//Courtney Love, backstage, Reading Festival, 1994. © Tom Sheehan//

Tom Sheehan may be known as a “rock photographer” – a déclassé term for any old snapper with access – but is really an exacting and highly adept portraitist who chooses musicians as his subjects because, put simply, music is his abiding passion.

I write as someone with the inside, having first encountered Sheehan in the late 70s glory days of one of the finest London pubs of our individually but carefully compiled experience, the eccentric Wickwood Tavern, situated in Camberwell’s Loughborough Junction, hosted by the glorious Syd and his pot boy Roy and populated by a wild and wonderful set of attendees from Mad Pat Collins to No Neck Neenan to George O’Dowd.

Right back then, when Sheehan was making his bones as a freelancer for Melody Maker and various record companies, his love for, and knowledge of, music knew no bounds. Consequently, as I devoured everything I could get my hands on at that age, I gained an education in the distaff likes of, say, John Cooper Clark or Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks.

We reconnected a couple of years ago; following Tom’s Instagram adventures is but one of the pleasures of falling back into Sheehan’s circle.

His current exhibition Analogue has been rightly acclaimed a success, and the run justifiably extended until December 17. If you’re in town do yourselves a favour and grab the chance to take in Sheehan’s cool, calm and collected body of work.

Analogue is at Lomography in Spitalfields – see here.

Visit tomsheehan.co.uk

Tags: Analogue, Courtney Love, Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks, George O'Dowd, John Cooper Clark, Lomography, Mad Pat Collins, No Neck Neenan, Radiohead, Tom Sheehan, Wickwood Tavern

//Gerry Visco in SEX Cowboys t-shirt and leather miniskirt, The Park Royal, NYC, 1976. © Bobby Busnach//

These captivating 70s images stem from the amazing photographic archive of New York DJ legend Bobby Busnach.

Many feature Busnach’s friend and muse, the fabulous writer/photographer/performer Gerry Visco, as well as the circles they moved in at NYC’s Park Royal Hotel, Boston disco/bar The Other Side and the nascent hip-hop scene in the South Bronx.

//Visco, Hillside Avenue,Boston, 1973. (c) Bobby Busnach//

//Donnie Ward, Hillside Avenue, 1974. © Bobby Busnach//

//Tony Roldan (centre) at the handball courts at 146th Street and Brook Avenue, the Bronx, 1976. © Bobby Busnach//

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Tags: Arisa, Bobby Busnach, Boston, Charles Jourdan, Donnie Ward, East Village, Fayja, Fiorucci, Gerry Visco, Ian's, Lyn Collins, MJ, Performa 13, Second Avenue, SEX, South Bronx, Stardust Memories, The Dakota, The Other Side, The Park Royal, Think About It, Tony Roldan, Tori Wrånes, Yes Nix

//One wall of the ShowStudio Punk exhibition//

In the period 1972-78 when the body of the partnership’s punk fashions were created, Malcolm McLaren’s art education and development as a largely conceptual visual artist was applied with Vivienne Westwood’s intuitive and sophisticated technical skills.

The resultant potency of the work was achieved by such factors as: balance in the proportions; deft use of juxtaposition; confidence in realisation; jarring harmony in the use of colour; wit in the application of motifs; and astute sense of framing, particularly of text and visual imagery.

Excerpt from introduction to my review of the McLaren/Westwood designs in the Costume Institute collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, summer 2013.

Precision, deftness, balance, harmony, these are terms unjustly omitted from the standard  critical lexicon applied to punk’s central design aesthetics as conceived and realised by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and their coterie.

Which is why Punk @ ShowStudio, the elegant exhibition which is now moving into its final week at photographer Nick Knight’s Belgravia gallery, is to be applauded, since it avoids the run-of-the-mill in favour of recognition of the importance of these qualities.

“I was very impressed. It was inspiring to see what I like to call ‘the origins of Punk’ as opposed to the usual well documented ‘greatest hits of Punk’,” the collector/archivist/author Paul Burgess wrote to me recently.

//Part of Judy Blame's contribution to the exhibition//

Read more about Punk @ ShowStudio here.

The exhibition is open every day 11am-6pm until Friday at 19 Motcomb Street, London SW1X 8LB.

Tags: Costume Institute, Judy Blame, Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Nick Knight, Seditionaries, SEX, Showstudio, Vivienne Westwood

//Olympia Le-Tan handbag based on artwork for The Damned's 1977 LP Music For Pleasure, with promotional t-shirt for Fred Burns' documentary Johnny Moped Basically using 1978 lightbulb design//

So potent is the creative legacy of the graphic design master Barney Bubbles – who died on this day 30 years ago – that he is continually cited as an inspiration by contemporary visual communicators, while his name and work is attached to all manner of endeavours.

Recently, Bubbles artworks were chosen by the French fashionista Olympia Le-Tan to lead her exclusive collection of handbags. Meantime Tokyo lifestyle label retaW has named a range of fragrance products “Barney*” in celebration of “the many album covers he was responsible for in the 70s and 80s”.

