Artists and Comedians
Diane Chorley
Canvey Island
Diane Chorley was born in Canvey Island in the late 1960s, the daughter of a Hodd Carrier and a housewife. Her father was a silent, reflective man who spent his time shifting bricks across the windswept suburban landscape of the ´Sinking Isle´. Her mother was a hard woman whose hands resembled the texture of a dried out flannel and her teeth were the colour of cracknel. She dragged Diane into her early teens before she received a life sentence on the eve of Diane’s 16th Birthday. She had killed Diane’s Father upon discovering that he was having an affair with a Chiropodist from Billericay.
Diane was left to bring up her brother Wayne alone. Under this great weight of responsibility Diane flourished. Canvey in the early seventies was a hive of activity at the forefront of the ‘Northern Soul’ scene. With a mouth to feed she launched into business, becoming the soul provider of amphetamines, black bombers and Purple Hearts to the exotic youth that would flood in from all over England to this seaside paradise. This is where Diane learnt her trade, setting up around her a network of heavies and a respectable reputation within the drug dealing business. Before long Diane’s council flat was stone clad; they were the first on the estate to have a Betamax and the first in Canvey to watch ‘Romancing the Stone’. She sent Wayne to private school with the intention of removing him from the life that she had been forced to uphold.
With the opening of her club, ‘The Flick’, Diane became a huge celebrity, the UKs answer to Steve Rubel. The clubs success was, for a period, unrivalled, visited by the rich and famous of the 1980s - “We had a light up dance floor so bright it made a young Shane Richie snow blind”. She was the subject of fly-on-the-wall documentaries and the cover star of many glossy magazines including ´Smash hits´, ´Take a Break´ and ´Sainsbury´s Essentials´. Diane Chorley was a household name. She became a global brand and a chart topping success with songs like ‘Dagenham Eyes’ and ‘The Old Mud Flats of Canvey’, endorsed by brands like Pepsi and HP Sauce. Sadly at the height of her career, events (which due to legal reasons we are not permitted to share) led to Diane spending the recent days of her life in Prison. Now vindicated and cleared (unequivocally) of those actions, Diane returns with two exciting projects.
