Sex: Too Fast Too Love Too Young Too Die

Toward the end of last year I chanced upon the news that one of my favourite CD compilations was finally getting the deluxe vinyl treatment, Marco Pirroni’s 2003 collection of jukebox picks from 430 King’s Road. The mix of British RnR (Vince Taylor, Lord Sutch, Joe Meek), Beat (Troggs), Freakbeat (The Creation), a slew of 60s Nuggets, (Spades, Sonics, Strangeloves, Castaways, Count Five), some classic RnB (Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, Arthur Alexander, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) is filtered by the more contempary sounds of Alice Cooper’s ‘Eighteen, Flamin’ Groovies’ ‘Shake Some Action’ and The Modern Lovers ‘Roadrunner’, and then topped off by Johnny Hallyday and Loretta Lynn. It’s not a particularly eclectic blend, or maybe that’s just hindsight provided by living in a post-Nuggets world and the fact that that so many of the featured bands and tracks came to have an importance in 1976/77 – dj’d at gigs and one or other of the tracks covered by just about any wannabe band moving out of the nation’s youth clubs and into the city. Still, I’m left asking where McLaren found a copy of The Spades (pre-Thirteenth Floor Elevators) ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’/’We Sell Soul’, both sides featured here. Originals go for four-figure numbers these days, though it did get booted circa 1976. Perhaps he got a repro copy from Marc Zermati at his L’Open Market in Paris or at one of Ted Carroll’s Rock On outlets?

The track selection on Sex isn’t that distinct from that offered on the 2008 Ace CD that celebrates Carroll’s shops and market stores. There’s nothing on that set that McLaren wouldn’t have approved of, including as it does Jerry Byrne’s ‘Lights Out’ that forms one side of the bonus 45 that comes with the first 1000 copies of the new vinyl edition (the flip is Ian Hunter’s sublime ‘Once Bitten, Twice Shy’). The difference is that the Ace CD has less of the English part of the equation, and none of the camp asides that Sutch, Meek, Hallyday, Lynn and Jackie and The Starlites provided on the Sex jukebox. Rock On has that very British addiction to a certain strand of authenticity, that still appeals to me, but it was one that McLaren eventually rejected when he dumped the Teddy Boy clientele and the fifties retro mode and, post his encounters with the New York Dolls, switched to Sex and the Sex Pistols.

1973 album of RnR covers by anonymous session musicians, but does credit the stylist – ‘Clothes: Courtesy of “Let It Rock” 430 Kings Road London’. Who are the models, because I bet they never drank at the Black Raven?

The deluxe vinyl edition with the bonus 45 can only be bought from Hackney’s Stranger than Paradise, a store named after one of my most beloved of films. Here. Perhaps they’ll also release on vinyl Marco Pirroni’s other two Only Lovers Left Alive collections Granny Takes a Trip: Conversation’s Dead, Man and Biba; Champagne and Novocaine.

John Peel Helps The Who Sell Out

You can see the whole disruptive dynamic of the band on display here. Other than that, the best part is when Townshend talks about the difference between record buyers and a live audience. His observation is up there with Jean-Paul Sartre when, after a visit to the States in 1946, he explained how the top ten was not a representation of any one’s taste:

. . . if he listens to the radio every Saturday and if he can afford to buy every week's No 1 record, he will end up with the record collection of the Other, that is to say, the collection of no-one

A Band With Built-In Hate

Dust jacket ahoy! Book should be in the shops in March.

With impressive eloquence, A Band with Built-in Hate situates '60s Britain's most volatile and incendiary group at the heart of pop's wild vortex, its sonic assaults on the class system and the cultural status quo. Stanfield digs brilliantly into the Who's transgressions, their up-ending of entertainment, their transmuting of pop music into art-rock and proto-punk. He can see for miles.

— Barney Hoskyns, author of Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits and Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion

The best book on the Who. Stanfield understands that they were built entirely around opposition - they didn’t want to be the Beatles or the Stones; they didn’t even want to be the Who most of the time. He smartly states the case for peak Who as transgressive, how their clashing obsessions with primitive rock’n’roll and sociological statements made them so exciting. He also wisely concentrates on their peak years, before pop solidified as rock, when the Who were the closest thing to pop art British music has ever produced.’

