Coming this week: Lucy Harrison’s multi-layered Carnaby Echoes + Nick Knight’s PUNK at Showstudio
I’m involved in a couple of events which open in London this week: artist Lucy Harrison’s multi-layered project Carnaby Echoes in the West End and photographer Nick Knight’s exhibition Punk at his Showstudio space in SW1.
A couple of days ago I dropped into 20 Foubert’s Place during Harrison’s install there of the exhibition element of Carnaby Echoes, which kicks off on Thursday (September 5).
Harrison has researched historical material and collected personal accounts from those who have been associated with addresses in the Carnaby area with musical significance, from Murray’s Cabaret Club, which opened in 1913 at 16-18 Beak Street, to the much-mourned 00s hip-hop mecca Deal Real at 3 Marlborough Court.
She has produced an app and a bookwork, assembled photography and print material and made a set of 13 films featuring such luminaries as Count Suckle and Lloyd Coxsone, respectively sound system operator (with the late Duke Vin) and DJ at the seminal Carnaby Street club The Roaring Twenties, Miranda Sawyer, who worked at the Smash Hits offices at 52-55 in the thoroughfare, and George O’Dowd, who served and styled at the boutiques Street Theatre at 12 Ganton Street and The Foundry in Newburgh Street.
By uncovering these and other narratives, Harrison has created a fresh view of an area which has been too often saddled in pop culture histories with associations to Swinging London mod and dollybird fashions.
I advised Harrison on premises and people with musical connections and hooked her up with various people, including O’Dowd, Martin Cole, who worked at the late Tommy Roberts’ psychedelic junk shop Kleptomania at 10 Kingly Street, Dudley Edwards of design studio Binder Edwards & Vaughan and Keith Albarn, who ran the important 60s art space 26 Kingly Street (also known as Our Own Gallery) with his wife Hazel, partner Ian Knight and others.
Harrison selected items from my archive for the exhibition, which looks to be shaping up very well; particularly impressive are the HMV Oxford Street-style listening booths loaded with Harrison’s playlist of 100 songs with links to the area.
Across town in SW1, I delivered exhibits to Showstudio for Knight’s exhibition, which springs out of his involvement in this summer’s Punk: Chaos To Couture at the NY Met and has a similar aim to Harrison’s, in that it seeks to liberate Punk from the caricatures which are blighting appreciation of what is increasingly understood as 20th century culture’s bookend to modernism.
To that end I am contributing:
• illustrator Jim French’s 1973 compendium The Colt Album, which contains a version of the Longhorn’s Dance drawing used by Malcolm McLaren as the main element in his infamous ‘Cowboys’ t-shirt design;
• an Olympia Press edition of Alexander Trocchi’s erotic pulp novel Helen And Desire, from which McLaren derived the text for his Sex t-shirt ‘I Groaned With Pain…’;
• an original early 70s shirt from McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road boutique Let It Rock;
• The February 1976 edition of Gallery International magazine which contains Sado Sex For The Seventies, David May’s feature on Sex which includes his important interview with McLaren;
• and the copy of the Sex Pistols fanzine Anarchy In The UK which I bought in December 1976 from the newsagents in Goodge Street I frequented at the time for my punk fanzines, copies of NME and packs of Disques Bleu.
If you are in town over the next month or so I thoroughly recommend both of these events, which have been created by individuals interested in broadening understanding of the story of social interaction, popular culture, art and design in the capital over the last century.
Find out more about Carnaby Echoes here and Punk at Showstudio here.