Interview with Alex Hetherington and Simon Eilbeck
Words: Evie Glen (she/her)
I watched Alex Hetherington’s The Disco: A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck twice before this interview, and I’m watching it again now as I write this. Each time I notice something new: a postcard reference to Luke Fowler’s Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait; the poet, Catherine Street’s yellow fingernails matching the yellow of the clapperboard; disco music muffled under David Toop’s flute trills; muted conversations in the smoking area; the turning of a film reel, a tinnitus-like drumming. Alex tells me he set out to make an aural, visual portrait of someone who he felt had ‘nourished all aspects of themselves, and made that both public and private’, making ‘constant declarations of what it means to have a liveable life’. It’s maybe the most tender compliment I’ve ever heard, and it’s clear Alex sees it crystallising in Simon.
Alex and Simon first met back in 2014 when Hot Mess Disco – a monthly queer club night founded by Simon – was still running out of The Annexe at Edinburgh’s Liquid Rooms. Alex remembers the party as a ‘sanctuary’, and he’s not just speaking in nostalgia fuelled hyperbole: at the time he sent Simon a poster that read, ‘Hot Mess Disco Saved My Life’ which Simon tells me, ‘still remains to this day the best piece of feedback [he’s] ever had’.
Photos: Alex Hetherington
Both are exceptionally admiring of the other, yet equally humble about their own work. Simon, a d/Deaf DJ, laughs when Alex labels him a ‘queer maverick’, but describes their first experience working together as ‘one of the most incredibly intimate experiences [he’s] had’. He tells me Alex has ‘such a gentle way of practicing his art’, and you can feel his gentleness throughout the film. Shot entirely on 16mm, the dusky blue shots of a Glasgow sky in late May crinkle like faded postcards, and the disco scenes that look like shots of Studio 54 in the 70s are overlaid with classical compositions by Henri Pousseur.
Exposing the sophistication of my references, I draw a contrast between these quiet club scenes and the frenetic energy of the club scene in Babygirl. Why did Alex choose not to direct a scene that made us feel all hot and messy, like we were there with him? Because, ‘if you want to go to Hot Mess, you go there’! As one account goes, ‘Hot Mess will blow your mind, give you little forehead kisses, and call you a good boy’.
Take it from Hot Mess regular Leyre Mann Vandillo, who says in the film that stepping into the disco might take you one step closer to ‘perpetual ecstasy’. From anyone else it might sound a bit flowery, but from Leyre, in a silk blouse and sipping a dram from a crystal glass, I’m convinced. The club’s borders are fluid: ‘the queerness goes out’. When people leave, they float in that space between the club lights and the afters until they come back again. It is a kind of perpetual ecstasy: a willingness to live in flux, in the inbetween, amongst the fringes. For regular Hot Messers like Leyre, that space is sacred. ‘Don’t you ruin Hot Mess’, she warned Alex, ‘It’s our place’.
Photos: Alex Hetherington
Leyre can rest assured that Alex far from ruins Hot Mess. His collage approach intelligently constructs a referential ode to a myriad of queer filmmakers, artists, and theorists. From Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (Alex’s ‘favourite movie of all time, of course’) and Judith Butler’s notes on a ‘liveable life’. Alex tells me he’s fascinated with Simon’s ability to DJ from memory, like he has an archive in his mind from which he draws each track. Alex’s mind seems to work similarly, maybe that’s why this project works so well.
In our chat, Alex’s answers drift in fascinating streams of consciousness that take us from Mr Benn, a TV show he watched as a child, to Robert Ashley, an American avant-garde composer. Linking the two with remarkable philosophical astuteness, he tells me both Mr Ben and Robert Ashley probe the possibility that you ‘might be someone other than you think you are’ – the possibility that there might be parts of our identities we never knew existed.
The Disco seems to suggest that it is only through others that we get to know those undiscovered parts of ourselves. As much as the film is a portrait of Simon, it is also (and I think it has to be) a vignetted portrait of Alex and all of his chain-linked influences. From Leyre to the artists, Conal McStravick and Nat Walpole, and all the seasoned Hot Messers – of which Alex is, of course, one himself.
Photos: Alex Hetherington
At a time of rampant individualism, austerity, and what Alex describes as ‘all the madness of late-stage capitalism’, this insistence on collaboration and connection – however fleeting – is really quite radical. Alex contends: ‘It’s a radical idea to have a queer night in this crisis’, to have a space beyond the outside world where all of the crises we’re currently living through seem to disappear. It’s something that rings achingly true across Glasgow’s club scene, especially with the closure of Bonjour over a year ago now, and the recent redevelopment plans that threaten to shut down Exit.
But while this film may be marked by tinges of melancholy, there is a pulse that keeps it turning. An underlying beat, a drone, a dance. While it might not replicate the energy of Hot Mess, it certainly teases us with it. Though to feel those chaste goosebumps, Alex tells me, ‘you’ve got to live this film’. ‘You’ve got to experience it in the cinema, like you’ve got to experience Hot Mess for yourself’. And I think I will.
The Disco: A Portrait of Simon Eilbeck opens at the Glasgow Short Film Festival on 19 March at the GFT. The festival runs until 23 March. Tickets for the opening gala, or any of the other screenings, can be purchased here.
