My Life with Alan Amsby: I performed in drag at Mountjoy Prison

Alan Amsby, aka Mr Pussy, who is one of Ireland's longest performing and most successful drag queens.

It was the only splash of colour in an otherwise dark and empty prison cell.

But, however small and seemingly insignificant, the Christmas tree staring back at me from a nondescript jail cell remains ingrained in my memory.

In my decades-spanning career as Mr Pussy, a drag performance for inmates at the infamous Mountjoy, I was reminded that even prisoners need to be entertained. The gig came more than 20 years after my first televised performance on The Late Late Show in 1970, which saw me shoot to fame overnight. Ireland was very innocent when I first relocated from London, but I think I shook it up a lot.

Over the years, I have performed in all manner of venues. The journeys took much longer in those days because there were no motorways, so we often spent hours on the road. It was my manager at the time who contacted the governor of Mountjoy Prison and suggested that I perform for the prisoners there. Fortunately, they were open to the idea. I was even given a tour of all the cells. Here I stumbled upon the Christmas tree standing in the corner of a prison cell. Something about its jarring presence touched me deeply.

The experience was memorable for many reasons. I made my entrance through the main prison gates in drag, which is something staff there wouldn’t have seen every day. I didn’t have the opportunity to chat with prisoners individually as they were sat in rows, similar to the set-up of a real theatre. As a crowd, the humour really resonated with them. The first thing I did was warn them to be quiet and behave, because if they didn’t, I would have them “thrown out onto the street”. It broke the ice as they instantly erupted into rambunctious laughter.

For the first time in my life, I literally had a captive audience.

Some of the prisoners I even recognised from previous gigs. After the show, we went to the governor’s office and spent the rest of our time chatting.

Not everyone was as encouraging of my act as the inmates in Mountjoy Prison.

Back in the day, I had a bishop condemn me from his pulpit. It was at Sunday Mass, and he warned everyone in the congregation to boycott my show. What the bishop didn’t realise was that he had done me a massive favour — I ended up with a bigger crowd than he had for his Mass.

Other members of the Church were a little more accommodating. As far back as the 70s, I did a show at a convent where I got changed in the Mother Superior’s bathroom. The nuns would have been very innocent, so I didn’t tell any jokes, but I did do a Sandy Shore number, complete with the boots and the hotpants. The act was part of an afternoon variety show. Just like the rest of the country, they loved it.

In 1994, I hosted my own cafe, Mr Pussy’s Cafe De Luxe on Dublin’s Suffolk St, which was owned by Bono, Jim Sheridan, and Gavin Friday. Supermodel Naomi Campbell came to us a lot. She once gifted me a pair of her knickers for the display cabinet. They were signed by her with the message “from one pussy to another”. Christy Turlington came to experience the cafe too. I never got her knickers, but she did leave a bra.

We used to play bingo into the early hours of the morning. I remember Ronnie Wood in particular getting very carried away while waiting to hear his number called out. He only had one number left, so was very keen to win. I had to tell him to be quiet at one stage. The prize was only a dessert or ice cream, but people often took it rather seriously.

There were many stars who passed through the cafe, but the highlight for me was hosting my mother’s 80th birthday there. It had taken her a while to get used to what I did for a living. In the early years, I had kept my drag act a secret from her. When I was young, she would call me to get up for work and I would leave the house and sleep on my friend’s house to lead her to believe I had a day job.

The truth was I had given up my job wig-making after swearing never to work a nine-to-five again. She failed to suspect anything until one day she spotted a picture of me performing in a newspaper. “Is that you?” she asked. There was no way to conceal it, so I admitted defeat. Once I confessed that the drag artist in the paper was me, she asked me not to tell the neighbours, and that was that. From that day on, I could sleep as long as I liked and in my own bed too. All these years later, I have no plans to retire, and my age remains a State secret. I’m very lucky to still be getting work, thanks to Sean Mullane from Drag Queens Ireland. It’s a different world now, and I can get away with a lot more. One thing that hasn’t changed is my love for drag and making people happy.

• Alan Amsby is at the Everyman Theatre, Cork, on August 1, with his show ‘An Evening with Mr Pussy and Friends – Comedy Cabaret Show’.
• He will also be hosting a Mother’s Day Show on March 15, at Bank Lane, Waterford.