//From Thames & Hudson’s July-December 2015 catalogue//

“As an artist Derek Boshier has never lost his sense of wonder at the world” – David Hockney

The publication date of Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-entry – the monograph of the great British artist I have edited – is confirmed as October 5.

Published by Thames & Hudson with a preface by David Hockney, Rethink/Re-entry contains 300-plus illustrations, from student exercises in the mid-50s to current works including the cover, a new portrait of Hockney and chapter openers especially designed by Boshier for the project.

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Tags: BBC Four, Chris Stephens, Christopher Finch, Courtauld Institute, David Bowie, David E. Brauer, David Hockney, Guy Brett, Jim Edwards, John A. Walker, Ken Russell, LIsa Tickner, Los Angeles, Middlesex University, Pop Goes The Easel, Royal College Of Art, Tate Britain, Texas, Thames & Hudson, What Do Artists Do All Day?, Women's Institute Of Houston, Zara Hayes

//Viva Hamnell at Glastonbury Festival, from Amanda Bluglass’s short Viva Punk Rebel//

//Viva Hamnell at Port Eliot Lit Fest 2006 with her daughter Jane and son-in-law Rik Gadsby modelling McLaren, Westwood and Reid punk designs for The Look//

//The crowd went wild and jogged the photographer’s elbow: onstage in this blurry shot with Viva in Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols Fuck Forever t-shirt, Port Eliot Lit Fest, 2006//

Punk had great freedom with no rules. I couldn’t sing, but I got up there and sung. It didn’t matter. You had to have the spirit and the energy.

Viva Hamnell, 2014

My first meeting with Viva Hamnell eight years ago was not untypical, I subsequently learnt.

74 at the time, she was viewing the various Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid designs I was co-opting friends and attendees at Port Eliot Lit Fest to model that year to illustrate an event for the newly published second edition of my book The Look.

//Hamnell goes about her Lollipop Lady duties in a 70s TV news item//

//Left in the 70s//

//Lining up with fellow members of The Bricks//

Having surveyed the Naked Cowboys, Mickie & Minnie and Snow White & Her Sir Punks, Viva plumped for Reid’s 1986 BOY t-shirt issue of his poster design for The Great Rock & Roll Swindle: Sex Pistols Fuck Forever set in flouro-pink.

And when she closed the show by strolling on stage wearing the shirt, the crowd naturally went wild.

Amanda Bluglass’s documentary portrait Viva Punk Rebel captures this indomitable rule-breaker, whose embracing of punk rock as a 43-year-old freshly divorced lollipop lady in 1976 set her on a life of adventure – taking in membership of Cornish punk band The Bricks and involvement in the Elephant Fayre and Lit Fest at St Germans and the Glastonbury Festival – which lasts unto this day.

Viva Viva!

Thanks to womenyoushouldknow.net for the link to Bluglass’s film.

Tags: Amanda Bluglass, Boy, Cornwall, Elephant Fayre, Glastonbury Festival, Jamie Reid, Jane Gadsby, Nake Cowboys, Port Eliot Lit Fest, Rik Gadsby, Sex Pistols Fuck Forever, Snow White & The Sir Punks, St Germans, The Bricks, The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, Viva Hamnell, Vivienne Westwood, womenyoushouldknow.net

//”She was an instigator and an enabler.” Boshier discusses Pauline Boty in Pop Go The Women//

Catch if you can Alistair Sooke’s excellent BBC documentary Pop Go The Women: The Other Story Of Pop Art. Derek Boshier – subject of my next book – is among the interviewees, talking about his contemporary Pauline Boty.

Her work, like the other subjects of the programme, has been neglected in the circumscribed narrative of Pop. In Boshier’s words, Boty is important, not least because she was “an instigator and an enabler” to the male artists who hog the story on both sides of the Atlantic.

//Boshier and Boty captured twisting in Ken Russell’s 1962 BBC documentary Pop Goes The Easel//

//Rosalyn Drexler. In the background her 1967 painting Marilyn Pursued by Death//

The film’s revelation for me is the American Rosalyn Drexler, whose art is identified convincingly by Sooke as “scathing, critical, strong and stern”. Pop Go The Women is available to view on BBC iPlayer for the next five days here.

