Divine

Born plain Harris Glenn Melstead in 1945, Divine was, as far as the establishment was concerned, everything a man oughn't to be. For a start, he spent much of his time dressed as a woman - though, as a self-confessed quot;drag-queen", rather than a 'true' transvestite, he confessed to liking the dressing down part as much as the dressing up.
But it was his burly drag burlesques that the audiences loved, and it's as the singer of camp disco songs like Love reaction and Walk like a man that the pop world will remember him best.
He had another audience too: one that frequented the art picture houses. In fact, he'd originally come to the fore as an actor in the films of oddball director John Waters, a friend of the singer since their schooldays together in Baltimore, Maryland.
Waters' stock-in-trade was bizarre, low-budget trash flicks - like Pink Flamingos, Polyester and Hairspray - in which Divine was always cast in grotesquely comic roles.
They really were crazy films, too, with a fascinating amorality that was all their own. No one ever knew what to expect: in Polyester, for example, audiences found a scratch'n'sniff card on their seat, to be sampled at various odorous points in the proceedings, while Pink Flamingos, Divine turned a few stomachs when he deigned to eat a real dog turd in his quest to become the 'filthiest person alive'.
Divine's outrageous showmanship couldn't be confined to film for long, though, and in 1978 he cut his first disco record. Almost immediately, he became a huge draw on the U.S. gay club scene, where he performed gauche renditions of songs like Gang bang and Shake it up, while winding up the punters between songs with his aggresive innuendo.
By the early 80s, when his fame had spread to the U.K., Divine was at his peak, and as the live recordings on de album Born to be cheap show, his energy, bawdiness and charisma lent his one-man/woman show a gloriously tawdry veneer.
Tracks like Gang bang may have veered towards the offensive, but the ribald slant of Shoot your shot and Born to be cheap puts Divine's - dare we say it - thrust into its correct comic context. The manmountain simply wanted to make people laugh, and to send up the prudes and posers who found his camp persona too hot to handle.
Eventually, the singer managed to draw a few tears, too, dying in 1988, shortly after the opening of Waters' magnificent Hairspray.

(Pat Gilbert, Record Collector)(from 'Born to be cheap')