I recently went down to Brompton Cemetery to help deliver a really beautiful ceremony and funeral for the fashion designer Pam Hogg. Over the past 30 years Pam had been coming North from her London base to hook up with her sister Angela and attend some of the huge environmental performances I was staging with arts company NVA, including the Path in Glen Lyon and the animation of the Old Man of Storr, on the Isle of Skye.
I was shocked like many people to hear that she was seriously ill last year and was incredibly honoured when she and Angela asked my late last Autumn if I would be Celebrant at her funeral when she passed away. That came all too soon in December,
So I found myself walking through the columns of angels to the stunning Brompton Chapel rotunda to conduct and truly heartfelt and caring ceremony for Pam. Her story is known to many, born in Paisley, she starting sewing and adapting hand me down family clothes from the age of six and never really looked back. She was released after a stint at Glasgow School of Art to run free with her design imagination making adapted clothes to appear at the Blitz Club in Camden in the early 80’s. Her remarkable outlandish, fetishistic creations attracted lots of attention and she started to get commissions, almost falling into being a fashion designer.
Years later she was doing her own Catwalk shows, stitching everything up to the last minute in situ, her stunning catsuits and other creations worn by the boldest of creative women, from Debbie Harry, to Siouxie, to Lady GaGa….an incredible range of clients. Pam herself was always creatively restless, equally at home fronting new bands as cutting new designs, but always a wild and compelling energy touching everything she did.
She was remembered beautifully with tributes from Angela, her soul mate and best friend, Rick Elwood the film maker who remembered a wild encounter with a Voodoo shop in Brasil, Bobby Gillespie who lost a close pal of 20 years standing, Arakis from Spain, fighting defiantly to establish Pam’s legacy.
There was singing by Tom Rasmussen, an incredibly pure and powerful falsetto rendition of Burn’s Red Red Rose and then a walk behind a hearse piped by my old Test Department companion Alistair Smith. Pam’s coffin was utterly unique a pale white bound torpedo shaped casket grown from live mycelium, the first of it’s type I]ve seen. So on a cold early January day, all her friends said there personal goodbyes at the graveside casting earthand rosemary strands down onto the coffin.
She was well remembered, well loved and given such a caring send-off to whatever comes next.
As a Celebrant with Celebrate People it is a day I will never forget.
