This is the finalised cover of Punk London: In The City 1975-78, my map collaboration with Herb Lester Associates which will be published in a few weeks.
Continue reading The day the map turned dayglo: Punk London In The City 1975-78
London
A brief journey through David Bowie’s London from the 40s to the 10s with me and Herb Lester
As a tribute to the late rock star, I have joined forces with map-makers Herb Lester to create an online guide to David Bowie’s London from his birth at 40 Stansfield Road in Brixton in 1947 through his solo art show in Mayfair in 1995 to the giant retrospective David Bowie Is exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington in 2013.
Punk in London: Exciting new project coming in the New Year
These are just some of the research materials I have been sifting through for the last few weeks for a project with a fabulous partner coming in the New Year.
We’re doing all we can to apply a fresh and vital approach to the much worked-over turf of Punk in London in the mid-70s.
Watch this space.
Found! The source of the Jerry Lee image in Let It Rock’s Killer Rocks On t-shirt
Let It Rock was digging in the ruins of past cultures that you cared about. It was giving them another brief moment in the sun. It wasn’t about doing anything new. It was an homage. It was nostalgia.
Malcolm McLaren to Momus, 2002
Forty three years after its creation I can reveal the source of the Jerry Lee Lewis image which appeared on the Let It Rock t-shirt design “The ‘Killer’ Rocks On!”.
It is from a lobby card for Alan Freed’s 1958 rocksploitation flick High Street Confidential!; an original was just one of the pieces of 50s ephemera adorning Let It Rock’s premises at 430 King’s Road in 1972.
Continue reading Found! The source of the Jerry Lee image in Let It Rock’s Killer Rocks On t-shirt
Studio Prints: At A Printmaker’s Workshop in Kentish Town 1970
The 1970 BBC documentary At A Printmaker’s Workshop focuses on Dorothea Wight’s fabled Studio Prints in Queens Crescent, Kentish Town.
It is also a marvellous snapshot of London on the cusp of change as inner city areas became invigorated by the arrival of interesting new businesses (with none of today’s dread “regeneration” and its companion property-speak of “creative quartiers” and such).
Continue reading Studio Prints: At A Printmaker’s Workshop in Kentish Town 1970
‘They had the t-shirt off his back’: The 40th anniversary of the creation of the notorious Cowboys t-shirt + the obscenity debate it sparked in the pages of The Guardian
This month – specifically July 26 – marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction for sale of Malcolm McLaren’s notorious Cowboys t-shirt in Sex, the revolutionary boutique he operated at 430 King’s Road with Vivienne Westwood.
The shirt’s status as the most provocative of all punk designs is enhanced by the fact that it made waves immediately: the same day the shirt went on sale, the first customer to wear it in public was arrested. Within 24 hours, the store itself was raided for indecency.
The Spice Girls: My part in their rise and my non-appearance in the Wannabe video
Just when boys with guitars threaten to rule pop life – Damon’s all over Smash Hits, Ash are big in Big! and Liam can’t move for tabloid frenzy – an all-girl, in-your-face pop group have arrived with enough sass to burst their rockist bubble.
From Music Week, April 1996
I see that next week marks the 19th anniversary of the release of Wannabe. Coincidentally I came across this cutting while ferreting around my magazine archive: the first published interview with the Spice Girls, when they launched the promotional campaign for the single and I was a contributing editor at industry publication Music Week.
I remember quite a lot about my encounter with the five of them at Virgin Records hq in Ladbroke Grove, not least that they afforded opportunities for digs at the full-of-itself British rock cabal which had grown out of the damp squib which was Britpop.
Continue reading The Spice Girls: My part in their rise and my non-appearance in the Wannabe video
Funky but chic: Roxy in Kensington Church Street + the Ken Todd connection
I’ve been aware of the existence of the Kensington boutique Roxy for some time, particularly since the store name was used as the title of the feature on London street fashion in a 1972 edition of Japanese magazine An An.
But my curiosity was pricked recently while browsing that same issue of An An which appears in Freddie Hornik’s scrapbook (see last post).
Continue reading Funky but chic: Roxy in Kensington Church Street + the Ken Todd connection
Tender + tough: Jean-Francois Carly’s Surrender After portraits
Surrender After is the title of photographer/director Jean-Francois Carly’s show of nudes opening at Forge & Co in east London next week.
Continue reading Tender + tough: Jean-Francois Carly’s Surrender After portraits
George Cox: The origins of the Diano brothel creeper + samples ordered by Malcolm McLaren in 1973
//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.