Drag artists can be tricky. Yes, they dazzle, command a room and compel us to watch them, but they can also be flaky, rude and yawn-inducingly vain. Not Jonny Woo.

As the 36-year-old Londoner briskly applies blue face paint and brushes out a blonde curly wig in preparation for his third ‘look’ of the photoshoot, there’s no sniff of a camp tantrum. This 6ft2in (6ft7in in heels), athletic, lightly bearded fellow is urbane, articulate... and acutely professional. “I think it’s important to be so when you’re working,” he says, popping a big hollow blue pig’s snout over his nose.

Dubbed ‘Shoreditch’s ringmaster’ by The New York Times, Jonny Woo (short for Jonathan Wooster) is the showman who helped create east London’s Noughties party scene. But he’s much more: actor, playwright, dancer, compere, songwriter and tranny lip-syncher extraordinaire.

Still, he’s had nearly three decades of practice. He first began dressing up and putting on shows when he was five years old. “I remember telling my gran this joke, ‘What comes with a second-hand toilet? Second-hand toilet roll! Do you get it?’ She’d go, ‘Yeah,’ and I’d go, ‘Uuurgh! Someone’s used it and rolled it back up again!’ And she’d go, ‘Ooh, Jonathan!’”

Young Woo went to Hundred Of Hoo School, a mixed comprehensive in Hoo, North Kent, and was a “complete show kid”, hanging around the music block at break and hoping desperately to be picked to play Joseph – though, being a good reader, he always ended up as the narrator.

“I remember being in a musical movement class,” he says, “dancing to that dramatic opening music of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I was really feeling it, you know! Then our teacher pointed at another boy and said, ‘Brian, show us your dance,’ and he was stamping and spinning, and even then, I thought, ‘That’s such an obvious interpretation! Sooooo boring! I was seven!

That’s when I knew I was destined for great things. The height of my arrogance came when I was 16. I directed the school play, the musical The Boyfriend, and made myself the lead.”

Drama queen

Free of coming-out trauma (“as I had a lot of girl friends and they kind of protected me. And people would just say, ‘OK, he does drama!’ You didn’t really have to come out, it was just accepted”), after school came Birmingham University and a degree in theatre arts. “I enjoyed doing really wanky drama-y stuff,” says Jonny, “much to the disdain of the other students who were trying so hard not to be typical drama students. I was like, ‘Oh, let’s be typical drama students!’ So we had a sponsored ‘happening’ for rag week and I wrapped myself up in cling film with a tinfoil phallus and wandered around asking people for money. I sooooo wanted to go to public school.”

And that was just the first year. But then Birmingham’s clubs flung open their doors, and a love affair was born. “I discovered drugs around that time,” Jonny says. “I almost flunked my degree because of clubbing. Clubland’s actually the place where I’ve done all my work subsequently, so in a weird way it was part of my learning experience.”

Moving to Shoreditch in 1996, Jonny hung out with a crowd that included fashion’s enfants terribles Katie Grand and Giles Deacon, partying endlessly, and finding himself hopelessly in love with house music – the scene, the whole package. “You know, there are people who can go clubbing without getting off their face on drugs, but I didn’t know any of them!” he laughs, daubing blue paint behind his ears, “They’re not the ones in the middle of the dancefloor, are they?”

Skint after university, there was a stint of jumper-folding in a Gap-esque clothes shop, some telesales, bar work and a comedy café, all bringing Jonny closer to his year at the London Contemporary Dance School, aged 27.     “I loved it. Absolutely loved it! It was fantastic,” he says. He’d finally arrived somewhere he really belonged.

Jonny’s next stop was New York, to hang out for three years with legendary tranny Lavinia Co-op of famed drag group the Bloo-Lips, getting a taste for dragging up and tranny lip-synching – one of Jonny’s trademark talents that he brought back to east London. He also fell into working with New York City performance art boundary-pusher Brandon Olson .

Jonny be bad

On returning to London in 2003, Jonny settled in Shoreditch and hosted a series of nights called Radio Egypt at the George And Dragon pub, alongside fellow Shoreditch stalwart, Richardette. They allowed their imaginations to run riot.

