//The Roebuck, 354 Kings Road, 1976.//

Thanks to Neal Purvis for alerting me to these captivating photographs taken in London in the hot summer of 1976 by German holidaymaker Klaus Hiltscher.

As Neal points out, Hiltscher captures the mood of the city in that specific period; I don’t believe my recall is playing tricks on me when I write that every day – from May through to September – was glorious in terms of the weather, and more often than not eventful in a variety of ways.

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Tags: Antiquarius, Gary Craze, Jean Machine, Jeff Kwintner, John Simons, Johnny Rotten, King's Road, Klaus Hiltscher, Malcolm McLaren, Meeny's, Neal Purvis, Sex Pistols, The Pheasantry, The Roebuck, The Squire Shop, You're Gonna Wake Up

Thirty four years ago today The Heartbreakers played The Speakeasy.

The rock business haunt north of Oxford Circus had seen better times by this gig. I was taken by a member, a photographer at the agency where I worked. I remember being embarrassed by his long hair.

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Tags: 1977, Erica Echenberg, Gail Higgins, Johnny Thunders, Lee Black Childers, Margaret Street, The heartbreakers, The Roxy, The Speakeasy

Bob Gruen + Nadya Beck’s All Dolled Up is a cast-iron rock-doc.

For three years in the early 70s they toted new-fangled video equipment trailing the New York Dolls, capturing fab performances, photo-shoots, media encounters, backstage delirium, fan interviews, even dancing at Rodney Bingenheimer’s E Club (the precursor to his English Disco).

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Tags: Arthur Kane, Bob Gruen, David Johansen, Johnny Thunders, Max's Kansas City, Nadya Beck, Rodney Bingenheimer, Sable Starr, Sylvain Sylvain

Last week I recovered this from the back pocket of a pair of trousers; a page torn from a copy of Mojo found on the tube a few months back.

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Tags: James Hamilton, Just Kids, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rod Stewart, Vali Myers

This portrait of David Bowie was taken by Kate Simon at Olympic recording studios in Barnes, west London, on January 14, 1974.

Simon’s photograph captures a man on the cusp; furiously occupied in the studio, Bowie was tying up loose ends ahead of his departure for America 10 weeks later. He hasn’t lived in Britain since.

Three days before this was taken, Bowie’s production job on Lulu’s version of The Man Who Sold The World was released as a single. Applying himself to finishing Diamond Dogs, Bowie also recorded such eventually unreleased tracks as Take It Right (to become Right, a “plastic soul”  anthem on Young Americans) and a try-out of Bruce Springsteen’s Growin’ Up.

Sessions with vocal trio The Astronettes – including paramour Ava Cherry – had proved inconclusive, though an olive branch recently extended to erstwhile producer Tony Visconti soon bore fruit in the form of renewed collaboration.

A month after the shot was taken, Rebel Rebel was released ahead of the marathon US touring schedule over 1974/5 which marked the severing of business relations with Tony Defries and the faltering of his marriage to Angie.

I wanted to talk to Simon about the stories behind this image and others which deliver an emotional charge yet retain the reportage stance of the cool documentarist.

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Tags: Any Day Now, Bill Brandt, Caroline Coon, Dave Fudger, David Bowie, David Hearn, Diamond Dogs, Disc & Music Echo, Elton John, Gary Glitter, Joe Strummer, Jonh Ingham, Josef Kourdelka, Kate Simon, Kevin Cann, leonard Freed, Mick Jones, Olympic, Paul Simonon, Rod Stewart, Sex Pistols, Sounds, Stomu Yamashta, The Astronettes, The Clash, Tony Defries

Ian Dury sent this letter to Roberta Bayley in May 1977.

As the late songsmith’s biographer Will Birch explains here, Dury was just a few months away from achieving nationwide fame.

Tags: Davey Payne, Denise Roudette, Humphrey Ocean, Ian Dury, Peter Blake, Roberta Bayley, Stiff Records, Vic Sweeney, Will Birch, Wreckless Eric

This is Gore Vidal’s Olivetti Lettera, one of a series of photographs of the great man of American letters, as well as some of the artefacts in his study, by Hedi Slimane.

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Tags: 1971, Dick Cavett, Gore Vidal, Hedi Slimane, Janet Flanner, New Yorker, Norman Mailer, Olivetti, The Naked And The Dead

//Steve Jones, Unknown, Alan Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, Vivienne Westwood. Photo: David Dagley/Rex Features.//

SEX became a magical place.  People spent hours there; no one wanted to leave.  In it, I created a feeling that was both euphoric and hysterical. You felt an enormous range of possibilities – that whatever was happening couldn’t be predicted, but it was a movement toward a place unknown.

Malcolm McLaren, Musical Paintings [JRP Ringier 2008].

One of the most prescient pieces published about 430 King’s Road in its incarnation as SEX appeared, appropriately enough, in sex magazine Forum in the mid-70s.

And, after more than 35 years, I’ve tracked down the writer and the photographer who, for the first time anywhere, recall the revolutionary retail environment and the sexually-charged photo-shoot featuring future Sex Pistol Steve Jones, performer Chrissie Hynde, radical shop assistant Jordan, film-writer Alan Jones and, of course, Vivienne Westwood.

The feature appeared in the June 1976 issue of the magazine and was written by expat American Forum staffer Len Richmond, later to pen hit British sitcom Agony and Three’s Company (the US version of the UK’s Man About The House). The photographer was Chelsea-based freelance David Dagley.

“In 1973 I’d arrived in the UK from San Francisco with 300 bucks in my pocket and found that I could work as a journalist because nobody cared about whether I had a green card,” explains Richmond down the line from Los Angeles.

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Tags: 1975, Agony, Alan Jones, Atomage, Chrissie Hynde, David Dagley, John Sutcliffe, Jordan, Len Richmond, Malcolm McLaren, SEX, Sex Pistols, Steve Jones, tits tee, Vivienne Westwood

Maggs has issued a scratch catalogue of William Burroughs’ photographs of London 1972 – 1974.

These are hand-made prints produced a few years ago from the original negatives and are conservation-framed and glazed.

Here are some more pages from the catalogue:

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Tags: Carl Williams, Duke Street, Maggs Bros, William Burroughs