Viva Las Vegas

Casino, Casino, the mad world we both know

The culture permeates and it’s reputation precedes it. I have a vision of black fluffy dice swinging from the rear view mirror of my father’s black chevy. Souvenir shot glasses, statuettes, snow globes and showgirl postcards in my mother’s bedroom. Neither of them had ever been to Vegas, and yet it had a presence in our lives, because they were rockabilly’s I guess? I’m sitting on my bedroom floor, cross legged, staring at a CD cover with Dean Martin’s face on it (who I had a crush on as a child and who’s CDs I would happily listen to alongside Britney Spears and S Club 7). He was colloquially referred to as the “King of Cool” and a founding member of The Rat Pack -who are synonymous with Las Vegas. I’m watching Viva Las Vegas for the first time with Anne Margaret in her black tights and perky pointy breasts in a burnt orange sweater, dancing like she had every ounce of life living fully within her; full of attitude, freedom and pizzaz, thinking -that’s who I want to be! I wanted to shine in Sin City one day.

The first single from my debut album, ‘Casino’, was inspired by my experience at The Hippodrome Casino in Piccadilly Circus, London, but very much buoyed by a whacky film from 1963 entitled “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world”, as well as the Sharon Stone classic ‘Casino’ and Louis Theroux’s ‘Gambling in Las Vegas’. I never like to leave a stone unturned, especially in dark places where the tragic and fabulous meet in some kind of meta cliché caricature that jumbles into a greater metaphor for life. I knew I’d get there one day and that I’d have to shoot the video there.

I spent my first few weeks in Los Angeles trying to convince anyone I met to drive me to The Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. No bites. Despite nobody seeming busy with anything at all except for flimsy commitments to ‘talk’ to strangers they met in bars and latte queues, they were (in fact) tethered to the anxious hopes, dreams and endless possibilities of another day where they might just meet the right person who opened the door to another door. LA FOMO is an infinity shaped conveyor belt. Some suitcases are Louis Vuitton, others are hard shell, some just boxes and laundry bags with packing tape, but they’re all piled on the same never-ending road to nowhere, waiting for their owners to come claim them, unpack them and take them some place else. 

A glimmer of hope twinkled when I stumbled upon my high school friend Alex Cameron, who was headed East with his “business partner” Roy Molloy. They were on tour, they were freewheelin’ and down to clown around and hit the GC with me on their way to Texas. They would be the Thelma and Louise to my Brad Pitt perhaps? Alas, the dates didn’t align, and they hit the road without me. I should preface this story with the context of my inability to drive a car and lack of a license, in case you’re curious why I couldn’t just fang down the highway on my own wheels and time, lone ranger style. Little did I know, that I’d reunite with these two highway men later down the line and that we would traverse the country several times over together.

I was out of options and my determination was as solid and vicious as a jackhammer these days; a mutate and survive adaptation from years of banging my head against brick walls and and getting stuck in the mud. Internet start-ups were blooming and booming and I embraced them wholeheartedly. In the early days of Uber, a driver picked me up in his banged up white panel van, dropped me at my home address and phoned me up to ask me out on a date (he got my number from the app). A director friend hot-tipped me on to a new gear sharing website for film makers, and after a little bit of uneducated research, I hired myself a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera and the cheapest compatible lens I could find. I could only afford the day rate, and who am I kidding, I couldn’t even afford that -I borrowed a hundred bucks to cover it. 

After hauling my ass across the pedestrian nightmare of greater LA to random film nerds’s share houses, grabbing a sparkly noughties dress from a Hollywood costume hire (famous for their Santa Claus provisions) that was located above a furniture store and a few hours sleep on a cot bed… I hopped on the Grey Hound bus at 4am from Union Station. It was still dark. Junkies and vagrants were aggressively pacing the median strip where we (myself and a series of bizarre characters) waited for the bus to pull up. I sat near the front of the top deck, where I still had a view of some fellow passengers. There were a group of ladies in Hawaiian Shirts and bucket hats grasping at penis straws,  some sketchy dudes in bedraggled oversized suits and some faces so unique they’d sit comfortably in The Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars. After a 6hr ride, we rolled into the strip and would be lying if I said I wasn’t completely buzzing, eyes wide open. 

