 Welcome to Inside Leather History, a fireside chat. My name is Douglas O'Keeffe. I produce these chats with Mistress Joanne Gatti, and I'm the host of the chats. And today I'm in London, England. You wouldn't believe it, looking at the beautiful weather today, but it's Sunday, October 21st, and we have an amazing day here in England. So today I'm interviewing Matt Spike, who has generously donated the use of his studios here in Soho, and we will begin the interview now. And Matt Spike, welcome to Inside Leather History of Fireside Chat. I would like to personally thank you for the use of your amazing studio facilities here in Soho. My pleasure. And for arranging such a beautiful day for us here in London. Yeah, I had a word with the Archangel Michael. Yeah, that was very kind of you. I appreciate it. Yeah, that's good. Please, tell us a little bit about your early years. How did you come out to your family? Well, my early years, I was born on the East Coast of England, which is very rural, or despite being quite close to London. And so it was very village existence, you know, village fates, Methodist church, quite normal, quite average. And yeah, I mean, some would even say it was just boring. It was just very, very nice for the first, at least first four or five years of my life. And then until my parents divorced, and then we kind of all then got shunted around places and lost contact with my father for a number of years. And coming out to my mother was fucking horrific, quite frankly, because she had this kind of idea of homosexuality as being sort of a lifestyle choice, if you like, which I don't think it is. I think you're born gay. I think there's a few people that probably become gay for other reasons, political, maybe they've been maltreated or something. But for me, I sort of think it comes naturally. So, and I just remember, you know, I went through that stage where you tell your parents that you're bisexual first, just to ease them into it. And I did that with her, and I said that I might be bisexual. And she was like, well, do you still get married though? And I said, yeah, I expect so. No, well, no, at that stage, because marriage was only to be the woman at that stage. And so I used to hang out with her and couples would walk past, you know, like an elderly couple and she'd kind of cry and say, you know, what's so wrong with that? You know, and I'd say, well, nothing, but it's just not what I want in my life. And this went on for a number of years. We sort of played cat and mouse with each other, really. She just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing until one day. We were driving down a really fast road and she just basically came out and said, you're gay, aren't you? And I said, yes. And she swerved across three lanes of busy traffic and then pulled the car up in a, what we call a lay-by, like a kind of a little rest area. And she cried for about two hours. But then she kind of said, you know, it's fine, you're my son, so if you're gay, you're gay. She said, my problem is, is that what do I get to tell your stepfather about that she'd remarried by that point? She remarried a guy who was quite a kind of, like a man's man. He was very much into football and cricket and golf and all this kind of stuff. And he'd passed the odd kind of joke. She saw somebody a little bit effeminate on TV. He would pass the occasional joke, you know, about, I mean, a guy like that or something like that. And she interpreted this as his homophobia. So when I came out to her, she said, look, you know, I'll always support you, but what my problem now is, is what if your stepfather doesn't like this? She said, I can't stay married to a guy who won't accept my son. I won't do it. And it was actually a friend of mine who I don't see anymore, but he was a big friend of mine at the time. And he, I kind of told him about this. And one evening she phoned me up in one of her panics. And she said, tonight I've got to tell him. I've got to tell him tonight. And my friend encouraged her to do it. And she sat there, apparently it was winter. So she sat there, learning the darkness after work until he came home. He said, why all the lights off in the house? She said, I've got something to tell you. And he went, okay. And kind of sat down and he said, what is it? And she said, well, he's gay. And my stepdad said, yeah, I know, but what's the bad news? So anyway, I got a phone call. I was in London, she was back at home. And I got a phone call about 20 minutes later from my stepdad. And he kind of said, hey, it's me. Your mom's told me you're gay. I don't give a fuck. So when you're coming home next. And it was just like a huge, massive relief was taken off my shoulders. So it came out really, it was a prolonged coming out over several years with a lot of drama that ended really, really well. At what age for you was all of this going? Oh my God, well it started at the age of about 16 and then went on till I was probably about 23. Oh my God. So it was a long time. And actually, one of her bigger regrets now is that she missed out on about six years of my life because I wasn't comfortable talking about anything gay with her. She is the one that thinks this actually is that she's now making up for lost time. I took her to Comptons this year twice, where she had a beaker of wine and sit outside in the summertime with all my friends coming by and complimenting her on her drape jersey. And she had a great time. It's just such a change and such a turnaround from how she was. So she's making up for lost time now and she's really, really nice. And now I'm engaged, she's really excited about that as well. So it started off horrible and ended out really well. But when you were young and you were in your school years, you experienced a very rough time. You