The Return Of The Saint: Cameo by The Saints at The Marquee and Shinny in Seditionaries
//Shinobu Kanai aka “Shinny” in a Seditionaries top in Episode 9 of the first series of The Return Of The Saint, broadcast November 1978?//
//Kanai in The Great Rock N Roll Swindle, 1980//
// As “Japanese Woman” in the opening sequence of Insignificance, 1985//
Currently doing the rounds of the punk groups on various social networking sites is this clip from the cheesy 70s revival of classic 60s British television series The Saint.
Entitled The Arrangement, episode nine of The Return Of The Saint was broadcast on November 5, 1978 and starred such UK TV drama stalwarts as Carolyn Seymour, seen here looking glam in a car in Soho’s Wardour Street outside The Marquee where the great Aussie band The Saints are crashing through Swing For The Crime from their Eternally Yours album.
The plot-line in this section revolves around the arrival at the club of a punk girl; unusually for the period televisually, she is sartorially correct, in a Seditionaries skull mohair muslin-style top with swastika patch. Also on view is a punter in a Barney Bubbles’ designed If It Ain’t Stiff It Ain’t Worth A Fuck t-shirt.
//John Lydon, left, in Seditionaries skull + swastika mohair top with the rest of the Sex Pistols, 1977. Photo: Bob Gruen. www.bobgruen.com//
The actress in Seditionaries is Shinobu Kanai, known as Shinny and an afficianado of McLaren/Westwood designs.
Kanai was the partner of Hull mid-70s band Dead Fingers Talk’s frontman Bobo Pheonix (otherwise Rob Eunson) and was prominent on the scene as being one of the few Japanese punk fans in London at the time. She associated with Julien Temple and appeared in a sequence of The Great Rock N Roll Swindle with Steve Jones (performing the post-Rotten Sex Pistols song Lonely Boy).
Kanai was also keyboard player in Pheonix’s short-lived post-DFT 1979 band The Internationals, who recorded the unreleased single Here Comes The World/ I Killed Sid Vicious.
The only other film credit I can find for Kanai is as the ‘Japanese Woman’ in the flower ceremony at the opening of Nicolas Roeg’s 1985 film Insignificance.
Interestingly the episode of the Return Of The Saint was directed by Peter Medak, who was attached to a couple of projects Malcolm McLaren was developing for production in LA more than a decade later in the early 90s.
When I encountered McLaren in Hollywood in my post as West Coast bureau chief for film trade Screen International, Medak was in the frame to direct The Brian Epstein Story, a project McLaren had nurtured since he was told stories of The Beatles’ manager’s exploits in London’s seamy underbelly by art dealer Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser.
But that, as they say, is another story… here’s Jonesy, Kanai and a talking police dog in The Great Rock N Roll Swindle: “Put it away Steve!”