Shelley: Dancing, Part 2
Shelley: Dancing 2
When Shelley and I turned 18 our brother Mike gave us a membership to BASE, a nightclub on Sydney’s Jaimeson Street that was eventually demolished, with a hotel now in its place. When we methodically and neatly unwrapped Mike’s gift we acted like we’d never been to BASE, but (sorry Mum and Dad) we had, so we were extremely excited about it.
BASE was an incredible place that had all the things we were looking for in a nightclub in 1989, and most of those things were fashionably dressed people dancing their arses off.
Look, I’m going to try not to fill this with too many back-in-the-days but fair warning: a lot of the words, phrases, concepts and imagery that follow were very, very cool at the time. I swear.
Mike, Shelley and I visited BASE and other Sydney nightclubs often, because Sydney nightclubs in 1989 were incredible. House music, warehouse parties and hip hop had only (relatively) recently gone mainstream, and white middle-class kids from the suburbs like us couldn’t get enough. It was a very, very fun time, and dancing was currency.
Disappointingly for the magnificent Harlem ballroom subculture that invented it, voguing was also becoming popular thanks to Malcolm McLaren releasing ‘Deep In Vogue’ (and a year before Madonna hopped on board). BASE held a ‘Vogue-Off’ dance competition challenging contestants to show off their dancing and fashion chops, and all three Thornely siblings thought that was just about the most exciting thing they’d ever heard, and entered.
Shelley and I had spent most of our young lives making up dance routines, and voguing — or at least our cultural appropriation version of it — wasn’t especially difficult, so we had that part of it down. For the fashion part, Mike opted for top hat and tails with embellishments — white ribbon tacked onto his pants as a kind of dandyish pinstripe, and a foppish cane. Shelley and I went for little black dresses with our hair in slick pincurls and our favourite shoes — thick-soled, silver-studded lace-up brogues that were called ‘Thug’ on the shoebox they came in. We added different bits of silver hardware to our dresses for the heat, semi-final, and (spoiler alert) grand final, thanks to aluminium foil from the kitchen and some cuttable-with-scissors metallic printing plate that Mike salvaged from the expired-material bin at Gestetner in Frenchs Forest, where he worked. We fashioned sewn-on foil swirls, the word ‘ELITE’ pinned across our ribs, and some ambitious and uncomfortable bustiers that sounded like tiny Rolf Harris wobble-boards whenever we moved.
We came second in the grand final, which was only mildly disappointing because second prize was some kind of voucher and our favourite kind of attention. Mike, being less needy for that kind of thing, bowed out of performing at that stage, but Shelley and I became addicted enough to start looking for our next fix.
With the exception of a handful of dancefloors and podia around northern and eastern Sydney, the next big fix came in the form of the terribly named Dynamic Dancing Competition at FJ’s, a nightclub at The Sands hotel in Narrabeen on the Northern Beaches. The club had an FJ Holden parked inside near the dancefloor, and due to some reasonable DJs and a lack of viable alternatives on Wednesday nights, was well-populated. At a time when painstakingly choreographed routines were experiencing a massive boom — thanks in part to Janet Jackson’s pivot into Rhythm Nation territory — Shelley and I had two of the characteristics required to stand out: dance ability and built-in precision unison.
We entered the competition and rehearsed in the downstairs living room at our family home in Frenchs Forest. The double glass doors leading out to the patio served as a makeshift dance studio mirror at night, so we could see how our moves looked. One evening as we were putting the finishing touches on a series of steps that required deep focus, we were concentrating so hard on our reflection in the window that we didn’t notice Dad on the other side. He’d turned his baseball cap backwards and was mimicking us, and when we finally noticed him the rehearsal dissolved, replaced with giggling. Dad was the most accomplished contemporary dancer out of all 50-something Frenchs Forest fathers at the time, by virtue of observation and emulation.