were even assaulted as a child. Tell us a bit about that. Yeah, I was bullied at school for being gay and sometimes viciously bullied. And I did get physical at times as well. It didn't really happen until, I mean, I went to a middle school, which was quite a small school. I think it only had about 500 pupils in it. And then at the age of 12, what they do here is they kind of siphon all the small, at least they did then, they siphoned all the smaller primary or middle schools into big high schools. And so suddenly I was transferred from the comfort of small rural school in the countryside into a gigantic, brutalist nightmare of a building in a town. And about eight or nine schools were feeding into this and they came from a variety of different areas. And so some of the schools that were feeding into the high school were from quite what we call rough areas. And so into my life came people who would, you know, take a craft knife and slice your arm for being gay, try and cut your cock off so you can wank again, things like that. That never happened, thank God, but it was threatened. And certainly I had a knife held to my throat. I've actually still got the scar on my wrist for when I was held down and slashed with a craft knife in high school. And I didn't report any of this either because the repercussions would have been terrible. Oh, so? Well, none of the school would have understood. At that time, I remember my English teacher, English literature teacher, told the group about the word gay. And he said, I can remember this as clear as day, it would have been about 1990, 89, 90. And he said, the word gay used to mean happy, colorful, proud, he said, but it's been overtaken by a group of perverts to now mean homosexual. And so if the teachers are kind of saying that kind of thing, you don't really feel comfortable, telling them about this kind of thing. You don't even want to tell them you're gay. There was no school counsellor. It's quite funny actually, because my second cousin has been through the same school and she's a lesbian and she had counselling. So between me being there and her being there, they've actually overcome all these issues, now have a school counsellor who encouraged her to come out at school before she had taken her diploma to school. But yeah, it was horrible. I often used to skip school and come to London, in fact, to Soho. So I'd sort of leave the house, turn left, instead of right and go to the train station and just come into London all day, take off my school uniform, the train, change, and then put it back on and go back in the evening just to, you know, she worked, so she was never home before six, 30, so she'd never know if I'd been at school or not. My brother would forge a note or just tell the headmaster that I wasn't coming in today. I was sick and no, I didn't really get caught for about two or three years, but I used to come to Soho and walk around and just think, this is so amazing. And so I knew then my life was not gonna be in rural England. It could never be. And yeah, and I skipped school to avoid the bullying for it, so yeah, it was horrible, it was really horrible. How did you have any concept about coming to Soho? How did you even know about that? I'd seen it on TV and I'd read about it and I had an obsession with London anyway from an early age. My parents took me here when I was probably about four or five for a day trip and day out, you know. And since I stepped foot in London, I just loved it. I loved the energy and the pace and everything about it. The only other city in the world that's ever been able to do that to me, there's two other cities in the world that have done that to me since, and that's New York and Johannesburg, but I loved the fast pace of London. I liked the impersonality of it. I liked the idea that everyone at home in the village knew who I was, knew my business, and that I could come here and just not be part of a small crowd of people who know everything about each other. That was what impressed me most about London was. It seemed so impersonal and individual. I loved that. I really loved that. And actually, now I'm getting older. My trip's home now. I come away and I think, oh no. That was so nice with my family. You know, I've got it back to London. So it's kind of 180'd a bit, but at the time coming to Soho it was just absolutely amazing, wonderful. I'd never seen fashion like it. I'd never seen, I saw Dominatrix pulling, you know, their slaves across the street and stuff like that, and I thought, wow, this is incredible. It's not like that anymore now. It's changed a lot. It's become quite gentrified, but in this, so when I was skipping school, this would have been 88, 89. It would have been the peak of all that kind of Kylie Minogue, stockache and a Mortimer type music. And it was really cool. It was really cool in the 80s. London hadn't been reconstructed yet. And it was, I mean, for example, where the train terminated when I skipped school, there wasn't Starbucks or Costa or anything like that. There was one cafe which had a spoon hanging from a string, and everyone used to use the same spoon to stir the sugar into their coffee. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Then they redeveloped the station and it all became like the rest of the world. Yeah. Well, how were you initially exposed to the concept of fetishism? What magazines did you see? What things did you learn? It wasn't so much magazines because fetish magazines, just I didn't see any. There just weren't any around. It came from within. I don't know how, but I just realized I liked leather, the material. I thought it looked really sexy and hot. So the first thing I used to do was my mother used to order these great, big, huge catalogs, like clothing catalogs, pre-internet. And she would order our clothes from catalogs. And I would basically go through the catalogs and skip through to the motorcycle section to where they sold full-on leather motorcycle gear. And I'd cut them out and then peel the corner of the carpet back in my bedroom and then just store them under there, under my bed, in the corner of the room. When I came back from my first break from university, the corner had been excavated and nothing was said. But yeah, I used to collect those. And films like, well, Grease, I suppose, was the first time I saw guys looking really hot in leather. And that was on the TV. And then later on, I started seeing films like Cruising, which had leather guys in it. I remember seeing lots of black and white ones, maybe the wild ones, films like that. I started to watch and get slightly very obsessed with. And then George Michael came along, which was great. That happened about 1987 or 88, I think, when he released his faith album. He's kind of pulling on that leather jacket. He's got the stubble. And I saw that album cover in the local record store. And then I was walking home and I was thinking, I want to have sex with a man like that one day. And I couldn't even believe I was thinking it. But I then started to sort of imagine things in my head at night when I then started to masturbate. And I used to invent characters inside my head. I'd even draw them or draw what they looked like and things like that. And there was a guy, ironically, one of the guys that used to bully me at school who wore a leather jacket to school. It wasn't a black leather jacket, it was a brown leather jacket. It was very fashionable at that time, about $89.90. And even though he bullied the shit out of me, I used to follow him everywhere. I was obsessed with him. I can't remember his name. But he was tall, very handsome, and wore this brown, shiny leather jacket. And he used to walk with it very much like that. He was a bad boy. I can picture him in my mind clearly. I can't remember what his name was, though. You mentioned the movie Cruising. That's been a definitive movie for a lot of people in our community. What about it appealed to you? I think it was the first time I'd ever seen the material leather connected to something else. So my leather fetish up until I saw films like that had just been purely about the thrill of wearing leather, full leather. And it does create quite a storm even now when you wear it, people sort of look. I do think men look attractive in leather. And I think everyone agrees with that, whether they're gay, straight, inter-fetish or not. So films like Cruising then showed me that there was something connected to leather culture, sex and rough sex. And I was frightened at first. You're not excessively scared, but I was a bit like, but then after a while, I realized that actually it was quite, quite, quite, yeah, I can see how this is all panning out now. I can see where this is going. It's dark, and it's black, and it's sort of got something a bit of the night about it. And yeah, that's when it began. That's what films like Cruising did. How did you begin exploring the leather fetish scene? Well, yeah, this is the thing. I think that divides me between, divides me from, say, the new, what they call the newbie crowd, is that there was no internet, or there was. It was just beginning. It was very, you know, there were no hookup apps or anything like that. There were no apps. So I had to go and do it by myself. Luckily, there was actually the internet. And through Gaydar, I met some people. I got a master, first of all. He was fantastic. It's called Uncle Kellen, if he's watching. Thank you. And he was a punk. He had a big, spiky punk hair, and he wore a jacket just like this. And he was tattooed all over, and he smoked big cigars. And he was very, very good at it. He just introduced me to the little, little bits in his, in his flat and Pimlico, little bits. Remember, once he tied up my cock completely with shoelace, and then held it, and then started touching it with a violet wand and things like that. And whilst I was tied on his bed, and whenever we hung out, we kind of became boyfriends for a while. And I would always have to sit on the floor whilst he sat on the bed, looking down at me. And I started to really like these little mind games, because for me, it's all in the head. The sex is all in the head. You know, it starts in the brain. And so I suppose role-playing was really great. And he taught me that. I found it really sexy. And just go and lie on the floor on your back. And he'd lay on the bed. And so he'd create this kind of power exchange. And that was great. But I also, at the same time, as well as soliciting kind of, on the internet, I had to go out to thrift stores and buy secondhand, thirdhand, fourthhand leather. I look at pictures of myself now when I was about 25 or 26. The stuff I bought was horrible, really bad condition. But it didn't matter, because I was a leather man. And yeah, the first one I ever went to on my own was the Backstreet where we were last night. And I lived in Bethel Green. I was probably about 26. And I just walked there on my own and just went into the club on my own and sat there and talked to people. Yeah, I just went out and did it, really. I think that's all you could do back then. There wasn't a support network for you then. You had to just go out and find the leather bar and get involved. That's what I did. Tell me more about what was going on in your head with your exploration with, I'm sorry, the gentleman's name. Oh, Uncle Kellan. Yeah, Uncle Kellan. Yes. What was going on in my head? I was living my dream. I was absolutely living my wildest fantasies. Up until that point, I was hanging around with a group of people in East London who were not fetish and who would laugh at the