Another find from my plethora of Halloween bits and pieces, a postcard from Simon Drake's 1992 UK tour. I saw him perform at Folkestone's Leas Cliff Hall and the tour was off the back of his late night Channel 4 TV show "Simon Drake's Secret Cabaret." I believe (but could be wrong) that he did two series of shows for Channel 4 mixing the rather bloody magic that Penn & Teller would later become famous for, with interviews from confidence tricksters and vintage footage of freakshow acts.
The show featured his staple acts of sawing a woman in half... lengthways! And ended with him being knowed out and balanced in the centre of his back on a tall metal spike or pole. As he was then spun in the same way plates are spun round on poles, the pole appeared to pierce his chest as his impaled body dropped to the floor with much blood and gasps from the audience.
Sadly he seems to have disappeared from our TV screens and apart from seeing on TV an Iron Maiden concert in the early 1990s for which he designed and performed similar effects, the last I heard he was running a 'House of Magic' in London performing magic tricks in his own pricey restaurant.
Sunday 26th September 2010