The Other Other Ginger Spice: Becoming a Creative Queer with Wigs, Friends, and Video in Post-Joh Queensland

This article has been peer reviewed

Introduction

It turns out that it’s difficult to consider my formative queer encounters with music videos without also reflecting on the ensuing strong compulsion to experiment with video production and creativity myself. This essay explores how music video aesthetics and remix practices shaped my creative and collaborative identity as a queer filmmaker, artist, and educator. In particular, I trace how my observation of remix, found footage, parody, and queer aesthetics in the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” and Pauline Pantsdown’s “I Don’t Like It” influenced me to continue exploring the creative potential of the music video form and to develop my own filmmaking practice. By tracing such links, I highlight how reflecting on such creative experiences and practices can offer insight into how we learn to think with, for and through screen and media works. In doing so, I argue that autoethnographic methods enable better understandings of how filmmaking, kinship-making, and identity formation processes might be thought of as co-constitutive. For me, reflecting on these formative experiences has brought a new appreciation for the significance of the music video form in my development as both a queer person and a creative practitioner; it was with and through music videos that I connected with peers and developed confidence in myself. 

These days, I make low-budget documentary and experimental films, often in collaboration with other queers and folks who hail from traditionally marginalised communities. I enjoy using smartphones and emerging technologies as part of my practice, and I love creating new meanings with archival materials and assembling pieces of media that might not usually be expected to fit together. Even in my academic writing, I see value in combining the personal and the scholarly. But music videos were perhaps one of the first media forms that helped me understand how an individual might take a specific text or idea and create new meaning with it. 

While remix, sampling and found footage montage in video production did not originate with music videos, the 1990s saw new technologies emerge that would turn fans into producers, and these practices went on to impact broader visual cultures beyond mere video.¹ I remember my excitement when my parents bought me a “TalkBoy” audio cassette recorder (featured in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (John Hughes, 1992)) for Christmas one year. Just like Macauley Culkin in the movie, I’d record voices and sounds at different speeds, playing them back to marvel at the effect that this manipulation had created – though I remember being disappointed it wasn’t as responsive in its operation as the film’s editors might have us believe. My sisters and I would record our own “radio shows”, taping popular music off the radio or from other cassette tapes through the giant stereo, and recording our own commentary between tracks. This is probably my earliest memory of making that is relevant to my creative practice today as a screen artist and scholar. I loved the idea of doing something with existing media. It was fun to be creative; to gather up things I liked or discover new meanings created by collating random clips – and these processes gave me a sense of optimism that I might contribute my own stories to the world one day. As Wees notes, “for filmmakers, it is not the splicer that makes a collage film. It is the decision to invest found footage with meanings unintended by its original makers and unrecognised in its original contexts of presentation and reception.”² Danks highlights “those contemporary films and filmmakers who see the found footage tradition as a key form of counter-history, whether in relation to cinema itself or to broader cultural, political and social movements.”³ For queer people, remix and found footage practices contribute toward better representation, challenge traditional notions of ownership,⁴ and play a key role in the survival of queer communities.⁵ Creating and performing with existing media brought me closer to my peers, helping me develop friendships and a sense of confidence in who I was becoming.

Today, as an educator, I embrace the idea that we each exist in our own little spheres of progressing experiences, which continue to build and inform how we approach our future learning or any given encounter with a new piece of media. As media creatures, reflecting on our formative encounters with media can help us understand how we have become who we are. In this way, I like to think that we each have our own little found footage archives that we carry around with us, our imaginations loading them up and pressing play at various moments. Some bits of footage or memories may be on hand nearby, while others are less easily remembered. Using autoethnographic or ethnographic approaches to understand individual experiences of engaging with culture and creativity can “provoke new ways of knowing, seeing, and experiencing the world”, “transform practice”,⁶ challenge “imposed forms of identity”;⁷ and, for queer people, it means “assembling a community invested in disrupting and changing narratives and cultures of apology, shame and fear”.⁸ By exploring my own formative experiences of encountering, thinking about, and creatively responding to camp aesthetics and remix practices I’d noticed in music videos during my youth, this essay seeks to illuminate the significance of this art form to how one develops a sense of queer identity and creativity. Further, it highlights the power of reflecting on our memories of formative experiences to generate greater appreciation for screen cultures and practices. In my case, it was through experimenting with music video texts for performance and filmmaking that I developed confidence as a budding queer creative across the 1990s and 2000s in Queensland, Australia.

