When I heard that Andy Bell from Erasure was in a musical playing a character called Torsten the bareback saint, I had to know more. He sits in a theatre under the railway arches in Vauxhall wearing a T-shirt from a big cats sanctuary in Bangladesh.
He is singing a song about a gay fetish club, reading the words off an iPad, while the 11.41 to Clapham Junction thunders overhead. The Torsten saga (the latest play is called Queereteria TV) was written for him by the poet Barney Ashton-Bullock. Barney and Bell, both married now and in their fifties, are older, “more respectable” versions of themselves looking back on a scene that formed them. They’re not nostalgic.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Content from our partners
