Flouting expectations and scorning boundaries since 1990, London fetish club Torture Garden is the biggest in the world. Still, strict rules apply: although clubbers are immersed in an arena of fantasy and temptation, touching anyone without permission is absolutely forbidden. The dress code excludes cotton trousers and encourages individual extremes: PVC tutus, Thunderbird suits, see-through suits, syringe decorated dresses and the mind boggles on. You’ll dance to anything from breaks and electro to classical and Vegas swing, but just who will you bump into?!

Torture Garden’s themed fetish nights have included Crash, Circus, Japanese, Mid-Summer Nights Dream, Arabian Nights, Medical, James Bond, Heaven & Hell, Sci-fi, Jungle and Carnival. When the club took over Brixton Academy, a couple of consenting thrill seekers got involved with the 'Body Art' presentation, getting hung by their skin from a suspension attached to the venue’s ceiling in front of 2500 people. Here club founders David Wood and Alan Pelling allow Notion into their alternative world to enjoy some probing questions - we give as good as we get, believe!

DAVE AND ALAN, IS FETISH CULTURE MOVING OVERGROUND?
DAVE: Our birthday event at Ministry of Sound in 1994 earned us some good press, but before that the tabloids would slag us off, the police would make arrests and we got closed down a few times! We’re careful with publicity but obviously sexuality in the media has changed. Channel 4 now runs documentaries on dressing up and sexual experimentation. I think fetish is almost accepted now as a part of sexuality and of society, but still, it’s not for everyone.
ALAN: We could have had the same conversation in 1995 when John Paul Gautier came up with kinky designs and there was some fetish in advertising. It seems to move in and out of the mainstream, just like we’re in and out of fashion.

SO WOULD YOU STILL LABEL TORTURE GARDEN AS AN UNDERGROUND CLUB?
DAVE: Yes, you know some of the visuals and the performances are quite extreme. But everyone who comes wants to be a little bit shocked.
ALAN: The Internet made things a lot more accessible; in 1997 the only way to find out about this club was to know someone who had been or by picking up a flyer, but you’d have no knowledge about it.

DO YOU EVER GET CRITICISED FOR THE WORK YOU DO?
DAVE: I think my family was a bit prudish initially but now they’ve got used it.
ALAN: My Mum takes all of our press into work! They accepted it and I’ve even had relatives come to the club! That’s a bit odd, and you know you generally just tell people that you’re a club promoter.

IS SEX ENTERTAINMENT?
DAVE: Torture Garden itself can be very serious, but after a while you’ve got to have a bit more fun – you always need to surprise yourself. British culture has always had the humour to take on sexuality and perhaps even has trouble taking it seriously at all. The fetish scene has a kind of sophisticated sexuality, sexuality with unlimited imagination, a little bit of experimentation and dressing up.
ALAN: That’s the positive side, but there is also a negative side...

DOES THE FETISH SCENE STILL THRILL YOU?
DAVE: It’s normalised for us! We were more into fetish when we first started. I still love the club but I do envy a lot of people who come for the first time because it’s their fantasy, a big sort of trip!

DO FETISH CLUBS ACT AS A VEHICLE FOR GETTING RID OF SOCIAL BOUNDARIES?
ALAN: Clubbing in general opens up new situations and lets you experiment.
DAVE: Torture Garden has always been a polysexual club, for anyone wanting to explore. A lot of gay people find gay clubs quite narrow and repressive, and dressing up liberates everyone.

WOULD THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE IF EVERYONE VISITED A FETISH CLUB?
ALAN: Ha! It’s vital not to confuse sex and love...But when people are frustrated and repressed, problems pass from sexuality to society; they can’t express it.
DAVE: I think everyone should be allowed to go or have the possibility of going. A lot of couples have said that we’ve changed their lives, or that they met at the club, but it’s not always happy ever after!

WHAT IS YOUR ULTIMATE FANTASY?
ALAN: Four beautiful women and a big pile of cocaine!