“Who Do You Think You Are?”: Becoming a Media Creature in 1990s Brisbane

Brisbane, 1996. For this sensitive 10-year-old boy, it was a time of pool parties, video games, recording our own radio shows on cassette tape, racing home from school in time to watch children’s television game show A*mazing, and listening to the Spice Girls’ debut album on repeat. Only a handful of years after conservative Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen left office in disgrace, it was an exciting time to come of age and set a path toward a creative life. We felt lucky to be growing up during what I now understand to have been a more aspirational, neo-liberal and globalised time that seemed to offer an unrelenting plethora of increasingly accessible (if marketed, monetised and syndicated) media content to consume. We experienced it all through live television, VHS tapes recorded at home or borrowed from friends or video shops, music on the radio, CDs and cassette tapes, console video games, and an emerging field of computer-based content and practices – even if it was still offline at that point on a very slow Intel 486. We watched a new boom of music videos hit our screens on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC’s) rage, Network Ten’s Video Hits, and some lucky friends could access MTV and Channel V via paid cable television. It seemed almost impossible to keep up with the number of boy and girl bands that were emerging. All of this helped expand our little worlds. We were the generation that completed primary school offline, before later exploring the early potential of the internet in our high school years. As the years pass by, I feel more and more lucky to have grown up when and where I did.

This explosion of technological advancement and media engagement encouraged growth toward a broader cultural phenomenon of creativity, fandom practices, home-made media, and “making and thinking about, or with, moving images toward critical expression or toward self-expression”.⁹ It was a time that saw the music video form continue to become somewhat fused with cinema, with many clips embracing the ideas of post-structuralist film theory.¹⁰ Remix, intertextuality, movie tie-ins, and parodies were aplenty, as was fast-paced editing, image manipulation¹¹ and computer-generated visual environments into which performers were digitally superimposed.¹² Convergence culture and participatory communication weren’t exactly new concepts, but in exploring these new tools available to us, albeit offline, we were learning to become media creatures whose methods of production were incredibly influenced by the things we were watching, listening to, reading, and experiencing. As we now consider the inner workings of human creativity in an age of machine learning, I find it comforting to reflect on how my own formative experiences of creative practice involved responding in some way to existing media. In my case, I can trace my initial forays into creativity back to dressing my friends in quick drag to perform a cover of the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” at the Year Six School Camp Talent Competition. 

The Spice Girls emerged during this neo-liberal boom time of seemingly infinite possibility and took hold of us. For popular music and music videos, the ‘90s saw the rise (and commodification) of gendered voices and boy/girl bands,¹³ and, if music videos were anything to go by, symbolised a challenge to masculine dominance, progression for the status of women, and anticipation of the broad possibilities that the future might hold. At least, that’s what record producers and managers would have us believe. The Spice Girls were created by Heart Management in 1994 and quickly skyrocketed to phenomenal success, with their first single “Wannabe” (1996) becoming the highest-selling debut single in history. The music video for that song embodied their “girl power” message and presented them as everyday, independent women on a night out in London across a seemingly single, continuous shot. Nicola Dibben highlights the fraught nature of “girl power” being co-opted from the Riot Grrl movement and within the limits of mainstream record labels, but recognises that listeners would “situate themselves amid competing ideological forces” to play out “very real tensions of female identity”.¹⁴ As a 10-year-old sensitive boy who enjoyed playing with hand-me-down Barbies (my Action Man toy was essentially a stand-in for a Ken), blasting the Spice cassette in my Walkman whilst nestled between my two older sisters during car trips in our family’s green Ford Falcon station wagon – complete with our “Women Can Do Anything” bumper sticker – it was a message to which I was incredibly receptive. I was curious about anything that might be considered “girly”, and was fascinated by these independent women singing about friendship and generally having a ball. Cue the carefree laughter in the opening moments of “Wannabe”.