— Bob Stanley, founding member of St Etienne and author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop

Marc Bolan Likes Chet Baker

A 1972 Record Mirror Special introduces the ‘real Marc Bolan’, and interviews his mum and dad to boot. Tracking through his biography, from his appearances in Town magazine to around the release of Electric Warrior, the Special offers a fine selection of archive photographs and titbits from old press releases, including the following used to promote ‘Hippy Gumbo’:

Marc Likes: £9000 cars. Marc Dislikes: £8,000 cars. Taste in Music: Rock and roll and Chet Baker. ‘I’ve never heard Chet Baker, but he looks great. I have all his album covers’.

Spoken like a true Mod.

The Fall – from Manchester to Memphis

Rock ‘n’ roll speaks in a secret language; its gnomic prayers and coded lamentations passed on from one disciple to another, which is why Bob Dylan posed with albums by Lotte Lenya, Ravi Shankar, The Impressions, Eric Von Schmidt and Robert Johnson on the sleeve of Bringing It All Back Home. Frankly, no one had to work hard to decipher the meaning Dylan wanted to set in train with that set of references. Mark E. Smith was no less adroit in his ability to speak in tongues, though truth be told his objects of devotion had escaped me for the best part of four decades; revealing themselves only after a recent binge on the band’s early catalogue.

Hiding in plain sight for all these years, up in the top left hand corner on the rear of Grotesque (After the Gramme) – part of a collage of snaps of the band – Smith stands next to a Pickwick Records spinner rack (liberated from the street outside Salford’s Radio Rentals, I’ll wager). On view is Elvis’s 40 Greatest Hits (inc. 18 #1s), released on the budget Arcade label in 1974 and at the time, and for years after, utterly ubiquitous. Above Elvis is a Charly Records compilation of Charlie Feathers’ 50s sides, Rockabilly’s Main Man – released a year before Grotesque in 1979 – a cult taste moving up fast into the mainstream courtesy of such disparate proselytisers of the new beat as Crazy Cavan and The Cramps . ‘Rockabilly is a hot sound just now’, wrote Martin Hawkins in his sleeve notes, ‘and getting hotter’. On top of the spinner stack is Tav Falco and the Panther Burns debut release; a self-produced EP that in 1980 would have been known only to a very small handful of initiates and hip priests.

The EP had zero distribution outside of Memphis and a first pressing of only 250 copies. I suspect Geoff Travis gave Smith a copy of the disc, which he would have obtained while negotiating and preparing the release on Rough Trade of Panther Burns’ album Behind the Magnolia Curtain the following year. Smith must have thought he’d found a fellow traveller in Tav Falco, who was also pushing the rattle n’ throb of rockabilly as far away from the revivalists as you could possibly get. His record could function as a touchstone for The Fall, and certainly worth putting at the top (or bottom) of a Memphis hierarchy. Beholden to Elvis, The Fall and Panther Burns are the true spiritual heirs to Charlie ‘One Hand Loose’ Feathers – fiery jacks one and all.

Marc Bolan Uses Fenjal Bath Oil

Marc is wearing a print crépe shirt, £6; satin print blazer, £20; satin stripe trousers, £5.50, all from Alkasura. He uses Onyx aftershave, £1.20 and Onyx shaving foam, 95p., by Lentheric. Fenjal bath oil, 49p.

Club ( a ‘gentleman’s magazine’) ran a feature called ‘Who Wears What’ in their December 1971 edition, Kenny Everett, Legs Larry Smith, David Hockney and Chelsea stiker Chris Garland found themselves pitted against Marc Bolan. They didn’t stand a chance. . . Bolan, still philosphically a Mod, said ‘The way I dress is only for me . . . Sometimes I spend a couple of thousand pounds on clothes . . .’

