//From the presentation for tomorrow’s event//
Tomorrow I’ll be talking to interiors, homewares and textile designer Sue Timney about the fashion legacy of the King’s Road, the two-and-a-half mile thoroughfare in west London’s Chelsea where the late Mary Quant kicked off the boutique boom by opening her clothes shop Bazaar at 135a in 1955.
When he launched the small-format 32-page song sheet The Melody Maker in 1926, Tin Pan Alley music publisher Lawrence Wright sparked the media revolution that created the music press.
This multi-million pound business eventually straddled the Atlantic and simultaneously proved a fertile breeding ground for generations of writers, photographers, film-makers and performers who made their mark in the wider world.
Everyone from Bob Geldof, Chrissie Hynde and Neil Tennant to Danny Baker, Caroline Coon, Julie Burchill, Barbara Ellen, Caitlin Moran, Miranda Sawyer and movie directors Cameron Crowe and Anton Corbijn (and even Michael Winner) cut their teeth on music magazines such as Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Rolling Stone, ZigZag and Smash Hits.
//Ellen Willis, c. 1970. Photograph: Ellen Willis’s family//
One of the narrative threads of my book Totally Wired: The Rise & Fall of the Music Press – which is published in paperback next week – traces the ways in which women writers have been forced to fight long and hard against white male dominance of the field.
//Gloria Stavers photographs Jim Morrison 1967. Photographer: Unknown//
This process was kicked off in the 1950s by Gloria Stavers, who transformed the US teen scene as editor and photographer at the huge-selling 16 magazine and went on to champion the likes of the Beatles and others in the 60s on her own terms: while she recognised the charisma of The Doors’ Jim Morrison, she was also his equal and lover.
//Lillian Roxon, mid-1960s. Photo by unknown, Fairfax Archives//
I have known the Arts & Crafts connoisseur, collector and dealer Paul Reeves since the early Noughties when I approached him for the second edition of my fashion x music book The Look; Paul’s previous career as a designer took in such important 60s and 70s labels and boutiques as Sam Pig In Love, Alkasura and The Universal Witness.
From the off we got on like a house on fire and became firm friends; he was a major contributor to my Tommy Roberts book and the ever-generous Paul has often hosted Caz and I at his wonderful Wiltshire farmhouse.
I’ll be joining contemporary music magazines including Disco Pogo and Ambit Pop at a celebration of the music press then and now at London’s premier magazine outlet Magculture a week on Thursday (October 27).
Magculture currently stocks a dozen music magazines, so is the appropriate place to talk about the past, the present and the future of the media sector which has spawned so many exciting publications as well as writers, designers, photographers and editors.
Starting at 6.30pm, I’ll be discussing the themes raised in my book Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press with magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie,and then we’ll be joined by editors including Paul Benney of Disco Pogo (and also co-founder of 90s mag Jockey Slut) and Kirsty Allison of Ambit + Ambit Pop.
Details and tickets for the event are available here.
//Interior of the first Fiorucci boutique, Galleria Passerella, Milan, 1972//
I am extremely grateful to artist and designer Paul Walters for his gift of dozens of issues of Design magazine dating to the dawn of the 1970s.
These are being catalogued and added to the collection I already have of the title; some were donated by Paul’s fellow artist and designer Steve Thomas a few years ago.
Design was founded in the mid-60s by the Design Council precursor the Council of Industrial Design, and back issues are a goldmine of visuals and text about most aspects of the design world, from interiors, posters and packaging to product innovation, architecture and popular culture.
//The report on the store opening in Design, December 1972//
I’m going to post a selection of stories that have caught my eye over the coming months, starting with the image at the top of the post: a rarely seen view inside Elio Fiorucci’s first boutique, which he opened in Milan’s Galleria Passerella in late 1972.
Fiorucci was much inspired, to put it politely, by Trevor Myles and Tommy Roberts’ pop-art fashion outlet Mr Freedom – which had gone out of business in the spring of 1972 – and commissioned artist Stan Peskett, who had produced murals for Roberts, to create a space which engaged customers with a similar energy: the yellow and red colour scheme was extended to the exposed piping and venting with insignia of sunrays emanating from fluffy clouds hovering over the clothing racks. Stan, who I interviewed a couple of years ago for my Malcolm McLaren biography, has described his interior for Fiorucci as ‘an installation’.
//Advert in Design, December 1972//
//Spread from fashion shoot featuring Mr Freedom designs, Nova October 1971//
Coincidentally, an ad in the same issue of Design featured an image of a model in Mr Freedom clothes which had appeared in Nova magazine the previous year. The advert was for the architecture and interiors publication Abitare, which continues to this day – see here.
I’m really jazzed about getting my hands on the first finished copy of Totally Wired, my history of the music press which is published by Thames & Hudson this autumn.
Designer Daniel Streat has done wonders with the day-the-world-turned-dayglo jacket concept and my choice of cover star Poly Styrene.
There are 60 or so illustrations, all magazines from my archive. The diversity reflects the content of the book, which covers the usual suspects – NME, Melody Maker, Rolling Stone – but will hopefully turn readers onto the unexpected and surprising, from Black Music and Collusion to WET, Ben Is Dead and Girlfrenzy.
Totally Wired is published in the UK and elsewhere on September 22 and in North America on November 29. It is available to order now from all good booksellers as well as my Bookshop page at uk.bookshop.org/shop/paulgorman or by clicking on this panel:
++ McLaren outside the empty Centre Point, spring 1979. Photo: Barry Plummer ++
Rare and exclusive images will be on display during the forthcoming event about the late Malcolm McLaren’s London life at Fora Soho on June 9.
//Painting To Be Stepped On, Yoko Ono, 1961. Photograph: George Maciunas//
“People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles, but I think the Beatles ruined her in many ways”
Anne Bean, artist, to The Guardian, 2021.
Saturated as mass culture has recently been by Get Backery, I note the lack of celebration for another significant anniversary: 70 years since Yoko Ono became the first female student to be accepted onto the philosophy course at Tokyo’s Gakushuin University in 1952.
As noted in Inventing Downtown, Melissa Rachleff’s incisive history of New York’s artist-run galleries from the early 50s to the mid-60s, Ono left Gakushuin after two terms to join her parents in Manhattan, where she promptly enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College to study poetry and composition.
London antique dealer James Jackson is currently presenting an Instagram exhibition of a folio of new works by the British artist Robert Rubbish.
Farfouiller dans Les Archives (Rummaging in the archives) consists of 10 original A3 artworks; James is posting one work daily on his IG account.
//The artist at bay//
“In the summer of 2019, I started making a collection of works inspired by stills from the French New Wave films I was watching,” explains Rubbish. “They are mostly of couples in cafes; I liked the idea of juxtaposing words onto them like subtitles, using 1980s pop song lyrics.
//”I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you”. Robert Rubbish, 2021//
“The text was translated from English to French using Googletranslate. The results became profound, existential (or profoundly existential?) and sometimes absurd.”
Jackson has exhibited Rubbish’s work previously at his premises in Fulham, west London. “Robert will return with an old school gallery type exhibition of new and inspired works at James Jackson in Lillie Rd as and when circumstances allow,” adds Jackson.
Enjoy the show here.
| Paul Gorman is a writer. This is his blog: art, books, conversation, cults, dancing, design, encounters, environments, events, film, galleries, groups, individuals, invitations, magazines, music, opinions, performance, photography, places, press, privacy, spaces, style, thoughts + views. |
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