Leatherman image. And we were sort of like a little click of about seven or eight people. And I would disappear for two or three days and come back dressed in leather and stuff. And they would just be like, you know. So my bonds with them began to break and I began to meet more and more fetish people. So what was going on in my head was that I was finding out that actually I wasn't just some kind of regular, kind of little faggot on the scene, you know. But I was, in fact, something more. My identity as a gay man was not with going clubbing and in a crop top and a pair of shorts. It was actually to get fully dressed up in leather and go and actually look for someone that would, you know, tie me up and spank me and stuff like that. Yeah. Tell me how that evolved for you. The people you met, the experiences you had. Was there anything shocking, anything fascinating? Oh, yeah. Oddly enough, none of it shocked me at all and still doesn't to this day. But I guess there were lots of surprising things. I remember the first ever visit as the hoist with Uncle Kellan with me on the leash was really interesting because we walked in and they weren't playing any music. They were, it was very quiet. So, you know, but there was someone shouting in the corner. Someone was really shouting and I said, what's going on? And he kind of said, this is a verbal scene that's going on here. And so someone had someone on the St. Andrew's Cross and was literally just screaming in his face. And I was just stood there for ages watching it and just thinking, wow, that's amazing. And then I was on a leash being dragged around and then some other guy came up and asked Uncle Kellan, my master, said, can I thrash your slave? And so Uncle Kellan said, he wants to thrash you. And I said, okay, is it okay with you? He said, it's okay with me if it's okay with you. So he took me off and I got my first spanking on the St. Andrew's Cross in the hoist. Amazing. Yeah. Loads of things going on like that. I mean, you know, for someone that's not really experienced it before, that was fantastic. I think that back then things were more protocol and more quiet. Yeah, so I was on the St. Andrew's Cross getting spanked. You know, when you, you know, that age just coming out to a gay bar, to a leather bar for the first time, you know, it was nothing, I wasn't, I wasn't ever afraid of it, but I was fascinated by it. Absolutely fascinated by it. Tell me more about the back street and the hoist, both of these places. I've only visited the back street once. How was it when you discovered it? The back street, well, both bars when I first discovered them were much quieter, I guess. Well, the back street often does is quiet sometimes then, but the, I mean, quieter as in the sense of people were much more, there wasn't that so much of the social side of it, I don't think. I think people went to these places deliberately to kind of do what they need to do and then go home. I don't think there was any of this kind of social side. I don't think there was. I think obviously there were people that were into leather and BDSM who would form friendships, obviously, you know. But you didn't go to the hoist expecting to spend half your night in conversation about, you know, I don't know, the Kardashians or something. Right, kind of happens these days a little bit. But again, I don't have any problem with that, but I just, I don't know, maybe it's just distance, you know, from that era, maybe I'm just looking back at it through rose into glasses, but it definitely detects a bit of a sense of there being less of a social side and more of a purpose. People would go to these places for the purpose of doing it. They were like place spaces or creative spaces where people could sort of live out their personas. These days I feel like people's personas are probably in place first and then they get into the harder side of sex. Yeah. Yeah. During that time, what did you discover about yourself in relationship to your BDSM journey? Well, actually the thing I had discovered about myself was that I am not a bottom. I had quite a, I was quite a gentle person growing up, but then I sort of realized after a year or so of sort of being people's slaves and bottoms that actually, I thought that I'd quite like to be the top. So yeah, that is what I learned most of all. And still to this day, I really, really don't like being dominated by anyone. I let my freelancer job dominate me. That's okay. But no, I hate it. I absolutely hate my control being taken away. Hate getting fucked. But I just love topping people. I absolutely love it. Whether it's just, you know, well, I'm engaged now. So the days of playing around are kind of behind me, but I would just absolutely love to top people. And I eventually turned that into a bit of a career progression. In fact, later on, slipping into escorting around about 19, well, I left university in 1999 and got into a series of dead-end jobs that were going nowhere, corporate shit jobs, you know. And basically, at the end of the day, I had enough, I was getting depressed doing the whole nine-to-five commuting thing. And I thought, well, I'd been in escort twice before to support myself during university, just as a regular escort, you know, just wearing pants and that kind of thing. Massages with happy endings, blah, blah, blah. And then I thought, well, what about if I just sold this? And it worked. And actually nowadays, you can look in the magazines and on the escorting websites. And see, lots of DOM guys who are in their 20s and stuff. But at the time, there was nobody else doing it that young. And I got a bit of a niche because a lot of my clients were in their 50s and 60s and actually quite enjoyed being tied up and dominated by this demented 20-something guy. Why demented? How demented? I