Chris 'Lick' Spedding – 1972

If Chris Spedding had never done anything more than record Motor Bikin’ he’d still be alright with me. In my pantheon he ranks not just for the spade work he did with Bryan Ferry on Let’s Stick Together and John Cale on Helen of Troy but also for his oversight of the first Sex Pistols and Cramps demos. A player with style and attitude to spare, I have a near complete collection of his RAK sides but, excepting the superlative 45 on Island, ‘My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It’, I never thought to bother much with his earlier lone efforts.  His pre-1975 solo releases have zero critical cache but as his 1972 Harvest LP, The Only Lick I Know,  was available for less than £15 on eBay (I was the only bidder), and I liked the sleeve, I took a punt.

The art work, put together by Bob Cotton, belongs to a subset of the 1970s retro cutie airbrush genre (roll down to Feb. 2020). On the front, Bazooka Joe and spunking phallic symbols are slapped over a chorus line of long limbed gals. On the rear,  behind the image of our hero and the album’s credits is a collage of 1940s/50s American porn comic strip figures of the kind that Mick Farren and J. Edward Barker would litter the pages of IT with and that the latter used on some of his sleeves for the Pink Fairies and a Red Lightnin’ blues album (roll down to May 2019). The music is none to shoddy either, Honky Tonk Blues has a great guitar solo and his own composition Don’t Leave Me should have merited a John Cale cover version. All said, not at all the deary prog rock prospect I was led to expect. Nor is it a truly tasty set of rock ‘n’ pop sides as found on his best album Hurt (1977)

Bob Cotton was also responsible for this plate of retro cutie for the UA label (click on the RnR Revival tag to see the series this LP belonged to)

Spedding shows style and attitude galore on the sleeve for Motor Bikin’

Spanish pic sleeve

From a Swedish poster magazine overpriced on eBay

The above images show how to use a jukebox to capture that 50s into 70s feel without looking like a deadbeat. . . Here’s how not to do it:

Yakety Yak . . . looking like the Skegness holiday camp answer to Sha Na Na

And cool as Mud . . .

Mod RIP: Nik Cohn – Ready Steady Gone.

Outside of Pete Townshend and the Who, Nik Cohn’s favourite topic in the 1960s was the Mod phenomenon, so it was a buzz to find this August 1967 article on the death of the youth cult, freshly killed by 10,000 flower-children.

Cohn thought Mod was an entirely new concept of youth, unlike Teds, for example, they owed nothing to past generations; ithey weren’t concerned with adult opinion. Teds revolted against their parents because they wanted to claim a masculinity; boys wanting to be men. Mod wasn’t rebellious in this way, because the boys were ‘unmasculine’. They wore make up, constantly changed their clothes and ‘completely rejected women’. Anyone over the age of 25 wasn’t alive and they weren’t inspired by Hollywood, which is to say America.

They had no heroes but themselves and they produced their whole litany out of nothing. . . They were exquisite, self-involved and undemonstrative.

‘Mod was a ‘very homosexual thing’, a 19 year-old Marc Bolan said of the scene he helped make happen five years earlier:

The music and the dancing and the scooters and pills came later. I’d say that Mod was mentally a very homosexual thing, though not in a physical sense. I was too hung up on myself to be interested in anyone else and, anyhow, I was still very young.

But Cohn doesn’t leave it there, he thinks the homosexual element was a working-class co-option of the old public school attitude to sex . . . ‘Later, it became very fashionable for Mods to go to bed with famous show-business queers and take money for it. . . Homosexuality was accepted, respected and completely assimilated into Mod life.’

Marc Bolan aka Mark Feld was among the prototypes, Chris Covill, 21, from Shepherd’s Bush, is a second generation Mod, (pictured top right). He told Cohn about the Crawdaddy Club and seeing the Stones every week, about money spent on clothes, on going out and on pills. He spoke about the action on Hastings’ beach and the emergence of the false Mod.

You can imagine Covill as a kind of model for Cohn’s hero in Saturday Night Fever:

Mod used to be something serious – now it’s been taken over by a lot of silly children. You see them in their old leather coats, green or red, and they’re all sick. Everything stands still and the point is gone.

