To celebrate today’s opening of the exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining The Dots From The Situationist International To Malcolm McLaren, this rare footage of McLaren talking about the genesis of the bondage trousers design has been issued by the Malcolm McLaren Estate through Dazed Digital.

The film is entitled Subversive Trousers and is from Being Malcolm, which was written and performed by McLaren and produced with Première Heure for Canal Jimmy. The series won a prestigious French TV award.

//From today’s Guardian Guide//

Among the many rare items in the exhibition are materials related to McLaren’s collaboration with graphic artist Jamie Reid, as demonstrated by the exhibits below.

// Sex Pistols -Fuck Forever. Design by Jamie Reid for Great Rock N Swindle, 1979, produced as t-shirt by Reid 1987, with source of image, front cover of Picturegoer, January 1959, and original copy of Leaving The 20th Century, Christopher Gray’s collection of Situationist texts designed by Reid, 1974//

Read Dazed Digital on the show is here .

The Guardian Guide’s preview here.

Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges opens today (September 26) and runs until November 14.

Find out more here.

Tags: Being Malcolm, Canal JImmy, Christopher Gray, Great Rock N Swindle, Jamie Reid, John Hansard Gallery, Leaving The 20th Century, Picturegoer, Sex Pistols Fuck Forever

Today David Thorp and I worked with the team at John Hansard Gallery on the first day of the installation of our forthcoming exhibition Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges: Joining the dots from the Situationist International to Malcolm McLaren.

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Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, David Thorp, Desire And Helen, Frances Lengel, I Groaned With Pain, Jamie Reid, John Hansard Gallery, John McCready Archive, King Mob, Liverpool John Moore's University, Paris Capital of the XXIst Century, Shallow 1-21, Situationist International, Snow White & The Sir Punks, William Burroughs

//Left: Detail of photo of model posing in leather Sex hood, autumn 1974. Photo: © David Parkinson. Right: David Bowie in leather hood, summer 1974, Sherry Netherland Hotel, New York. Photo: Dana Gillespie//

My recent post about David Bowie’s visits in 1974 to 430 King’s Road when it was in its Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die incarnation prompted Facebook friend and DJ Graham “Sugarlump” Evans to alert me to Polaroid photographs of David Bowie trying out make-up, hair and styling options in preparation for his Diamond Dogs tour of the US that year.

// Polaroid taken by Dana Gillespie in New York in 1974//

In one, as Evans points out, Bowie posed in a leather hood of similar style to the model sold at 430 as it was transformed over a period of six months from TFTL to fetish emporium Sex.

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Tags: Anarchy In The UK, Brian Epstein, Cambridge Rapist, Dana Gillespie, David Bowie, David May, Henry Edwards, James Dean, Jamie Reid, Kevin Cann, Michael Collins, Peter Cook, Robert Fraser, Sex Pistols, Susan Shaw, The London Leatherman, Tony Zanetta, Vivienne Westwood

//Malcolm McLaren in a previously unpublished shot wearing original 50s George Cox Bingley D-ring brothel creepers to match his detail-perfect Teddy Boy garb. Photo taken inside Let It Rock, 430 King’s Road, January 1972. (c) David Parkinson//

//Left, Saint Laurent point-toed patent brothel creepers, A/W 2014. Right: George Cox Buckle Diano made to the 1950s last//

Last season’s foregrounding by Saint Laurent of the pointed brothel creeper is just one of a run of examples of fashion brands plugging into the purity of this quintessentially British rock & roll style minted in 1949 by the UK independent footwear company George Cox.

Among the first stylistic innovators to take the design out of Teddy Boy revivalism and apply it to contemporary fashion was Malcolm McLaren, who had been selling creepers for a couple of years at Let It Rock, the boutique he operated with Vivienne Westwood, by the time he visited the Cox factory in Northampton in November 1973. Here he ordered samples for six styles, some of which went into production for sale at 430 King’s Road.

