It’s late in the day at Ryan Styles’ Bizarre photoshoot, and we’re getting the lowdown on the rising cabaret star’s tattoos. “This one is inspired by my embroidery work,” he says of the beautiful misshapen circles on his left shoulder, like age rings in a tree.

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“There are 27 rings: I waited until I was 27 to get it done because I believe in seven-year cycles and the 27-year-cycle of life. It was done from one of my original designs, but then my tattooist had to freehand around it. He’s good at line work.” Which tattooist was it, Ryan? A giggle. “Um… I don’t even know his surname. He was recommended by a friend.” Where was the studio? Another giggle and a whisper. “I went to his house – which is illegal! All the best things are!”

Sweet, petite and self-effacing... Meeting Ryan off-duty, it doesn’t seem possible he could be a performer of presence. But as he puts on his make-up and climbs into his various costumes, the 27-year-old Staffordshire lad transforms into characters so big, he appears to double in size.

It’s not bad for someone who never formally studied acting. “I wanted to be a performer from a very young age, but I didn’t know how it was going to materialise out of me,” he explains. “I wasn’t self-confident and didn’t enjoy drama classes, but I used to really enjoy dressing up.”

It was while studying at Stafford’s Oval Art College that Ryan (real surname, Wagg), first got up on stage – with three mates, as Pollyrosa, a band named after PJ Harvey. “Performing music made me realise that the stage was somewhere I could really express myself,” says Ryan. “We were quite extravagant in our look: I used to wear old women’s dresses and chiffon nighties. In a small town like Stafford, with three guys and a girl doing that, people were a bit freaked out. We loved it!”

The band split as Ryan finished his 3-D Design degree in Staffordshire and decamped to London to start a four-year degree in Jewellery Design at Middlesex University. He had a great time.

“My course wasn’t about making silver earrings, it was about the body and the concept of adornment,” he says. “I was designing totally unwearable pieces! I used to do a lot of casts of my body and explore ideas on blurring the boundaries of the male and female form... Ideas that are still in my work now, actually. I’d use lot of found objects – I’m into recycling, though not in a naff way – such as foams, plastics and balloons. In any case, I tried soldering silver and it just used to burn my hair. I couldn’t work with it! So I gave up and thought, ‘Stick to balloons.’”

As well as designing unwearable jewellery, Ryan was hitting the London club scene hard. In 2004, letting rip with the same sense of fun as when he’d dress up in his mum’s clothes as a kid, Ryan began creating a raft of characters and changed his second name to Styles.

He was soon noticed by top club entrepreneur Matthew Glamorre, who spotted Ryan one night in a floor-length fur coat and 6ft dunce’s hat and offered him a job at über-trendy London club Kashpoint. Ryan swiftly became the capital’s hottest door whore.

“I was doing two or three clubs a week, depending on what nights were on,” he says. “It’s less glamorous than one would expect. We’d get Amy Winehouse, Boy George and Simon Amstell in frequently, but there was a lot of standing outside, wearing heels and little else. I had the power to turn people away if they weren’t dressed right, which gives you a bit of an ego boost. It’s great when ex-Big Brother people come up and really try to blag it, and you can turn around and say, ‘Look, just please fuck off – there’s no way you’re coming in.’ But I don’t miss it.”

It was in March 2005 that Ryan first took to  the stage and did a cut-and-dried show, rather than just swanning about as eye candy. At Hanky Panky Cabaret, at Bistrotheque in Shoreditch, he performed A Bump In The Night, a sublime piece of work that involves heart-shaped balloons and his Pierrot look.

“I’d walked into a balloon shop where they put balloons inside balloons, which inspired me to think about babies, wombs and fertility,” he says. “But I don’t do the act so often now because I’ve done it so many times that it doesn’t really inspire me any more. When you produce a variety of acts, the newer ones are the ones you want to concentrate on.”

Ryan’s longest bout of formal performance training was to explore his inner clown in Paris on a course run by physical theatre expert Philippe Gaulier. “It was a real challenge for me,” he remembers. “I’m not sure that Paris is the city for me, though – it’s beautiful and pockets of it are amazing, but one month was enough.”