Everyone was seemingly grey and crinkled with sky high 100 ounce plastic coloured cocktails. There was an air of wet beds and beer drenched carpets sticky with desperation that lingered once you passed through the lounges to the glossy gaudy hallways of marble and gold. My room at The Flamingo was pretty fancy for a tenner, so I figured they must make up the difference in guest’s gambling losses. It feels deflating saying that the first time I saw a real life Flamingo was in the enclosure out the back of the hotel. I waded in the pool alone, watching fake tanned drunken people who had planned their vacations milk the most out of it. I wandered the streets, dining halls and casinos with this camera until the early hours of the morning, agitated by a niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach and a flutter in my chest. An epiphany hit me in the grand entrance lobby of The Venetian like the final scene of Clueless. I wasn’t in love with my boyfriend back in London anymore, and I had fallen deeply, inescapably in love with someone, well something else… and her name was America. She was everything I ever dreamed of -big, bold, wild, ugly and beautiful, full of veneers and polarities. The best and worst. Everything changed for me that night and my new life began. 

I once fell for a Mormon in Vegas who had a wife, unfortunately for me (and her… and I guess them). I won’t go in to the details here, but amidst the drama (of which there was plenty, including being walked in on wearing only a thong, convinced I was about to be shot) I met a pocket rocket called Lil D*b D*b who lived in a trailer park. She was throwing wads of cash at me after a show, tucking it in to my cleavage gallantly, and besides that, she was extremely charming; a blonde doll; a Marilyn; drunken and vivacious. She noticed I was selling my packaged worn panties and asked about my production methods. She offered to wear them for me at the gym, to carry some of the load for me, and sell them on a legitimate panty-selling site that she made good bank from. She was a pro in the art of seduction. I didn’t take her up on it, stupidly. Anyhow, she had a friend, a “boyfriend” - who I have in my phone as “T*ddy Las Vegas” who was also a “man of the night” and clearly a wild child, something kind of sinister about him. Like I said, Vegas is everything it claims to be. After some delirious time in the back seat of my lover’s parked car, going for a slow drive around the streets as the sun started to rise, past the Elvis wedding chapels and puking women in pig trotter stilettos, a blur, a blur, I’m back on the bus right out of there, through the blankets of desert that surround it. What happens in Vegas stay in Vegas.

Next thing I know, I’ve booked a fancy Air BnB in Joshua Tree, with my guitarist Lucy, a solid couple I know from the music biz, and a new friend who happens to secretly be an ‘escort’ with her long-term boyfriend (who knows). I’m at the end of a tour where everything bad happened, every muscle is hurting and there’s a hot tub outside that I’ve been dying to dip my lifeless body into. It’s early morning and I slip in the tub, in haste, to find this new friend and her dude giggling shamelessly and obliviously to me about what they’ve been up to in there… with a fucking butt-plug floating around the top of the tub on its way to me. I’m genuinely grossed out, about 10 levels harder than the way I get when a one night stand wants to use my toothbrush, and I am well and truly over it. Life, I mean.

One of my oldest friends (let’s call him Keith) is set to stay with us after the show tonight and I’m looking forward to hanging out -he makes me feel like I’m home. He turns up to the show with a fake machine gun as a fashion accessory (great idea) and has some trouble with security. Lo and behold, Lil D*b D*b and T*ddy rock up from Vegas and pull my friend in to their lair for the night. His phone is dead and I can’t find him in the morning. It worries me -for some reason I just feel ill at ease like something really bad might’ve happened. I get a text from T*ddy at midday saying “Keith” is with them and they had a great night *winky face*. He shows up in a bit of shell-shock. He had spent intimate time with D*b while T*d was asleep and is unsure of the dynamic between them all. The tension is palpable and bizarre as we share a meal at a long table in a steakhouse. We say our goodbyes to them and ride home together by the light of a rainbow and some scattered rain, where he divulges the night’s details to us. He receives a text from T*d saying “I can taste you on Lil D*b D*b’s P*ssy” with a winky face and none of us know if we want to laugh or vomit.

This is the last time I remember setting foot in Las Vegas. My bandmate’s girlfriend had been sulking and generally being a pain in the ass for most of the drive from Colorado, so we stopped in Vegas for a meal in the hopes of cheering her up. Wholefoods. A scammy supermarket that is actually worthy of Las Vegas behind its hippy green washing and cult covered capitalism. She hops in the van looking happy with herself (in a Veruca Salt way), revealing she stole the food in her lap (despite not needing to). I see a staff member point to our van as we drive out of the parking lot straight on the freeway anticipating a highway chase and losing my beloved American Visa by association…

There’s people who visit Vegas, and then there’s people who live in and breathe Vegas. Shit gets twisted either way in Sin City and you bring it back out into the real world with you like a cat dragging a dead mouse. All I can say is, the only aspiration I ever harboured with any seriousness was to be Liberace, and I can say that dream has well and truly gone with the wind.

*huge swathes of information redacted for legal purposes*