There are many ways to describe Casey Spooner. A performance artist, an electroclash pioneer, forever the fierce frontman. He’s also a lovable giant, a fashion darling and a statuesque beacon to those living on the fringes.
Maybe ‘shapeshifter’ is a more all-encompassing title for the future-facing creative. Spooner, 55, an experimental theatre performer who thrashed his way through downtown Manhattan galleries and was thrust into the spotlight in the early 2000s as part of the boundary-pushing musical duo Fischerspooner, likes to treat his life’s work as an ongoing character study.
“I’ll come up with a character that I am interested in casting myself as and a theme. From there, I can really work in many different ways. It can be applied to visual art, it can be applied to music and it can be applied to performance.” Viking-like in stature, with broad shoulders and silky ’70s-movie-star waves, his towering physique is offset by a buttery smooth Deep South lilt that’s welcoming and somehow familiar.
His art has led him to transform into a slew of different personas in recent years that have been remixed and redefined with each intriguing project. Like his bid to become US president in 2020, an art performance-cum-political campaign rallying against backwards Americana and all its Trumpisms that was, unfortunately, stopped in its tracks by Covid (he resurrected the project last September with a series of performances at Wilhelm Hallen in Berlin).
Since 2022 he’s been crafting an ongoing piece he calls With Love from Death Beach – “my more apocalyptic Tarzan persona” – based on themes of ideas of sex and death, creation and mortality, which inspired an 11-track album of the same name and led to accompanying film work, bronze cock sculptures (as you do) and a stage production at Berlin’s Gropius Bau art space at the tail end of last year, directed by MJ Harper.
Spooner’s arrival in the German capital was accidental. After Trump was elected in 2016, he relocated to Paris following 23 years spent in New York. At the tail end of 2019, he took a trip to Rio to see the fireworks on Copacabana Beach for New Year’s Eve, going on to stay in the city for the first half of 2020 to celebrate his birthday, experience Carnival for the first time and seek refuge from a stressful legal battle with Madonna. (Spooner said on Instagram he had co-written the melody to her track God Control but had received no payment; she contacted him saying she was unaware he had worked with her co-writer, Mirwais, on it and he was later given a credit.)
Cue the pandemic and France cancelling all artist visas that were within their first year, locking him outside Europe. After a brief pit stop at his parents’ place in North Carolina, he spent the rest of the pandemic in Hollywood, eventually making his way back to Paris in 2023.
“That July, on Christopher Street Day [a European Pride celebration], I bought a last-minute ticket on a Saturday night to Berlin that departed Paris at 8pm. I landed and went directly to Berghain with my carry-on,” he says. Originally meant to be just a weekend of partying, he bumped into art dealer André Schlechtriem on the Panorama bar dance floor, who encouraged him to extend his stay in an apartment the dealer owned. After a missed flight and an impromptu trip to Whole festival, 90 miles south of Berlin, the following weekend, he returned to the city the next week to perform at an art party. It was there that he met his partner, João Tinen. “He introduced himself to me right as I was about to perform. He was very handsome and charismatic and we kissed immediately. When I got off stage we kissed again, and that kiss was even better.”
He came for the rave and stayed for love, spending two months with Tinen in a romantic whirlwind, and has spent his time between the city and Paris ever since. The pair married in August in Berlin. The dress code? “Upstage the bride – wear a wedding dress.”
When they met, Spooner was wearing over-the-thigh boots and a skirt with a built-in thong by GmbH. “There’s something about the power of glamour, especially if you’re gay – it’s kind of like a social weapon,” he says. His performing wardrobe through the years has largely been anchored by Chelsea boots, sheer, Tom Ford-Gucci-era briefs yanked over a rhinestone jockstrap or a bedazzled thong and cape. “When you grow up being the freak and not feeling like you fit in, it somehow segues really nicely into the extravagance of fashion, because you don’t fit in if you’re fashionable. You stand out.”
Spooner hasn’t always been the out- and-proud experimentalist that sits before me today on Zoom from his Berlin pad. He grew up in Albany, Georgia, where any whiff of sexuality was largely repressed. “On top of being gay, the Aids crisis complicated my sexuality because it became very commingled with death very early.” His first taste of romance came in 1988, as an 18-year-old student at the University of Georgia, in the form of a short-lived relationship with Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who had been to the same university a decade earlier.
“I went to Athens, Georgia, to be a painter and I ended updating Michael and being around so much music. Athens in ’88 was a music hub for indie rock. Basically the template for Nirvana. I never went to class. I went out every night,” he says.
When he was growing up, Spooner’s family didn’t own a record player, but he remembers religiously listening to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and Donna Summer’s Bad Girl on eight- track. His mum was an art teacher and she got him a place at a reputable private school on the promise that she would start the school’s first arts programme. “She was very ambitious,” he says. “I got my hair from her. She would do this chic bohemian art teacher look, not too craftsy – more Parisian.”
She could never truly wrap her head around the star-studded life Spooner would go on to live, like the time he was at a dinner in Paris celebrating one of Hedi Slimane’s collections for Dior Homme in 2003. “I was outside speaking to Karl [Lagerfeld] and my mom rang. She asked what I was up to so I told her I was with him. My mother was like, ‘That’s not possible. You’re totally lying.’ So I asked Karl to speak to her. He got on the phone in that super Karl voice and said a couple things. She couldn’t believe it.”
After moving to Chicago in 1990, he continued his indie- rock education by going to watch his friends’ bands play. He also became heavily immersed in the underground rave scene and regularly visited the city’s house clubs, like The Warehouse, an influential gay Black disco. He’d spend the next nine or so years producing and performing original works as part of experimental theatre company Doorika, making the jump to New York in 1995.
