Homosexual Death Drive is a live art project that uses performance, text, drawings, music, merch and showbiz.
It began in 2010 in East London as a band with me, Charlotte Cooper, Kay Hyatt and occasional collaborators. Simon Murphy/Mona Compleine of Good Fuzzy Sounds has supported the work throughout with home made musical instruments. Over time the band became more allied with live art. It is now a solo project.
Roots
I come from a queer punk aesthetic, also known as Queercore.
My early musical collaborations, The Lesbian and Gay Community and The 123s, looked a lot like queercore bands but delivered something strange and interdisciplinary. I became interested in the parts inbetween the work of being in a band and working the circuit: the showbiz, making merch, creating a feeling or a moment.
Homosexual Death Drive is a concept that comes from a branch of queer theory influenced by psychoanalysis and engaged with the antisocial and critical futurity. This is about an anti-assimilationist approach to queerness, an emphasis on sex, and embracing a symbolic death by not reproducing through children.
In 2010 I thought this was an interesting premise for underscoring performance, especially since I had been channelling a queer confrontational persona on stage for years. It fitted with the nihilism I had grown up with through punk. I wanted to make complex, adult work for other queers.
I thought Homosexual Death Drive was an evocative and catchy term. The straight-world formality of homosexual, the invoking of death, and the energy of a drive really grabbed me. The name would make it difficult for the project to be appropriated by the mainstream. I thought about my friend Elana Dykewomon, whose name expressed her commitment to lesbians, and felt that this was a similar kind of naming, about being accountable to other queers.
How it started
Andrew Milk invited us to play, so I wrote some songs that were influenced by this theory and performed them with others, primarily Kay. We went down well at Club Milk and played at many subsequent events.
Kay and I attended some spectacular Heart n Soul nights in London. This is a project by and for people with learning disabilities and open to all. They run Sound Lab, which introduces people to accessible music technology. We ate it up, and this formed the backbone of the musical practice and in 2014 Homosexual Death Drive released the Sunshine ep and suite of videos.
How it’s going
Working on SWAGGA exposed Homosexual Death Drive to a community of artists who embraced us as their own. This enabled us to relocate the work within live art and really own the weirdness of what we were doing.
In 2019 I decided to develop Homosexual Death Drive as a solo project. I wanted to see how far I could go.
And that was that.
Notes
Queer as Smoke by Charlotte Richardson Andrews, NME, October 2014.
An interview with Homosexual Death Drive by Charlotte Richardson Andrews 20 January 2014
Maximum Rocknroll Monday Photo Blog: Pawel Haraszkiewicz 2 September 2013.
Some groups have names so good it’s almost not worth blurbing them. But then some bands aren’t really bands, so much as they are (self-described) ‘Dykes. Fat. Old’…amateurish, no-fi… one of their influences is tampon information leaflets… the only thing I could find on youtube was a song called the temple of butthole… one of their number writes ENTIRELY AWESOME fat activist literature and bemoans the absence of working class voices… in short, they’re exactly the sort of group for whom, if ANY of those words make you uncomfortable then you really need to be watching because they’re clearly the best thing ever, EVER.
Supernormal (2013) ‘Homosexual Death Drive’, [online], available: http://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/programme/2013/.
Queercore U Kno The Score: She Said Boom – The Story Of Fifth Column by Melissa Steiner 11 April 2013.
The Things We Play by Charlotte for the Scumbag zine, 2012.