Covill said he been working hard and had ‘met a lot of people in pop and I’ve got myself on to a good scene.’ Cohn doesn’t let on who in pop Covill is making out with, nor is there much about Feld’s transformation into Bolan, except to say in passing that he is a singer and songwriter who has made a few records but not had any hits.

By August 1967 Bolan had quit John’s Children and had formed Tyrannosaurus Rex (see Cohn on their first single and Bolan’s history here) . I haven’t found much on Covill, but Andy Ellison, in an interview published on the John’s Children website, says he was one of their roadies and hung out with them. And Cohn once had a ten percent share in John’s Children. The rest was owned by Simon Napier-Bell, or at least a large portion. He is thus the absent-presence in all of this.

 A month earlier, in a July 1967 survey of the ‘Love Generation’ in Queen magazine, Napier-Bell had told Cohn:

 One lives from day to day trying not to be bored. The things one does to avoid this boredom depend on one’s degree of intelligence. Intelligent and creative people have to do the most extreme things and, therefore they often seem outrageous.

17 year-old Geoff McGill, another Mod from Shepherd’s Bush, stood in for Cohn’s third generation of Mods, he ‘represents the Face at its most bored.’ Meanwhile, no one is listening to Covill’s ‘nostalgic stories about the battles of Brighton and Hastings, the 15-years-olds don’t understand and aren’t interested. Already, the fanatic young days of Mod have become as distant as past wars are always bound to be.’

Boredom, boredom, b’dum b’dum . . .

Marc Bolan – Let Me Sleep Beside You

‘All the lunacy and merchandising things going on around me are seldom anything to do with me. I mean, Bolan pillows! Please, people, it’s nothing to do with me.’

Marc Bolan to Keith Altham, NME (September 30, 1972)

I’m guessing then that Bolan didn’t have shares in the Jeepster Jean Co. . . Satin loons. . . and he effectively nixed the release of Simon Napier-Bell’s set of old demos, Hard On Love, for Track. Great poster, however, which uses John’s Children era images. The single, ‘Jasper C. Debussy’ saw the light of day in 1974, along with the album that was subsequently retitled as The Beginning of Doves. Hard On Love was the better title, I reckon . . . I get the double-entendre of the original but I haven’t got a clue what ‘beginning of doves’ means . . .

John 'Speedy' Keen and His Girlfriend's Dildo

The retro graphic attracted my attention to this 1973 advert in NME for John ‘Speedy’ Keen’s latest 45, but it was the dildo to her right that made me laugh. Sometimes, Track Records really do seem like the precursor to Stiff.

Who was the illustrator ‘N.R.’?

And Who Is Terry Stamp?

Single of the month, sort of, in Cream (UK), August 1971, for the 2nd Third World War 45. James Hamilton wrote:

Terry is the mouthpiece of an aggressively working class group called Third World War, who in a so far rather small way have become notorious for their somewhat simplistic sloganeering. They are recognised less for the music they make , which is noisy yet very original, and has a definite ‘sound’ of its own. Their latest single is great fun, not at all controversial, and, as they realised in retrospect , a sly dig at the blanketing anaemia of ‘Country Rock’. It is accurately titled ‘A Little Bit of Urban Rock (Fly BUG 11), it is very tough and gritty, it lasts for over four minutes, and it moves like the clappers throughout.

Fuck yeah! And with a killer live pic to boot . . .

French pic sleeve release

The New York Dolls in the Denim Age

Here, for your delectation, are two images never before juxtaposed: the New York Dolls and a crowded rock festival that is being used to market jeans, both 1974. You wanna know why the Dolls were so important? I think this juxtaposition says it all.

Landlubber were an American company, the advert is from the back of Creem January 1974. I wasn’t familar with the brand, but they were sold in the UK.

I never owned a pair of bell bottoms but I did wear Skinners . . .

