Image Credit: Photo of Simon Casson, 2026.

Full disclosure: I’ve known Simon since the late ’90s. So when I say I fucking love what he does, you should know I’m hardly a disinterested observer. It’s hard to deny, he’s a big hearted, generous soul – a champion of one of London’s most brazenly creative communities, Duckie. For those who are lucky enough to know him, you’ll probably agree. If this fella is new to you, read this 5-minute interview and if you’re still curious – there are plenty of opportunities to get involved with his world.

Right, let’s take it from the top. Simon Casson didn’t take the obvious route into culture. Before becoming one of London’s great queer impresarios, he packed potatoes (no innuendo intended), swept floors at Woolworths, sold Yohji Yamamoto to pop stars, trained badly as an actor, toured prisons with a theatre company and discovered that what he was really good at was bringing people together. By 1995, that instinct became Duckie.

Co-founded by Simon and his gang of collaborators, Duckie grew from a Saturday night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern into something much bigger: a gloriously unruly mixture of performance, nightlife, social art and community building. At its heart is Simon’s belief in “Collective Joy” – mixed rooms, participation, affordable culture, working-class entertainment, queer history, dancing, food, mischief and the simple civic pleasure of strangers spending time together.

Right now, Duckie is looking backwards and forwards at once. July 2027 marks the Diamond Jubilee of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, and Duckie will commemorate the landmark with a weekend takeover of the new London Museum at Smithfield. The build-up is already underway with Take Courage, an ambitious excavation of queer London across generations. Next up is Boozers on 2 September, exploring the stories of three south London backstreet queer pubs.

Then, on Sunday 20 September, Duckie heads to Southbank Centre for Shirley: This Is My Life – Duckie Salutes Shirley Bassey, five hours of camp, music, performance and collective celebration.

So here’s your homework: tell your mates about Take Courage. Better still, get involved. Volunteer, show up, dance, talk to someone outside your bubble and enjoy the extraordinary diversity of London. That’s not an optional extra to our culture – it’s what makes it rich, unruly and beautiful.

What did the teenage Simon Casson imagine his life might become? Your recent social media posts sketch an unruly apprenticeship through Woolworths, Yohji Yamamoto, community theatre, prison touring and some spectacularly unsuccessful acting. Which failures, detours or accidental lessons proved most useful when you eventually became a producer, and what would you tell a young creative who feels they are taking the wrong route?

I’m spectacularly bad at everything apart from being a producer and promoter which – with the help of my partner in crime Dicky – I seemed to have gotten away with for the past 30 years. I can’t drive, I can’t cook, I can’t do exercise, I’m rubbish at computers or anything technical, but I can just about put on shows and work with artists. It’s always come naturally to me. When I was 14 I was putting on my brothers band in the local hall on the estate, and making the posters in art class at school. When I was 19 I started to hire halls in the west end and put on shindigs. It’s just what I do, as long as my pecker is up. The advice I would give young creatives is, do what you feel compelled to do, what comes naturally and go where your heart is, rather than buckling down into something you’re not that interested in. Try to create a niche by being true to your instincts.

Image Credit: Simon Casson (right) and Duckie team on stage.

Duckie has always made politics feel social, funny and physical rather than theoretical. In 2026, when people seem increasingly sorted into political, class and cultural bubbles, what happens when you put different generations, identities and backgrounds in the same room?

I really believe in Collective Joy. I believe in dance floors and shows with physical participation. I’m an extrovert which means I get my energy from other people. I love being in groups in a sort of civic way – getting energy from being together with friends and strangers. My desire is to be in very socially mixed environments. I’m a lifelong Londoner and I have a natural desire to mix with different ages, races, genders, identities. I don’t want to just mix with other white gay men like me. I don’t want to live in a mono-culture. I don’t relate to this Reform Party attitude of just sticking with the familiar, and folks that are culturally similar to you. I like the mix.

Film Credit: Video of Simon telling us about Take Courage. Filmed by Julian Langham. If you’re interested with helping tell the story, get in touch with Duckie via Instagram @duckievauxhall or email the Duckie team at takecourage@duckie.co.uk or just show up on the next night, at BOOZERS Wednesday 2 September at 7pm. Info and tickets → duckie.co.uk

Take Courage digs into queer London through pubs, cruising, sex work, HIV, drag, race, lesbian culture, trans histories and nightlife. What gets lost when queer history becomes too respectable, and which messier stories do you most want Duckie to rescue while the legends who lived them are here to share them?

