//Richard Boch, 4am, Mudd basement, 1980. Photo: Lynette Bean Kral//

//Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite, The Times Square Show, 1980. Photo: Bobby Grossman//

Tonight’s DJ appearance at Manhattan’s’ Soho Grand by the city’s clubland legend Richard Boch – who will be joined on the decks by none less than Fab 5 Freddy and Club 57’s Dany Johnson – affords an opportunity to champion one of my favourite books of the year.

//Judy Nylon and transient tattoos, 1979. Photo: Lisa Genet//

//Cookie Mueller, 1979. Photo: Bobby Grossman//

Boch’s The Mudd Club is a visual and literary orgy of delight, packed full of striking images and tales of glory and excess from the late 70s/early 80s nightclub where he was the kingpin doorman and communed on many levels with the good, the bad, the deviant and the simply deranged of popular culture.

//Clockwise from top left: Vicki Pedersen’s membership card; staff member Debi Mazar by Rhonda Paster Corte; ID card flipside; Cookie Mueller, 1979 by Billy Sullivan; Lisa Rosen 1980 by Maripol; Richard Sohl + Richard Boch in Montauk by Ron Beck; Kate Simon’s ID card 1980//

//Clockwise from top left: Vicki Pedersen/Joan Crawford Mother’s Day Event 1979 by Marcia Resnick; Nan Goldin Night School at Mudd 1979 by Billy Sullivan; Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong 1980 by Robin Schanzenbach; Hal Ludacer 1979 by Eileen Polk; Eric Mitchell and Amos Poe 1979 by Marcia Resnick; Anya Phillips and James Chance, Mudd dance floor 1979 by Chris Stein//

You want to know how David Bowie corralled Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi to back him on Saturday Night Live? Read it here, along with hundred of other yarns to make your hair stand on end.

//Poison Ivy Rorschach post performance. Photo: Alan Kleinberg//

//Damita with cowgirl tattoo, 1980. Photo: Ebet Roberts//

Gossipy and jaw-dropping with a tone which is by turns sardonic and dewy-eyed for times long gone, The Mudd Club is a must-have.

The Mudd Club is published by Feral House; copies available here.

Festivities at the Soho Grand’s Club Room, 310 W Broadway, New York, NY 10013, kick off at 9pm tonight. No cover. Details here.

Tags: Cookie Mueller, David Bowie, Debi Mazar, Ebet Roberts, Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite, Feral House, Joey Arias, Judy Nylon, Kate Simon, Klaus Nomi, Maripol, Poison Ivy Rorschach, Rhonda Paster Corte, Richard Boch, Richard Sohl, Saturday Night Live, The Mudd Club, Vicki Pedersen

//From left: Kent, James and Nylon. Please advise if you are the photographer or know their identity. No reproduction without permission//

Artist/thinker Judy Nylon has sent me this great shot taken at London punk haven The Roxy in the spring of 1977.

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Tags: Boys Express, Erica Echenberg, Granny Takes A trip, Joe Stevens, Judy Nylon, Kate Simon, New Musical Express, Nick Kent, NME, Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Roxy

A few years back I came across Malcolm McLaren’s annotated copy of Indian Rawhide, the anthropologist Mable Morrow’s study of the folk art produced by Native American tribes which inspired the late cultural iconoclast in the conceptualising with his partner Vivienne Westwood of their Spring/Summer 1982 fashion collection Savage.

//Frontispiece to Morrow’s book, published by University of Oklahoma Press in the Civilization Of The American Indian Series, 1975//

//From Indian Rawhide: design produced by the Apache Mescaleros in Taos, New Mexico, matched by McLaren and Westwood with book-end marbling on this Savage slip dress. No reproduction without permission//

//The Apache design as it appeared printed on the end of the train on a Worlds End jersey toga dress. No reproduction without permission//

McLaren obtained a copy of Morrow’s book during travels recording his debut solo album Duck Rock. Since the Pirate collection of March 1981 had established a post-Punk direction for himself and Westwood and their Worlds End shop and label, McLaren set about investigating the powerful ideas residing in pre-Christian ethnic cultures, selecting Indian Rawhide as the text with which to frame the next group of designs.

My McLaren biography, to be published in spring 2018, will reveal that research – particularly literary – was one of the life-long consistencies in his approach to creative acts.

The musician Robin Scott told me that McLaren was an avid attendee of art history lessons during their spell as students at Croydon Art School in the 60s, and a couple of years before his death in 2010 McLaren confirmed that he was inspired in part to open Teddy Boy revival emporium Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road in 1971 after reading Nik Cohn’s peerless post-WW2 youth cult history Today There Are No Gentlemen.

//This edition Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971//

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Tags: A General History Of Pyrates, Assiniboin, Bow Wow Wow, Dakota, Duck Rock, Frederick's Of Hollywood, Giorgio Morandi, I Want Candy, Jean Kerboull, Judy Nylon, Mable Morrow, Mescaleros, Nik Cohn, Norah Waugh, parfleches, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak-Catchers, The Cut Of Men’s Clothes 1600-1900, The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, The Strangeloves, Today There Are No Gentlemen, Voodoo And Magic Practices, Wilhelm Reich

//The Michael Joseph image which was to be central to the 1971 Fernet-Branca campaign was featured in Dave Saunders’ survey Sex In Advertising, published by Batsford Books in 1996//

//Front, Funk Spectrum, BBE Records, 1999. Photo: Michael Joseph//

//Back, Funk Spectrum, BBE, 1999. Photo: Michael Joseph//

In 1971 the great advertising director and photographer Michael Joseph was commissioned to shoot a billboard campaign for the Italian digestif Fernet-Branca.

