Immodesty Blaize: Sex, scandal and naked ambition

It's a shocking thing for an interviewer to be distracted from what his interviewee is saying, but the safety pin was bothering me. I was taking tea with Immodesty Blaize in London's Mandeville Hotel. The foremost burlesque performer in the UK, cheerleader for the billowing new wave of arty striptease and now a dbut novelist touted as the new Jackie Collins, Ms Blaize is a striking presence. She's five feet nine in her stockings; add the five-inch heels, and she's so tall that her vast cat-like eyes, with their hint of Eurasian-harem decadence, look down into mine. From a complex hair-do arranged in huge, coal-black spheres, a wide strand of platinum blonde escapes across her perfect forehead. Her face possesses a beauty made to sneer at the puniness of men: the Russian cheekbones could take your eye out, the blood-red lips hint at a feral streak. Ms Blaize, you feel, could eat you alive, and not in a good way.

Then she speaks and normality is restored. Her voice bears traces of her native Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, and her conversation is naturally animated, even jolly. From coming on like Mata Hari one moment, she can morph into a public-school head girl with a flair for maquillage. She's dressed today in a royal-blue cashmere garment, like a cardigan but longer. It's pulled tight over her bosom, wraps itself round her 26in waist and clings like a drowning man to her hips. As she wiggles and gesticulates on the hotel banquette, her blue garment travels up and down leg and thigh, apparently at random. Then I notice that a safety-pin in the hip region is holding together all the material and I can't take my eyes off it. Is the stretchy wool frock clamped to her voluptuous frame by a single pin? If it were to spring apart under the strain, would I suddenly find unscheduled bits of flesh exploding all over the De Ville restaurant?

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A foolish worry (she calmly removes the pin with the words, "I was wondering where that had gone") but men (and many women 60 per cent of her audience, in fact) cannot help gazing, and peeking, and ogling and gawping at Ms Blaize, who has obligingly made a career of stripping and flirting and bending over and teasing, and making her body a thing of revelation and recreation. Since she first appeared in 2003, dancing in Alison Goldfrapp music videos and knocking several million MTV viewers dead, she has extended her burlesque act from Hackney music hall to Las Vegas, where she was crowned "Miss Exotic World" at the Burlesque Hall of Fame in 2007.

Mostly because of her influence, burlesque is big right now. It's hard to move in London showbiz-land without becoming engulfed in an ocean of feathers, fans, corsets, sequins, stockings, rhinestones, jewelled merkins and mink pompoms. The spirit of camp, sexy cabaret as seen in Cabaret, set in Weimar Germany, and in the topless Amazons of the Moulin Rouge and Crazy Horse, circa 1950 is back. Acts such as Le Clique are West End hits, a serious biography of Gypsy Rose Lee has just hit bookshops, performers called the Hurly Burly Girlies are finding a mainstream audience rather than a lot of men in raincoats. And whatever Dita Von Teese does in the US, Ms Blaize can trump it, whether by riding an eight-foot rocking-horse or lying athwart a six-foot telephone.

Her most recent extravaganza was The Tease Show, which ran earlier this month in Camden, north London, compered by Julian Clary and climaxed by Marc Almond. It was not a show for straights or fainthearts. The diva led her dance troupe, the Blaizin' Angels, and a 12-piece Blaize Big Band, through raunchy numbers, featuring some of her peers from America. "There's nothing quite like it," says the show's deviser. "It's not a musical, not a rock show, not a comedy. People come for the schtick and the strip, the glamour and high camp, and they're always knocked out by it. We had Killarney Coconuts with her Fans of Fire. Catherine D'Lish did her champagne-glass routine. Pearl Noir did her Josephine Baker number in a banana skirt..."

Clothes and accessories take up a good deal of Immodesty's stage act and her life. When on tour, she sends trunk-loads of outfits ahead to her destinations. "But there are some things I won't let out of my sight. I travel with my feathers. It's always a bit of a drama because I have a lot of feathers. I always have to have a certificate to say where the feathers are from, because they're an animal product." She has, she proudly boasts, costumiers in Vegas, Chicago, New York, Paris and London. And Stephen Jones, the celebrated milliner who designed for Kylie on her Showgirl tour, makes her headdresses.