Derek Boshier: Rethink/Re-Entry is published by Thames & Hudson next spring.

Tags: AListair Sooke, BBC, Ken Russell, Marilyn Pursued By Death, Pauline Boty, Pop Goes The Easel, Rethink/Re-entry, Rosalyn Drexler, Thames & Hudson

//Dread at the controls: Toby Amies. Photo: Sarah Lee//

A self-confessed exhibitionist who took the world for his stage and his life for art and theatre, a blank canvas on which to create and display himself without preconceptions or inhibitions. Heavily tattooed and pierced, with his thin waxed moustache jutting forth at a rakish angle, Drako Zarhazar was for many years a familiar figure around the Kemptown district of Brighton, striding forth with cape and cane, an aristocratic apparition who seemed emblematic of true transgressive bohemia.

The Quietus, 2013

This Sunday evening I’m hosting a q&a at London’s BFI with director Toby Amies after a screening of The Man Whose Mind Exploded, his valediction for the unique Drako Oho Zarhazar.

Come along, enjoy this incredible film and join in the conversation afterwards. Tickets are available here.

The Man Whose Mind Exploded is being screened as part of BFI Flare, the London LGBT Film Festival.

Tags: BFI, BFI FLare, Brighton, Drako Oho Zarhazar, Kemptown, LGBT, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, The Quietus, Toby Amies

On Sunday March 30 I’ll be hosting a Q&A with film director Toby Amies (above right) after a screening at the BFI of The Man Whose Mind Exploded, Amies’ heart-rending documentary of the life of the extraordinary Drako  Zarharzar (above left).

We’ll be talking about Amies’ relationship with Drako, who died during the making of the film, and the often-fraught path documentarists tread between exploitation and celebration.

Other relevant matters, including the here and now, brain damage, memories, love, faith, cocks and nipples, may well crop up.

Come along, enjoy the film and join in; it will be a splendid way to spend a Sunday evening. Tickets here.

The Man Whose Mind Exploded is being screened as part of BFI Flare, the London LGBT Film Festival.

Tags: BFI, BFI FLare, Drako Zarhazar, London LGBT Film Festival, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, Toby Amies

//Flyer for The Rock n Roll Show printed on the back of a subscription form for Oz magazine, July 1972. The Move were replaced by lead member Roy Wood’s new band Wizzard; this was their first gig. Original Brit-rocker Heinz was added to the bill; his backing band would soon become Dr Feelgood//

I acquired my first underground press publications in the summer of 1972, at about the point when the sector was taking the nosedive from which it never recovered.

Still, better late than Sharon Tate, as they say. Aged 12, my taste had been whetted by sneak peeks at an older brother’s collection of magazines when a guy called Kevin O’Keefe who lived down the road gave me a few copies of Oz, including number 43, the July issue.

A few weeks later, to my astonishment, the newsagents in Hendon’s Church Road started stocking Frendz. I folded issue 33 between a couple of music papers and pored over it in my bedroom.

//Front cover of OZ 43, the issue which included the Wembley flyer//

//Front cover, Frendz 33, September 1972//

//Crowds around the Let It Rock stand. From the 1973 film London Rock N Roll Show directed by Peter Clifton//

Neither of the magazines are shining examples of the genre, but they had something in common: the centre spread of OZ 43 contained a subscription form back-printed with a flyer for the London Rock N Roll Show, a one-day festival of original 50s acts and those who could claim kinship held at Wembley Stadium on August 5 that year.

And for me the most beguiling article in Frendz 33 was a two-page stream-of-consciousness report of the event filed by one Douglas Gordon and illustrated with photographs by Pennie Smith, soon to leave for the NME and carve out her reputation as one of rock photography’s all-time greats.

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Tags: 1972, Chuck Berry, Douglas Gordon, Dr Feelgood, Evening Standard, Fats Domino, Fred "Sonic" Smith, Frendz, Gary Glitter, Geoffrey Aquilina Ross, Granny Takes A trip, Heinz, Hunky Dory, Ian Bodenham, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, London Rock N Roll Show, MC5, Oz, Pennie Smith., Peter Clifton, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, Vivienne Westwood, Wembley Stadium, Wizzard, Yvonne Gold

“Do you know what? I was a no-hoper. Prison was a possibility, you know, an absolute possibility for me. It was probably 50:50 whether I’d end up there or not.

