A couple of years ago I did some research into appearances of Sylvester in Brighton, so I was both stunned and thrilled when I recently came across actual footage of him performing here! The venue on this occasion was Coasters, a ‘fun bar’ in the Kingswest building on the corner of Brighton’s West Street and King’s Road.
Aren’t all bars fun bars? Well, apparently a Fun Bar or Fun Pub is a particular concept as Mike Sax explains: “the ‘fun bar’ idea was imported from Amsterdam. Which is gay entertainment for straight people, including music, all the music would be gay music in those days. There was a big separation between the straight music scene and the gay music scene.”
And Mike Sax would know – he was the sound engineer at Coasters, he was there the night Sylvester performed, and has found himself with a copy of the film of that show. The footage was filmed by Robbie Seabrook but Mike has done significant work to improve the visual and audio quality. “In the years since I’ve had to edit it and tweak it up a bit and make the sound a lot better, because it was obviously only mono and it was terrible sound in those days on the VHS recorders”.
Sylvester had originally been invited to come to the UK by Nicky Price, to appear at his Sunday gay night Bolts at the Pink Coconut (previously Sherry’s) in Brighton. However the venue was having a light refit at the time, so for a short while Coasters hosted the Bolts night including this performance by Sylvester.
Coasters
Mike remembers “Coasters was cheap, 50p, in comparison to everywhere else. Coasters was 16s and up, you didn’t have to be 18, you had to be a minimum of 16 in those days so it was a very young crowd. It closed about ‘85, something like that, Sylvester was one of the last acts.”
I asked Mike about the crowd that night “Oh loads, it was full. 1,200 maybe a bit more.” And if it was the regular straight crowd or more gay “I’d say fifty-fifty for Sylvester”.
Coasters lasted roughly five years from 1981–85, and although I haven’t been able to verify it for certain, it looks like this film was taken around 1984.
Naughty!
Apparently there was a little hiccup before Sylvester performed that night – he went AWOL.
On the night of Sylvester… we couldn’t find him. He disappeared. It might have been his manager who found him in the end, or was guided by security or whatever. They eventually found him, down in a cottage on the seafront. Naughty little boy that one!
Mike Sax
Someone else who was on the naughty side was the main DJ for the club – Rory Steele. Rory can be heard introducing Sylvester at the start of the film: “Ladies and gentleman, direct from the US of A, Sylvester!”
Rory, according to Mike: “was so outrageous it was untrue, and so camp. Oh dear, dripping, dripping is not the word for it, with all the gold lamé and the hand movements, unbelievable you know, so camp it was untrue. If you look at the Coasters page on Facebook you’ll see a picture of Rory [in the club] with things hanging out. Yeah he was a big boy, and a slut as well. But what a good DJ. Unfortunately, he’s dead now as well, the usual thing A…”
And roll it!
“You can hear him [Sylvester] talking to me at the beginning of the show” Mike says. “I had the music too loud, and the microphone not enough, so I had to quickly balance him up because he couldn’t hear himself. We didn’t really have any decent monitors in those days.
“I’m on the sound, that’s why he says ‘Mike roll it’ because I was controlling a reel to reel tape deck with his backing tracks on. The backing track contained the Weather Girls’ vocals but not him, and amazing, amazing power once the guy got into it.
“We had a telejector screen behind him. I was amplifying him behind. I don’t know whether you can see it because of the smoke but the camera feed was going back into the projector. You get that echo chamber effect with all the different bodies.”
Tracklist
The film of Sylvester at Coasters is almost 20 minutes long, and obviously well worth your time, however in case you have somewhere you need to be (really?), here is the track list with time stamps:
- 00.03 – Do You Wanna Funk
- 06.10 – Dance (Disco Heat)
- 08.33 – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
- 11.10 – Take Me To Heaven
A special encore
Mike also remembers a moment at the end of the show that wasn’t caught on camera. “At the end he did another encore, and there was no backing track for it, so he sang it a capella. It’s a famous ballad type thing, I think it’s all about being out of it, a famous track apparently which he used to sing, but only when he was really happy with the gig. It was very rare for him to sing this, his manager was amazed. The crowd were great obviously, I mean they loved him.”
Mike has further described to me the final song from Sylvester that night, and it seems most likely it was ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’ by Cole Porter.
Were you there? Do you remember that night, and the final song Sylvester sang? If you do, please get in touch: [email protected].
Just to be clear, Mike supplied the film, and I have uploaded it onto my YouTube channel so you can see it here. Neither Mike Sax nor I make any claim to the copyright.
