‘Lucian Freud was thrilled when Leigh Bowery stripped naked’: how a wild club kid became the great painter’s muse

When outrageous clubbers Sue Tilley and Bowery posed for the eminent artist, some of the most spectacular portraits of the century were born. Tilley talks about sex, cash and Bowery’s untimely death

‘Leigh would have been livid that it wasn’t a painting of him that broke the record,” says Sue Tilley with a laugh. She’s talking about the £17.2m paid by Roman Abramovich in 2008 for a Lucian Freud nude of her, called Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. It was then the highest price ever paid for work by a living artist and Tilley thinks Leigh Bowery, the fashion icon and performance artist, would have found a way to claim the credit. After all, it was Bowery, her great friend, who got her the modelling job.

Tilley is now repaying the debt by telling the Australian’s story in a new edition of her book Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, featuring never-before-seen photos and an extra chapter on his legacy. You can’t really understand Bowery – his looks, his performances, his club Taboo, his band Minty – without thinking about Freud. The artist’s naked paintings of Bowery and Tilley are today’s equivalents of the great nudes of the western artistic canon. When he painted these two larger than life people in the 1990s, Freud had finally found subjects who could unlock his full and thrilling mastery of the human form, its flesh and its spirit. Yet, says Tilley, Bowery was not so much muse as collaborator, guiding the older man into preserving him and his friends on canvas.