Queer culture in the 20th century comes from illegality. When I was born homo sex was against the law and our lives were lived very underground. I feel very connected to that generation of queer men from the mid 20th century – the Joe Orton or Kenneth Williams generation, they are just one generation before me. Duckie have always celebrated the illegitimate. I need to be a bit careful about potentially fetishising the ‘marginalised’ or the ‘underbelly’, but that’s where the most vivid stories come from.

Image Credit: Artwork for ‘Boozers’, the story of three South London backstreet queer pubs. Wheatsheaf Hall, Wednesday 2 September at 7pm (Doors Open 6pm). Info → duckie.co.uk

Deep Divers asks people to get off the internet, enter archives, meet elders and make history together. You have written about social media as addictive and polarising. It feels weird to ask, but has making culture IRL become a form of resistance?

Social media is not serving us, is it? While some younger queer folks have found their tribe this way, for most of us it’s just alienating and makes us more lonely. It’s expensive to meet IRL in London, space is expensive – just stepping out of your front door costs more than a tenner with fares and a frothy coffee – so people retreat to their bedrooms and the internet, but it’s not working for us, it’s making us ill. Out of my friends, the ones that avoid social media are the most mentally well I’d say. I spent a day with the archives at Bishopsgate Institute last week, and it was such fun, much better than doom scrolling. With our history project Take Courage we really want to encourage queer intergenerational mixing and getting out and about.

Image Credit: Artwork for ‘Shirley: This is My Life – Duckie Salutes Shirley Bassey’ at the Southbank Centre, Sunday 20 September. Info → duckie.co.uk

Duckie talks proudly about Progressive Working Class Entertainment, while you have written sharply about gentrification, middle-class cultural bubbles and the need for newcomers to be useful to local communities. Has the arts world genuinely become more class-conscious since we last spoke in 2016, or has it mostly learned better language?

The intersectional revolution that came out of the universities from about 2015 has had a massive impact on my life and work and really opened things up. Gen Z and BLM and the trans revolution has taught me so much in terms of equality and accountability in the past decade. The depressing and complicated shift to the right for many white working class communities is partly due to the fact that economic and social class wasn’t as central to the intersectional movement as it could have been, and the right wing elites have been very good at telling divisive stories, which is proving disastrous for our future prospects.

Image Credit: A Duckie audience.

Looking forward, what gives you hope about the next generation of queer artists and audiences, and what genuinely frightens you about the cultural, political and economic conditions they are inheriting now?

Can you imagine being a young artist in London now? Surviving in expensive, insecure, temporary housing, working in precarious jobs, all the social pressures of the city – and then trying to create artwork. It must be near impossible. A few people are surviving it, but it feels very different and much more difficult than it was in say the 1970s or the 1980s. It’s a brutal economic landscape unless you give yourself over to just serving capitalism.

Image Credit: ‘Badge Cafe’ (by Ben Walters) at Duckie.

From The Posh Club and Duckie 7/11 to a five-hour Shirley Bassey salute, you keep putting pleasure, camp, food, music and showing off alongside serious social questions. In an age of anxiety, austerity and political anger, is having a bloody good time itself a political act?

It’s all we’ve got, isn’t it? Ben Walters calls them ‘Homemade Mutant Hope Machines‘. We can just take part in making little projects happen. It’s depressing but most of the big stuff seems out of our power.

Image Credit: Simon ‘Cockney’ Casson (Producer, right) and ‘Slim’ Dicky ‘Bitches Love Him’ Eton (Producer, left). Find them here → duckie.co.uk

Finally, which three cultural places in London would you send a Run Riot reader to – not necessarily the grandest or most fashionable, but places that have shaped you, surprised you or still make the city feel alive – and why does each one matter to you?

If you are young and working class, I’d suggest joining a youth theatre – if you can find one – and making up some creative shows in a gang. That’s what I did in my teenage years and it was life changing.

For any age I’d recommend volunteering at The Posh Club. It really is a shot in the arm if you want too feel connected to other people, you want to do something useful, and you like dancing in the daytime.

The Southbank Centre is also good, just for hanging out in. It’s so rare to have a place where you don’t have to spend money and can just sit about, without buying something, they even have a few decent free shows sometimes.

Find Simon and all things Duckie at duckie.co.uk and on Insta @duckievauxhall