“Say You’ll Be There” (Vaughan Arnell, 1996)

“Say You’ll Be There” (Vaughan Arnell, 1996)

“Say You’ll Be There” (Vaughan Arnell, 1996)

After the suggested realism of their first video, the clip for “Say You’ll Be There” took a more fantastical approach. The music video is set in the desert and, along with Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much”, Madonna’s “Frozen”, Kylie Minogue’s “Some Kind of Bliss”, and S Club 7’s “S Club Party”, it seemed the desert was the place to be for those inhabiting music videos in the late ‘90s. Shot in California’s Mojave Desert (or Hayikwiir Mat’aar, in the language of the Mojave people), the setting draws inspiration from science fiction and post-apocalyptic films, such as Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), Barbarella (Roger Vadim, 1968) and, most significantly, Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965). Indeed, the latter film is generally considered to be the key influence in terms of the cartoon-ish characterisations, the desert setting, and shot composition.¹⁵ The combination with animated components arguably makes this a sort of “techno-space”,¹⁶ where post-production makes anything possible. When I first watched the video on rage, I was struck by the sheer escapism it offered. I was a film buff from an early age, and I loved the way the video remixed movie culture. In my mind, I was out in the desert making movies with them.

The Girls are credited along with fictional character names by way of titles in the style of an action film: “Melanie C as Katrina Highkick”, “Geri as Trixie Firecracker”, “Emma as Kung Fu Candy”, “Victoria as Midnight Miss Suki”, and “Melanie B as “Blazin’ Bad Zula”. They dance in formation in front of some sort of satellite-looking structure, and they are each dressed in a different flavour of “female-to-femme drag” that screamed “futuristic ‘hard girl’”.¹⁷ “Their sexual idolisation invites the male gaze but simultaneously challenges the assumption of male power in a way which panders to masculine fantasies of the dominatrice.”¹⁸ Later, the director of the video, Vaughan Arnell (who also directed “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive, “Fast Love” by George Michael, and later “Monkey Business” by Pet Shop Boys) remarked:

“I couldn’t believe it. … I almost died! … I just thought, ‘How the hell are we going to put them in this?’ … It was all Spandex and leather and it was just pure sex shop. But by some miracle, it really didn’t come across like that… It had an edge, it was more B-movie and cartoony.”¹⁹

While that cartoonish sensibility and kung fu-esque choreography had featured across plenty of media works that my friends and I enjoyed in those days, the video also contributed to our coming of age into adolescence. At lunchtime, we ten-year-old boys would discuss which Spice Girl we most fancied. I think I would have quickly said I liked Geri and hoped the discussion would move on. I seem to recall that I really admired Geri because of how confident she seemed in the limelight, which inspired me as a shy kid. However, in the context of adolescent desire and peer pressure to fit in, I can now appreciate that worshipping pop divas can be a conveniently useful thing for queer kids.

The Girls dance in formation while a nearby hot guy drives around the desert. Exiting the vehicle, his leather pants hang low and unbuttoned. Before we know it, he’s suddenly blindfolded and restrained, spreadeagled and struggling on the desert sand – the off-screen work of the Girls. Soon, a new guy – this one has more of a boy-next-door energy – drives towards them in a pick-up truck, wearing a much more everyday kind of outfit of red, white and blue (perhaps a hint of Americana for the Girls visiting the States for the shoot, or simply a nod to their beloved Union Jack). As quickly as he jumps out to curiously approach, we cut to the Girls driving into the distance with him tied up on the roof of their sports car. Bloustein notes that, while the shots of male bondage go unexplained, of course, they function as symbols of male disempowerment.²⁰ While the notion of the male gaze provided the perfect excuse for me to be a Spice Girls fan without drawing too much suspicion, my memories of being distracted by the men in the video remain strong. 

The video was camp, presented a challenge to traditional masculinity, and – from the funky bass riff featured in the song to the kung fu-inspired non-de-plumes – presented an example of remix and bricolage that inspired this future creative practitioner toward a trajectory of creative practice in film and media. It demonstrated how one might do something with the media one watched, and we ‘90s kids really knew how to let pop culture references set the topic and tone of any given lunch break. Appropriation abounds in the “Say You’ll Be There” video, just as prominently as the Girls’ kung fu kicks, computer-generated ninja stars, futuristic boomerangs, and rap lyrics²¹ – but we were not discussing such cultural concepts in the fifth and sixth grade. While we didn’t necessarily recognise every cultural reference any given text invoked, we became adept at drawing our own links between the various media we experienced. To us, I suppose “Say You’ll Be There” probably felt more like a continuation of the 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up (Shin Sang-ok, 1995) than Tura Satana in Meyer’s film, but in any case, air kicks were in. I put my yellow-belt Taekwondo moves into practice in the school yard and fit right in with the other boys, all the while imagining how much cooler it’d be to do the kicks in Geri Halliwell’s thigh-high red latex boots. 

