Premiere: Lo Carmen unearths tortured footage for ‘You Never Learned How to Dance’ video

The days of Les Girls, a popular drag queen venue along Sydney’s King Cross nightlife district, are long faded. In its heyday, it was a magical haven ⎯⎯ allowing for society’s mistreated and misunderstood to express themselves freely and unapologetically. The acclaimed cabaret show was truly groundbreaking for its time and lasted until 1993 when its doors were closed forever. 25 years later, its memory might be dwindling with each passing day, but Americana singer-songwriter Lo Carmen unearths grainy footage taken at the now-defunct, long-abandoned space. Her song “You Never Learned How to Dance,” from 2017’s Lovers Dreamers Fighters, punctuates the tortured souls flowing in and out of that sacred place, romanticizing a bygone era and folks who had nowhere else to go.

“Many moons and many bands ago, I made a music video for a driving torch-disco rock song with my band mates and various other musician friends dropping in,” shares Carmen about the visual, which bursts at the seams, owed in large part to its original VHS recording. Busted neons and blood-shot reds splash across the screen, cutting the film-noirish presentation in affecting fragments. “We got some amazing footage, and then, because I was a broke waitress single mother, I could never afford to have it edited, and it crept further and deeper into a forgotten box somewhere.”

The clip captures youth at is most naive and most scarred, intimate interactions between strangers and friends mixing together with the ghosts of the past. It’s forever locked in another time and place, but thanks to Carmen, it is immortalized as a timeless centerpiece of our history. “Cut to 2018, and I finally got the Super VHS Hi8 transferred to digital and discovered the small amount of salvageable footage was completely decimated; what was once rich color had become flickering black and white, shot through with flashes of neon,” she continues. “My dance partner, infamous rock’n’roller Ian Rilen and another of the featured players were long dead. Les Girls had closed down. The intimacy and poignancy of the images were haunting.”

“You Never Learned How to Dance” is a searing country waltz, a delicate but mournful ode to love’s invigorating speed. “This song is about the effortlessness of love, in all its glory and its torture; everything is as its meant to be and love is simply an unstoppable force,” says Carmen, whose father is Peter Head, of ’70s rock outfit Headband and later, The Mount Lofty Rangers.

Watch below:

Photo Credit: Karin Catt

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