Listening to Wes Baggaley talk about his youth is to be confronted by his gallows humour. His accent reminds you that, although he played NTS Radio over the weekend and has played Berghain on several occasions, he cut his teeth on the streets of the North West.
This teeth cutting first occurred by hanging around Wigan Pier, a landmark venue on the Leeds and Liverpool canal which hit its peak in the 1990s. From here, Wes travelled to clubs such as Manchester’s Bugged Out and Liverpool’s Voodoo playing his affronting mix of brutal techno, EBM, industrial and new wave.
“Wigan Pier was actually a destination!” Baggaley tells me. “Before the donk thing… that was because one of the lads from our school what used to stink of piss became one of the DJs at Wigan Pier and ended up with a mix CD of Ministry of Sound.”
But it wasn’t all partying in Lancashire: “Once I got thrown through a window in Wigan, I’ve still got no teeth from that.” It was the end of a fight that he started, over what he can’t recall. This is a time before the word queer had been reclaimed, where it was endlessly laid on Wes to the industrial clamour of his factory job. But there were brief glimpses of freedom too. Like in Blackpool gay bars where he met beautiful effeminate men who he starved himself to look like, only to learn later they were dying of AIDS. He says that the Wigan scene didn’t impact his work too heavily, but it’s hard to imagine that the slurry of prejudice and misinformation didn’t contribute to Baggaley’s sound.
I first saw him at Fetisch in Leeds, an alternative pride event in my least favourite city centre venue. I pulled on a neat white vest and a leather jacket and headed down. Sweat fell through the air around me, the perfect darkness interrupted by strobing lights, each drop hitting the ground only when Baggaley commanded it to. That intensity is hard to imagine when sitting with him in the Wetherspoons of Waterloo station. Wes often pauses to giggle during his tales of being “the only gay in the village”. Personally, having grown up visibly queer in a provincial town myself, I find few reasons to laugh along to his tragic anecdotes: “It was the worst time in my life. I lost all my mates. People would talk to me but you could see they were laughing.”
One tale of Baggaley’s sets me creasing, mind you. He was booked for a gig at Snax Party, a large male-only play party in Berlin’s notorious Berghain. As he heads for his set, he’s taken back by the friendliness of one of the bouncers. Once Baggagley is behind the decks the bouncer appears next to him with his dick out. Never one to deny anything,he begins to give the security guard a blowjob whilst continuing his set with a free hand, a feat he assures me not many other DJs could pull off. He’s proud of himself until he realises he’s visible to the whole room. Baggaley hasn’t been booked there since, to his dismay. “You’d think they’d give me a residency!” he booms.
I suppose Berlin allows for this extreme exhibitionism, but Wigan in the 1990s was still some kind of Kreuzberg. Baggaley laments that the town has never recovered from the 2008 financial crash, but prior to this there was always something going on. Wigan Casino in the 70s, Maximes, and hardcore gigs at The Greater Manchester Bus Companies Social Club, nicknamed “The Den”.
I’m struck by the image of the Pier’s under-18s night, where the weekend DJs would practice their sets to “a room full of kids from school off their heads on speed and trips”, to prepare for the adult clientele of the weekend. Baggaley fondly recalls his nights there, but says that he very quickly snuck into the Friday and Saturday nights with the adults. Baggley’s sexuality would become local knowledge around 1993, but not for his own lack of self-preservation: “I was doing things I thought heterosexual people would do but taking it to a caricature-like extreme and just going round punching people in the face for no reason.”
Not many people would approach Bagelley due to his reputation as a fighter, so the ever-crafty homophobes put rat poison in his speed, he tells me. Another time at Blackpool gay bar The Flying Handbag, a group of football hooligans that Baggaley used to know turned up outside. A bit pissed and forgetting himself, Baggaley waved to them – they responded with a brick through the window. He laughs at this and continues that it was around the time his mother had kicked him out. “It wasn’t a nice story,” is his only response to my prying questions, “I was depressed as fuck.”
Baggaley’s volatile relationship with his mother did lead to his first gay experience. Having fallen out with her, he went to hang out with his aunt and her homosexual friends in Blackpool. “She was what you call a ‘faghag’,” Baggaley informs me. After boozing out on the town, Baggaley found himself getting head from some “minging guy” his aunt knew. Hearing her stir upstairs, he pretended to be asleep. When his aunt walked in, Baggaley “woke up” and with mock surprise punched the old boy in the head.
Baggaley’s stories paint a picture of a chaotic youth spent running from himself. At first he wasn’t even into dance music, he was just into drinking and drugs: “Everyone was on drugs from the late 80s through to the 2000s, really. Es every weekend, speed every weekend, coke… And everyone started dabbling with smack, myself included! But, luckily I really didn’t like it. It made me sick, and I don’t like being sick.”
The DJing career that would go to define Baggaley’s later life only started because he was an avid record collector and a friend of his happened to own decks. But the idea of performing for anyone but his mates was out of reach. A set of decks, a music instrument, or any kind of hobby was for kids whose parents had jobs, anyone else would be mercilessly bullied for it, something Baggaley was already too familiar with. During our chat, he quickly draws a link between his own experience and what trans people are facing now: “The same thing with gays back in the 80 and 90s… It’s media fuel, and the government as well. Keir Starmer seems to have taken a complete 180 on trans people since he got into power.”
In 1988, Thatcher’s government introduced Section 28, which prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. What this actually entailed was vague, but it was enough to create a climate of fear around LGTBQ+ people nation-wide. Similarly, recent anti-trans legislation has led to an increase in transphobic hate crimes. Anecdotally, most of my transfemme friends are afraid to leave the house. Baggaley tells me that most of his regulars are young transwomen – in times like these, the club becomes a sanctuary.
I’m in a club of sorts. As a transfemme person, I want to know how we should respond to the affront to our rights. Whilst chatting about my own work Baggelay tells me to not take shit from anyone. You can see this attitude in his regular and questionable Instagram feuds with other DJs which he guarantees me are behind him now. Though, as I write this he’s been slamming Ravers For Palestine pretty hard on his Instagram.
When I asked Baggaley about confrontational queer art I hoped to get a rallying cry – one I needed to hear when I was 18-years-old, wearing my girlfriend’s clothes in the smoking area of Preston’s Warehouse. Something to bite back at the foul stares I was always receiving. The answer I got surprised me:
“Confrontational art is great but actual confrontation? I think there’s a lot of it with no resolution…. It’s called a minority group for a reason. You’re never going to win a screaming match with all these people.”
I sat with this answer for a while, trying to align it with my own distaste for respectability politics. I personally feel it’s a time for action: the soft approach of tender queer-ism is beautiful and necessary in the sheets but it’s no longer enough in the streets. It’s time for queer people to put on an angry outfit and cause some kind of scene. But in Baggaley’s answer there’s a truth that’s hard won.
Minority groups are always at the whims of the majority. Unless cis/het people are willing to form a united front with us, we cannot hope for liberation. First they will come for the visible queerness in us and then they’ll come for the invisible queerness kept hidden within you.
But that’s really beside the point. I remember being called a freak and threatened on the streets of Southport. I can’t picture the perpetrators face, but I remember how many people stood by and did nothing. Like Baggaley, I found little pockets of joy amongst the personal carnage of those years. But those pockets can shatter as easily as a window when a brick flies through it.
all images credited to
Morgan Pugh Photography
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