Indeed, for a kid who was most excited by the prospect of bringing out the dress-ups box, “Say You’ll Be There” holds a special place in my heart as the song and video that first inspired me to start experimenting with remix, sampling and bricolage practices early in my own creative life, even before I picked up a video camera myself. As I would slowly progress towards experimenting with video production, these early creative forays were just as much about performance and decisively interdisciplinary in hindsight. In that way, one might say I was a budding queer creative practitioner²² from an early age.

Growing up in Brisbane in the 1990s meant growing up in the wake of the Bjelke-Petersen state government, an era in which some viewed Queensland as Australia’s most homophobic state.²³ Indeed, only a few years after my birth, Queensland became the second-last state in the country to decriminalise homosexuality. Combined with an anti-democratic ban on protests by the rural-minded National Party, progress was sluggish in the “Sunshine State” and “mainstream Queensland was slower to embrace homosexual reform than other states”.²⁴ Even in more progressive Australian states and cities, there existed a broad range of views on homosexuality.

Indeed, for 10-year-old little me, queerness was pretty much an unknown concept. Of course, I was just at the beginning of my journey and would later learn there was more happening out there to which I wasn’t yet privy – or maybe I was simply too naive to understand. I was only just learning how to notice. When I did encounter media that seemed a bit gay, I was fascinated, but it also usually stirred up feelings of shame and fear. I remember thoroughly enjoying The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996) at the cinema, as well as the John Waters episode²⁵ of The Simpsons, and I somehow snuck Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994) into the stack of weekly rental VHS tapes from the video shop. Kym Mazelle’s cover of “Young Hearts Run Free” and the accompanying music video featuring clips from Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996) brought drag further into the mainstream and added to my confusion. Reflecting on these formative encounters with gay or outsider narratives, camp aesthetics, remix and intertextuality, video and performance within the broader social context of the time gives new insight into the shaping of my identity as a creative queer.

“Spice Up Your Life”: Remixing the Music Video

Luckily, the Spice Girls were so popular at my primary school – especially with the boys – that I thought nothing of convincing my friends to dress up like them and perform a version of “Say You’ll Be There” at the Year Six Camp Talent Competition in 1997. I crafted wigs for each of us out of crepe paper and, in true diva fashion, pinched two strands of blonde from Baby Spice’s wig to complete my own signature Geri Halliwell as Trixie Firecracker look. Sex shop costumes were not going to be feasible for us 11-year-olds(!), so it was rugby jumpers with balls of newspaper underneath for padding out some boobs. Drag on a dime, indeed! 

Patrick Kelly and friends performing “Say You’ll Be There” by Spice Girls in 1997

Knowing the lyrics better than anyone else, I kept control of the microphone. Our dancing formation remained static with Trixie Firecracker up front. For a shy, sensitive boy, I really learned how to hog a microphone that night. The spirit of Geri Halliwell was strong in this one. While not true to the Spice Girls’ equitable nature that always saw them take turns in the spotlight, we must have done a good job, because we won the talent competition! It was an important foundational experience, and I appreciated how well our act was received. My enthusiasm for the Spice Girls continued. And then, the following year, on 27 May 1998 – the day I turned 12 – the news broke: “Geri quits”, “I’ll never sing with the Spice Girls again”. Another headline read “Geri’s got a broken heart” – and so did I. It really was the worst birthday gift a sensitive boy could imagine at the time, but I was so grateful for everything the Spice Girls had given me by that point. It was because of the Spice Girls – and everything they remixed, appropriated and represented – that I developed the confidence to embrace their camp aesthetics myself. Using an autoethnographic approach to reflect on this time offers new insight into the development of my own creativity and sense of queer self.