In the January ‘74 issue of Creem, their fashion correspondent, Lisa Robinson, reported on her recent visit to Paris and the city’s obsession with denim, which was generally more expensive and better cut than Landlubbers, she wrote, but Parisians were also wearing good looking but poorly made in Spain Lois jeans. The worst aspect of French street fashion she found was the vogue for U.S. college sweatshirts. Oh well, French taste and all that. Meanwhile, the Parisians had shifted their fascination with decadent Americana in shape of the Velvet Underground in favour of the New York Dolls. Anticipation was high for the band’s December Olympia gigs.

Staying with the denim theme her piece is illustrated with four images from the ‘Denim Art Show at the Serendipity in NYC. Included in the exhibit are the jeans James Dean died in (who knew he wore flares?) that are now owned by Jackie Curtis, David Bowie’s rhinestone codpiece and Bruce Lee’s Death Jacket. Second panel below offers three hand pained denim jackets featuring movie stars. The one at the bottom of the frame, Marilyn, should be familiar to anyone who spent too much of their youth staring at the rear cover (above) of the Dolls second album. In his memoir Sylvain wrote that the image on the jacket is of Johanson’s girlfriend, Cyrinda Foxe, not Marilyn as everyone thinks, but this suggests he’s got it wrong: a one-off either way

I can’t make out the artist’s signature but the date is ‘73.

Iggy and Elton Take CREEM In Their Coffee

I’ve recently acquired a few issues of Creem circa 1971-75 that between their glossy covers are deteriorating as fast as any 50 year-old British inky. I never read the magazine back in the day, I doubt it could have been readily found in Hemel Hempstead’s newsagents, but since those faraway days it has taken on something of a mythic status, hosting, as it did, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw and on occasion Nick Tosches and Greil Marcus. It also, I was surprised to discover, gave fairly regular space for pieces by British writers, mostly from the NME, like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray. There was a regular column, ‘Letter from Britain’ from the always entertaining Simon Frith, whose singles reviews in Let It Rock easily rivalled his American equivalent, Juke Box Jury, that Greg Shaw put together for Creem and for his own magazine, Bomp.

To some extent the magazine lives up to its reputation, it has a terrific sense of community, between the writers most obviously, but also between them and their readers, which was something NME tried to emulate. But what the British weeklies did much better than their monthly American cousin was to create a sense of an unfolding narrative. NME and Melody Maker pulled their readers into the heat of the action, you can see this clearly in the reporting on and around Bowie throughout 1972, each new move he made was eagerly anticipated, reported on and responded to. The music papers produced a remarkable feeling of immediacy (and intimacy). By contrast Creem is all reaction, everything has already happened. It features last month’s story, NME and MM were about tomorrow.

An exemption to the lack of the future tense in Creem is the coverage afforded to the figure of Iggy Pop who runs loose and fast across a number of the issues I have, often he appears as just a note on what he’s doing in London or Hollywood but always with anticipation that he is about to deliver and in doing so change the very fabric of rock culture. Must have been frustrating as hell to have been a proselytiser for the Stooges back in those days, because, at least in retrospect, Iggy was always going to disappoint.

In the news stub above, from January 1974, Iggy is sharing coffee and donuts with Elton John while the Stooges are undertaking a week’s engagement at Richard’s in Atlanta, Georgia. One of those shows was recorded and released in the deluxe Raw Power box from a few years ago and were witnessed by James ‘The Hound’ Marshall, who has written about his teenage road trip from New York to Georgia to see the band [here]. Elton sat through two shows, appearing on stage during one of them in a gorilla costume. He said of Iggy, “I simply can’t understand why he’s not a huge star.’  

He should have asked Pete Townshend, he sure knew why Iggy was never gonna clean up. In the same issue he’s interviewed by CSM about Quadrophenia as well as things like Bowie’s Pinups and the overlaps between the two albums, especially as they relate to rock history and rock stars. On the latter, some of CSM’s colleagues think stars should conform to the image of a noble savage. Inevitably, then, Iggy is raised as a sort of exemplar of the type and the conversation skirts around whether he might appeal to the kid in the ‘Punk and Godfather’. Townshend thinks not. Songs aimed at teenagers need to contain ‘a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a fifteen or sixteen year-old . . . But someone like Iggy and the Stooges couldn’t grasp that if they stood on their heads, because inside they’re old men.’ Now that’s an image worth pondering over . . .

