The new interiors magazine TON – the first issue is out now – has two pieces by me on very different but equally extraordinary homes.
TON’s founder and editor-in-chief Jermaine Gallacher – who works with art director Rory Gleeson and editorial director Ted Stansfield – commissioned me to write about Dave Baby’s apartment close to where we both live, in south London’s Stockwell.
As I write, ‘this otherworldly space represents a bewitching realm of desires, sexuality and esoterica with Dave at the maelstrom’s centre, a still figure dispensing wily wit and charm’.
//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.
“It’s like reconstructing the debris of old pop paraphernalia… what’s exciting about it is that you no longer need to buy guitars. You can choose a friend up the road, put your decks together with a beatbox and make your own records, demoralising [sic] the pop myth and beginning to find a way of using material yourself .”
On November 19 1982, the UK’s national weekly youth music programme The Tube included a segment marking the occasion when the terms (and concepts of) “scratching”, “break-dancing” and “hip-hop” were introduced to a mass British audience for the first time.
I am honoured to have played a part in Dermot Kavanagh realising his ambition to produce a biography of the late footballer and soulboy legend Laurie Cunningham.
Tonight I will join academic and arts writer Dr Ian Massey and filmmaker John Maybury in conversation with photographer David Gwinnutt for an event to coincide with his exhibition Before We Were Men at the National Portrait Gallery.
//The plaque at 73 Lancaster Road. Photo: Peter Tarry//
Great news about the English heritage blue plaque dedicated yesterday at 73 Lancaster Road in north London’s Finsbury Park, one-time home of the late great footballer Laurie Cunningham.
//Dermot Kavanagh speaks at the unveiling. Among those in attendance were Cunningham’s friend Cyrille Regis, his former girlfriend Nikki Brown and members of his family. Photo: Peter Tarry//
As I’ve written here before, Cunningham’s significance extends outside of his considerable achievements as a sportsman; the first black player to represent England and be signed to an overseas club (Spain’s Real Madrid), he lived his tragically short life off the field at the cutting edge of street style and club culture.
Next month I’m taking part in an event which examines the birth of London club culture in the early 60s.
Held at creative hub Second Home, London Stories: The Mod is the first in a three-part series of discussions hosted by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, authors of the club bible Last Night A DJ Saved My Life and the men behind the mandatory DJ History.
This’ll put a spring in your step – Dee-lite performing at Wigstock in 1990, as posted by Hintmag. The second track is What Is Love (Holographic Goatee Mix).
//The simulation of the Seditionaries facade in industrial materials provided the entry and exit point for models on the runway today////With rings representing the positions where designer Ben Kelly exposed air conditioning vents to view, Kim Jones replaced the diagonal bar which occupied the central square over the door with the trademark Vuitton ‘V’////Ben Kelly’s portfolio shot of the facade he designed and installed at 430 King’s Road in December 1976//
Amid the references to the late Christopher Nemeth in today’s Paris show of the Louis Vuitton A/W 15 menswear collection (see my last post), artistic director Kim Jones used the staging to pay subtle homage to the two great maverick figures of London street culture – namely Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and specifically their 70s punk store Seditionaries.