DAVE: He’s just split up with his girlfriend...

WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT FETISH - WHAT’S PUSHING YOUR BUTTONS RIGHT NOW?

DAVE: Last Valentine’s we did a ‘Love the animal within’ theme which was quite provocative! People dressed up in big fur animal suits, it gave a kind of weird twist that no one even knew existed!

WAS THAT BUNNY SUIT YOUR MOST MEMORABLE OUTFIT?
ALAN: Well I’m not a big fan of rubber...
DAVE: I usually like to wear a uniform.

IS SEX THE ULTIMATE FORM OF SELF-EXPRESSION?
ALAN: It’s like shitting, eating and farting; animalistic!
DAVE: If you don’t enjoy sex you don’t enjoy life, and it’s good communication!

HOW DO YOU KEEP UNDESIRABLE CLUB GOERS AWAY?
DAVE: The name puts some people off! As does the dress code - geezers will try to get in wearing jeans! The punters police the events themselves, we have dungeon monitors and most women carry their own whips anyway! A fight might break out at the odd event but about a third of the crowd is regulars, some are one-timers; some come to three a year. We print banners and flyers with the club rules; we let the event go and when it gets too much, reign it back in.

DO YOU THINK THAT ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS A SUITABLE SOUNDTRACK FOR FETISH?
ALAN: Yeah it complements all of the synthetic clothes! Techno, hard house and drum n bass is all body-based stuff, but guitars just wouldn’t work!
DAVE: We’ve experimented with swing bands before, the core music is obvious though, we use sexual sounds and visuals, everything is connected.

DO YOU ONLY DRESS FETISH AT WEEKENDS?
DAVE: I like dressing up at home! I like going out wearing a suit and bowler hat.
ALAN: I don’t dress up so much these days.

WHY IS TORTURE GARDEN THE KING OF FETISH CLUBS?
ALAN: In the late 80s fetish clubs needed re-vamping – the energy was there but the music and the styling were all wrong. We’ve brought vision and professionalism to the scene, it’s in the experience and the way we treat our customers. Torture Garden has gone through so many phases – goth, techno, electro, lounge, rave – we borrow and improvise. We were the first fetish club to get a website and have an office, and the first to do burlesque in 1993.

WILL THE SCENE EVER SURPASS ITS OWN LIMITS?
ALAN: I think that we have!
DAVE: We have to keep re-styling the night or we get bored; we’re our own worst critics and we also re-invent ourselves and our music constantly. The crowd, our designers and our DJs change so this new generation keeps updating it.
ALAN: Every few years you wonder if you’re doing the right thing. Of course there are limits to what you can do in terms of venue and budget but it’s mainly all about getting the right crowd in. You have to get past clichés as well; people who invent their own costumes are the best.

IS THE JAPANESE FETISH SCENE MORE ADVANCED THAN LONDON’S?
DAVE: Japanese culture is naturally fetishistic – submissive! Their sense of wrong and right is completely removed from ours; they’ll tie a girl up in burning rags but won’t be allowed to show her pubes! The Japanese have a strong taste for visual imagery, which is a big part of fetish culture. Dressing up is also a lot more normal for them. Their costumes are, after London’s, the most creative and original. The energy is different there; you don’t get the sexual predators! In America there’s a hierarchy like at high school – who gets to touch who! London is definitely the world’s fetish capital. It’s a melting pot for all of the weirdos in Europe, fetish is just the British party instinct gone wild!

IS THERE ANYTHING FETISHISTIC ABOUT EVERYDAY LIFE?
DAVE: Being weird is now so normal for us that to go to the pub and be blokey is like a fetish! Life can be so strange when you scratch beneath the surface. There’s an underbelly of the world that you can see all of the time, and living around here (Hackney) there’s loads of weird shit. Outside a bar the other day, there were 7 dwarfs in lederhosen being looked after by a Polish art teacher!

Read our review of Torture Garden's Valentine's Ball here