“New York was kind of dull musically,” he says. “I don’t know if it was like a post-Aids lull in its culture, but it was a little not happening compared to Athens and Chicago.” Spooner kept bumping into Warren Fischer, a Chicago friend who he’d lost touch with, as their social circles overlapped. “Warren had a really bad heroin problem and I was super concerned about how fucked up he was. So Fischerspooner started as rehab. I sat with him in his apartment in the summer of ’98 for three months as he programmed music while he dried out.”
It was during those months that the pair defined their signature electroclash sound, consuming a diet of Bollywood soundtracks and music by DMX Krew and DJ Hell. “All of a sudden there was access to software and the nature of making music became more accessible,” he says. “Daft Punk had released their first album [Homework, in 1997], Miss Kittin and The Hacker were happening [both French electronic music producers]. We were all weirdly, simultaneously, making something that was in the same world.”
After first performing as a duo as part of an artist showcase staged in a Starbucks on Astor Place in the East Village, they went on to infiltrate the downtown art scene with avant-garde performances that have become something of a legend for their extravagant costuming and experimental, cabaret theatrics – with pioneering tracks like Emerge garnering the band a cult following overseas, too.
“My favourite show was an early one at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, our first big gallery show,” he says. “We performed nonstop from eight o’clock at night until one o’clock in the morning for five days straight. There were three sets that were about 15 to 20 minutes long [each]. Eighty people would come in, we’d perform for 20 minutes, they would leave, we would go to the dressing room, reset, then people would come for the second set. It’d be a totally different show. Totally different costumes. Totally different songs. Totally different special effects. I remember the final performance on the final night was just like everybody crammed in and it was complete and total euphoria. I lost about 20 pounds that week because I was performing so much. I was living on adrenaline.”
Throughout his career, Spooner has been “on the edge” of the fashion world. When he was 25, he briefly moved to Milan to pursue a career in modelling, staying with a friend of a friend, Fabio Zambernardi, who was a shoe designer for Prada (he would go on to be Miuccia Prada’s right-hand man). Slimane was a fan of Fischerspooner from the jump, creating a Napoleonic jacket for Spooner to wear on stage for a performance at the Centre Pompidou in 2003. “Sometimes he sent me pieces that apparently were made for Michael Jackson, so I was getting some of the Michael Jackson leftovers.”
He reflects on his time in Fischerspooner as creating “performance art about entertainment”, feeling more at home in a gallery setting than touring gig venues and festivals. It was when he started “pretending to be a pop star” after the band signed with Capitol Records for their second album, Odyssey, that things started going awry.
“Before, I would get an idea. I would have a costume made. We would write a song. We would do a show, we would do a photoshoot. We would write another song, I would make another costume. We would do another show. We would film something. It was all kind of developing simultaneously. When we got involved with the major label, it was really like you record all the music, then you do photography, then you do film, then you do performance last. You’d spend two years making the music and then they expect the image to be done in a month. Then it becomes complicated because also you’re signed to a major label, so people are charging commercial rates, which means you can’t do 10 photoshoots, you can only afford to do one.”
Things got more complicated when the band’s third record, Entertainment, came out the year after the 2008 economic crash, where big festivals in the duo’s touring schedule axed their bookings or were cancelled completely. “That killed the budget, basically. I should have quit the tour because I did something like 70 shows in 90 days. The economics were terrible, I came home $100,000 in debt.”
Spooner retreated back into experimental theatre, performing as part of The Wooster Group company and recording a solo album, Adult Contemporary, which came out in 2011. The next Fischerspooner record, Sir, wouldn’t come out for another eight years – with Spooner reconnecting with Stipe, who co-wrote and co-produced all of the tracks.
“Once Michael signed on as producer in 2016, he threw out half the songs that were finished. I made a 10-song album over a three-year period, which is basically my normal cycle, and then he stepped in and said, ‘Half of your album? Forget that.’ I was like, ‘Okay, this guy is very experienced, he’s really talented. I have already explored my idea fully, so why not let him take it apart so that I learn from his process?’”
The album, chock-full of tales of drugs, fucks and Grindr hook-ups set to throbbing beats, would be the band’s last. “Thank you for everything,” wrote the pair on Instagram in 2019. “Fischerspooner is dead. Long live Fischerspooner.”
“It’s pretty crazy that every time I go out, even now, so many people confess how helpful [Fischerspooner] was in the development of their sexual identities,” he says. “I mean amazing people like a doctor from Syria, so many different kinds of people, are always saying thank you so much for your work. That gives me a lot of creative confidence.”
As to what, or whom, Spooner will morph into next is intriguingly unknown. Wherever his next shapeshift transports him, one thing is for certain: his talents demand the glow of a spotlight.
10 Men Issue 62 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – is out September 18. Pre-order your copy here.
CASEY SPOONER: CHARACTER BUILDING
Photographer ELLEN VON UNWERTH
Fashion Editor KLAUS STOCKHAUSEN
Talent CASEY SPOONER
Text PAUL TONER
Hair STELLI using ORIBE Hair Care
Make-up SASKIA KRAUSE at Basics Berlin
Set designer CHARLIE GOWER
Photographer’s assistants JEROME VIVET and FREDERIC TROEHLER
Fashion assistant DAVIDE ZIANTONI
Hair assistant ANDREA YOUNG
Production KURVE ENTERTAINMENT
Producer ANNE-MAREI HEINRICH
Floral arrangements ATISO FLORAL DESIGN STUDIO
Location CLIC CLAC KREUZBERG, BERLIN
