52 The Times Magazineuring the lockdowns, when we
all had too much time on our
hands and too many worries
to fill it with, a DJ from south
London became something of
a phenomenon. Fat Tony, who
at 56 is still the party starter of
choice for Kate Moss, Elton and
David, and other people you don’t
meet down the local Lidl, took to
Instagram to post silly, irreverent memes and
it took off. “They say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a
woman scorned.’ They have clearly never met
a homosexual slightly inconvenienced,” was a
good one. “Me five minutes after arriving at
work,” over a photo of a “Tiredness can kill:
take a break” sign was another. DJ Tony,
discovered close to 300,000 followers, was
a one-man fun machine.
“The thing about Instagram is: everyone
takes it so seriously,” says “Fat” Tony
Marnach, on his transformation from the
celebrities’ DJ of choice to a Hogarth of the
social media age. “People post pictures that
have been filtered and make their lives look
perfect, so it was time to up the ante. Besides,
I was bored. I find humour in dark places,
mainly because I’ve lived in those places.
Now I’ve become the housewives’ favourite.”
We’re in the plant-filled conservatory of
Marnach’s basement flat in Pimlico. Despite
mourning the loss of his beloved dog, Tailor,
he seems like a happy, not very fat soul- with an impressively gleaming set of teeth
and a glow of vitality that can only come
from a healthy diet and a positive attitude.
His forthcoming memoir, I Don’t Take Requests,
so named because he doesn’t, tells a very
different story, however: sexual abuse, drug
addiction, HIV, homelessness, imprisonment
and eventual redemption. It’s remarkable that
he survived at all, let alone came out smiling.
Marnach’s story begins on a Battersea
council estate where, with an elder brother
in trouble with the police and a younger
brother on whom his plumber father and
cleaner mother doted, he learnt how to make
an impact. “All the attention was on my older
brother, even though it wasn’t positive. Then
the golden child younger brother comes along
and I’m like, what the hell? I had to be really
naughty, really loud or really clever to get any
attention, but the real naughtiness came after
the abuse. I couldn’t speak about it to anyone,
so it came out sideways.”
When Marnach was ten, attending a
summer holiday programme at Battersea Arts
Centre, he was taken under the wing of a man
who ran a business screening films in youth
clubs. The sexual abuse followed soon after,
under the guise of being employed as the
man’s assistant. “He picked up on the fact that
I was a gay kid. He found out that my mum
had cancer and my dad was drinking to cope.
He stole my youth, my self-worth. He told me
that I brought all this on myself and if I ever
told anyone I’d be the one in trouble. It wasn’t
an isolated incident. It went on for four years.”
A horrible situation got worse after the
man told Marnach he could help him break
into the movies, and he took him to an office
in Wardour Street, Soho. “I remember it
vividly to this day. There was a guy called
Hugh with thick-rimmed glasses who said,
‘To be an actor you have to do certain things,
to please people.’ I was groomed, pulled into
a paedophile ring, and I was so young. The
worst of it was, I was getting paid. That’s why
my attitude to money is: get rid of it.”
Marnach didn’t tell anyone, not even
his parents, until he was 30. “Mum blamed
herself, of course, but by then I was lost in
addiction. It wasn’t until I broke it down and
digested the abuse that I could really deal with
it. Even writing this book... I no longer want
to be a victim, but when we were doing the
chapter on it, I felt like I was going to vomit.
To this day, I can never look at a Prince of
Wales check, because he wore a jacket in it.
Talking about it now I can see him staring at
me. He still has a hold.”
By the time Marnach hit his mid-teens
promiscuous sex became the norm, less as a
celebration of gay liberation and more as a
tool of destruction. “You’re giving yourselfaway to anyone and everyone and that chips
away until the only thing you are left with is
self-hatred. Out of all the addictions I’ve had,
I think sex is the most powerful. When I was
41, I gave up drink and drugs. How could I
give up sex as well?”
Back in his late teens, Marnach was busy
carving a name for himself as, he says, “one
of the most obnoxious and arrogant f***ers
on the scene”. He was in the goth-tinged
London nightclub Limelight one night when
he saw a woman who looked like Siouxsie
Sioux, so he told her she was a pathetic try-
hard and, besides, the real Siouxsie looked
awful. Unfortunately, it was the real Siouxsie,
so she slapped him in the face. A pre-fame
Boy George, later to become one of his best
friends, hated Marnach so much that he
banned him from the shop he was working in.
Then there was the time he decided to pour
poppers down the Vivienne Westwood coat
of someone he had taken exception to – after
which his partner in crime set the coat on fire.
“That’s how I was back then,” says
Marnach, when I recite this litany of crimes.
“It was my way of saying, I’m going to make
you hate me, so you don’t get to know the real
Tony, because inside I was a scared child.”
Despite all this, Marnach always seems
to have had an army of friends. Besides, you
don’t get to DJ at parties for everyone from
David and Victoria Beckham to Meghan and
Harry (he had a slot at the royal wedding)
simply by making everybody hate you. The DJ
career began at 16 when, after doing the door
at a club called the Playground, run by the
New Romantic era figures Steve Strange
and Rusty Egan, he moaned about the music
until they agreed to give him a DJ slot. That
was shortly before he ended up at Freddie
Mercury’s house one night, where he had his
first – but far from last – line of cocaine.
“[Boy] George read the book and said,
‘There’s so much I didn’t know about,’ ” says
Marnach, on his lifelong ability to mask inner
torment with a busy social life. Nightclubs
provided DJ Fat Tony with the perfect arena:
a place for reinvention, where appearances are
everything. “No one needs to know your real
name. No one needs to know your real age.
I started lying about my age at 13, pretending
to be 18, and carried on lying until 50.”
By the mid-Eighties, gay club life in
London was taking on new extremes of
expression. The Australian performance artist
Leigh Bowery was turning himself into a living
sculpture, his friend Trojan was painting his
face like a Picasso, a designer called David
Cabaret turned up to clubs as the perennial
charity shop painting Chinese Girl, aka The
Green Lady, by Vladimir Tretchikoff, and Boy
George was taking it all into the mainstream
with Culture Club. At clubs like Taboo and
Kinky Gerlinky, the goal was to have a lookD
He ended up at Freddie
Mercury’s house one night
where he had his first line of
cocaine. It wouldn’t be his last
Fat Tony, centre, with Philip Sallon in the EightiesPREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: REX