The Royal Vauxhall Tavern Pays Tribute To Legendary Drag, Lily Savage, On The Passing Of Paul O’Grady
Iconic London gay venue, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern has tweeted a tribute to Paul O’Grady, creator of drag personality Lily Savage, who has sadly passed.
“We are deeply saddened to learn of Paul O’Grady’s sudden death. Lily Savage was a beloved resident performer at RVT throughout the ’80s and ’90s, paving the way for a legion of drag artists,” says their tweet. “Paul was a fierce advocate for RVT. Our thoughts are with Andre and Paul’s loved ones.”
Paul O’Grady started out as a sharp-tongued, working-class drag queen and became a titan of British entertainment – a comedian and TV presenter. His husband Andre announced yesterday that he had died suddenly. He was 67.
Lily Savage, said to be based on O’Grady’s female relatives, was famed for her animal prints, giant beehive and black roots. She was perfected in one of London’s most famous gay pubs, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Developed on the fringes, she later became a beloved household name via the UK’s major TV channels.
In the ’80s, Savage had a solo residency at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London that ran for eight years. Many who remember that time describe O’Grady almost as a wartime entertainer, down in the trenches entertaining the troops at the height of the HIV crisis.
In 1987, homophobic British police raided the Royal Vauxhall Tavern wearing rubber gloves and arrested Savage. Before they did, Savage mocked their gloves (worn because they assumed they’d catch AIDS from those assembled in the gay pub) by saying from the stage, “Well, well, it looks like we’ve got help with the washing up.”
O’Grady was handcuffed and taken to the police station before being released without charge. The story has entered into urban legend, with popular drag queen Myra Dubois citing the influence Savage has had on her career.
Writing on Facebook, author and editor Matthew Todd said, “There’s books to be written about his multi-dimensional, ground-breaking career… I’ve often thought his story was unlike anyone else’s.”
Others highlighted how the working class identity O’Grady embodied influenced his values in helping others from similar backgrounds up the career ladder.
Widely shared was his evisceration of one of the first of the current UK Conservative government’s “austerity budgets” in 2010 on his daytime TV show under his own name after he retired Lily Savage to a “convent in France”.
Defying the usual asinine daytime TV standards, he called Chancellor George Osborne and fellow ministers “bastards” for “hooping and hollering when they heard about the cuts. Gonna scrap the pensions – yeah! – no more wheelchairs – yeah! … I bet when they were children they laughed at Bambi when the mother got shot.”
He later left chat show hosting because, he said, celebrities were so dull they were like “relatives you felt obliged to visit”.
In later life, he focused on the charitable causes that’d always enthused him via his work for the Battersea Dogs And Cats Home and the Peter Tatchell Foundation.
Last night, his performing home the Royal Vauxhall Tavern paid tribute to him with a riotous cheer. “Today we lost one of the greatest drag artists the UK has ever seen, a legend who raised up the community into the mainstream, into breakfast fucking television, and teatime television and still stayed true to his queer self, and his working-class roots by telling the Tories to go fuck themselves,” host Michael Twaits said. “A trailblazer, legend and absolute icon has left us.”