Immodesty loves the word "showgirl". She uses it all the time, mostly as a more acceptable word than "stripper". "The showgirl has meant many things throughout history," she says. "She's like a barometer for our thoughts and taboos in society. You can see it from Mistinguett to Josephine Baker and Gypsy Rose Lee. They're always skirting the edge of high fashion, and treading that knife-edge of what's erotic, what's artistic, what's fashionable, what's avant-garde. But for me, 'showgirl' has glamorous connotations too. What inspired me was Parisian showgirls from the 1950s, and that was the image I was first drawn to."

She was, she shyly reveals, a genuine, get-'em-off stripper for "about three months" after leaving Brunel University. "I learnt to strip in a gentleman's club in London. No, I'm not telling you its name. It was one of the most un-erotic and creatively unfulfilling experiences I've ever had. Clinical and impersonal and uninteresting to me, because it didn't involve much performance. I wanted to do it my way." By the time Goldfrapp picked her out at an audition, Immodesty had graduated to a Mexican outfit "with big black tail feathers, very bump-and-grind" and her new career was launched.

Today she objects to people who compare burlesque with striptease. "It's like comparing acid-house music with tango. They're from different eras with different objectives. I don't mind people calling me a stripper, because that's what I do. I take my clothes off for a living. But I don't like people who take the moral high ground about it." Did burlesque artists look down on strippers? "I don't believe in that kind of snobbery. If a girl makes an honest living out of it, I won't complain. What disturbs me more is seeing burlesque done badly, amateurishly, with no decent production values." And she's off on another recital of how a good burlesque act works.

It's hard to withstand Ms Blaize's breathless enthusiasm for her work. And the words "glamour", "ornate", "opulent", "dazzling", "sparkling" and "showgirl" also reverberate through the pages of her first novel, Tease. The book is an irreducibly autobiographical insight into the life of a burlesque performer called Tiger Starr. It introduces us to the backstage bitching, the frantic organisation and the wayward imagination that goes into making an international strip show. Pages are devoted to the caustic exchanges between Ms Starr, her agent, her stylists, her boyfriend, her sister, her lawyer, her dance troupe and sundry members of her court called Blue and Ocean and Cherry and Brandy. The heroine spends most of her time in a self-delighting whirlwind of feathers, diamonds, parties and sex, interrupted by nasty anonymous letters and rude speculations in the tabloids about her early life. Interspersed chapters trace Tiger's childhood, when she was the tomboyish, hockey-playing Poppy. Gradually we learn about what became of Poppy at the hands of her sports teacher, and the truth about Tiger's true identity: her age, her nationality, her relationship with her treacherous sister. Tease isn't going to win the Man Booker prize, this or any other year, but it whizzes along with bags of energy and shameless product placement.

"What made me write it? My hair stylist was telling me about one of his mother's friends, a former Rockette called Boom-Boom. The story gnawed away at me for a while and I created whole new characters in my head. I haven't seen Jackie Collins writing about the world of the showgirls, so I thought: I'm just gonna do it. Paul O'Grady [aka Lily Savage] gave me a book called The Same Old Grind set in the showgirl world with every kind of ne'er-do-well you could meet. And I thought this was the perfect opportunity to put some eccentric characters in a book and immortalise them." She enjoyed making up extravagant ideas for "glittering" and "opulent" shows without having to worry about health and safety issues. "Writing the book was amazing; I could have whatever I wanted. Each day I'd long to see what the characters were going to get up to."

And today the fruits of her labours can be seen at the Hay Festival, the trendiest of literary events. On a tented stage more used to seeing the sensibly clothed forms of P D James and Joanna Trollope, Immodesty Blaize will discuss her book and preface it with a burst of fleshy glamour. "I thought I'd perform the rocking-horse routine and ruffle a few feathers," she says, with a hint of the Naughtiest Girl at School. "It's quite establishment, isn't it? Well, literary establishment." And, when faced with a well-read Hay audience, how will she describe her literary influences? She laughs, defensively. "It has to be the obvious ones, doesn't it, like Jacqueline Susann, Jackie Collins and Olivia Goldsmith? Valley of the Dolls is a well-written novel. Just because something is commercial, it doesn't mean it's any less valid as a piece of writing."

