When Joanne Rosenthal was a kid in Manchester, gatherings of her religious Jewish family were enlivened by the presence of her uncle’s eccentric wife. “Mad eye makeup; larger than life. You’d say to her: ‘Auntie Avril, can I give you some more chicken?’ And she’d say: ‘Go on, Joanne, my punters love me with a bit of meat on.’ Hang on, what are you talking about, your punters?”
There would be other “tantalising references to her career on stage” besides, but no further info. “Everyone’s sitting there at Passover or Jewish New Year and no one asks any follow-up questions!” Rosenthal continues. “It’s like everyone accepts that Auntie Avril is this subversive presence. When I told her I was getting into music, she said: ‘Quit school, join a band, get on the road, never look back – you won’t regret it.’ It was a very humdrum, suburban, conformist, normative environment and she kept … going off script.”
It was only after her aunt died that Rosenthal really understood the full extent of what had been going on. “I went to help my uncle clear her stuff, and when I walked into the living room, it was like a shrine to her career. Boxes of stuff, floor to ceiling. Posters, flyers, photos, studio masters, tapes, obsolete media like videos, boxes and boxes of correspondence, letters she’d written to Factory Records and EMI.”
She had uncovered her aunt’s extraordinary double life: by day, she was Avril Eventhal, a housewife in north Manchester’s Orthodox Jewish community; by night, she was Avril A, star of the city’s gay clubs. She made fabulously low-rent hi-NRG records called things like Hard Up for a Man, Sex Slaves of New Orleans and Man Power – collected on a new compilation, Housewife Superstar – and entirely bizarre videos, somewhere between surrealist performance art and standup comedy: “They’re sort of unsettling,” says Rosenthal, “because they don’t make sense, they’re not wholly sincere and they’re not wholly taking the piss.”
But it was for her chaotic live performances that she was locally renowned, despite what you might tactfully call her limitations as a vocalist (“I sound horrendous,” she told one interviewer). “This small round-faced woman with ruddy cheeks, spinning and twirling around wearing a costume that looked like it had been run up on a home sewing machine, topped off with a bright feather boa,” remembers Glenn Routledge, who ended up booking her to perform at the Haçienda. “Avril’s twirling created an apprehension that she was going to fall over, and the singing was sometimes off-key. At first I thought it wasn’t for real and perhaps it was someone’s idea of a joke – I was wrong. The crowd loved and encouraged her … I became an instant Avril A fan.”
Other fans were more direct in expressing their devotion. “At one gig in Blackpool, a fan chased her round the stage with a bottle of poppers,” says Adrian Hall, who went from seeing her live to being employed as her driver. “I would have intervened, but it was one of her best gigs!”
She had attempted to start a musical career in more conventional circumstances, slogging around the north-west’s pubs and clubs playing MOR rock, much to her “very, very, very religious” family’s disapproval, her progress hampered by what Rosenthal tactfully calls her “unconventional voice”.
“Then she organically found the gay scene, where it all clicked,” she says. “She got booked to play at a club called Manhattan Sound near Deansgate – the Smiths played an early gig there. She didn’t know it was a gay club, but her cab driver told her, you know, ‘it’s a gay night, you’d better watch out’. She didn’t care. And I think that night she realised ‘these are my people’. It wasn’t macho guys being sexist jerks, shouting abuse and throwing bottles – she felt safe. And they had a sense of the ridiculous that worked for her. So she became this kind of cross between a northern, working-class Divine and [infamously off-key Cuban singer] Margarita Pracatan.
“When I first saw videos of her performing, I thought ‘this is the Susan Sontag definition of camp, it’s so bad, it’s good’. She’s in a leopard print dress, carrying a feather duster, doing these robotic and seemingly nonsensical choreographed routines, engaging with the crowd in a very sweet, loving kind of way. Whenever I’ve reached out to her fans and asked her what the appeal was, the common thread is always ‘I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know how I was supposed to react’. I think when people disarm you like that, they get you, they grab your attention.”
She became a genuine underground phenomenon, billing herself as “fat, 40 and flirty”. She swiftly took on managers, appeared on local radio and got a deal with a tiny indie label: “My favourite discovery was a local chart from the Manchester Evening News,” says Rosenthal. “Joy Division are at No 1, and Avril A’s right at the bottom. She played in London once, supporting the Three Degrees at the London Palladium – I know! – but it was Manchester where she became a legend. Her husband was very supportive, he went along to lots of gigs, but I think he was slightly bemused by it. She used to say ‘he doesn’t really understand’.”
Nor, it seemed, did anyone else in the Orthodox Jewish community. “I went for a meeting at her house once,” says Hall, “and she opened the door wearing her full stage outfit – leopard-print dress, white bootees, feathers in her hair. She stepped outside, kissed me on the cheek, and said ‘can you see the neighbours’ net curtains twitching?’ I could. She said: ‘Good – it’ll give them something to gossip about.’”
Rosenthal suggests her outcast status might have informed a more serious side to her success. “She performed a lot of Aids benefits, she was successful at a very traumatic time for the gay community. And she was a sort of maternal figure: she got a lot of fanmail from young gay men, pouring their hearts out. One says his family have disowned him and he isn’t invited to his brother’s wedding, and he’s asking her what to do. And she wrote back saying, ‘My family don’t really want much to do with me, it’s only my husband’s family will see me – it’s their loss. As Gloria Gaynor said: we will survive’.”
An ankle injury brought her career to an end in the early 90s. “It shook her confidence, and she stopped performing,” says Hall. “I think she had a breakdown. I tried to get her out – we went to Flesh at the Haçienda and she was mobbed, everyone wanted to know when she would perform again. She just said ‘soon’, but we didn’t stay long. She was overwhelmed.”
She never really made a comeback and died in 2017. That would have been that, had Rosenthal, a professional museum and gallery curator, not assembled the stuff she found in her late aunt’s living room into an archive. When she gave a presentation about Avril A in Sheffield, a mutual friend alerted audio-visual archivist Alex Wilson, whose label Memory Dance specialises in “work from the archival fringes” – previous releases have featured avant garde jazz, electronica and post-punk.
You might consider Avril A wonkily ploughing through her signature song Paris Is for Lovers to be out of the label’s remit, but Wilson says he sees her “in that wonderful lineage of eccentric British outsider artists … People who ploughed on for the sake of it, not the fame of it. Of course, Avril was different because she wanted fame, but the fact that she never made it yet inspired a devoted faithful was so touching to me, I knew it would resonate.” And besides, he thinks her forgotten recordings have a value in the grim climate of 2025. “As soon as Avril came into my headspace it screamed pure joy, happiness, and a proper northern laugh. And we all need a bit of that,” he says. “Especially now”.
