CREDIT: COURTESY OF SUICIDEGIRLS
The Girls are coming back to London with an all-new show, which is sure to please and excite attendees.

Grab your friends, grab your lovers and leave your prudish inhibitions at the door, because the most popular burlesque performance in North American history is making a return to London.

The SuicideGirls: Blackheart Burlesque show is a steamy celebration of pop culture, alternative beauty and raw sexuality, and it will make its way to the London Music Hall April 18.

SuicideGirls co-founder and one of the show’s creators, Missy Suicide, described it as “pretty kickass.”

“It’s set to a really modern soundtrack, and the girls are doing some very cool dance moves,” she said.

She says the dancers are genuinely dancing and described the old brand as more of a tease.

“[The dancers] would prance between the numbers,” she said. “While we definitely take the sexy tease element – and a bit of the same feel – it’s a much more modern spin on it.”

After the whirlwind success of the initial Blackheart Burlesque, the girls came to the conclusion that it was a little too time consuming and decided to take a year off to focus on another project.

“The show was a lot of fun, but it was quite a bit of work, and we decided that we were going to take a season off and [write] a book,” Missy said. “Then we decided to make a movie so that kept getting pushed off and pushed off.”

She was able to pinpoint what it was that brought the show back to life.

“When we put out our third coffee table book Hard Girls: Soft Light last spring, we sent two of our girls on a book signing tour up the west coast,” she said. “We had a lineup of 500 to 750 people out the door just to get these two girls’ autographs, and we knew we could put on a much better show than that.”

Sitting just outside of the mainstream, SuicideGirls has been celebrating all that is beautiful in being different for over a decade, with its humble beginnings as an online pin up site – a small shadow of the Internet phenomenon that it has become.

“We have over 12 million fans on various social networks,” Missy said. “The increase in their popularity has definitely helped to increase our profile.”

Millions of photos have been submitted to the website over the years, with a chosen few selected to join the SG ranks based on a mix of personality, uniqueness, and of course, the raw sexuality that is needed to convey the required confidence on camera. Over half of the members of the website are in fact female, a somewhat surprising statistic for a website that focuses on image of nude women, but not one that surprises Missy.

“I think that the women on our site provide nude images yes, but they’re done in a very tasteful, beautiful way that you don’t often see in a lot of nude imagery and erotica.”

Despite the heart of the website consisting of the nude imagery that it was launched around, Missy credits the ability for members to join groups, read posts and subscribe to blogs based on an incredibly wide variety of topics, giving them the opportunity to interact with like-minded people across the world.

“All of our models keep blogs, and they can interact and find people who share their interests,” she said. “There really is a group for almost anything that you can imagine, and our members can meet and interact with others who share their interests.”

The groups and forums of SuicideGirls are not only a source of online friendships, they also have a real life effect for many members, something that Missy is extremely proud of.

“We’ve had hundreds of thousands of really tight friendships made, couples that have met and married, and now there are babies born because their parents met on SuicideGirls,” she said. “I think that extra connectivity is really strong.”

Many of the SuicideGirls are avid followers of alternative pursuits, with comic books and fantasy stories being a common topic among the websites blog posts. It is this vested interest in the geek world that is a driving force behind the Blackheart performance.

“We really want to bring the girls’ interest as well as our fans’ interests into the burlesque,” she said, describing most of the girls as extremely geeky. “Comic-Con is always our biggest event. All the girls are always asking to be the ones to go.”

As a lot of the cultural pursuits that a decade ago would have been considered out of the norm have become more mainstream, it widens the net of interest in the topics the SuicideGirls have always focused on, giving Missy great confidence for the future of her website.

“I think that people appreciating tattoos and our thoughtful, nerdy sort of culture is only a good thing. I hope that people still continue to grow with it and use SuicideGirls. There is always going to be outsider culture all over the world, and while we’ve become extremely popular with some demographics of it, there are plenty of people in the world who have still not heard of Suicide Girls.”

This one-of-a-kind performance is coming to London on April 18. Tickets are available at ticketmaster. com or blackheartburlesque.com.