was taking a lot of cocaine at the time. I'd left a proper job and was existing on the earnings of prostitution. And drugs came up half my life. So, yeah, I wasn't absolutely not my best self at that time. Although, looking back, I was having the time of my life. Yeah, in general, you know, when you're in your 20s, you sort of have a much more carefree attitude now. I mean, like, you know, these days, if I wake up in the morning and find there's not enough milk to make a coffee in the fridge, I kind of, you know, get freaked out by that. Whereas in my 20s, I'd have just probably just drunk the coffee black and thought, fuck it, you know. So, you know, I guess I was just a bit more rebellious and adventurous back then. Well, what do you think of the art of cruising? Oh, I think it's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I wish it still kind of happened because I feel like it's moved online now and I think it's all kind of in apps and I don't think there's any art to it anymore. I would say the art of cruising perhaps has been lost by most people. Yeah, I mean, because we've all had those grinder conversations and they're just, they're just a string of words that are put together and aren't particularly very eloquent. There's nothing sexy about it. It's all very much, you know, upfront about everything. There's no kind of, I used to, I remember you used to going to the hoist and sort of catching people's eye and sort of staring at them and, you know, and I was pretty good at it. I think it might have been lost now, a little bit. And of course, now I'm engaged. I don't really tend to sort of, you know, cruise. I don't need to, but I can see it. When I go to events and clubs these days, I can see that people are sort of cruising in a sense of looking in, checking out the goods, but they're not really having that flirtatious, homosexual kind of cat and mouse game anymore, which I always thought was wonderful. And loved it, absolutely loved it. Looping back slightly, let's take a few steps back. Tell me more about how you got into the scene being an escort. How I got into escorting. Yes. Right, okay. Well, like I said, I mean, I left university with a French and politics degree, which does fuck off for you really, unless you want to be a teacher. I should think, yeah. It doesn't really do much for you. When they sell you the degree, it's like, oh, you're going to end up running the European Union or something, but no. I got out of university and found that there were no jobs for me. So I ended up working at first at a publishing company, which I hated. Although that did give me my first permanent kind of access to having a computer, because I didn't have a computer at home, but I had one at work on my desk and luckily my screen faced away from my boss. So yeah, sure, I was typing up those Excel spreadsheets, but it's also looking at guys in leather and watching porn films on it. And this went on until a circular email went around the company saying, somebody, we're not going to name who, is looking at porn all day, will they stop or they will be named? That's when I stopped. Yeah, I used to, for a good year, I used to spend practically nine to five trying to get my jobs done so that I could have at least 15 minutes during my lunch hour to look at some porn online or just pictures. And yeah, that was great. So I then dumped that publishing job for a job in TV. I worked for a TV company called Carlton TV, which doesn't exist anymore. And my boss was a nightmare. She was horrible. She was absolutely horrible, nasty woman to work for. The company itself was dull. We were just selling TV programs. We weren't involved in any of the production or the glitz of it, or we were just selling shows to other channels around the world. And so if you ever go to South Africa and see Inspector Morse, then that was me. Yeah, but so I kind of just grew fed up with it and then I just decided to rebel. So I created an escort page on Gaydar, put some pictures up, found some photographers from somewhere God knows where, put some pictures up, created an escort profile, published it online, and then sent the email, the link to it to my boss, who then about three seconds later opened the email and said, can you come in here please? And shut the door. And I went into her cubicle and shut the door and she said, you're not seriously gonna do this. And I said, yeah, I am. And she said, she said, when? And I said, now, I've started, I've had advertising. I think I've just got a message. I might have a job tonight. And she's like, so you're leaving now? And I said, yeah, I'm going, bye. Wow. Yeah, and I just cleared my desk and walked out. Wow. Yeah, and I went home and I was living in the east of London that time and you could see all the tall buildings in the financial district, city of London. And I was on the fourth floor of a terrace building and I could just see the top of them. And I remember thinking that, you know, that's the money making part of the world. And now I can actually go out, I got it into my head that I could actually go, I could kind of do things my way. I thought, you know, we live in an open market. I don't have to go to this corporate mincing machine in order to make money. I can make money however I want. And so for the next few years, I'm going to make money out of selling leather sex. And I did. Tell us more about that. What experiences did you have? What did you learn doing this? I learned that quite a lot of clients are actually just in need of someone to talk to. I also learned that some clients are fucking crazy and need to be locked up. And I learned that there are a lot of very unhappy straight men out there who fantasize about fetishes and so forth. What else did I learn? I learned to become very strong. You have to. That