Viva Brighton April 2015 Issue #26

fetish-club scene is moving in that direction. What,
I must ask, happens at a fetish club?
“Sometimes they’re quite dance based, like a dance
club but wearing fetish clothing or latex or leather,
or crazy outfits. You get a little bit of spanking
going on, and various people roleplaying and doing
stuff. Sometimes there’s actual sex going on, not on
the dancefloor but in certain areas of the club. So
it’s just like a crazy adult playground.
“In some in Europe, there’s a lot of sex going on;
not so much in England. The English are still a
little bit reserved about having sex in a club environment.
But generally it’s a mixture of dance, sex
and fancy dress.”
While Brighton was a good place to set up Taboo
– “I wouldn’t want to have one of these shops in
a little village in Somerset” – the city’s fetish-club
scene “isn’t particularly huge. People think that
Brighton, being this hedonistic city, is going to
have fetish sex clubs going on every night, or every
weekend, and it’s actually not true.”
There is an annual Brighton Fetish Weekend,
though, and “this Dungeon Bar that’s opened up in
Regency Square. Have you heard about that? It’s
got BDSM equipment in it, you can go and have a
drink and spank someone…”
Like Richardson’s dinner-party acquaintances, I
was full of questions, though what I really wanted
to know was why people are drawn to sex toys,
dressing up, and fetish-like behaviour. “I think it’s in
us all, really, to some degree. We’ve all kind of got
it going on; it just depends whether you want to go
inside yourself and explore that.
“I’ve had customers over the years, they might start
by coming in and buying a little sex toy, and then
they’ll come back in a couple of weeks’ time and
buy something else, and you can see their journey
into their exploration of their sexual fantasies, or
fetishes.”
But why isn’t straightforward sex enough? “If you
go to a funfair, you can go on the bumper cars, but
you can go on the rollercoaster as well. So, what,
are you just going to go on the bumper cars?” SR
Taboo: 2 Surrey Street, Brighton, and 8 Blatchington
Road, Hove (tabooshop.com). Lust: 43 Gardner
Street (lust.co.uk). Brighton Fetish Weekend runs at
Rialto Theatre from April 10th-12th; see brightonfetishweekend.co.uk
and rialtotheatre.co.uk
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