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Tags: Adam Waterfield, Commes des Garcons, Fred Perry, Ganryu, George Cox, Jamie Reid, Let It Rock, Ray Stevenson, Saint Laurent, Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious, The Bingley, The Diano, Vivienne Westwood

//Viva Hamnell at Glastonbury Festival, from Amanda Bluglass’s short Viva Punk Rebel//

//Viva Hamnell at Port Eliot Lit Fest 2006 with her daughter Jane and son-in-law Rik Gadsby modelling McLaren, Westwood and Reid punk designs for The Look//

//The crowd went wild and jogged the photographer’s elbow: onstage in this blurry shot with Viva in Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols Fuck Forever t-shirt, Port Eliot Lit Fest, 2006//

Punk had great freedom with no rules. I couldn’t sing, but I got up there and sung. It didn’t matter. You had to have the spirit and the energy.

Viva Hamnell, 2014

My first meeting with Viva Hamnell eight years ago was not untypical, I subsequently learnt.

74 at the time, she was viewing the various Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid designs I was co-opting friends and attendees at Port Eliot Lit Fest to model that year to illustrate an event for the newly published second edition of my book The Look.

//Hamnell goes about her Lollipop Lady duties in a 70s TV news item//

//Left in the 70s//

//Lining up with fellow members of The Bricks//

Having surveyed the Naked Cowboys, Mickie & Minnie and Snow White & Her Sir Punks, Viva plumped for Reid’s 1986 BOY t-shirt issue of his poster design for The Great Rock & Roll Swindle: Sex Pistols Fuck Forever set in flouro-pink.

And when she closed the show by strolling on stage wearing the shirt, the crowd naturally went wild.

Amanda Bluglass’s documentary portrait Viva Punk Rebel captures this indomitable rule-breaker, whose embracing of punk rock as a 43-year-old freshly divorced lollipop lady in 1976 set her on a life of adventure – taking in membership of Cornish punk band The Bricks and involvement in the Elephant Fayre and Lit Fest at St Germans and the Glastonbury Festival – which lasts unto this day.

Viva Viva!

Thanks to womenyoushouldknow.net for the link to Bluglass’s film.

Tags: Amanda Bluglass, Boy, Cornwall, Elephant Fayre, Glastonbury Festival, Jamie Reid, Jane Gadsby, Nake Cowboys, Port Eliot Lit Fest, Rik Gadsby, Sex Pistols Fuck Forever, Snow White & The Sir Punks, St Germans, The Bricks, The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, Viva Hamnell, Vivienne Westwood, womenyoushouldknow.net

//Nowhere Buses print on Jamie Reid's website.//

David Jacobs – the US activist who says that his Situationist group Point-Blank!, not Jamie Reid, created the infamous “Nowhere Buses” punk graphic (see yesterday’s post) – is calling on the Sex Pistols art director to donate income from sales of the artwork to the Occupy movement.

//Back + front cover of Point-Blank! pamphlet, 1973.//

“Neither I nor anyone in P-B! ever wanted any commercialization of what we had done; that was the antithesis of commerce,” says Jacobs.

“But if Jamie Reid were up for contributing the gains from this artwork to a good cause such as Occupy – in which we are very much engaged – we would be cheered.”

Tags: David Jacobs, Jamie Reid, Nowhere Buses, Occupy, Point-Blank!

//Back + front cover, Point-Blank! pamphlet 1973.//

//Top: Page 3, Space Travel, Point-Blank!, 1973. Bottom: Sleeve back cover, Pretty Vacant/No Fun, Sex Pistols, 1977.//

In the week of the opening of Jamie Reid’s exhibition Peace Is Tough, the founder of the 70s American Situationist group Point-Blank! is challenging claims that Reid originated one of the key graphics of the punk aesthetic: the so-called “Nowhere buses”.

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Tags: Anarchy In The UK, David Jacobs, Isis Gallery, Jamie Reid, Nowhere Buses, Peace Is Tough, Point-Blank!, Pretty Vacant, San Francisco, Sex Pistols

Incredible footage here from 1977 doc Roots Rock Reggae of producer “Prince” Tony Robinson (working at either Joe Gibbs or Harry J, reggaenuts will tell me) as well as scenes shot at a JA pressing plant and the legendary Randy’s Records (“You Name It We Have It”).

Highlight for me: The Gladiators laying down the vocals for Jah Works, stand-out track on their album Proverbial Reggae.

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Tags: "Prince" Tony Robinson, Cooke Key, Front Line, Harry J, Jah Works, Jamie Reid, Joe Gibbs, Randy's Records, The Gladiators