But Ryan is a natural – for proof, just go to YouTube and check out his stunning single-take performance, filmed by Alex de Campi (who’s directed videos for Amanda Palmer and The Puppini Sisters), of egg-eating clownery. “Alex chose the music – ‘Le Piccadilly’ by Erik Satie – and she filmed three takes and picked one,” he says. “It’s great how it turned out.” He doesn’t have a name for his on-stage character, though. “I haven’t quite harnessed my inner clown yet.”

As you’d expect from a hot young performer, Ryan has a number of irons in the fire. He’s a member of The Lipsinkers (the acclaimed troupe of miming ‘mister sisters’, who did a heavy metal performance at the 2009 Bizarre Ball), though he’s having to take a step back from that as his solo work commitments grow.

“I don’t like saying to people, ‘I’m an artist’, because it sounds a bit wanky. But I don’t call myself an entertainer, either, as I don’t necessarily set out to entertain. For me, it’s a bit more self-reflective. I don’t really care about making people laugh – it’s more about challenging them.”

Happily, the formula is working – Ryan doesn’t have to juggle a ‘day job’ and he picks up the odd advert and pop video as extra income. Tune into ‘witty banter’ TV channel Dave and you’ll spot a Speckled Hen ident that has a slim young man in jeans and a T-shirt with a huge balloon for a head, jumping up and down in front of a sofa. That’s Ryan.

He also pops up in Paloma Faith’s ‘Stone Cold Sober’ promo and was one of half-a-dozen clubbers handpicked to dance along to ‘Wow’ on ITV’s The Kylie Show in 2007.

“Ha ha! Kylie Min-ogg-yew. She wanted some dressed-up ‘club kid’ people dancing with her and I got selected. Kylie is quite remarkable. She’s completely the queen bee diva, in control of everything. She’s just really professional. The audience was made up of about 50 die-hard Kylie obsessives, who had, like, Kylie tattoos. As we were dancing on stage, the fans were giving us these looks as if to say, ‘Who the fuck are you freaks?’ That was a good moment.”

Ryan’s also in Trans Kabarett Maxximus with fellow scenester Jonny Woo, which they started up last year as an platform for any work that wasn’t necessarily quite finished. “It’s a party that happens when we want it to happen. We wanted a place where we could throw around ideas without feeling pressured. We do it at the Resistance Gallery in Bethnal Green, which feels neutral – no fancy lighting system, no velvet curtains. It’s fantastic.”

Ryan’s daily routine involves porridge at 9am, emails, then a brisk swim (he’s a fanatical swimmer), followed by a long afternoon at the studio working on material. Finally, it’s costume-making, embroidery and handicrafts in front of the telly. Sorry – handicrafts? No getting wasted on the dancefloor? “Nooooo!” he smiles. “I’ve done that, especially in the early days, but I’m a really hard worker and I put a lot of graft into what I do – when people see me on stage it’s only the tip of the iceberg; so much work has gone into it.”

Ever committed to making good art, Ryan’s influences tick all the boxes: he raves about Russian clown Slava Polunin and French puppeteer Philippe Genty and his favourite MySpace friends are British dancer Lindsay Kemp and Californian filmmaker Kenneth Anger (“He’s off his rocker! Completely how you’d want him to be. He lives in Hollywood and has had a lot of face-lifts.”).
 
Another MySpace fave is Ladynoise. “It’s the tranny punk-rock band that I’ve started,” he explains. “We’ve got lots of gigs coming up, which is fab. It’s made up of trannies and angry gay men, and I play guitar and sing. I wouldn’t say I sing, actually – I’d say I scream and shout.”

Right now, Ryan’s working on a piece that involves audio tapes of himself aged 5-10 that his grandmother recorded. “They’re really embarrassing and hideous to listen to, but it’s interesting in terms of who I was.

I was working with oversized costumes at the time – when I was a kid I’d wear pyjama bottoms on my head as long hair, my nan’s high heels and my mum’s skirts, pulled up to make a dress. So with this piece I want to make oversized costumes, synonymous with being five years old again – I’m gonna make really big heels and everything. It’ll be less accessible as a cabaret piece but I’m trying to personalise it a bit more.”

It sounds utterly Ryan Styles: original, compellingly bonkers and with a deep seam of integrity running through it. It’s very much like his new ‘ever-decreasing circles’ shoulder tattoo, in fact.
 
For more about Ryan, go to Ryanstyles.com