Rock 'n' Roll Penthouse

It may not be by Hipgnosis, but the above is my favorite sleeve from the early 1970s. It perfectly encapsulates 1972 and the rock ‘n’ roll rumble. 10 years later and pop cult sholars would be looking at The Face and writing essays about bricolage and the post-modern, but it was already afoot a decade and more before. Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here To Stay is all about the iconography of youth culture collapsing in on itself – late 1960s American custom choppers, the early 1960s Parisian blonde sex kitten look and, of the moment, London Ted style with 1950’s applique courtesy of Let It Rock. All surface and no depth: a signifiying monkey. How pleased I was then to discover a couple of German variations, which are all the better for checking out the Ted’s opulent waistcoat and the model’s ability to get almost completely prone without toppling off the bike (and she’s wearing neat platforms to boot)

The cover conception is credited to Pierre Tubbs (great Anglo-French name), photography is by Bryce Attewell, who I presume had fairly steady work at UA as he also took the photos of Brinsley Schwarz on their Dave Edmund produced classic, New Favorites Of (1974), but that’s about all I know. I know even less about the Teddy Boy, though with that hair and those sideburns I presume he was the real thing. As for the BB impersonator I was, until recently, equally ignorant, but in my pursuit of the lost short fiction of Mick Farren (see here) I stumbled across this 1972 edition of Penthouse; she is rather unmissable. Her name, if you believe anything written in the editorial that accompanies glamour spreads, is Karen McCook, 20 years old and a daughter of San Francisco. She was photographed by David Jonathan

Karen’s Penthouse cover image made a hit not only with me, 48 years after the fact, but also with whoever did the marketing for Stoke-On-Trent’s Heavy Steam Machine discotheque, NME classifieds November 1972. PoMo or just plain-old plagiarism?

Those keen to follow Karen’s traces a little further might Google ‘Susan Shaw’ and ‘Mona Solomon’

You Can’t Put Your Arms Round A New York Doll

Paul Gorman’s biography of Malcolm McLaren is a thing of wonder, monumental in size and scope; a definitive account of the man. I burned through its 800-odd pages but paid especial attention to the King’s Road years. His account of Let It Rock and McLaren’s amour fou with Teddy Boy rock ’n’ roll is without parallel, a brilliant encapsulation of the 70’s resurrection shuffle.

His story of McLaren’s interaction with the New York Dolls is also the most authoritative that we have and are likely to get. In Sylvain Sylvain’s memoir he claimed to have first met McLaren in New York in 1971, bought clothes from him and Westwood when they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He’s emphatic that their paths first crossed in the spring of that year. He chides others who said it must have been the summer of 1973, he gives his evidence, which all sounds reasonable enough. But as Gorman makes clear in a footnote, that Spring 1971 date is impossible because McLaren was still a student at Goldsmiths and Westwood was still a teacher. Who you gonna believe? Well, not Sylvain who later writes about the halcyon days of 1972, when the Dolls were conquering Manhattan, that he has ‘no idea today of the chronology, if indeed I ever did.’

Even if he spends too much time disputing song writing credits and contesting who was responsible for what, Sylvain’s autobiography is a funfair ride, a pleasure to read, but he is an unreliable witness. That said,  Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane is even worse. For all its undoubted charm, his memoir is full of misremembered events, half-recalled occurrences, forgetfulness and simple errors. None of which is surprising as Arthur was pretty much out of it throughout the band’s whole existence. His is a story of an alcoholic stumbling from one blackout to another, from one bad hangover to next, from a desperate and ever on-going search for a bottle and oblivion. His time in the Dolls reads like a nightmare, a delirium tremens. The bitterness he feels towards his management team (and toward Johansen) is palpable at times, he fumes away at being left to deal with things on his own, yet they could hardly take responsibility for his addictions, his acts of self-destruction.

