 19th March at the Glasgow Film Theatre.
Find out more + tickets: glasgowshort.org
The screening will be accompanied by a live reading by Catherine Street, followed by a conversation with Alex Hetherington, Simon Eilbeck and other contributors, and has Descriptive Subtitles for accessibility. The Q&A will be BSL interpreted.
All photo credits: Alex Hetherington
