//Anita Pallenberg + film-maker Harmony Korine, 2008. Photo: Eva Vermandel.//

A couple of years back I interviewed Anita Pallenberg – who celebrated her birthday yesterday – for Mojo magazine.

The subject was the scene in and around the King’s Road in 1967. Crisp and funny, Pallenberg was just as buzzed about the present;  visiting Karl Lagerfeld in Paris the next day, her interests in gardening and photography, the bargains to be found in charity shops and the notion of a collection based on the MA show from her studies at Saint Martins in the 90s.

A few months later, with her friend Anna Sui, Pallenberg participated in a rock & roll event I organised at the Port Eliot LitFest; after the show it was an honour to give her a vintage Vive Le Rock tee, which, of course, she wore with her trademark élan.

Here’s a refreshed and re-edited chance to appreciate this bewitching figure whose combination of innate style, fashion-savviness and earthy sexuality brought Continental sophistication to Swinging London and turned it on its head:

Gawky gamins and dolly-birds melted into insignificance in the presence of the impressive 21-year-old who arrived in London in 1965 having already studied graphic design in her native Rome, assisted Vogue photographer Gianni Penati and modelled in Paris.

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Tags: Anita Pallenberg, Donald Cammell, Emmerton & Lambert, Eva Vermandel, Granny Takes A trip, Harmony Korine, James Fox, Keith Richards, King's Road, Ossie Clarke, Robert Fraser, Volker Schlöndorff

By the time this appeared in International Times, The Angry Brigade had bombed the Biba boutique in Kensington High Street, west London, on May Day, 1971.

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Tags: Biba, International Times, Kensington High Street, The Angry Brigade

These are items from the new range of garments using graphics, sleeve designs, song titles and photography relating to Can as part of Jun Takahashi’s Underman range.

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Tags: 1974, 1977, Can, David Bowie, Dinah Shaw, George Murray, Irmin Schmidt, Jun Takahashi, Soon Over babalumba, Stay

Maggs has issued a scratch catalogue of William Burroughs’ photographs of London 1972 – 1974.

These are hand-made prints produced a few years ago from the original negatives and are conservation-framed and glazed.

Here are some more pages from the catalogue:

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Tags: Carl Williams, Duke Street, Maggs Bros, William Burroughs

This framed Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster is available from Steven Sclaroff.

Read my report on how MAD magazine artist Wally Wood produced it in 1967 for Paul Krassner’s satirical publication The Realist – and how the element featuring Snow White and “the Sir Punks”  came to appear on a t-shirt sold at Seditionaries – here.

Tags: MAD magazine, Paul Krassner, Seditionaries, Snow White & The Sir Punks, The Realist, Wally Wood

//Gillett + McLaren, 1983.//

Year-ends and beginnings naturally bring a sense of loss, of time passed and experiences weighed.

For me, 2010 will always mark the deaths of two individuals of personal import and also of lasting significance to our culture: Charlie Gillett and Malcolm McLaren.

These apparently disparate individuals – Gillett 68 and McLaren 64 at their time of passing on, respectively, March 17 and April 8 – shared several characteristics, not least idiosyncratic and uncompromising viewpoints and an abiding interest in bringing vanguard music into the mainstream.

Charlie was among folk and popular music’s most prominent enthusiasts – though he never liked the phrase, it is his achievement that “world music” entered western lives – and, as art consultant Bernd Wurlitzer wrote in 2008: “Malcolm McLaren is and has been an artist in the purest sense of the word for his entire adult life.”

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Tags: Bernd Wurlitzer, Charlie Feathers, Charlie Gillett, Duck Rock, Elvis Costello, Flaco Jiminez, Geraint Watkins, Ian Dury, Jimi Hendrix, Johnnie Allan, Leadbelly, Les Chats Sauvages, Let It Rock, Malcolm McLaren, Nick Lowe, Peter Grant, Puccini, Ry Cooder, Sex Pistols, Syd Barrett, Velvet Underground, Wynonie Harris

These are exterior shots of the incarnations of 430 King’s Road since the early 60s.

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Tags: Bill Fuller, Carol derry, Hung On You, Jane Ormsby-Gore, Let It Rock, Malcolm McLaren, Michael Rainey, Mr Freedom, Paradise Garage, Peter York, Seditionaries, SEX, The 430 Boutique, Tommy Roberts, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, Trevor myles, Vivienne Westwood, Worlds End

//5 Silverthorne Road, London SW8, 1978.//

Alan Freeman (BBC DJ): “The popular music press always branded Henry Cow or Art Bears as ‘left wing’. “
Chris Cutler (drummer, Henry Cow/Art Bears/etc): ”Of course. Extremely. If you hate this government, and everything it stands for.”

I witnessed Henry Cow live for the first time at a “free” concert held one afternoon in a room at Finchley Town Hall in 1974 supporting The Global Village Trucking Co.

The culmination of the performance came when guitarist Fred Frith trod on a tatty and evidently useless acoustic and brought the hat around to “pay for repairs”. Recognising this as a piece of “show”, I was simultaneously bamboozled and excited by the incomprehension I felt at their improvisations.

I also appreciated the anti-rock/agit-prop stylings, particularly Frith’s beanie hat and cricket jumper, and the insistence on sitting down during even the most energetic extemporising (was Jah Wobble also taking note? I shall have to ask him).

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Tags: Alan Freeman, Art Bears, Chris Cutler, Henry Cow, Kevin Coyne, south Lambeth

//Jah Wobble, 2009.//

NAME: Jah Wobble (real name: John Wardle)

RESIDES: Cheshire

OCCUPATION: Musician

It’s well documented that, in his teenage years, Jah Wobble was a member of the Four Johns, the gang of youths who gravitated to each other while at Kingsway College Of Further Education on the fringes of the City Of London in the mid-70s.

The other members included John Beverley, aka Sid Vicious, John Lydon – later Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols – and Lydon’s friend, John Gray.  Knocking around east and north London, the quartet followed football and voraciously consumed music from Bowie to Can to Hawkwind to Big Youth and beyond.

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Tags: Acme Attractions, Daniel hechter, Dennis Morris, Don Letts, Jah Wobble, Jeanette lee, John Lydon, John Wardle, Kenny macDonald, Marx, Missoni, Public Image Ltd, Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious, Terry Jones, versace

//Layla Curtis: World Political detail, 2001.//

Aphasic Disturbance, the current show at CHELSEA space, is curator Stephen Bury’s response to  “Two types of language and two types of aphasic disturbance”, the 1956 essay by the linguist/literary theorist Roman Jakobson on manifestations of aphasia (the loss of power of expression through speech).

And Bury – now Andrew W. Mellon chief librarian of New York’s Frick Art Reference Library – uses artists’ books and multiples in the main from the collections he built when he was at Chelsea College of Art & Design’s library between 1978 and 2000.

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Tags: Anselm Kiefer, Bruce McLean, Chelsea Space, Dieter Roth, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Kenny Hunter, Layla Curtis, Peter Liversidge, Roman Jakobson, Sol LeWitt, Stephen Bury, Yoko Terauchi