Riff Raff returning to old haunt

IN TOWN: Rocky Horror creator Richard O'Brien has "come home" to the Waikato for a holiday, with plans to return for good. (JEFF BRASS/Waikato Times)

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/waikatotimes/0,2106,2757125a6579,00.html
 
12 December 2003 
By INGER VOS

The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Richard O'Brien wants "to come again and stay".

"Cliche, yes I know," said O'Brien, about his plans to "come home" from London to paint and pot in four years' time.

The words "to come again and stay" are from the song I'm Going Home in O'Brien's musical and film about Frank'n'Furter, a sweet transvestite from transexual Transylvania.

O'Brien, who also stars in the film as the butler Riff Raff, immigrated to New Zealand from England with his family when he was 10 years old.

At 22, he returned to London to pursue a career in showbiz because he did not want to be a barber in Hamilton for the rest of his life.

Back in Hamilton this week, O'Brien, thin, in fawn, tight jeans and a white collared long-sleeved t-shirt, spoke about returning to New Zealand for good.

Plans have been drawn up for an American gothic barn house and stables on his white picket fenced 1ha section in Katikati.

But the 61-year-old scoffed at the words retiring. "I don't view anything I have done in my life as work anyway," said O'Brien.

He was a game show host for four years, starred in the films Dark City, Ever After - A Cinderella Story and Spice World, and as the Child Catcher in last year's West End stage show of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

But it was the Rocky Horror Show, which he wrote about 10 years after leaving New Zealand, that was his biggest success –- it is the most produced musical in Europe and audiences around the world still dress in drag for film screenings.

The show was inspired by late-night double features in the "flea-pit" Embassy Theatre in Hamilton.

The song, Whatever Happened to Saturday Night, was inspired by an evening as a "bodgie bastard" with greased hair and tight jeans at Hamilton lake.

O'Brien stops posing for photographs to bare his teeth and hurl provocative comments at an adolescent girl who jeers at him.

"It's funny –- people are quite prepared to give it, but they can't handle it when you give it back," he mused.

"All my life I've got funny looks from people... my devious character was certainly formed by the times I had in Hamilton."