Kane’s time spent in England recording demos in Kent, playing support to the Faces at Wembley and Billy Doll’s sad demise in a bath tub in SW7 is little more than a drunk’s set of impressions, albeit a compelling read. When not recording or travelling to one cancelled gig or barely remembered show, the Dolls hung out at the Speakeasy. One night, the band rouse themselves to get up on its stage and bang out a couple of numbers. A drunk loudly and boorishly heckles them: ‘He kept screaming and cursing at us as we tried to finish one of our songs. He was loud, totally obnoxious, and completely distracting’.  The rowdy is Mick Farren.

I couldn’t recall if Farren had mentioned the incident in his memoir, Give the Anarchist A Cigarette, but it’s my favourite autobiography of the 60s and 70s scene, so I was happy to return to it and perform a little detective work. In the past I’ve probably given it too much credence when it comes to questions of fact and veracity, but I know better now. I already knew that Farren had misremembered some things, such as reporting that Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges played together on the same night’s bill at the King’s Cross Cinema in July 1972, but that sort of error is easily forgivable – amphetamine psychosis, or too much to drink, or even just the passing of time, can collapse two shows into one, especially when they were only 24 hours apart. But, on the following page, he loses not a day but a whole year, a good 12 months. There’s no mention of his harassment of the Dolls at the Speakeasy, but he was there to watch them at Wembley:

The Dolls set was interesting is so far as bass player Arthur Kane was dressed as a ballerina, but they had very obviously never played to an audience of more than 300 and were lost in front of 13,000 Faces fans in the cavernous and echoing auditorium.

Never mind, because a few days later they are playing Biba’s Rainbow Room and making a lot more sense: ‘They had clearly returned to the Deviants’ ethic that rock ’n’ roll should not be the exclusive preserve of virtuoso players.’ You can’t argue with that, or at least I wouldn’t, but the Dolls played Wembley on 29th October 1972 and Biba’s on 26th and 27th November 1973.

If you want to know what happened and McLaren was involved, you can trust Paul Gorman, and if you want a great read about how pop culture shifted and changed across the course of McLaren’s 30 odd years of stirring it up then I can think of no better guide either.

Retro-cuties – airbrushing the 50s into the 1970s

A significant trend during the early 1970s in the cover design for reissued 1950s recordings was to wrap them in a vibrant cartoon sleeve featuring teenage girls slurping on overflowing sodas or sticking their butt in the air. 50s teen iconography – saddle back shoes, rolled cuffed Levis, over-rouged lips and pony tails are all there with jukebox and soda fountain used as backdrops. It’s a cute sell but one that is unequivacably sexualised. Teen innocence is but a masquerade for more prurient adult action.

Tipped off by Paul Gorman’s blog [here], I’ve been browsing through early editions of Paul Raymond’s Club International skin mag, circa 1972-75. Among the attractions on offer are some of the era’s best illustrators, many of whom worked on album designs, including Bowie and Bolan’s chum George Underwood. NTA Studio is prominently featured, as is photography from Hipgnosis who frequently collaborated with the Studio’s illustrators, eg. Be Bop Deluxe’s Futurama. NTA’s Bob Lawrie, George Hardie and Bush Hollyhead were used regularly by Club International, including this illustration that accompanied an article on cinema going

Hollyhead and Club International were clearly uninterested in any ambiguity in the cartoon’s depiction of 50s teen activities. When NTA dropped out, Mike Farrell’s illustrations were regularly featured in their stead. He’s the artist responsible for the Bo Diddley and Billy Stewart albums shown above. Farrell did some arresting photo montages for the magazine but here’s a fairly typical illustration. The girl might come straight from the pages of Eerie or Creepy horror comics.

ROLL UP, folks, for the great pop strip

The People, Sunday September 21, 1969, p. 5.

The Deviants rip it up in Hyde Park and in the process get to titilate sunday tabloid readers.

Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman described to Deviants’ biographer, Rich Deakin, the impact of first seeing the band:

From the bottom up, he’s got his Acme cowboy boots on, he’s got his leather trousers on, he’s got his yellow Ben Sherman shirt open to the waist and an enormous great studded belt, and hair that gone completely fucking Hendrix liker  . . . and then some. And he just looked . . . you know? . . . this huge broken nose, and he can’t sing a note in tune,, and it was the most fearsome thing the pair of us had ever seen in our lives, and we looked at each other and went, ‘Maaan! What have we let ourselves in for?’

Revolution in Abbey Wood – White Panthers on the Prowl

International Times #127 (Aporil 6, 1972)

The revolution will be dressed by Levis.

We bring our music to our communities with revolutionary, high-energy bands like the Pink Fairies. Our life style becomes our politics, our politics our lifestyle.

Who are these well-dressed young men? I’m guessing one is John Carding, who put his name to the report as co-ordinator White Panther Party UK.

Photo by Phil Stringer

Jiving at the 2i's with the Cosh Boys

Cosh Boy (1953) is among the new dual format sets from the celebrated BFI Flipside series and its another terrific addition. Like so many Flipsides, the attraction is as much with the extras as the main feature. Of especial interest for me was the 1956 8 minute report from ITV’s This Week programme on the Teddy Boy. Before R ’n’ R had corrupted Britain’s youth, working-class Mike Wood from Hounslow showed a fondness for jazz and a hair style called ‘be-bop’. The cut and perm made a nice set with his barely formed goatee.

With hair done just right, Mike takes his girl to the Flamingo where they dance to The Tony Kinsey Quartet.

Filmed 5 years later, the 22 minute short film by Robert Hartford-Davis, Stranger in the City tracks around London from morning to night. To modern eyes, the Big Smoke seems uncannily empty but as night falls the streets begin to fill up with cars and pedestrians. Outside the 2i’s coffee bar two teenagers jive to the new rock ‘n’ roll they hear in their heads.

Like the images of the Soho strip clubs seen earlier in the film, juveniles loitering in caffeine joints are now firmly part of the city’s attractions. Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo had put both into mainstream cinema two years earlier.

Who are these jiving cats illuminated by the 2i’s window? One is instantly recognisable as Paul Raven, Decca recording star. He was born with the name Paul Gadd but we know him as Gary Glitter. He looks like Sid Vicious before the drugs hollowed out his cheeks.

Who’s the other, better looking lad? Vince Eager maybe? I dunno. Whatever, a great little film and a great find by Flipside.

Addendum

Rob Finnis got in touch and identified Paul Ravens’ mate: as the ‘one hit wonder Lance Fortune, who scored with 'Be Mine' in late 1959. His real name was Chris Morris and he hailed from Liverpool. Incidentally, Hartford-Davis discovered and managed Paul Raven and got him his first record deal in 1960 which, I guess, is why he makes an appearance in the short.’

Thanks Rob.

From the Underground: Joy and Mick Farren

Published in early 1969, Queen magazine ran a set of interviews conducted by Jenny Fabian with the leading lights of London’s underground. Among the contenders who answered her questions and sat for photographer Clive Arrowsmith was designer John Goodchild, DJ Jeff Dexter, dancers Mimi and Mouse and, advocate for those incarcerated on drug charges, Caroline Coon. She was also the issue’s fabulous cover star. Offering a leather clad contrast to this small gallery of hipsters are Joy and Mick Farren;

‘We don’t really know why we got married,’ says Joy, ‘because neither of us really believes in marriage.’

Mick, twenty-five, is leader of the Deviants, an extreme underground group who specialise in revolting. ‘We’re a nasty group, and now we’ve started to make a bit of money we’re getting nastier.’

 Held against the image of Jeff Dexter in his satin robe, Farren really does look like he lives and loves in the shadows. He couldn’t sing for shit (he called it ‘weird-ass atonal’), but he looked every bit the part.

Clive Arrowsmith is running the images from the shoot on his webpages [here] including some beautiful shots of Caroline Coon. Amusingly he doesn’t recall who the couple are – ‘a rock musician guy and his girlfriend’ who ‘epitimised hippy style of the moment’.