By some miracle, we won the competition. That’s not humility, although we were competing against undeniable quality. The miracle was specific and accidentally well-timed. In the Dynamic Dancing grand final, Shelley and I completely forgot two bars of our entire routine. The miraculous part was that we both forgot what we were supposed to be doing on the exact same beat and, exactly two bars later, both remembered again. It looked so intentional that we went home with the trophy.
Soon after, FJ’s management invited us to be their regular Wednesday night podium dancers. Many clubs at the time had podium dancers — dancing was absolutely massive and the more people were encouraged to participate, the thirstier they got, and nightclub cash registers love thirsty people. As far as Shelley and I were concerned, we were being paid to do what we would have done anyway, but with the added bonus of an assigned bouncer who wouldn’t let anyone else invade your dance space. There was a podium on each side of the FJ’s dance floor, and we’d dress in matching clothing — Stussy and Converse alternating with bike shorts and hoodies — and do our kinetic stereo duty. We were provided with a hotel room upstairs to change and rest in, but mostly in between dance sets we hung out with our friends. It’s one of the few jobs I’ve had where having a beer during your break isn’t frowned upon. To be fair, eventually we were let go because we were spending far more time socialising than dancing, but it just wasn’t the right environment to develop a solid work ethic.
Once we were in that particular scene, we did little dance jobs all over the place, balancing university, part-time retail work, and paid dance work with energy I definitely don’t still have. Our mate Sally, a fellow Northern Beaches girl furiously enthusiastic about Sydney nightlife and soon to be known as DJ Sally Sound, volunteered to be our manager. We were called ‘Thugwize’ (named after our aforementioned shoes) with the subtitle ‘The Stomping Twins’ which — again — I promise was incredibly cool at the time.
The rest is all flashes of memory and save for half a box of physical photographs there’s not a lot of evidence, but a summary of our post-FJ’s “work” (paid playtime) is required:
Dalley’s at the Manly Pacific Hotel
Our shift at Dalley’s, open until 2am, began after our shift at FJ’s finished, so we’d scrounge a lift from Mike or our friends and dance on their tiny stage. Using glowing fluorescent rubber thread, the stage had been done up to look like a cage, which I still can’t figure out. After closing at staff drinks one night, Sally, Shelley and I invented a hip-hop and doof version of The Sound of Music, including the phrase “yo… delay”, which I thought was unbelievably clever at the time.
MXTPLK
Kinsela’s in Darlinghurst had a massive dancefloor and stage on its third level, and when ‘stomping’ was a thing for a hot minute in the early nineties, their dedicated night MXTPLK was extremely well-populated. They held a Stomp Comp which Shelley and I entered and won, wearing shirts that Shelley had screen-printed at Sydney Uni and repurposed hygiene safety hats from our home science classes in high school that I’d painted.
The Gaelic Club, The Front, Black Market, Dome
Clubs would have their regular nights, and every now and then for a much higher cover charge, they’d spend a bit of money on big name DJs, slap on a bit of extra decoration and lighting, and chuck some dancers on stages, podia, or catwalks. At the Gaelic Club we shared our level 2 catwalk stage with two gurning, wide-eyed dancers we hadn’t met before who would take huge toots of amyl nitrate right before each set.
Frenzy at Sydney International Passenger Terminal
Erasure did a world tour in 1990, including an appearance at a dance party called Frenzy! in 1990. One of the support artists, an electronic band called MDM, had Shelley and me as dancers for their performance. We didn’t get to meet Erasure. Bummer.
Brainspeak Music Video
A frankly not totally amazing Sydney hip hop act called Brainspeak had us dance in their music video which, from memory, was played once on Rage at around 4am. The video was filmed in an abandoned building in Redfern, with a graffiti artist (I want to say Wixta?) spraying a big suspended sheet of plastic in the same room. The fumes were overwhelming, and likely part of the reason I can’t remember the artist’s name.
We’ve met many people since the mid-90s who remember the dancing twins, including Shelley’s husband, Stocko, who saw us dance at FJ’s. He didn’t know at the time that he’d end up married to one of us, but I reckon if you want something you do to be remembered decades later, try doing it in unison with someone who looks a lot like you. Works a treat.
