Plastic Band
Words by Dan Jude
Fifties burlesque outfit Plastic Hearts do sexy like you’ve never seen it before. From smut-cake bake-offs to bath-time singalongs, they’re every aspiring husband’s wet dream. Club kids with a difference, they’re putting the ‘life’ back into nightlife, spicing up discotheques across the land with their risqué antics and bawdy tomfoolery.
Plastic Hearts ooze sex appeal. A 1950s burlesque-inspired collective of tantalisingly beautiful damsels, they spend every minute of their free time gallivanting across the country with one sole mission: to inject an unhealthy dose of entertainment and titillation into the days and nights of clubbers, festival-goers and merrymakers nationwide. Indulging in all manner of activities, from baking ‘smut-cakes’ to face-painting unicorns, running beauty boudoirs to dolling punters up in fancy dress, they’re guaranteed to turn your comedown frown upside down.
With influences ranging from Nigella Lawson to Marilyn Monroe and, erm, ‘all people named Pamela’, they’re the best thing to happen to girl power since the release of Spice World. Founded in 2007 by inspired students Jennifer Geach and Leoni Blue, Plastic Hearts have been growing in size ever since, and with their 30-strong troupe ready to take on summer, the world is theirs for the taking. We caught up Jennifer and Leoni, the self-defined ‘Queens of Sexy Time’, to get the lowdown on the enigma that is Plastic Hearts.
DH: Hello. So firstly, who or what is Plastic Hearts?
JG: Me and Leoni started it about a year and a half ago. It began as a few girls hosting events in clubs, but now it’s grown to about 20 to 30 people helping us out – there’s even some men involved, but they have to be gay. Gay men make the perfect husbands, don’t they?
DH: How did it all come about?
JG: Our friend Dan runs a club night called Big In Japan, in Bournemouth, and he asked us to come down and start doing the guest list and making a fuss of all the people - dressing them up, painting their faces. Then we started doing that sort of thing in more clubs in Bournemouth; we’d do a 1950s-style bake sale, or set up a beauty boudoir - things like that. It then spread to Brighton and London: to Fabric, Potty Mouth Disco, Proud Galleries, and we also did a few festivals like Secret Garden Party, Field Day, Beach Break, and Camp Bestival. We mainly do beauty boudoirs, but we also host club nights - we’ll think up a theme, like a 1950s beach party, or a paint fight, or a circus, or roller disco, and go with it. All this makes up what Plastic Hearts are and we do.
DH: Do you all have different roles?
JG: Well me and Leoni think up all the ideas, do all the planning, make costumes, make the sets, and then everyone else just comes along and helps us out with the face painting and things like that. We just love going around clubs in leotards really.
DH: How come you’re so obsessed with the 50s?
JG: We’re crazy about the music and style, but the fashion photography has probably inspired us most. It’s how twee and playful it seems I suppose; rather than being overtly sexual it’s more a playful kind of sexy. We’re not a burlesque act but that definitely influences a lot of what we do - like a slapstick burlesque. It’s more about what you can’t see, than what you can.
DH: Who would be at your dream 1950s dinner party?
JG: Do they all have to be from the 50s?
DH: Erm, no.
JG: Well, Nigella Lawson, because she has a fabulous 50’s figure. Pamela Des Barres - she wrote I’m With The Band, and she was the original groupie in the 1960s and started a girl troupe called the GTA’s who are a real inspiration for what we do.
LB: We also really love Marilyn Monroe, so her as well. And in fact we love all people with the name Pamela, because it’s also my nan’s name. Pamela Anderson is awesome and we love Pamela Courson, who was Jim Morrison’s girlfriend. Oh and Edie Sedgewick too. We just really like people who are famous for doing nothing.
DH: So if you got married, would you want to be like a 1950s housewife?
LB: We’ll probably never get married; instead we’ll just live next door to each other, connected by a secret door. We did a corpse wedding with vintage wedding suits for an event once - that’s probably the closest we’ll ever get. But we do love housework and baking.
DH: Why the name Plastic Hearts?
LB: Our boss was really pushing us for a name, and then he eventually invented one for us. We love it because it’s so kitsch. It’s made merchandising really easy too - there’s loads of branding that suits us.
DH: Is what you do fun or business?
JG: It’s a bit of both really. We want to make it into a business, and we’re slowly getting more recognition and paid more for events. But, at the end of the day, it is all about having a good time. We only approach nights that are a little bit different, who want to create something like a festival-type atmosphere.
DH: So what would a typical Plastic Hearts night involve?
LB: Every single event we do is different because we try to cater to specific requirements, and it depends on the budget we are given. At the last event we did we made cupcakes with swearwords on, and gave out handcuffs, pregnancy tests, and vaginal wipes wrapped in newspaper. Sometimes we try to be as smutty as possible.
DH: What sort of filth do you write on your smut cupcakes?
LB: One of our gay husbands gave a cupcake to a girl and it had “Shit On Me” written on it - she squashed it back in his face and he was really upset. That was probably the worst reaction we got. Ones with a bloody tampon drawn on with icing went down quite well - one girl thought it was a mouse.
DH: What’s your favourite thing to face-paint on people?
LB: Jen likes doing creative themes like mushroom fields, or thunder-storms, or night scenes, or forests and unicorns. I’m really good at things like animals or Spiderman - just anything silly. Jen’s got a really good design for a gimp mask but she’s yet to find someone to let them paint it on them.
DH: Do you want to keep growing?
JG: Yeah. We communicate with people on Facebook, and really anyone who wants to join can come and help out. It would be great to have photographers come and get involved, or people who want to make costumes, or illustrators to make posters for us. We team up with DJs sometimes, which makes it easier on the promoters because they two acts for the price of one.
DH: What does the future hold for Plastic Hearts?
JG: Well we want to do as many festivals as possible this summer. We’d like to create more of our own club nights- we’ve got one at the moment called Disco Biscuit in Bournemouth. We’re graduating in a year and then going travelling after that, so we want to do as much Plastic Hearts stuff as possible before that. Hopefully the rest of our team will be able to take over whilst we’re away, but when we come back we’ll probably move to London and move it all there.
DH: Finish the sentence: “I should love Plastic Hearts because...”
LB: “… a glitter-kiss goes a long way in a muddy field.”
JG: “…they are the Queens of Sexy Time”.
http://www.theplastichearts.com
The Plastic Hearts will be taking up residency in the Potty Mouth Disco tent at Bloom Festival 14th-16th August, 2009. http://www.bloomfestival.com
Posted Wed, April 08, 2009