She selects a small strawberry tartlet from the triple-tier cake-stand, and shatters it with her perfect teeth. "Things are so gloomy at the moment, you want real escapism. I think chick-lit had a good innings, but the days of reading about girls agonising over their credit-card bills is over now. I want to read about someone with unlimited funds, rock-star boyfriends, a story with heroes and villains, super-bitches, alpha males and glamour and shoulder pads Dynasty in other words."

Such an old-fashioned girl. She was born Kelly Fletcher in 1978, with a complicated genetic heritage. Her father, an electrician, was Irish. Her mother, a dog-breeder, was of East European descent (which may explain the cheekbones). Her parents divorced when Kelly was three, and she was later sent to a Catholic boarding convent. How much did she resemble Poppy in the novel, the athletic tomboy schoolgirl who comes to the attention of the sports master? "I wasn't sporty, though I liked hockey because I could hit people's ankles. But the truth is, when I was young, I was five feet one and stayed flat as a pancake until I was 16. When I was five, I had a squint and had to wear an eyepatch. I grew up crippled with self-consciousness. I used to get teased because of my looks. They said I looked foreign. They asked if I was Japanese. And can you imagine a girl at school being made to wear an eyepatch?"

Her voice rises to an indignant squeak. "Then when I was 16, it was voom upwards and voom outwards, like someone had sprinkled Baby Bio on me. Suddenly I had an arse and tits. But, although I'd sprouted, I felt I was still a midget. I still feel a bit like that, which is why I wear heels."

Was she bothered, at 16, by teen lechers? She considers. "I didn't know about that. I was too self-conscious to look around me. I assumed they were all staring at me because, as usual, they were thinking: How weird she is..."

She soon found women outside school with whom to identify. "My mother looked like Wonder Woman. She had big hair and boobs like mine, very vixen-like and feminine. I suppose that's why I'm drawn to very high-glamour women, from Ava Gardner to Sophia Loren and Racquel Welch, that kind of spilling-out-of-your-blouse style."

But Immodesty, I say, you're 20 or 30 years too young to have seen Gardner and Loren and Welch in their 1950s and 1960s heyday. "I found images of them in books I used to collect," she says. "I'd find books on MGM musicals. I used to collect them because they were pretty and because I didn't have a dressing-up box when I was young. I'd collect old postcards of movie stars from flea markets, I still have a few. I was always drawn to high-voltage glamour."

So the ugly duckling became the curvaceous bombshell and, four years later, was stripping in front of London audiences. Was it a form of revenge on the world?

"I suppose," says Immodesty Blaize, "it happens because you want to put it right." She nods. "You're saying to yourself, 'This is to make the 15 year-old girl happy.'"

Indeed. And an awful lot of pleasure-seeking cabaret fans of both sexes too.

Burlesque in brief

By Charlotte Philby

Do not be confused: burlesque is about far more than mere striptease. A skilled burlesque dancer titillates her audience as much through a single wink or a nod, as with the flash of her thigh. Above all else, the joy of burlesque lies in the riveting power of suggestion.

Derived from the Italian word 'burla' – meaning 'mockery' – burlesque has enjoyed a rich history, and originated long before the invention of the art form as we know it today – in Athens in 411 BC, in fact, with Aristophanes' comic play 'Lysistrata'.

'Lysistrata' charts one woman's attempt to end the Peloponnesian War by encouraging the female population of Greece to deny their husbands sexual privileges while also flaunting their bodies in front of them.

The idea of provocation and denial lies at the heart of burlesque, which focuses on the tease rather than the strip.

In 1868, Lydia Thompson led the Victorian burlesque troupe, The British Blondes, from the musical halls of London to New York where, it is said, the men went wild for their flirtatious comedy routines, songs and dance.

In decadent 19th-century Paris, meanwhile, it was the age of the cancan, the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère, which gave birth to the age of illusory burlesque. At the helm of the revolution was a girl who went simply by the name of "Miss".

Not a natural beauty, "Miss" instead invented her own legend, convincing her audience that hers were "the most beautiful legs in the world". It was the showgirl's job, she explained, "to create and sell magic".

A successful burlesque performer, it is said, can convince her audience, during the course of her show, that the she is the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world. Every man in the room should want her – and her only.

Straightforward striptease this is not. In burlesque, insinuation and innuendo reign supreme; results are achieved as much through what is not shown as what is. A true burlesque audience is never wholly satisfied.

'Tease' is published by Ebury (£10), out now