Life Drawing A Naked Rock Band

Last Friday, my friends' band Bad Guys played a naked show for a postgraduate life drawing class at the Royal Academy of the Arts. It took place in the oldest life drawing room in Britain. I was there down the front, risking a teabagging for half an hour in order to bring these historic pictures to you. I hope that you appreciate them.

I couldn't remember too much about the show. From where I was squatting, it was all just a big blur of pasty skin and cocks, and the fact I watched most of the gig through my camera didn't help either. Here's what the band and some people who were there had to say about it.

LOZ CHALK (event organiser): The students wanted a night of events to mark the end of the course. I wanted a band to play for a life drawing class, and the first people I thought of were Bad Guys.

STUART (vocals): I've got a feeling I said we should play it naked. I only realised after we'd agreed that I was the only one who didn't have a musical instrument to hide behind. At that point, I thought it might be a bad idea.

PJ (baritone guitar): I was up for it immediately. I'm pretty much naked every weekend, anyone who knows me has seen me naked. Only Mark was a little bit reticent. I’ve never even seen him in shorts. I don't think he owns a pair of shorts.

MARK (drums): They were really cagey with me about it, they were putting off telling me. I've no idea why. I only found out two weeks ago. Even up to the last minute they didn't think I was gonna get naked. But we already had another gig planned later that night, organised by my girlfriend, so my biggest worry was, "Shit, I've got to deal with telling my girlfriend we have to do another gig before her one, and this one's naked."

LOZ: I kind of kept schtum about it at the Royal Academy because I didn't want the directors to kick up a fuss about noise complaints. It's the oldest life drawing room in the country.

ELIZA BONHAM CARTER (curator of the RA Schools): Yes, it was built in 1868. The benches are earlier, they came from previous places that the RA inhabited, so they might have been sat on by Turner or Constable. The penny only dropped about three minutes before the gig began. I felt some trepidation mixed with delight.

PJ: We had to undress in this ridiculous little cupboard, there was barely enough room for one of us. It was the closest I've ever been to four naked men.

STUART: The cupboard was really small. I've seen PJ and Dave's cocks before plenty of times but I've never been that close to any of them naked, it was funny. Going out into the actual room wasn't as funny.

DAVE (guitar): The gig was odd at first, but then I just forgot about being naked. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

PJ: It actually felt quite normal and comfortable. It was all a bit too easy actually.

STUART: It was really good fun, and the weirdest thing about it was that it wasn't really weird. Maybe I should have felt weirder. The only thing I was conscious of was that I didn't want to turn my back on the audience and bend over. I don't know if that's normally something I would even do. But I was consciously not doing that.

ELIZA: I thought it was fabulous. Bad Guys are great musicians, and I think this made the performance wittier, it was like a riff on the culture of the life room and rock all in one. I liked how many people actually got into it; they were drawing away like crazy. They were drawing and dancing at the same time.

PJ: People didn't focus on the penises as much as I thought they would. When I did life drawing, I'd always get suckered into drawing really detailed vaginas, and the rest of the body would just be a blob. It seemed to be the other way round with this.

VICTORIA (illustrator - victoriasin.co.uk): I used to do a lot of life drawing classes in Toronto. It was a bit difficult to take this seriously as they were moving around a lot, I knew it wouldn't turn out exactly like them. I tried to get as much of their likeness as I could. You get an arm from this pose, a leg from this pose. Dave I made look too friendly, I think. But I think it turned out well.

SHEHZAD (illustrator - thrux-sketch.blogspot.com): I just drew automatically, I wasn't even looking at what I was doing. It was a mess of bald heads and cocks, just men on top of men, movement lines. I can't say I like what I drew, but it was fun.

ELIZA: The RA has a fascinating archive going back to 1768 when it was founded. The archivist, Mark Pomeroy, is very keen to preserve some of the ephemera from the Schools, and I hope to get a film of the gig into the archive. Bad Guys and their flaccid cocks will be there forever.

ALEX GODFREY