GLYN FUSSELL
When he created queer club night Sink The Pink with Amy Zing, working-class boy Glyn Fussell found it gave him more than just a job, but a chosen family who would carry him through the hedonistic highs and lockdown lows of the years to come
The Sink The Pink founder opens up about why his queer club night is about so much more than just getting the party started
It’s somewhat ironic how Sink The Pink co-creator Glyn Fussell and I first met. The setting was The Wig Party at London’s iconic Café de Paris, an annual charity fundraiser and colossal dress-up affair, which, once upon a time, was a highlight of the queer social calendar. To gain entry, going all-out with your costume was a given. It was October 2009 and Glyn, then a spritely 28 years old, was sat in a booth at the top of the stairs, dressed in everyday boy clothes, to which I immediately raised a disapproving eyebrow when we were introduced by mutual drag queen friends. His droll standard attire caught my eye among the shimmering sea of glitter and glamour. Now that’s no diss to Glyn – the man is as dashing out of drag as he is outrageously striking on stage in full queer gear MCing the Sink The Pink club events that would soon turn the scene inside out. Perversely, that night I was dolled up to the wig line – and beyond. The Wig Party theme that year was All At Sea, and while most of the gays present were dressed as either sexy seamen/semen or sassy mermaids, my ensemble was dubbed ‘Miss Oil Slick’ to represent the dark side of the sea. I was dripping in black body paint, while on my head was a ginormous, Amy Winehouse-esque beehive wig with dead dolphins, plastic bags, bottles and other ocean detritus weaved into the bulbous bouffant. (Greta Thunberg would be proud that my anti-glamour environmental statement – years ahead of its time – won me runner-up in the costume competition.) It was the one and only time I would outshine Glyn in the glamour stakes.
As we chatted through the usual gay conversation topics of sex, pop divas and boys, Glyn explained how he and best friend Amy Zing were planning to launch a new club event, Sink The Pink, to take over The Green, a now-closed bar on north London’s Upper Street. I congratulated him on the endeavour and suggested he keep in touch because I was editing London’s gay scene magazine QX at the time.
Almost immediately, Sink The Pink established itself as the hottest, newest, queerest event on the London calendar. The madcap formula of unabashed pop coupled with deranged drag performances and an utterly hedonistic vibe provided a fresh reboot for London’s sometimes-too-serious gay scene. After it outgrew the pokey Islington spot, Sink The Pink took over the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, a move that would push the brand on to new levels of notoriety.
In the heart of freshly cool Bethnal Green, the venue was a shabby community centre, which, given the changing times and slow gentrification of east London, had embraced its future as a destination for cabaret and club nights. With its late-night license, it was primed to become the capital’s favourite queer dive. Its dated interiors added to the charm, harkening back to the oldschool gay clubs of the mid to late 20th century and providing an antidote to the glitzy, 21st-century super-clubs. It was an instant hit, with queues around the block.
“I remember at the end of the first night, me and Amy just looked in shock. We didn’t blink for about an hour,” Glyn recalls at hurricane-force speed, animated like a Disney cartoon on acid, as we chat IRL over cocktails on the first day of lockdown ending
“Sink The Pink established itself as the hottest, newest, queerest event on the London calendar”
in England. “There wasn’t, like, shitloads of people on that first night, but there was something going on, where we just went,
‘This is it.’”
The club went nova almost overnight. “There was an energy of us as a group of weirdos. We met each other,” he says of the performers, DJs and loyal customers that returned for each outing, building a radiant chosen family. “I think we’d all been looking for the same thing. We’d all been trying to find this little community. And then all of a sudden, it’s a snowball effect.”
The launch of Sink The Pink was a major turning point for Glyn personally, as well as professionally. “I knew from three years old that I felt like an alien. I used to have this feeling that I was born into the wrong family, and it had been a mistake. And it was really hard because my mum and dad are amazing, as are my family,” he reflects. “But you know, I’m one of seven kids. That’s a really weird feeling to feel invisible. You don’t want to feel invisible, but you need to because otherwise, someone will know that you’re completely weird.
“Sink The Pink is when I first felt comfortable with my difference. I was always trying to be a version of who I thought I should be. I was so scared to be completely who I was. It’s like you’ve been faking it before that.”
Glyn praises his co-conspirator Amy — who has since migrated to Margate to found the Margate Arts Club as well as Margate
Pride — for being fundamental to the club’s success and helping him realise his dreams. “We are two peas in a pod, but we are very different human beings,” he says. “She is completely community-based, and I’m, like, ‘The world should see us!’ She would
“Sink The Pink is when I first felt comfortable with my difference. I was always trying to be a version of who I thought I should be”
be happy in Blackpool, and I was always thinking about Vegas. She is literally like the gay man I had always wanted to be. She is the love child of Quentin Crisp and Su Pollard. She’s magnificent.”
It wasn’t just the funkiest and finest of London’s LGBTQ+ community that descended on the club, but the famous, too. In true Sink The Pink style, it attracted the most eclectic clientele: Faye Dunaway turned up with the Sultan of Brunei’s son, with Samantha Mumba tagging along. Bryan Adams was a frequent visitor, throwing on a wig and leaving his driver waiting outside.
Eventually, Sink The Pink outgrew its second home. “It’d become very stressful at Working Men’s Club because no one could get in. We had to fucking open another club up the road for the off-spill, which became Savage. We were the anti-fashion club, really. The sound system always kind of popped and whistled, the microphone would cut out every third word. We all know the smell from Bethnal Green Working Men’s. It was like cat sick and meph. And I think we just got to a point where we were, like, ‘This is a really weird, unconventional space. We’re in a working men’s club. Where else can we go?”
