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).

The lady is my great aunt Alice Clowes, a lovely person from Stoke on Trent who spent her entire working life as a porcelain flower painter. They were paid peanuts for that stuff, which now changes hands for massive amounts among fine china collectors. She never married, after her beau was killed in WW2, a sad and familiar story. She herself died in 1982.

The family had moved from a tiny hamlet in Oxfordshire to a much larger village just outside Reading in 1977, and I had a job as a milkman’s assistant, so all this wonderful clobber was paid for with tips from the floury hands of the “jam and Jerusalem” brigade.

I earned a lot of money for a teenager then: the shift was £6 and the tips took it to £10-£15 a week. The milk round – and I tell you, it’s all true about randy milkmen; the chap I worked with, was a mega-Sid James – brought me into contact with eccentric aristocrats, a transvestite former Hells Angel (who became my friend) and an on-the-run militant anarchist who lived in a pigsty. He’d had links with the Angry Brigade and was arrested in possession of bomb-making equipment. So it all tied up, so to speak…

Early in 1978 I made my first trips to the King’s Road. Armed with my milk money, I found the curve to the World’s End and Seditionaries. I’d spent a lot of money on the way, it being the big city and all. As you can see I looked young and small for my age, due to a couple of leg accidents which meant they healed for years rather than grew. Inside Seditionaries I deliberated for ages and was in there hours studying each piece of clobber before deciding that Destroy had to be the one.

As I was paying with my milky crumpled fiver, Auntie Viv [Westwood] held up a Cowboys shirt to me and then an Exposé one, saying in that quiet voice: “Looks good on you….hmmm…Take it…”

And so I got two for one. I was gobsmacked and one day will thank her properly. Weeks later, on my second trip to buy a Parachute shirt, [Seditionaries manager] Jordan gave me an apple. I must have looked so hungry. It was rather an amazing event, this giant (to me), painted punk rock goddess, reaching down to give me an apple.

It’s a nice photograph this. It shows no generation gap between me and my great aunt, that we are still just people. She couldn’t give a hoot about my appearance, unlike the rest of the world….

This is my Mum and Dad wearing each other’s clothes in about 1960. I guess this just helped me develop a style of dressing!

My personal interest in clothes came with this hand-me-down maroon velvet late mod jacket which would have been my brother’s. It sparked something in me about clobber. That’s my first dog Sheba. We came into the world at around the same time, so I think that picture is from 1970-71.

This one of my dad was taken around 1960. I guess in the end all little boys want to look like their dads, and mostly we do indeed end up looking like ’em! He was a WW2 RAF officer, and a very lovely man, very calm, kind and laid back, and liked his clobber too.

Grab a slice of Johnny Deluxe at his Facebook page.

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