job makes you very, very strong. You know, when I was doing out calls, especially in the early days, I would often find myself on it like it. Some suburban train platform with a huge suitcase full of bondage gear and masks and gloves and things like that. I often used to find myself on train stations with this black suitcase I had full of stuff. And you know, when it's like midnight and it's raining and it's January and you've just tied up a guy in a barn in Berkshire and he's driven you to the station and thrown 250 pounds at you and stuff. And then you'll sit there on your own waiting for the last train back to London and stuff. You know, it is lonely. It's kind of lonely and it makes you tough when you've got a client who's crazy, literally crazy, and you have to stay strong for them. But also when, I think you taught me responsibility as well because I then started to get into more serious things like breath control and bondage and things like that. And then I realized I had somebody's life in my hands as well. So I learned many things. I learned to be strong. I learned to be much more self-aligned than I would have become, would have been, would have done if I'd stayed in the corporate sector. And I also learned that, yeah, the responsibility side, actually ensuring some of safety during a really heavy scene. What, was there anything shocking you had to do, anything that was completely out of your realm, anything that was... Yeah, there was... Unusual. Yeah, yeah. There was a gas, one client liked a certain type of gas. I can't remember what it was called now. So it was, I can't remember what it was. Some sort of gas, apparently knocks you out straight away. And we did a couple of sessions and yeah, I knocked him out completely. Chloroform or some such thing. Yeah, it wasn't chloroform, but it was a gas you can buy a canister. And they would inhale it out. They'd put a rubber mask on with tubes coming out and I would just get them to inhale it until they were unconscious and then they wanted to get fucked whilst they were unconscious. So yeah, that did make me a little bit scared, especially buying the actual stuff as well. You know, I had to go and buy it and then go to some suburb of London and do it to somebody. I've just remembered, it's just come into my head. I remember when I was escorting that I got a job in a place called Nunhead, which is in South London. It's a nothing suburb in South London. And I went there, I did the job. The guy paid me, but I'd noticed that the interior decor was really 70s or even 60s and that it looked like someone had literally just moved out. And as I was leaving and he drove me back to the train station, I said to him, like, I'm not being funny about you decorating or something because that flat is just weirdly like, you know, the big 70s flowers on the walls and stuff. And he said to me, no, it's actually my mom's flat. She died last week. And I didn't want to go to my place because my boyfriend's there. So I was like, so I just tied you down to your recently departed mother's bed. I kind of thought, if my mother died last week, I'm not sure if I would do that. That struck me as a bit odd. That's more comedy, I guess, but it was still a bit weird, you know. How long did you work as an escort? I think roughly for about 10 years. My gosh. As a full-time escort. So that being my only source of income. During that time, I did a couple of stints in the gay shops. Now, Clone's Own. I worked at Clone's Own for a while where I got fired for steaming porn on poppers. And I was then, for a short while, I was a supervisor at a furniture store, which was dreadful. But yeah, I pretty much supported myself using my earnings as an escort. But I wasn't completely stupid. I did save some of the money. I didn't blow it all on clothes and drugs. I saved some of it and I bought my, started by myself, camera equipment, cameras, card readers, bits you need for photography. Some of the stuff I bought with my escort earnings all those years ago, I still use even now. Some of the triggers and flashes and flash guns and stuff are from that time. Yeah. How did you begin moving away from that into a new realm? It started just to become, I just started to become a bit resentful of the clients. And if any of them are watching, I'm really sorry to have to say this. I didn't resent anyone personally. What I resented was them coming into my home. And I just started to feel that it was a little bit, I was a bit tired of it really, you know. Some of them were, as I say, some of them were quite unhinged mentally. You know, one of them told me that he had connections and he could have me make me disappear. He would say that during sex. And that's he ejaculated. He would say, give me AIDS, give me AIDS. I want a life of dependency on pills. That was what he said while he was ejaculating. And when these people are in your home, you kind of think, well, this is my home. And I believe in energies anyway. I'm a bit woo-woo like that. And I kind of, and I honestly believe that they would leave an aura of themselves in my home. So, and I didn't want them to see any pictures that had hung up, in case they could see my family or some, and then somehow psychically leave something behind. So I used to take everything off the walls, all the objects off the, all the shelves, you know, and hide them so there were bare walls, nothing. So that the client coming into my apartment could not see anything about my taste in furnishings or interiors, couldn't see any photos of any friends. He knew nothing about me. And then of course, when they left, now I let you have to put everything back up again. You know, it was ridiculous. So I kind of thought, right, we're gonna have to move on from this now. And I decided to get into photography. Tell us about