By the time the Year Seven School Camp Talent Competition came around, a few months after Geri’s departure, we had moved on to new cultural phenomena. Given the previous year’s success, my friends and I brought out the crepe paper wigs once again, but this time they were all bright orange for a lip-synched rendition of Pauline Pantsdown’s “I Don’t Like It”. 

“I Don’t Like It” (Pauline Pantsdown, 1998)

“I Don’t Like It” (Pauline Pantsdown, 1998)

“I Don’t Like It” (Pauline Pantsdown, 1998)

Pantsdown was the creation of Senate candidate, activist and sound artist Simon Hunt, whose drag creation satirised right-wing populist Australian politician Pauline Hanson’s racist politics by remixing soundbites of her public statements. To do this, Hunt utilised a ProTools digital audio recording system for the project, a newly available technology that allowed him to conceal the edits between samples more effectively than his previous 8-track reel-to-reel sampling process.²⁶ interviewed by Scott McKinnon,” State Library of New South Wales, 17 Aug 2022.] Combined with a catchy dance track, the song underscored Hanson’s “overall negative worldview,”²⁷ parodying her xenophobic claim that Australia was being “swamped by Asians”. The music video for “I Don’t Like It” featured Pantsdown’s drag persona stamping “NO” on a heap of immigration forms and being supported by a group of Asian back-up dancers in a gay club. Even as primary school children, we recognised the inherent racism of Hanson’s politics and appreciated the potential of remix and parody that Pantsdown presented. We loved how it made fun of Queensland’s conservative politics, and this was a key work that demonstrated the power of appropriation.

Patrick Kelly and friends performing “I Don’t Like It” by Pauline Pantsdown in 1998

It is quite heartwarming to reflect on how happy a group of Queensland school children were to embrace the perspective of a drag performer back then. Indeed, our collective rejection of racism in Australian politics and embrace of the campy potential of remix became yet another formative experience for me. Perhaps we weren’t in Joh’s Queensland anymore. Around the same time, we were given a school assignment to create our own versions of current music videos with a VHS-C camcorder, and so began my journey as a filmmaker. I seem to recall I helped a few different groups with shooting their videos, all so I could spend more time experimenting with the camera. I studied VHS recordings of rage and Video Hits, watching and re-watching specific videos to perfect the shot-for-shot remakes I helped my classmates record. I began to learn that it was harder than it looked as I questioned why the raw footage I’d shot looked handmade and unpolished (an aesthetic I’d grow to appreciate).

Technology continued to develop, further fuelling my embrace of remix and music video methods. Years later, my university friends and I passed around our Palm Pictures: Directors Label DVDs, featuring the work of music video directors like Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. Highlights included: “It’s Oh So Quiet” by Bjork; “Come into My World” by Kylie Minogue; and “Sugar Water” by Cibo Matto. YouTube emerged as a new platform, throwing open the door for us to watch just about any music video we desired and explore the potential of online communities with whom to share our work. It was clear to us that music videos were a form defined by creative freedom, expression, and ingenuity, and that we were on the precipice of another exciting era of change. Remix practices and music video production came into the foreground more and more. Indeed, emerging creative screen practitioners often experiment with the form as part of university capstone courses,²⁸ as extra-curricular undertakings toward a creative calling card, or as experimental creative endeavours alongside more mainstream client projects.²⁹ They are a great addition to any portfolio and offer an excellent opportunity to extend one’s craft, collaborate across disciplines and develop new creative relationships. While making a shot-for-shot remake of the video for Journey’s “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” was not my idea, it was maybe one of the best creative projects to come out of that semester – and it wasn’t even for assessment. Rather, it was a fun, creative way to further practice our craft and create a memento of our time together. 

I later went on to complete a creative practice PhD for which I made a low-budget feature documentary film³⁰ that explored the relationship between storytelling practices and video technologies. Autoethnography, satire and remix were key methods I employed for that study, and I even donned a wig for the film so I could play Socrates bemoaning the introduction of the written word. I’ve made several smartphone essay films over the years, using these handheld, omnipresent mobile devices to quickly shoot video in everyday contexts; building an archive of clips that I juxtapose or remix in post-production as I think with and through images to create new meanings. The smartphone is my new “TalkBoy”. When I was shooting documentary video of Melbourne drag and queer performance party “Honcho Disko”, I saw relationship-building as being just as important as the filmmaking process. Funnily enough, in the final days of refining this essay, I had the pleasure of seeing Hong Kong-born Melbourne drag queen Scarlett So Hung Son lip-synch to Pauline Pantsdown’s “I Don’t Like It” at a new queer party, “Rough Trade”. Reflecting on my childhood experiences of remix and video practices for this essay gave me a new appreciation for the clear link between my childhood and more recent encounters with wigs, friends, and handheld media-recording devices. 

