//Annie Frost Nicholson with the Fandangoe Discoteca. Pic courtesy of anniefrostnicholson.com//

Next week sees the opening at London’s Canary Wharf of artist Annie Frost Nicholson’s Fandangoe Discoteca, the mini-disco installation where we can shake out our grief and help maintain daily mental health – the programme covers all intersections of grief from bereavement to climate angst to political rage to break-ups.

The design of the kiosk was inspired by De Stijl and Ettore Sottsass and holds up to eight dancers at a time.

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Tags: Amy Taylor, Annie Frost Nicholson, Black Star Liner, Bonzai, Canary Wharf, Dorothy, Fandagoe Discoteca, Guru, Harris Elliott Studio, Horace Andy, Inner City, Joe Smooth, Kid Loco, KLF, Lara Haworth, Le Tigre, Lil Yachty, Linnet Kamala, Mura Masa, Pet Shop Boyts, Raissa Pardini, Rebel MC, Rom Boyd, Stephe Hause, The Fall, The Fandangoe Kid, Timothy Wang, Viagra Boys, Wire

The new interiors magazine TON – the first issue is out now –  has two pieces by me on very different but equally extraordinary homes.

TON’s founder and editor-in-chief Jermaine Gallacher – who works with art director Rory Gleeson and editorial director Ted Stansfield – commissioned me to write about Dave Baby’s apartment close to where we both live, in south London’s Stockwell.

As I write, ‘this otherworldly space represents a bewitching realm of desires, sexuality and esoterica with Dave at the maelstrom’s centre, a still figure dispensing wily wit and charm’.

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Tags: Celeste, Christopher Nemeth, Clare de Rouen, Dave Baby, Derek Jarman, House Of Beauty & Culture, Ischia, Jermaine Gallacher, John Maybury, Judy Blame, Luchino Visconti, Mark Lebon, Reference Point, Rory Gleeson, Roxy Lee, Ted Stansfield

//The opening spread of my piece, with images from In The Gutter. Left: Pleasant Gehman, right: Caroline Coon//

//The new issue of MacGuffin//

I’ve returned to the excellent MacGuffin magazine with a piece in their latest issue, which adopts the theme ‘The Chain’.

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Tags: Belmacz, Caroline Coon, Diana Pfammatter, Ernst van der Hoeven, IN The Gutter, Julia Muggenburg, Kirsten Algera, Pleasant Gehman

//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.

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Tags: 112 Chambers Street, Fluxus, Gakushuin University, George Maciunas, Get Back, Inventing Downtown, John Cage, John Lennon, La Monte Young, Marcel DUchamp, Melissa Rachleff, Painting To Be Stepped On, Sarah Lawrence College, Simone Forti, the Beatles, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono

A Box Of Bubbles is the special edition of the forthcoming book The Wild World of Barney Bubbles.

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Tags: Do It Yourself, Galactic Tarot, Glastonbury Fayre, Hankie Pantie, Hawkwind, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, IT, Revelations, There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards, X In Search Of Space

British artist Paul Kindersley has produced a bewitching small publication which is available now from his Twitter account.

Shipwreck Of The Fake Fairies is 12 pages with 10 b&w illustrations and continues the themes of Kinderley’s recent work, including the performances Fake Fairy Fantasies and Ship Of Fools and his film The Burning Baby.

Limited to 100 in A5 format on 300gsm paper, each is signed and hand numbered.

Copies of Shipwreck Of The Fake Fairies are £10 each inc p&p.

For yours DM Kindersley at twitter.com/PaulKindersley.

Tags: Paul Kindersley, Ship Of Fools, Shipwreck Of The Fake Fairies, The Burning Baby

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.

Tags: Instagram, James Jackson, Robert Rubbish

//The postcard, which measures 230 x 150mm (6 x 9in), is printed in a numbered limited edition of 150//

“Fashion seemed to be the place where music and art came together. Creating my own clothes was like jumping into the musical end of painting. The shop became a natural extension of my studio.”
Malcolm McLaren. The Look, 2001.

Featuring a rare portrait of Malcolm McLaren displaying his wares inside the recently opened Let It Rock in January 1972, this limited edition large-size postcard is a companion to my biography of the man published earlier this year.

The photograph on the front of the card was taken by the late David Parkinson, who documented the refurb of  the premises at 430 King’s Road carried out by McLaren and his art school friend Patrick Casey; the address had previously housed Trevor Myles’ Americana boutique Paradise Garage.