“I was considered a failure. I left school, no qualifications, at 15. I’d come bottom of the class in several subjects. I’d gone from one job to another. I was seen as a drifter within my family, so now I wasn’t going to screw this up.

“If I was going to do this I was going to really do it, because this was the one thing from very young that I knew I was good at. And I’d kind of gone off the path, I’d tried to be like everyone else, I’d tried doing the things I thought I was supposed to do, that other people wanted me to do, and failed at all of them.

“So this meant everything to me really.

“Probably meant too much, you know?

“There it is.”

Kevin Rowland, 2014.

Centred on Dexys’ 2013 residency at London’s Duke Of York’s Theatre and the group’s One Day I’m Going To Soar album, Nowhere Is Home will premier in May.

Tags: Dexys, Duke of York's Theatre, Heavenly Films, Kevin Rowland, Kieran Evans, One Day I'm Going To Soar, Paul Kelly, This Is What She's Like

//Vivienne Westwood in felt Inside Out Jacket with assistants Debbie Wilson and Michael Collins in Seditionaries, 1977//

While updating his rich and varied archive, photographer Homer Sykes came across these superb photographs taken inside Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Seditionaries at 430 King’s Road in the spring of 1977.

The images capture the air of raw uncertainty surrounding the shop and the McLaren/Westwood coterie in this period. McLaren’s charges the Sex Pistols had recently been signed to their third record company in six months – Virgin Records – after being publicly excoriated for their behaviour and bounced out of EMI and A&M. The national media had seized upon punk as a source of sensationalism and the release of the Pistols’ explosive God Save The Queen was a matter of weeks away.

//Debbie Wilson (aka Debbie Juvenile) sports Hangman Jumper, Seditionaries, 1977. Note the studded Venus Top and leather jacket on the wall behind the counter//

//Westwood expounding against the photographic mural of Dresden after WW2 air-raids, Seditionaries, 1977. Note Collins’ Cambridge Rapist design produced by Westwood’s partner Malcolm McLaren a couple of years earlier//

//Behind the customer in black bondage jacket is the wall-size inverted photographic mural of Piccadilly Circus, Seditionaries, 1977//

On Saturday August 20 1977 Sykes again took to the King’s Road to document the atmosphere of unrest embodied by the outbreaks of violence caused by marauding Teddy Boys targeting punks and such boutiques as Seditionaries and Boy.

//Young Ted bops while another’s jacket mourns Elvis Presley’s recent death, King’s Road, 1977//

//Musician/actor Gary Holton and girlfriend Tracy Boyle lead a demonstration against violence between Teds and Punks along the King’s Road. Far left is punk Mick Bladder//

Some of his photographs feature the punk Mick Bladder, whose arrest on that day in August 1977 was featured in Wolfgang Büld’s Punk In London. This documentary  shows how the movement’s initial creative burst swiftly dissipated, while Sykes’ images capture the ways in which a cult movement had entered the mainstream, infiltrating the media, music, fashion and the wider culture.

Sykes’ archive covers the waterfront, from social unrest including the Notting Hill Carnival riot of 1976 and the riots in Toxteth and Brixton in the early 80s, to the on-the-road antics of Paul McCartney & Wings and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the New Romantic haven the Blitz club, Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World and Quentin Crisp . Visit www.homersykes.com.

Tags: A&M, Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World, Boy, Cambridge Rapist, Debbie Juvenile, Debbie Wilson, Elvis Presley, EMI, God Save The Queen, Hangman Jumper, Homer Sykes, Michael Collins, Paul McCartney, Quentin Crisp, Seditionaries, Sex Pistols, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Virgin Records, Vivienne Westwood, Wings

Here’s a cure for year-end cookie-cutter rock-doc fatigue.

Basically Johnny Moped, Fred Burns’ exemplary documentary about Paul Halford (aka punk rocker Johnny Moped), has been selected for a week of screenings at London’s ICA.

The mini-season kicks off next Tuesday night with a post-film chat and q&a with Moped conducted by Burns.

Tickets available here.

Find out more about the film here.

Tags: Basically Johnny Moped, Fred Burns, ICA, Johnny Moped, Paul Halford

//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