The Times Magazine 55that conveyed wit, imagination and extremity,
and didn’t reveal too much along the way.
“To be heard and seen, you had to create
your own platform,” says Marnach of the
Eighties/Nineties golden age of club culture.
“It’s not like now, posting pictures and
pretending to be in Los Angeles. Back then
you had to be in the moment – and you
had to create that moment. It was about
being the loudest, the funniest, the vilest,
the most screeching.”
Marnach went from being an estate kid to
working at a stall at the Kings Road fashion
emporium the Great Gear Market, to being
a successful DJ earning huge amounts of
money, all in a very short space of time. “Two
months after starting to DJ I was flying off to
New York, hanging out with Andy Warhol.”
What does he remember about the king
of pop art? “He was really, really boring. And
creepy. The worst thing about Andy was all
the people who surrounded him, and on the
rare times you got him on his own, he was
sweet – but still boring. Now people portray
him as this weird genius in the corner, but you
didn’t feel that at all.”
Many of the scenes in I Don’t Take Requests
are laugh-out-loud funny. There was the
time Marnach’s little brother, Dean, left some
Ecstasy pills lying around and their mother,
thinking they were headache tablets, took a
couple. “She started tidying up like mad while
putting on music and dancing around the
living room, and I was thinking, ‘Oh my God,
my mum’s on E.’ It actually turned her into a
really nice person for about 20 minutes.” Then
there was the clubbing holiday in Ibiza that
ended up with Marnach falling asleep in
a toilet at Palma airport, missing his flight
home and being stranded with nothing but
the padded leather Jean Paul Gaultier jacket
and little white shorts he was clothed in.
“I called my mum, crying, and she said,
‘Yer Auntie Anne lives in Palma. She’ll come
and get you,’ ” says Marnach, putting on a
particularly hideous screech of a voice. “I was
curled up in a ball at the airport, wearing the
gayest outfit ever, when I heard this voice
going, ‘Oi! Wake up, you little sod!’ I opened
my eyes and saw these thigh-high patent
leather boots, hotpants and a ripped T-shirt
with beads on it. It was my Auntie Anne. She
was well into her sixties by this point and she
had been a prostitute in London. We got in
her fluorescent green beach buggy with a pink
hippopotamus on the bonnet and off she took
me to the Here We Go bar in Magaluf.”
As the years passed, the partying got more
extreme. Marnach moved into a flat above Bar
Italia in Soho, never paid the rent and ended
up owing the porn baron and Soho landlord
Paul Raymond more than £200,000. “I spent it
all on cocaine. In 1995, I signed a record deal
and did an interview where I said I loved the
Freedom Bar on Wardour Street, so of course
the bailiffs turned up at the Freedom Bar that
night and served me a writ. I had tiger hair
at the time, and I got my mate to get his hair
done the same way and tell them they had the
wrong person. Somehow I got away with it.”
By the end of the Nineties, Marnach
started passing out; a product, he thought, of
all the drink and drugs he was taking. In fact,
he was HIV positive. “I kept blacking out and
not telling anyone, until one Monday morning
my mum came to my house in Battersea
and found me lying on the kitchen floor. She
had the foresight to take me to Chelsea and
Westminster Hospital and they knew what
was going on immediately. I weighed 7st. I had
almost no teeth. I knew I had a serious drug
problem. But there was a part of me that
wanted to kill myself on a daily basis.”
Marnach was put into an induced coma, and
beside the hospital bed when he came round
were his family and his boyfriend at the time,
Johnny, who had been told he wasn’t going to
survive. “The minute I could stand up, I was
getting drugs delivered. Six months later I had
septicaemia of the mouth and what was left of
my teeth fell out. Funnily enough, I was at my
happiest when I couldn’t even afford to buy
cigarettes, because that meant I had run out
of options. It wasn’t a life. It was an existence.”
The worst was yet to come. In 2009, a year
after getting clean, Marnach spent six weeks
in Pentonville prison. “The weird thing is,
I went to do a talk in Pentonville for Narcotics
Anonymous and I was watching these boys
run about in their grey tracksuit bottoms
thinking, ‘I wouldn’t mind being in here.’
A month later, I was there.”
Marnach was out on a walk in Islington
one day when a bunch of boys knocked into
his dog, Tailor. He shouted a load of threats at
them and thought that was the end of it, but
the following day he was on his way to the
cinema when he was pinned to the floor by
six police. One of the boys had accused him
of sexual abuse.
“I was brutally honest in my interview with
the police. I told them I had been abused as
a child, that I cruised, had casual sex... I told
them what they wanted to hear. Meanwhile,
the boy’s story got bigger and bigger the more
attention he got, and the sad thing about
it was, I could see myself in him. I was that
boy. I was allowed one phone call – to my
boyfriend, Johnny, who said the police hadraided the flat – and that was it, the last
contact I had with the outside world.”
Moved to Pentonville after four days in
a police cell, Marnach’s first thought was
to hang himself. Knowing he was innocent,
however, he resolved that he had to fight the
case. “They wanted to put me on the special
wing [for sex offenders] and I said, no, I’ll take
my chances in there. I had to tell people I was
in for drugs.” What kind of recompense did
he get from the police for wrongful arrest?
“A sorry and a handshake. And the worst of
it was that in people’s eyes, I had gone from
abused to abuser. I was spat at in the street.
I won and was vindicated of all charges, but
we live in a society where we are guilty until
proven innocent.”
Once the ordeal was over, Marnach moved
back in with his parents at the age of 42 and
got to know his father for the first time, just
before he died. “I saw a very honest and
righteous person, not the brute I decided
had beaten up my mum because that made
it easier for me to explain the kind of person
I was. Actually, he loved my mum. He saw
me get clean before passing away, and I would
never have had that connection with him
unless I hadn’t gone through the darkest
period in my life.”
A suspiciously early review of I Don’t Take
Requests, appearing before any review copies
had been sent out, claimed it was the work of
a master name-dropper in action. Actually, the
famous names don’t take up nearly as much
space as the stories from Marnach’s own life,
but there is one celebrity friend I do want to
know about, chiefly because she was the pre-
eminent model of my generation and remains
an enigma to this day.
“She’s still a Croydon girl,” he says of Kate
Moss. “What you see is what you get with
Kate: no snobbery, no airs and graces. I knew
her before [she became] who she is today- and she’s still that person now.”
By the end of our hour and a half together,
I’m as charmed by Fat Tony as the endless
celebrities who pay him large amounts
of money to DJ at their parties and the
thousands of people who follow him on
Instagram for a daily dose of cheer and
cheekiness. One question remains. Given
the title of his book, I want to know what
would happen if, during one of his house and
disco-based sets where the dancefloor is full
and everyone is having a good time, I go up
to the DJ booth and ask if he has Chirpy
Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle of the Road.
“I’ll tell you, ‘Yes, I have got it, but I’m
not playing it because I don’t do requests.’ If
you tell me to eat my greens, I won’t eat my
greens. If you tell me not to take drugs, I’ll
take more drugs. If you tell me to play Chirpy
Chirpy Cheep Cheep, it’s not gonna happen.
And that is the story of my life.” n
‘Andy Warhol was boring
and creepy. On the rare
times he was alone he could
be sweet – but still boring’