//The postcard arrives clad in black, McLaren’s favourite anti-colour. “Black expressed the denunciation of the frill,” he wrote in the introduction to my book The Look//

The card shows McLaren revealing the detail on a flamboyant drape jacket made to his design by the East End tailor Sid Green, while he is surrounded by the accessories and ephemera which constituted Let It Rock’s environmental installation. Against the black walls, Day-glo socks from Whitechapel wholesaler Kornbluth vie with Frederick Starke red rockabilly shirts, Sun Records 45s, French rocksploitation movie posters and deadstock clothing.

It makes for a beguiling image: the 25-year-old – then still legally Malcolm Edwards – is caught making the leap from art school to fashion retailing by, as he later described it, “jumping into the musical end of painting”.

Limited edition numbered postcard hand-numbered and printed 4/1 col. offset on 350gsm single sided board stock, trimmed to size.

Printing: Something Else.

Price: £12.50 each or £20 for 2. P+P: £5 UK, £10 rest of the world. All postage with tracking and/or signature.

Payment via PayPal to this address.

I’m happy to sign cards on request.

Tags: David Parkinson, Frederick Starke, Patrick Casey, Something Else, Sun Records, Trevor myles

//From The Times, July 29, 1966. Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//

The late Malcolm McLaren made his first national media appearance in a 250-word item on the Law Report page of The Times in the summer of 1966.

This is an extract from my biography The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren:

In 1966 while he was attending a painting course at Chelsea College of Art, Malcolm McLaren – who had been forced to take his step-father’s surname Edwards a few years earlier – came under the influence of Stan, a fellow student whose last name is lost to memory.

“Stan was a Trotskyist who played a mean jazz saxophone and politicised Malcolm,” says Fred Vermorel, a friend of McLaren’s who had been at Harrow art school with him a couple of years previously.

For McLaren, radical politics opened up a world of possibilities when entwined with his investigations into art. Encouraged and initially accompanied by Stan, McLaren began attending rallies and demonstrations protesting on behalf of the causes célèbres of the day: against the war in Vietnam and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Long gone were the polite CND parades peopled by earnest chaplains and fresh-faced Home Counties youth in duffel coats chanting Kumbaya. Taking their cue from the US uprisings such as that among the African American community on Chicago’s West Side, the British protestors of 1966 brought activism to new heights in direct confrontation with the authorities. A turning point was the July central London rally calling for the British government to disassociate itself from US military policy in south-east Asia.

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Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Chelsea College Of Art, Fred Vermorel, Harrow school of art, Henry Adler, King Mob, Kumbaya, Malcolm Edwards, Mrs Gold, Stars & Stripes, The Times

//Flyer for Ludus performance at Cabaret Futura, London, 1981//

//One of two hand-painted t-shirts given to the author, depicting him and Linder’s sister Nettie in a lover’s embrace in 1983. No reproduction without permission//

On the eve of the opening of Linderism, a new exhibition by the great contemporary artist Linder, I’m publishing a guest post by a follower of this blog who, like many, was introduced to her work via the sleeve artwork for Buzzcocks’ 1977 single Orgasm Addict.

“To me, it was punk for the eyes rather than the ears,” writes the contributor, who has asked for anonymity and was a 17-year-old school-leaver living in south London at the time.

He went on to forge a connection with Linder by following her post-punk group Ludus and encountered many in her circle, including the pre-Smiths Steven Morrissey.

Here he tells his story and shows a selection of the artworks Linder gave him:

The message I received from the Orgasm Addict sleeve was: “Think A.N.Other way. See it as it is”. A few months later I purchased The Secret Public, Linder’s print collaboration with Jon Savage.  Again I’d never seen anything like it, hardcore pornographic imagery redirected into a cocktail of consumerist lust.

//Back page of The Secret Public, Linder + Jon Savage, 1978//

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Tags: 101 Club, Buzzcocks, Cabaret Futura, Cargo Studios, Charles Hawtrey, Christina Birrer, Clapham, Howard Devoto, Jon Savage, Kettle's Yard, Linder, Linder Sterling, Ludus, Magazine, Manchester, Orgasm Addict, Psychedelic Furs, Rafters, Real Life, Richard Strange, Rochdale, Secret Public, She/She, Steven Morrissey, The Hacienda, The Lyceum, The Secret Public, The Smiths, Whalley Range