“Viva (Creative Practice) Forever”: Conclusions

Today, remix and video practices continue to evolve for young people in a media environment increasingly shaped and fractured by online communities, collaborative platforms, and algorithmic curation. The rate of change is rapid, with some questioning whether the rise of TikTok is killing the music video form.³¹ Meanwhile, in Queensland, the latest conservative government demonstrates their continuing hostility to queer people and communities³² and, under federal social media bans that threaten youth media access,³³ the cultural and political terrain remains challenging for Australia’s next generation of creative practitioners, queer or not. The latter is a complex issue, but such a ban would surely slow the growth of creativity and wellbeing in Australia. Rather, kids need a comprehensive education to guide them in the development of digital literacy skills.³⁴ While being online is not devoid of risk, online spaces offer a safety net that school yards do not.³⁵ Platforms such as YouTube remain vital for queer youth, not just for discovering authentic representation to which they might relate, but for participation: to tell their own stories, find their people, and become the media-makers of the future by thinking with and through media. 

While the 1990s saw kids like me making the most of VHS tapes and waiting for the latest rage broadcast, younger generations can now access networked media tools that uncover a mountain of globalised cultural references from early childhood. If I were a kid today, perhaps I’d be using a smartphone to remake Chappell Roan’s “The Subway” music video (Amber Grace Johnson, 2025) on a Brisbane CityCat ferry, or convincing my friends to don blonde crepe paper wigs and beige rugby jumpers for a rendition of drag political parody Belinda Gread’s queer dance track “More For Me” (Belinda Gread, 2025), or simply going down a YouTube rabbit hole of Spice Girls’ back-catalogue of video clips. I would likely have my own YouTube channel and probably a whole online network of friends (and audience members) outside of the schoolyard. Perhaps I’d be worried about what the impending social media ban might mean for my ability to develop as a creative practitioner in the context of a National Cultural Policy that places a key focus on audience engagement.³⁶ As debates over the challenges posed by media accessibility, censorship, AI-generated content, and algorithmic curation continue, we must understand how vital human experience, storytelling, shared cultural memory, and digital literacy are to becoming the media creatures³⁷ and good citizens we grow up to be. In the context of a media landscape dominated by Big Tech and a feeling of increasing exhaustion at the sheer amount of media hurled at us, I believe remix and found footage practices that encourage us to think with media may be the best way to contend with some of those challenges.

This autoethnographic reflection has traced how formative the watching, remixing, and performing of music videos were to my developing identity as a queer creative practitioner. The process of looking back on the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There”, the Year Six talent show performance it inspired, and the creative experiences that followed, has enabled a newfound recognition that remix practices and camp aesthetics were not merely the playful acts of young fan, but early forays into queer creative practice, kinship-making, and critical media engagement. 

Ultimately, the convergence of watching, creating, and belonging that I experienced through music video culture created a generative space where work, love, identity, and self-expression cannot be disentangled. I think I’ve often found that some of the most joyful moments of life have been when the watching, the performing, the making, the belonging, and the becoming, all converge pretty much at once in the same complex and wonderful collage built in through layers and layers of meaning. I now recognise it as the start of a practice that’s given me, in the words of the Spice Girls, “everything; all that joy can bring; yes, I swear”.

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to the peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions that were integral to the development of this essay; to all of my MFQ colleagues for collaboratively building this wonderful project together; to RMIT Culture, the School of Media and Communication, and the team at Senses of Cinema for supporting this project; to Adrian Danks for his generous feedback and encouragement; to my family – especially my sisters, Melissa and Rebecca, for helping to shape my musical tastes and encouraging several important purchases of crepe paper; to every teacher who encouraged me to be creative; to the other “Spice Girls” and “Pauline Pantsdowns” of late-90s Holland Park; and to every friend I made along the way.

Endnotes