#i just realised that the clip i watched on sunday was dated the exact same date sixteen years ago and it sort of blew my mind

[skatingthinandice]

sixteen years later and finally my eyes are open to the matthew/perdy/grayson potential of it all

[paultoner]

Take a Bite of Niall Candy

From dancing onstage with Charli XCX, to working almost every party you wish you were on the guestlist for, meet the London based drag queen about to push the throttle on their career.

Glitz. Glam. Galore. These are the type of words which spring to mind when you’re about to meet up with one of London’s most exciting drag queens. But it’s early Sunday evening and I find myself at a desolate pub tucked behind Granary Square in Kings Cross. The kind of place firmly left behind as London’s nightlife suffocates in gentrification. I’m surrounded by kids aimlessly trying to entertain themselves whilst their dads use the penultimate hours of the weekend to have a well-deserved catch up with good ol’ Stella Artois.

Niall Candy’s look today is rather tame, but within our unfortunately bleak surroundings, he’s as subdued as a jock-strap plastered in Swarovski crystals. His milky complexion compliments the pale pink kawaii-printed shirt he’s wrapped himself in, his eyebrows half shaven, his dark curls concealed by a beret held put by three rather large bedazzled clips. “At the moment everything has to be pink” he confesses, “the hair has to be pink, the eye makeup has to be pink. I don’t know why but if I put on anything else I don’t really want to wear it and I don’t really want to go out.” He politely turns down my offer to buy him a drink, he’s not the first boy to do so. Thankfully this time it wasn’t due to my piss-poor chat up lines, but because of a heavy night before, hosting a party at the Ned Hotel in Bank, “I basically got payed to stand around and look pretty all night, it was great.”  

Essentially Niall Candy is the Clark Kent of drag (as if Superman could get any camper?) By day he’s a final year fashion journalism student at Central Saint Martins, where he’s about to embark on his final major project, “it’s a magazine basically like the Country Life, but full of drag queens.” By night, he’s one of the most innovative faces within London’s queer nightlife sphere. “I learnt a lot of my drag make-up style from my friends in Paris. The House of Morue. I lived out there for 6 and a half months” he tells me, “that’s where my boyfriend lives. And he does drag. So I kind of had my own style, then I was very inspired by their style which is very severe. Very Mugler woman. Then I took part of their style, part of what I was already doing and I think it works.”

Candy’s look has evolved from stepping out a Harajuku day dream with gentler, dainty male-drag looks, like a school boy after a growth spurt, to larger-than-life anime eyes reminiscent of a Lady Gaga, Hello Kitty inspired, shoot back in 2010. To now, a mutant woman, subverting the clichés of feminine beauty. Endearing, with a dash of sexual confusion. Carrying the elegance of a forgotten starlet spat straight out the mouth of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Long before we felt the true effects of the Ru-pocalypse, when drag was catapulted straight into the mainstream all thanks to a little show called RuPaul’s Drag Race, Candy was already doing drag for a hot minute. Clad in pleather skirts, New Look wedged heals and a fringed wigs straight out of the bag, a fake ID was his gateway to amercing himself in the serotonin-washed bliss of the capital’s queer nightlife spaces, from Dollar Baby in London Fields and Hoxton’s East Bloc, all at the tender age of sixteen.

Growing up in Watford, he was the only out-gay pupil in a school of 2,400 students. He needed an escape from heteronormative lifestyle of mundane village reality. So he downloaded Twitter and got in contact with Smiley Vyrus, a new kid to the London drag scene at the time, who he began spending most weekends with. “I would not go to school and not say anything to anyone, get my friends to sign me in” he admits, slightly squeamish at his once irrational behaviour, “ I would just get the train straight into London and stay at someone’s house and go out for the weekend.”

Although, his now signature mug hasn’t always had a mesmeric hold, confessing many of the queens he has recently affiliated himself with didn’t recall meeting him in his premature days of drag. Partially due to his naive skill with the paintbrush, “it was terrible, like I had that brow, that Latina bam bam” gesturing at a brow arched over half of his forehead’s surface area. But for the most part, because of a four year hiatus Candy took away from the scene.

A drastic revaluation to his life choices, Niall decided to swap spending his time dating 24 year olds from North London for the books. He had a lot of catching up to do. For all those days in his first year of sixth form spent with a lipstick or a glass of champers in his hand as opposed to a pen, dedicating all his free time toward his studies, even missing close friends’ eighteenth birthday parties in preparation for his A-Level exams.

Speaking of eighteenth birthdays, it was only shortly after his when Niall’s family decided to emigrate to Canada, “I really didn’t want to do drag when I first got out there because I needed to like find a friend” he says, before breaking into an embarrassed giggle. Thankfully, he only spent a year across the Atlantic before returning back to London in time to enrol for Central Saint Martins, and reintroduce himself to all the pretty thrills of his drag closet.

Two years into validating drag as a viable career path, it’s only been within the last few months that the cheques have begun to write themselves, “those queens who think RuPaul has made [drag] a very acceptable thing to do, they’re the ones who think they’re gonna become instantly famous and make all that money straight away. I can tell you from experience, I’ve been doing drag consistently full time for 2 years, maybe 3 years? I don’t know it all rolls into one, enough drunken nights it’s just like a blur. I’ve only in the last 6 months started to make money. Like enough that I can actually survive.”

And who better to continue your drag journey with than your boyfriend? Although Candy isn’t quick to shrug off accusations of jealousy, “we both decided to do drag stuff at the exact same time, and now sometimes it’s a jealous motivation” he admits, “If you’re gonna look good. then I’m gonna look good as well. It pushes us both to work a lot harder, its two brains instead of one, I never have a look that I don’t run past him first.” He speaks of Timothy through a particular tenderness, a genuine admiration. Throughout our discussion this evening, I’m arrested by Niall’s sincerity. He gives me hope that once you get through a drag queen’s tough outer shell, they’re surprisingly sweet on the inside.

“He’s quite genuine in a city full of fakes, I’ve always been struck by his kindness”, says Bailey Slater, a fashion journalist who first met Niall at age fourteen, waiting in line for a Charli XCX gig, “he’s always been a great person to get advice from, a real sweet soul.”

Niall speculates a supportive family network is at the route of his kindred spirit. Raised on a random stew of Cher, Gwen Stefani and Dolly Parton “In our house Dolly is held to a level of godliness”, his brother, eleven years senior of Niall, played a key role in paving his queer influences. “My brother made me watch Party Monster when I was a child child, and my parents lost their shit” he recalls, “he is very pro-gay, very pro-LGBT. The way he said it to me, as soon as he realised I was going to be gay, which it was no secret, he tried to educate himself as much as he could.” His parents are equally as supportive, as he jokes about a birthday post his mum wrote for him on Facebook were she only posted pictures of him in drag.

His passion for drag is potent. From throwing a sash around his head pretending to be Cilla Black as a child, to today, telling me plans of heading to America to escape the crippling restrains of being a queen in London, it’s unequivocal that he’s destined to make it. He has that dreamboat charm, with a twinge of awkwardness, the primal ideal of creative integrity, with common decency.

We walk to Euston station together, casually talking dreams of owning breast plates and plastic surgery wish-lists, I’m halted in query, “how do you plan to manage your double life? Balancing a full time drag career with hopes of also making it into the fashion industry. ” He ponders, “I honestly don’t know, but in the least cocky way possible, I want this so much that I will get it. I deserve everything.”