//Clockwise from top left: Gene Vincent with one of The Houseshakers, Magnet Club, Chelmsford, UK, February 1971. Photo: http://gene.vincent.fanclub.voila.net; Let It Rock assistant in Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps top, Wembley Stadium, August 5, 1972. Photo: Masayoshi Sukita; Vincent’s quote as featured on the Sex t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up, 1974//

‘Gene Vincent for me was the embodiment of rock’n’roll’

Malcolm McLaren 1997

On September 22 1971, Gene Vincent was a mid-week booking to play a “rock revival” night at central London club The Marquee.

Times were tough; at just 36, the soft-spoken American rocker was apparently way past his heyday and beset by severe health problems brought on by the combination of alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs taken to dull the constant pain in his left leg. This was the result of a crippling motorbike accident in his youth and the lingering effects of having been in the 1960 car-crash which killed Eddie Cochran.

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Tags: bernie Rhodes, Billy Fury, Gene Vincent, Hal Carter, Jeff Beck, Joe Foster, John Collis, London Rock & Roll Festival, Masayoshi Sukita, Patrick Casey, Rev Ola, The Marquee, Vivienne Westwood, Wembley Stadium, You're Gonna Wake Up

//Signed bar menu. Courtesy: Jonathan Ross//

//Signed back cover of So Alone, Johnny Thunders, Real Records,1978. Courtesy: Jonathan Ross//

As demonstrated by my recent post, the west London house of collector/gallerist Jonathan Ross became a hive for the art/boho/punk crowd flooding the capital in the  70s.

Among the visitors were Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop, who both left their marks in different ways.

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Tags: Bob Gruen, Chrissie Hynde, City Lights Studio, Felix Dennis, George Melly, Isobel Strachey, John Armit, John Jesse, Johnny Thunders, Johnson & Johnson, Jonathan Ross, Julyan Wickham, Lucian Freud, Morrison Hotel Gallery, Sable Starr, Tchaik Chassay, The Rainbow, Tony Mackintosh, You're Gonna Wake Up, Zanzibar

Photo: Andrew Bunney.

Earlier this month I gave a talk to foundation year art and design students at Saint Martin’s as part of a brief to deliver work based on their personal opinions and beliefs.

The subject was the 1974 t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Of These Days And Know Which Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!.

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Tags: Andrew Bunney, BLast, Futurists, Nicola Malkin, Roland Barthes, Saint Martin's, Society for Cutting Up Men, You're Gonna Wake Up

//The Roebuck, 354 Kings Road, 1976.//

Thanks to Neal Purvis for alerting me to these captivating photographs taken in London in the hot summer of 1976 by German holidaymaker Klaus Hiltscher.

As Neal points out, Hiltscher captures the mood of the city in that specific period; I don’t believe my recall is playing tricks on me when I write that every day – from May through to September – was glorious in terms of the weather, and more often than not eventful in a variety of ways.

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Tags: Antiquarius, Gary Craze, Jean Machine, Jeff Kwintner, John Simons, Johnny Rotten, King's Road, Klaus Hiltscher, Malcolm McLaren, Meeny's, Neal Purvis, Sex Pistols, The Pheasantry, The Roebuck, The Squire Shop, You're Gonna Wake Up

Two “manifesto” designs which emanated from 430 King’s Road – the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt and the Anarchy Shirt – share a reference to “The Black Hand Gang”.

I had long assumed that both referred to Spanish anarchists La Mano Negra, since the group’s name was listed with that of their fellow countryman and revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti.

But on the t-shirt, the absence of an “and” or connecting device had me pondering the possibility this was another Black Hand Gang; maybe the secret society dedicated to Serbian unity (linked to one of the events which triggered the First World War, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914)?

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Tags: bernie Rhodes, Buenaventura Durruti, Christopher Gray, David and Stuart Wise, Don Letts, Franz Ferdinand, Futura 2000, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Jay Strongman, King Mob, La Mano negra, Malcolm McLaren, Notting Hill, Point-Blank!, The Black Hand Gang, You're Gonna Wake Up

//Comic Strip, Point-Blank!, 1971. Derek Harris Collection.//

My investigation into the multifarious strands which fed into the creation of the 1974 t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up has, in turn, ignited a convincing set of new theories about the genesis of another “manifesto” design, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s so-called Anarchy Shirt.

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Tags: Anarchy shirt, Derek Harris, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Malcolm McLaren, Point-Blank!, Situationist International, Vivienne Westwood, You're Gonna Wake Up

Wyndham Lewis’ 1914 publication Blast 1 is the daddy of the modern aesthetic manifesto.

It’s also a Modernist objet d’art.

Iconoclastic and satiric, at times inchoate and irrational, Blast’s aim was to establish Vorticism‘s endorsement of the machine age and and simultaneous disavowal of the stultifying Romantic legacy of the Victorian era.

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Tags: 1914, Blast 1, Edward Wadsworth, feng shui, Filippo Marinetti, Ford Madox Ford, Gerry Goldstein, Jacob Epstein, Malcolm McLaren, Picasso, Rebecca West, Suffragettes, Wassily kandinsky, Wyndham Lewis, You're Gonna Wake Up