Sapphira and Tonestepa are on a mission to make burlesque a household name

BURLESQUE lovers are celebrating 10 years of marriage on Saturday, but their relationship began when they were separated by many thousands of miles and oceans.

Antony and Priscilla Silcock, who go by their stage names Tonestepa and Sapphira, now live on the border of Holloway and Archway.

The couple will release a song, Sanctuary – an “ode to the bridge between Melbourne and Islington” – near where they first met in St Pancras, at a private event attended by the mayor of Islington, Cllr Anjna Khurana.

They told the Tribune how they met on the former social media platform Myspace when Sapphira came across a page for a music group that interested her, which was run by Tonestepa and his friend.

They chatted, wrote lyrics together and then progressed to eight-hour phone calls, speaking across time zones from Melbourne to Bristol.

“It was actually a very, very good way to start a relationship,” Sapphira said. “You can really fall in love like that because you’ve not really got a lot of the other physical trappings that confuse the relationship. It’s purely just connecting intellectually.”

Besides their love of music and burlesque, the pair bonded over their shared upbringing in the Brethren church, a separatist movement in Christianity that is “very basic and very strict”. They dis­covered this connection through Sapphira’s song­writing, which referred to biblical symbols like forbidden fruit.

Wedding day, 2014

“I felt from a very young age that the church didn’t really approve of my musicality and theatrics,” she said. “It became even more problematic, because there’s no premarital sex, and even considering anything linked to sexuality is highly frowned upon. And so when they found out that I’d had premarital sex I got kicked out of the church. It was very distressing because they were a family.”

Now Sapphira is able to express herself by producing burlesque shows, including a burlesque festival, with Tonestepa and writing music. “Burlesque is really freeing,” she said. “We believe that it’s changed my life and body confidence significantly and that’s our mission.”

She said they plan to make burlesque a household name like Zumba, and to remove its “seedy” connotations, adding: “Modern day burlesque is really reviving the art of the tease. It’s very sweet and kind of quite theatrical storytelling with an element of undressing and striptease to add a bit of comedy to the performance.”

But Sapphira was resistant to falling for her soon to be long-term creative partner and soulmate at first, having just come out of another long-distance relation­ship. She said: “I was like, I can’t do this. I’m not doing the London to Australia thing again. I tried to be in love with other people and have other relationships. And I told him we need to be sensible. We’re not young. He was mid-40s, and I was 38. It took four years to eventually go, ‘I can’t live without you’ – and now we’re inseparable.”

Eight months after she first pinged him a message on Myspace, she flew across the world to meet him for the first time. It was such a fairy tale,” she said. “It was in St Pancras, which we live 20 minutes away from now. We met and laid eyes on each other millimetres from the lovers’ statue. So every year we go there and we take a photo at the statue and we just drink champagne.

“We can’t believe this year is 10 years since tying the knot.”