Clubs

It may be a while until leather paddles are as common on every bedside table as reading glasses, but the fetish scene seeps further into the mainstream every year.

Couture fashion designers, Christina Aguilera, Madonna and Beyoncé Knowles, flicks like ‘Secretary’ and, of course, Ann Summers have all exposed fetish to rubber virgins. New ITV2 drama ‘The Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, starring Billie Piper, adds fuel to the fire too with its tasteful, yet saucy domination scene, choreographed by Empress Victoria (featured in Time Out 1917). There’s no excuse not to know what a BDSM relationship is now.

This weekend, the finest UK fetish event of the kinky calendar, Skin Two’s Rubber Ball, comes around for its annual extravaganza of all things playful, freaky and very, very naughty. Now in its sixteenth year, it’s expanded to cater for a growing audience, spreading its sheen across four vast venues on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The Skin Two Expo pitches camp at ExCeL London on Friday and Saturday, upgrading from the Barbican where it was held last year. And the evening entertainment? Torture Garden kicks things off at Mass in Brixton on Friday, Saturday is the gargantuan Skin Two Rubber Ball at SeOne and Embassy nightclub in Mayfair hosts a Soul Sunday, a fetish-friendly place to recover from the weekend.

So how has it managed to stay, ahem, abreast of the scene? Its live entertainment aspect  – a wet dream for boundary-bashing art fans – is definitely one reason. There are not many other places in Britain where can you experience such an international range of (wait for it…) burlesque, boylesque, mime, cabaret, live music, body art, bondage, catwalk shows, theatre and musical theatre, Mexican wrestling, rope art, Samurai rape, punishment demos, comedy and self-suspension all in one go. Ryan Styles, Dominic Johnson and Lucha Britannia are just a few names to drop.

And the highlights? ‘We’ve got an American cowgirl scene where the pantomime cow is going to be brutally abused,’ chuckles Hannah Platt, Skin Two’s event manager, ‘and we’ve got fashion company Boutique of Pleasure doing a show with a contemporary dance company, Inko Dancers, which hasn’t been done before.’

To hardcore deviants, however, perhaps the freshest aspect of the weekend is the Sunday Soul wind-down with sassy singer Bridget Metcalfe. The urban flavours that are creeping in (there’s a funk, hip hop and rare groove room at SeOne this year) certainly take the weekend in a new direction, making a sharp change to its usual hard house, electro, industrial and goth soundtrack. Posh club and sit-down social? It seems like an antidote for kinksters’ dark and explosive desires.

Platt is nonplussed: ‘The music is quite across-the-board but we like to keep the Rubber Ball Weekend open to everybody. Yes, there is this dark side to fetish but after all, it is supposed to be fun.’