//Barney* products named after Bubbles by Japanese lifestyle company retaW//

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Tags: (I Love The Sound Of) Breaking Glass, Basically Johnny Moped, Blockhead logo, Brian Griffin, Chalkie Davies, Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Fred Burns, Ian Dury, Imperial Bedroom, Music For Pleasure, New Kids On The Block, Nick Lowe, Olympia-Le-Tan, retaW, Royal Photographic Society, Spasticus Autisticus, The Damned, The Photographers' Gallery

//Feature includes this Nick Logan self portrait//

The new issue of Arena Homme + features my interview with publishing legend Nick Logan, who founded the men’s fashion magazine 20 years ago.

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Tags: Alasdair McLellan, Arena, Arena Homme +, Ashley Heath, Brian Griffin, Juergen teller, Morrissey, NME, Smash Hits, Steven Klein, The Face

The intriguing new project from photographer Bradley Richards is Austerity Measures, a hand-bound and printed collection of observations taken in and around Canary Wharf, the capital’s business district and financial hub.

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Tags: Austerity measures, Box Brownie, Bradley Richards, Canary Wharf, Claire de Rouen, Kodak Tri-X, Somerset Black

Here’s a selection of photographs from the family photo album of Johnny Deluxe, one of my favourite unpindownable Londoners. Deluxe is an artist, clothes-maker, performer, raconteur and all-round individualist.

I’ll let him tell the story behind each.

This was taken in March or April 1978. I was wearing a Seditionaries Destroy t-shirt and Boy zip trousers, not quite bondage ones, just zips on the pockets, but super drainpipe in bright canvas. I was just about to go to France and be chased by French teddy boys. I got my hair cut at Alphonso’s in Oxford Road, Reading, an old boy’s barber where I asked for an “Elvis” and then hacked into it at home (Alphonso was too old for the modern stuff).

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Tags: Alice Clowes, Boy, Cowboys, Destroy, Johnny Deluxe, Jordan, Reading, Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood

//All photos (c) Jonathan Ross//

Here are more previously unpublished images from London’s punk demi-monde.

Coincident to receiving Joe Stevens’ photograph of the pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde and photographer Kate Simon in Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols Nude Boy shirts, collector/gallerist/Londoner Jonathan Ross supplied me with this fabulous selection of Polaroids taken at his west London house in the same period.

These include Hynde and Simon as well as their fellow Americans-about-town, the performers Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin and artist/tattooist Ruth Marten, writers Tamasin Day-Lewis and Jon Savage, Ross himself, his girlfriend Gina Louthan and Sir John Betjeman.

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Tags: Chrissie Hynde, Gina Louthan, John Betjeman, Jon Savage, Jonathan Ross, Judy Nylon, Kate Simon, Patti Palladin, Ruth Marten, Tamasin Day-Lewis

//Photographer Kate Simon and performer Chrissie Hynde (lifting the front of her mohair jumper from Sex), London, 1976. (c) Joe Stevens//

This photograph – taken by Joe Stevens in early 1976 in Fulham, west London – is featured in the exhibition Just Chaos!, which opens tomorrow (May 7) at Marc Jacobs’ Bleecker Street NYC bookstore BookMarc.

The T-shirts worn by Simon and Hynde were among the first variants of a limited edition designed by Malcolm McLaren to promote the newly formed Sex Pistols. A few were also sold in Sex, the environmental installation/shop operated by McLaren with Vivienne Westwood at 430 King’s Road in World’s End, Chelsea.

“Malcolm dropped the shirts off at my Finborough Road studio; they were freshly silk-screened from a limited edition,” says Stevens, then working for the NME and living with Simon (who was employed by rival music paper Sounds). “Chrissie was living in a squat and cleaning offices for a living. She’d drop by the pad to take showers. I’d hear her singing in there and realised she had a wonderful voice.”

McLaren produced the designs with the express aim of promoting the new group. “This was my first attempt at making a Sex Pistols T-shirt,” he told me in 2006. “I wanted to create something of a stir.”

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Tags: bernie Rhodes, Bleecker Street, Bob Gruen, BookMarc, Boys Express, Chrissie Hynde, Fulham, Glen Matlock, Godlis, Hans Herbert Hubermahl, Joe Stevens, Kate Simon, Lee Black Childers, Marc Jacobs, SEX, Sex Pistols, The Clash, Vivienne Westwood

//Kenny putting on make up, Nan Goldin, Boston, 1973 //

Perhaps it is a matter of displacement – that slippery moment when art becomes commerce, shifting back again into the cultural arena as another kind of commodity. The fact is, even today, few among us are willing to acknowledge that certain mass culture forms and practices may comprise the most significant ‘culture’ of our time, precisely because of their ‘popular’ characteristics.

Marcia Tucker and William Olander, New Museum Of Contemporary Art, 1988.

In the 25 years since Tucker and Olander made this statement, the displacement they sought to define has become, if anything, more slippery.

For this reason alone, Liverpool Tate curator Darren Pih must be applauded for negotiating such tricky waters with Glam! The Performance Of Style, the exhibition he has curated in an attempt to locate the early 70s glam-rock phenomenon in the context not just of a certain area of artistic practice of the period but also more broadly the interplay between “high” and mass culture.

//Fashion spread featuring Mr Freedom and Ossie Clark designs, Nova, May 1970 //

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Tags: Candy Darling, Darren Pih, Glam!, John MacManus, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Marcia Tucker, Nan Goldin, Nova, Ossie Clark, Peter Hujar, Tate Liverpool, Trevor myles, William Olander