“The first proper one we did, where we really went for it, was a war party,” he explains. “We’d just gone into Iraq. It was carnage. I was painted white, with all this black and red pouring off me, and I just jumped around and banged a tambourine. It was very freeform. Once, I was a witch for Halloween. They stripped me, cut off my hair, tarred and feathered me, but I ‘flew’ away on a fluorescent tube broom. For another one, about trashing royalty, I made this huge dress out of cardboard boxes and had eggs thrown at me.”

Creating amazing characters, getting wasted, having a scream – life couldn’t have been better... Until 2006. He’d had a particularly busy time, working every night, all night. “I was utterly exhausted and I’d run my body into the ground,” he says. “I didn’t eat properly, I drank a lot and took drugs all the time.”

The party ground to a halt when he woke up one day in intensive care. He was suffering acute liver and kidney failure and spent five weeks in hospital with added complications of pneumonia and lung failure. Treatment included a medically induced coma, being put on a ventilator, and dialysis, where his blood was artificially cleaned.

“It was horrible, but probably more horrible for my friends and family at the time,” he says. “I’m back now, and everyone can move on, but I’ve got to try and adapt. They can all relax but I’ve got to keep focused. It’s taken quite a while to actually work out how to deal with that.”

Jonny no longer takes drugs, but still drinks and, when asked what his tipple of choice is, lists blithely, “Cider, wine, sambucca. Vodka. Gin.” He pauses, adding: “I’m trying to moderate my drinking too. I need to get things done! I can drink all week if I really want to but I’ll feel like shit, so I try not to.

I tend to be a bit of a binge drinker: I’ll go out and have a big ol’ binge and then I’m like, ‘Right! I can’t do that for the next day or two!’ So if I go out on a Friday, I won’t go out on Saturday, but I might go out on Sunday.

I was always one of those people who didn’t want to miss anything. I’m much better now at saying if I don’t feel like going out. It’s such a temptation to start drinking, but I’m like, ‘I need two days off’. It’s all part of my learning curve – my changing curve.”

Jonny be good

To relax, Johnny likes to “watch really shit TV”. But he’s not enjoying it as much as he used as, “I’m watching everything on computer at the moment. Before, I’d just turn on the TV and watch Escape To The Country. But now I have to choose to watch Escape To The Country and it kind of takes the enjoyment away.”

Not that there’s much time for telly, as Jonny’s as busy as ever. There’s a restaging of his cult soap-opera comedy Stark Dallas Naked with David Mills and Timberlina, plus Tranny Lip-Synching and Gay Bingo (both of which Jonny has been hosting for years). It’s not all froth, though: last year’s semi-autobiographical tale International Woman Of Mr E, which touched on his drug-induced brush with death, was a more profound work – and a hit at the Edinburgh Festival.

Perhaps the hardest part of the job is compering. “At Gay Bingo I’m literally doing up to two hours of improvised stand-up. And sometimes I’m like, ‘I’ve got nothing to say!’ he explains. “It’s not like I have a set routine of jokes. ‘Have you heard about the one about the fucking second-hand toilet?!’”

When asked who he’d like to work with, Jonny namechecks Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and US artist Bruce Nauman, but for now it’s nose to the grindstone with his new show, Faggot. It features songs, spoken word remixes and Jonny’s blue piggy character, Mr Snores. “It’s a rollercoaster show – full of peaks and troughs. It’s not autobiographically me, but an extreme. It’s about being gay, camp, a leather queen, butch. There’s a flipside of this dark, twisted, paranoid character, personified by Mr Snores.”

He’s written a single called ‘Faggot’ too, based on abuse he got in the street, which is “a reclamation. It’s a house-y bit of fun.”

It’s late, and time for the question one must ask any clubland figure or cult drag performer, no matter how well-known. Do you have a day job, Jonny? “No! I decided a while back to commit to this. And I’m happy to say that I make a good living out of it. I love going out. I love performing. I feel stifled if I’m not being creative. And I want to do more fantastic things on bigger stages, and hit the mainstream without compromise.”

And with that, Jonny dons his blonde wig and blue snout, and whisks himself off to pose for the camera once more.
 
For more about Jonny and  to hear his single ‘Faggot’,  go to MySpace.com/  jonnywoouk or visit Jonnywoo.com

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