Angie Stardust

Mel "Angie Stardust" Michaels (1939 – October 21, 2007) was an American singer, actress, and drag artist of the 1950s and 1960s and the first black star of New York's Club 82. She was also the manager of Hamburg, Germany's first all-male strip club, Crazy Boys, and was the founder and proprietor of Angie's Nightclub in Schmidts Tivoli Theatre.

Stardust died on October 21, 2007, at the age of 67–68.

Early life Stardust was born in Norfolk, Virginia

Career Stardust performed at the Jewel Box Revue and Club 82, both in New York City. She was one of the first drag stars to take female hormones, an act she was scorned for at the time, Two of her co-stars were Jayne County and Tara O'Hara. By 1994, the venue was regarded as "one of the best places to hear free-form jazz." and came to be known as the Big Mama of Soul, as she was known for singing soul, jazz, pop, and musical theater standards. In 1997 she recorded a version of Stephen Stills' "Love the One You're With" backed by Hamburg blues band Shanghai'd Gutz, at M.O.B. Tonstudio in Hamburg, with engineer Horst "Hobi" Siewert and American producer Daniel Liston Keller. Only a few hundred copies were released on Keller and Siewert's AlgoRhythm Recordings. Annually since 2008, Angie's Nightclub has been one of the participating venues for Hamburg's Reeperbahn Festival. Acts have included Skinny Lister, Mo Kenney, Ezra Furman, Kristoffer Ragnstam, Andreas Moe, Leyya, Louis Berry, George Cosby, Vita Bergen, Joel Culpepper, Conner Youngblood, Inna Modja, Bess Atwell, and others.

In 2017, Angie's Nightclub was still "one of the most popular clubs of Sankt Pauli’s night scene," according to the travel blog At 30,000 Feet.

Discography