Enter Sandman

Last week's photoshoot (and thank you for the lovely comments) was all about getting the camera settings ready for Halloween. We didn't go to Torture Garden like last year, but we did go somewhere that was equally fitting of serious dressing up. It was another White Mischief night, as we've been to before, but smaller than the others as it was at 33 Portland Place, a small mansion/private party venue in Bloomsbury (with a bad reputation - there was a police drugs raid when we were there!), rather than in a big club. The theme was "The House of The Sandman", but the original German version by ETA Hoffmann, which is much nastier than the sanitised version we get these days, like most of the Brothers Grimm stories. Here's the relevant quote from the story:

“He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”

As such, one of the suggested dressing-up themes was "eyeless bodies", and that's what I chose to go with, getting some black-out contact lenses for the occasion (not the full-sclera ones though, those are incredibly expensive), fake blood, and a new corset - any excuse, right? In the 20 minutes we had to wait for our cab, the boyfriend took rather a lot of pictures of me, and this being an entirely narcissistic post (and blog), I shall present them here:

He's a clever boy with a camera, isn't he?  Everybody kept saying I looked really young wearing the lenses.  I'm not sure why that would be.

I don't have any good pictures of the evening itself, as the boyfriend was shooting film (old skool!) and it's not developed yet, and I took my smaller camera on the basis that it fits in my handbag, but it truly is shit in low-light conditions, so all my photos are shaken to buggery. I'll put them up though, so you get the general idea.

Me and the boyfriend, who went as Wee Willie Winkie, "sleepwalkers" being another recommended theme:

Me and Mrs Lovett, aka Gail, complete with meat pies:

A rather sexy older man with a gravelly voice and marvellous dusty grey wings. I told him he was like Leonard Cohen will be when he dies and goes to heaven - if only I wasn't spoken for...

Smokers on the patio, photographed because I really wish this many people wore hats in everyday life:

The Sawchestra, there being rather a lot of saws being played that night:

Burlesque performers, one as the devil, one as a ballerina in a hooped skirt:

The Puppini Sisters, who are fairly famous but I thought they were rubbish, but they only did three songs anyway:

And actually even more rubbish was Death doing a pastiche of Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet":

Our hosts, the band formerly known as Kunta Kinte, now called Tough Love. They're pretty good and they did a cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman". Rock on!

I actually didn't get a photo of by far the best band of the night, The Dead Victorians. Check out their songs on their Myspace page - genius. So much so that we're trying to book them for the wedding. This is rather indulgent because we already have the awesome Southern Tenant Folk Union booked, but hell, we may as well make this a music festival while we're at it, and some risque songs from men in top hats will go down very well indeed.

Unexpected visits by the Metropolitan Police notwithstanding, the organisation wasn't great - the hideously overpriced bar even ran out of alcohol by just after midnight, and we all called it a night just after 1am. Better to leave early when the going's still good, in my opinion. Sadly I have no scheduled dressing up occasions this side of Christmas now, but I'm sure I can find one if I look hard enough...

P.S. Here's the official photographer's shot of us, and here are the police!