British design media outlet Creative Review has reported on the publication of A Box Of Bubbles, the forthcoming limited edition boxed and enhanced edition of the new monograph The Wild World Of Barney Bubbles.
The Rise & Fall of the Music Press: The brilliance of Black Music, Carl Gayle and Alan Lewis
Working on my forthcoming book The Rise & Fall Of The Music Press has brought home to me the brilliance of publications and journalists who have been marginalised in the story of the media sector inaugurated by the launch of The Melody Maker (as it was then known) in 1926.
A Box Of Bubbles: Limited edition up for grabs now
A Box Of Bubbles is the special edition of the forthcoming book The Wild World of Barney Bubbles.
The Wild World of Barney Bubbles is out this summer
My next book, The Wild World of Barney Bubbles, is published around the world this summer by Thames & Hudson.
This is the enhanced and revised third edition of my monograph of the late graphic artist, who died in 1983 and would have been 80 this year.
Too Too Utterly: Malcolm McLaren’s film pitch by fax to James Bond scriptwriters
These faded pages constitute a film pitch Malcolm McLaren sent by fax to screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade way back in 1991.
Purvis and Wade are responsible for many film successes including the astounding run of screenplays for the seven James Bond movies from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough to the recently released No Time To Die. I’ve known them for a while and Neal has mentioned their contact with McLaren during preparations for their first feature Let Him Have It, so made sure it was covered in the hardback edition of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren.
Where’s Malcolm?! McLaren spotted with downtown punk royalty at the May 1975 Central Park peace rally
46 years after music manager Danny Fields took the photograph of a group of New York’s 70s demi-monde at the top of this post I’ve spotted the previously unidentified person behind them: the subject of my latest book, Malcolm McLaren (who appears to be chugging a half-bottle of Smirnoff).
‘Sickened’: Designer Diana Crawshaw on Moschino’s lifting of her 1971 Mr Freedom design for its SS 22 resort collection
//Left: ‘Waitress dress’ designed by Diana Crawshaw for Mr Freedom 1971. Right: Karen Elson models Moschino dress in the Italian luxury brand’s campaign for its SS22 resort collection//
Even by the cynical standards of today’s fashion industry, the lifting – down to the closest detail – of a particular early 1970s design for British pop art store Mr Freedom by Italian luxury brand Moschino is breathtaking.
‘UNBELIEVABLE’ was the take of a leading fashion journalist while an internationally renowned fashion designer told me they thought it was ‘Outrageous!’
‘I’m sickened,’ says Diana Crawshaw, who came up with the original of this and many other designs for Mr Freedom’s owners Trevor Myles and Tommy Roberts between 1970 and 1972. ‘It’s terrible that they’ve simply been able to take things I spent a lot of time and effort on realising.’
The new version of Crawshaw’s waitress dress is the centrepiece of the Moschino collection, which is the brainchild of creative director Jeremy Scott. As well as direct quotes of these individual pieces, Moschino’s campaign appears as a tribute to a particular phase of Mr Freedom’s brief life, when its second set of premises at 20 Kensington Church Street included the cartoonish restaurant Mr Feed’Em.
And so the new Moschino campaign is replete with repeat prints and references to fried eggs, dripping hamburgers, hot dogs and ice-cream, all Mr Freedom and Mr Feed’Em motifs, as you can see in the film Scott has released to coincide with the collection drop:
And Crawshaw isn’t alone. The use of colour contrasts in the Moschino garments and on accessories such as bags imitates those used by another Mr Freedom designer, Jim O’Connor, as you can see here from this jumpsuit design in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection:
That there is a paucity of new ideas in mainstream fashion is not news though I can’t help wondering about the role of those operators of vintage collections who are regularly raided by fashion designers in return for payments and thus encourage this behaviour.
Diana Crawshaw started her career at the King’s Road branch of I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet before moving on to make important contributions not just to Mr Freedom but also the legendary outlet Paradise Garage at 430 King’s Road.
A charming and constantly creative person, Diana was a Royal College a graduate and is now in her 70s. I interviewed her for the King’s Road music and fashion trail I created for Kensington & Chelsea Council in 2012 and when last I bumped into her (inevitably in Worlds End Books) she snapped a photograph of me and sent a flattering portrait she drew from it.
Diana continues as an inveterate Chelsea-ite as a palmist for the enduring outlet Wilde Ones (though at the moment is giving phone consultations). You can book a reading with her through the Wilde Ones website.
The city as a weapon of sex, style and subversion: New maps celebrate the London of Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols
My new guide out with Herb Lester Associates is out now.
A celebration of the London lives of the Sex Pistols and their charismatic – some might say notorious – manager Malcolm McLaren, it comprises two fold-out maps with 100-plus addresses from birthplaces, schools, colleges, art schools, pubs, clubs, venues and boutiques to such diverse places as Buckingham Palace (where the Pistols signed to A&M Records), the Soho gay club Il Duce (frequented by McLaren after leaving art school in the early 70s) and the Shepherds Bush remand home where the teenage Steve Jones resided before being pulled up before various beaks on assorted burglary charges.
The Pistols maps covers the group’s 29-month existence and the lives of the five members as they relate to the British capital, while McLaren’s shows how this fourth generation Scottish/Jewish provocateur used the city as a weapon of sex, style and subversion.
SITUATION VACANT: Sex Pistols and Malcolm McLaren in London is available from Herb Lester Associates here.
All my yesterdays: King’s Road pub The Roebuck and key Barney Bubbles designs recreated on our doorstep
This is freaky. Our local has been transformed into the King’s Road pub The Roebuck for the filming of Danny Boyle’s forthcoming FX series Pistol, based on guitarist Steve Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy.
The thing is I knew the Roebuck very well; it is in fact the place where I first met Malcolm McLaren, at the age of 15 in 1975. By happenstance I was drinking in the pub with an older brother the night McLaren recruited John Lydon to the Sex Pistols.
//The Roebuck in the late 70s. Photo by Barry Beattie/ANL/Shutterstock (5823647a)//
At The Roebuck I came across such individuals as the gangster John Bindon and his well-born paramour Vicki Hodge and the male model David “Piggy” Worth. One night we spotted the infamous art dealer Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser with some ne’er-do-wells. It was that sort of place.
I returned there over the following years, particularly after I moved to neighbouring Kensington in 1977 – it was a 15-minute walk away. By that time Punk was shifting overground and the upstairs snooker room was the scene of much nefarious activity.
A wild twist is that pioneering 60s designs by the late graphic genius Barney Bubbles have been recreated as period adverts on a bus which is being used for filming.
The conjunction of two of the subjects of my books with a fondly remembered venue 20 yards from where I live is kind of wild.
A life in (mainly second-hand) books: Interviewed as part of Book/Shop’s One Great Reader series
I am the latest subject in the One Great Reader series published by Oakland CA’s Book/Shop.
In the interview by Wes Del Val I talk about the importance of books, particularly second-hand books, in my life.
Above is a selection of reading material mentioned in the chat plucked from the shelves, ranging from Myths & Legends given to me by an older sister when I was eight in the 1960s to Tabitha Lasley’s incredible Sea State published this year.
Read my One Great Reader chat with Wes here.
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