Pussy Palace 1985 Video May 2026

The last night was November 30, 1985. They played The Wizard of Oz synced to Dark Side of the Moon —and then a final, silent film: Man with a Movie Camera (1929). No dialogue. Just life.

Inside: a bootleg of Possession (1981). Or a Japanese laser disc of Tetsuo: The Iron Man —three years before its official release. Or a grainy, beautiful copy of a Pasolini film that no one in Britain was supposed to own. Pussy Palace 1985 Video

The Last Frame of Excess: Palace Video, 1985 The last night was November 30, 1985

You didn’t join Palace. You were invited. The man behind the counter was Julian “Jules” Thorne —a former art-school provocateur with a lazy eye and a genius for finding films that made the BBFC blush. He wore a Japanese kimono over a torn Sex Pistols T-shirt, and he never smiled. But when you asked for a recommendation, he’d slide a clamshell case across the counter without a word. Just life

That was Palace in ’85: Part Five: The Fall Of course, it couldn’t last. By autumn, the tax man came sniffing. A rival shop called “Visions” opened down the street—clean, legal, boring. And the new Video Recordings Act 1984 meant Jules’s bootlegs were now felonies.

In the neon-drenched spring of 1985, a run-down Soho video club becomes the secret temple for a tribe of London dreamers, bootleggers, and broken aristocrats—where the currency is not money, but the thrill of seeing the forbidden on a flickering screen. Part One: The Invitation The door was easy to miss. Sandwiched between a boarded-up tailor and a shop that sold only novelty ashtrays, the black-painted front of Palace Video gave nothing away. No sign, no window display. Just a buzzer you had to know existed.

And they’ll feel it: the ghost of a time when entertainment was dangerous, lifestyle was an art form, and a VHS was not a product but a .