that. Well, it's always been in my life because both my grandmothers were photographers and my maternal grandmother used to retouch photographs, retouch negatives. So it's always been there. I kind of wanted to do art at school but was pushed in the languages and politics direction by my parents, who now realize it was stupid because I'm a freelance photographer with no formal training. So yeah, I basically just started to advertise as a photographer. At this stage, I hadn't thought about fetish photography, but I just used to kind of, there were websites like Model Mayhem where you can find models. I just used to contact them and just start photographing people, created a website. Then my mum paid for me to go in the Yellow Pages, the local one for central London. And I got real-time calls and I was running a photography studio out of a bed set in Bethel Green. You know, a bed set is like a really small room where you just have like the stove in the corner in your bed. It's just one tiny little cell block. And I turned it into a photo studio and then people would come and they'd look around and go, what the hell is this? But I started to turn out good photos and the majority of people that came were people who, because things like LinkedIn were starting and Facebook and the need for you to have a professional portrait of you was starting to become the thing. And most of the people who booked me as a photographer were business people needing a shot for a presentation and we're gonna do a conference or something. So I thought, well, okay, let's do corporate photography then. So I rebranded the website as a corporate photographer. And then, yeah, within about, after about a year of that, I was making a living as a freelance corporate photographer. Fantastic. Yeah, it was kind of, it was amazing. That then enabled me to get this place and have a, because I've got to now well, a good sized portrait studio and it's in Soho. So I have no problem getting photo jobs now. It's really easy. In fact, I even rent the space to other photographers sometimes. But the fetish thing came in. I think an ex of mine were having a drink in a bar and we're looking through, we're just bitching at the escorts in the back of the gay newspapers. And he said, what you should do is you should actually contact these escorts and ask if they want photo sheets done because then you could have another string to your bow. You could do kind of like gay male erotica. It still hadn't occurred to me that I could be a fetish photographer. But I did. I called some escorts. And then it was when recon started, which wasn't called recon then. It was called World Leathermen. And Phil Hamill was going around gaydar and sort of poaching leather guys to come to his new site, worldleathermen.com. And then I looked at worldleathermen.com and I thought that there are a lot of pictures. Well, I was doing hookups with people and I was meeting a lot of people that didn't look like what they look like in their pictures. And I thought, oh, this is an interesting niche because there might be a need for people to have decent fetish pictures. The same way that people in business need a profile pic. Right. Maybe people in the fetish world should have more realistic pictures. So I put some text on my worldleathermen.com profile saying I'm a photographer. I've got a studio space. I can take your photograph and you can use it on worldleathermen.com. And then that just kind of... Immediately after that, I stopped being known as the escort because I'd become a little bit infamous with the escorting name. And people started referring to me as the fetish photographer. And I was like, fucking hell, this is weird. And then I got a call from the guy who now does the PR for the Backstreet. There was a porn film being made in there and they needed someone to do the stills for it. So that was my first ever fetish shoot was at the Backstreet during a porn film. And then Antoine from Recon contacted me possibly a couple of months or a couple of years later and said, we're doing a shoot for the second ever fetish week in London. Our photographer dropped out. We need someone straight away, can you do it? And I was like, yes. And immediately I was dropped into a gigantic daylight studio near Liverpool Street in London with about eight models to direct and I was just left to it. And I'm not particularly proud of it. Looking back, it looks, you know, compared to what I can do these days, it looks really amateurish. But that got me started. That got me commercial work and then it all just kind of carried on from there really. How long have you been doing this? Nearly 10 years. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you feel is your greatest personal achievement? Personal achievement. I think, does that question have to be fetish related or is it just going to just be anything? That's up to you. Okay. Well, I think my personal, I think my greatest personal achievement is overcoming that kid that was held down in school by their throat and kind of cut open by a craft knife. I could easily have just basically decided to become a recluse or a quiet person. In fact, I am naturally quite shy and quite quiet. My whole life has been about overcoming that. Oh, okay. It really has. And I don't, I hide it from people. I even hide it from my family. But so my, you know, to be able to stand here and be interviewed by an American journalist, I guess, and to do big shoots for fetish entities all around London to be personally commissioned by people to do their photos to have had exhibitions. All that took a lot of inner strength from me. You know, I could easily have said, no, I a lot of times wanted to say no. I was very frightened. There is such a thing as well as photographer stage fright. A lot of people think the person getting photographed is the person that gets scared. But we're kind of fucked on the floor, something. It's heading away. Yeah. Do you want Doug to come back in with the question again and start from the beginning or do you want to pick up? I am happy to pick up. Okay, so let's change the shot, I know. So back to Doug. Yeah, okay. Because there is such a thing as photographers stage fright. Most photographers I know have it. And there's a sort of a pang of anxiety before you do a major photo shoot, you know, because you have an idea in your head of what's going to happen and usually outcomes completely different. So how you get from your expectation to your outcome is sometimes quite frightening. I've lost my trace. That's okay. But you said you did things your way. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, it's like I said, that decision to leave that dreadful job in television was really the kind of the turning point for me. Realizing that I could make my way in this world without having to rely on a corporate entity of any kind. Just making my way through my world just being myself. Surviving just being myself. Not relying on anybody. Being entirely self-aligned and making my own decisions. I've never really had to kind of bend my will to anybody. I haven't achieved things by being nasty or vicious or mean. I've just literally just kind of positioned myself and arranged my life to suit myself, which I think is quite a good achievement. Absolutely. Because a lot of people that are obliged to do things they don't want to do in life, I've never really had to deal with that. But it has come at a huge price, and that is that I've had to really fight hard with myself to be strong to do that. Yeah. What differences do you see between the fetish community and the leather community into which you entered versus what we have today? This is a very contentious issue at the moment. I think that one of the things I notice a lot of these days is this idea of people being concerned about how people are inducted into the fetish community. Whereas I didn't really experience that. It was like either come or don't come. And whereas these days I think there's a lot of people talking about newbies coming into the leather scene who might need to be looked after and sort of guided in. And in actual fact, last night, as you know, I think I told you, I introduced you to him, didn't I? My friend who was fascinated by the leather scene, I took him shopping last week for a full outfit. And last night at the back street, I took him for his first gay bar experience. Yes, okay. I recall now. Yeah, yes. So I think these days what's changed is the way that you enter the leather scene. Because it's so saturated with apps and magazines and advice and, you know, Twitter and there's so many websites and personal blogs and you can learn so much just going through the internet. I think that that's what's changed mostly for me is that in my day, you just had to basically go out, find a thrift store, dress yourself up and just go and do it, you know. The other big change is that, and it's interesting because you're gonna be speaking to Susie tomorrow, but she started the first club that basically took fetish into the dance floor in London at least, is that these days things are not so much bar based anymore. So we lost the hoist, the hoist closed. Various other pubs, gay leather-friendly pubs have closed over the years. Now we just have the Backstreet as a bar. And everything, all fetish events are now based in clubs. So it's all about dancing in your fetish gear. That's a huge change that's happened as well. That format is now, I think, really, really quite, it's the go-to format, it's even getting a little tired actually. Because I think most people end up stood in the smoking area chatting rather than dancing and stuff. I think people are looking for connection. And somewhere along the way it's all got lost in this kind of sort of dance fetish culture that's going on, which I don't disapprove of. They say, hell of a good fun to dance on the dance floor in a pair of chaps. It's great, but we're just talking about differences. So that's definitely one of the big differences that's happened. What's the significance of your ink? Oh, my ink. There's no significance. There's none. Oh, seriously? No. It's just a collection of places I was at in my head over the last year. And all these are all done at different times. Some of them are cover-ups. There's the name of an ex-partner on there, which I'm gonna change at some point. But I just liked ink, really. People have often asked me that question over the years. What does all this mean? And I'm like, it doesn't mean anything. It's like I literally just basically just took my neck and just doodled on it, except really well. Got a tattooist to doodle on it with a tattoo needle. Yeah, they're just their decoration. Oh, all right. Yeah. What's the biggest misconception about you? Oh, well, probably that I'm really strong. Probably that I'm really kind of a bit tough and a bit hard, maybe. That's a real misconception, because I'm actually not. I'm quite shy and introverted. And like I said before, I have to force my way out of that to just sometimes even go and get milk some days. But yeah, I would say from the image I've put out there of myself and the work I do, and the way I make myself so visible, people might assume that I'm quite tough or perhaps more arrogant than I am, whereas I'm not. I'm actually a pussycat. Matt, Spike, thank you very much for being part of Inside Leather History. Thank you. You can find your side chat. Thanks, guys. Again, I thank you for the use of your studio here in Soho. You're most welcome. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Thanks. All right. Thanks, thanks, thanks.