181. The Courtesans
The Black Heart
30 November 2017
Camden’s Black Heart is exactly the kind of place where rock’n’roll still draws breath, a black box of sweat, bourbon and questionable décor. It’s the sort of venue where you meet the mad, the bad, and the marginally employed, and where tourists, though tolerated, are not encouraged to linger.
Upstairs, past the gloriously ambiguous sign, still there, reading “Venue and Toilets”, half directional, half philosophical, four figures took to the stage. The Courtesans, a gothic biker gang turned band, brought with them a self-styled cocktail of doom, alt-rock and trip-hop they called “gypsy glam rock.”
From the first snarl of “Mesmerise”, it was clear this wasn’t going to be some delicate art-rock soirée. This was doom-pop with teeth bared and mascara weaponised. Guitars growled, bass thundered, drums pummelled, and over it all Sinead Bale prowled the edge of the stage, her voice swinging from sultry whisper to full banshee wail. The walls shook and pint glasses vibrated near their shatter-frequency.
Their sound was a glorious contradiction: part sludge, part seduction, all swagger. Imagine Nine Inch Nails fronted by Siouxsie Sioux after a week in a Camden tattoo parlour. The choruses were so darkly infectious you half-expected them to soundtrack an underground vampire club.
Ironically, not long after this, the band had to change their name thanks to an American outfit with the same moniker. They became The Chelsea Vampires, a name so overwrought it sounded like a boutique bondage emporium run by a trust-fund Penelope on the King’s Road. It was a cruel twist for a band already walking that fine line between cult and collapse.
Between songs, they were witty, unfiltered and magnetic, the kind of stage banter that feels genuinely alive rather than rehearsed. They exuded confidence without polish, defiance without delusion.
The crowd, Camden’s nocturnal menagerie of goths, hipsters and slightly bewildered metalheads, were spellbound. By the time they tore through “Genius,” “Valentine” and “Feel the Same,” the entire room was moving as one, transfixed by Sinead’s voice and the band’s feral chemistry. Then came the night’s most endearing moment. Sinead stepped up to the mic and, with a grin sharp enough to draw blood, and announced: “It’s hard being a band these days. We can barely afford to eat, so buy a fucking CD.”
It got a laugh, but behind the snark there was truth, a flash of weary sincerity from a band surviving on talent and fumes. So, I bought three. They signed them afterwards, with warm smiles and tired eyes.
Months later, they launched a Patreon, or something similar, I cannot recall, promising a “gift from the band.” What arrived remains one of the strangest and most wonderful artefacts in my music collection: a black-spray-painted box with a plastic window with a hand-scrawled “Break in an Emergency” daubed over it. Inside it contained handwritten lyrics, a crushed can of Aldi lager, an empty packet of fags, a small bottle of sloe gin with a hand-drawn poison label, all decorated with poems from each member, with one particularly memorable one that announced: “This was full, but Agnes got hold of it”. Punk defiance never died; it just got craftier.
The Courtesans didn’t last much longer after that; they burned fast and fierce, just not hot enough, like so many before them and countless thousands that would follow. But for that one night at The Black Heart, they were incandescent.