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Tags: BBE Records, Brent Sherwood, Dave Saunders, David "Piggy" Worth, Fernet-Branca, Funk Spectrum, Gala Pinion, Judy Nylon, Keb Darge, Lord Snowdon, Masters At Work, MIchael Joseph, Norman Parkinson, Pete Rock, Peter Lyster-Todd, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, RZA, Sex In Advertising, Syd Barrett

//Judy Nylon at David “Piggy” Worth’s basement flat, Edith Grove, World’s End, London, 1971. Photo:©Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

//Nylon and  Worth amid the cut-outs, props and mannequins in his flat, 1971. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

It is a great honour to feature this guest post by the artist and thinker Judy Nylon about her friend David “Piggy” Worth and their life and milieu in London at the turn of the 70s (brought up in Boston, Nylon had arrived in the UK capital at the start of the decade). The photographs, like those posted here at the weekend, were taken by Tony Hall as he set out on his career in photography, and have not been previously published…

THERE was a time when I smoked and owned skirts.

I lived at 14 Edith Grove, just south of Fulham Road, in a house owned by Donald and David Cammell just after they’d done Performance.

Piggy lived further down Edith Grove below the King’s Road, in a basement flat that was like stepping into his imagination. He had collections of clothes, props and small objects.

//”Like stepping into his imagination.” Nylon and Worth and part of his clothing/antiques collection. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

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Tags: Anello & Davide, Avon, Beggars' Banquet, Clovis Ruffin, Dave Saunders, David "Piggy" Worth, Dunhill, Findus, Hovis, Ian MacDonald, Judy Nylon, MIchael Joseph, Player Specials, Ridley Scott, Rolling Stones, Silk Cut, Tony Hall, Tony Scott

//David “Piggy” Worth and Judy Nylon at the back of the building which housed his basement flat, Edith Grove, World’s End, London, 1971. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

//Worth in Ossie Clark snakeskin coat, Brompton Cemetry, west London, 1971. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

//On West Pier, Brighton, 1971. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

“Piggy was a special dreamer” Judy Nylon

“Piggy got me my first job with Helmut Newton” Yvonne Gold

“He was an amazing character, funny, exuberant, outgoing, such fun to be with. Everybody wanted to be his friend” Tony Hall

Before David Gandy, before Nick Kamen, there was David “Piggy” Worth.

//With Graeme Edge’s girlfriend at the Moody Blues’ drummer’s apartment, Bayswater, west London, 1971. Photo: © Tony Hall. No reproduction without permission//

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Tags: Adel Rootstein, Biba, David "Piggy" Worth, Duggie Fields, Gaby Longhi, Graeme Edge, Helmut Newton, Herb Schmitz, Jean Machine, John Stephen, Jordan Mooney, Judy Nylon, Ken Russell, Missionaries of Charity Sisters, Moody Blues, Ossie Clark, Shirley Russell, The Boyfriend, Tony Hall, Tony Lonsdale, Yvonne Gold

//All photos (c) Jonathan Ross//

Here are more previously unpublished images from London’s punk demi-monde.

Coincident to receiving Joe Stevens’ photograph of the pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde and photographer Kate Simon in Malcolm McLaren’s Sex Pistols Nude Boy shirts, collector/gallerist/Londoner Jonathan Ross supplied me with this fabulous selection of Polaroids taken at his west London house in the same period.

These include Hynde and Simon as well as their fellow Americans-about-town, the performers Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin and artist/tattooist Ruth Marten, writers Tamasin Day-Lewis and Jon Savage, Ross himself, his girlfriend Gina Louthan and Sir John Betjeman.

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Tags: Chrissie Hynde, Gina Louthan, John Betjeman, Jon Savage, Jonathan Ross, Judy Nylon, Kate Simon, Patti Palladin, Ruth Marten, Tamasin Day-Lewis

If you’re in Austin TX – and there’s a chance you might be since hundreds of thousands of people have descended on the city for the annual SXSW film/music/interactive conflab taking place there this week – try and nip along to the Ray Ban Legendary Visions house at 78 Rainey Street on the eastside for a gander at the room collages/installations I have engineered to reflect my take on the look of music.

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Tags: Austin TX, Boy George, Glastonbury Festival, Henry Diltz, Hipgnosis, Jeff Dexter, Judy Nylon, Kate Moross, Mark Powell, NCompass, Nick Ebeling, Nick Lowe, Ray Ban, Sheri Timmons, Steve Pross, Stiff Records, SXSW

This is the little-seen promo video for Brian Eno’s song China, My China (from 1974’s Taking Tiger Mountain [By Strategy]).

Eno appears with Polly Eltes and Judy Nylon.

Eltes is a former model turned actress and singer; she contributed vocals to the same album’s Mother Whale Eyeless and has collaborated with Michael Karoli and Jah Wobble. She is also a photographer.

Judy Nylon is the American-born performer, writer and artist who took 70s London by storm – I wrote about her a couple of years back here.

Nylon was often in cahoots with her partner in Snatch, Patti Palladin. Here they are performing at Hurrah! in 1979. I think this was shot by the estimable Paul Tickell:

Tags: 1974, 1979, Brian Eno, Jah Wobble, Judy Nylon, Michael Karoli, Patti Palladin, Paul Tickell, Polly Eltes, Snatch, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)