As chance would have it, a friend was running the Troxy on Commercial Road, near Limehouse. “It looked like the inside of a wedding cake. It was camp and Art Deco,” Glyn recalls. The cavernous former theatre meant they could do all the OTT creative stuff the pair had been wanting to do for a long time. Big-name pop acts like Little Mix followed, headlining one of its most spectacular parties ever. “But we’ve made mistakes. We did Brixton Academy, and I fucking hated that. Because I think I got really obsessed with trying to make everything bigger and bigger and bigger,” Glyn acknowledges of the move to the south London gig venue. “Just the whole thing was a nightmare. And it was on the hottest day of the year, and the World Cup. I hated it. But it made me go, wait. What are we doing?”
As the brand grew, so did the team, international tours followed, including performing at São Paulo Pride with Melanie C to four million people. However, Amy and Glyn never forgot their camp roots, taking over Butlin’s for a weekend, and launching the Mighty Hoopla festival, which returns in September to Brockwell Park in south London.
Then, Miss Corona Virus arrived in early 2020, and the shit hit the fan.
“The first couple of months I loved it,” says Glyn, who lives with his bestie Anthony aka DJ Absolute. They did what we all did: wine deliveries arrived, they played records from their balcony all day long, and indulged in life’s pause. “Obviously, none of us realised it would go on this long. I was quite philosophical about it at the beginning. I was, like, this is a sign. I’ve wanted some peace and quiet. To just have that routine, to walk my dog at the same time every day, to suck my boyfriend off at the same time every day… You know? All of a sudden, it was amazing.”
As the weeks and eventual months passed, in common with many people in the events industry, Covid and lockdown saw his mental health take a battering. “At the beginning of the lockdown, everything disappeared, like, literally everything: clubs, all the gigs that were coming up, all the events. I realised that my life had been really chaotic, and I’d been complaining about it the whole time. All of a sudden, I turned 40, and I felt like I had been in Groundhog Day for a long time. And then I started completely freaking out when a lot of people around me started freaking out. I started feeling a huge amount of pressure, as
if I’d let a lot of people down. And I think I took it really, really hard at the beginning.
“I went from having, like, the best time and living my best life to thinking, the world has ended, and nothing’s ever going to be the same again. And there was a long time that I thought, we will never, ever come back. That was, like, an all-time low.”
Try as he might, Glyn struggled to get out of the negative mindset. “I’m always like ‘the cup isn’t half full, it’s brimming over.’ I’m that person. But I was depressed for three months. A lot of people were. I didn’t really know what depression felt like because I’ve never had it. I didn’t want to get out of bed, didn’t want to talk to anyone on the phone. You don’t want to talk about it because you feel really very much… You feel like you’re in a place of privilege.”
He continues, “After properly talking to great people around me, I had to put my big-boy panties on, and get out of bed.”
Glyn started therapy, which helped him work through his problems. “I’m working-class. I don’t talk about my feelings.
I’m the king of sweeping things under the carpet. I’m the king of putting a wig on it, and creating an illusion and a fantasy world. But then, when that is taken away from you, you are literally sat in a dark room going, oh my God, what am I going to do?”
Therapy proved to be a refreshing reset for the man whose previous solution to life’s challenges would likely include being stuffed into a confetti cannon and fired into a crowded dancefloor while Sophie Ellis Bextor sings Murder on the Dancefloor. “This is the weird thing about therapy, you talk for an hour, and you realise they’ve barely said anything, and you’ve been the one that has come up with all the solutions. It’s the weirdest witchcraft.
“After being at the lowest low, it then made me feel really, really grateful. I lost that for a long time because I was so busy, I’d become complacent. I’d become, like, it’ll always be there. When it’s ripped away from you, you go to that shit place. And then all of a sudden, after therapy, I’m, like, fuck me. I feel so great. I’m someone that rarely looks back.”
With renewed energy, and the shadow of Covid (hopefully) fading so that the nightlife scene can return, Glyn is ready to bring Sink The Pink back with all the fabulous fury we need right now. “Clubbing is fucked. It’s so at-risk. Essentially, clubs are our church. They are our football match,” he says. “And if we don’t have those, then we don’t have our culture. We don’t meet our partners. We don’t meet our friends. Those places are the line of our history and our culture. That’s where we’ve come together.”
Sink The Pink’s return to post-lockdown life saw its November national tour dates sell out in just 28 minutes, with huge plans into the new year.
Last month, Glyn also expanded into podcasts with We
Can Be Heroes, a series of chats with inspiring celebrities, sportspeople and artists. “I’m talking to people that have done something that I feel that I’ve done, which is finding their own lane in life, disrupting everything around them, and just going hell for leather, saying, fuck it, I’m disillusioned. I want to change something. I don’t care what happens, I’m just going to chase my joy, and go for it.
“Like I said, when you’ve been in bed for three months, you’re like, I need to inspire myself, just from purely selfish reasons. And then hopefully, that will do the same for other people.”
As we wrap our interview, Glyn and I call the waiter over, pay the bill and head off to the next bar for more cocktails, and to enjoy the first day of what feels like the rest of our lives.
Listen to We Can Be Heroes with Glyn Fussell on Apple, Spotify and all podcast providers
“If we don’t have clubs, we don’t have our culture. We don’t meet our partners. We don’t meet our friends. Those places are the line of our history and our culture”