Thirty four years ago today The Heartbreakers played The Speakeasy.
The rock business haunt north of Oxford Circus had seen better times by this gig. I was taken by a member, a photographer at the agency where I worked. I remember being embarrassed by his long hair.
Continue reading Posters: The Heartbreakers at The Speakeasy (1977)
Bob Gruen + Nadya Beck’s All Dolled Up is a cast-iron rock-doc.
For three years in the early 70s they toted new-fangled video equipment trailing the New York Dolls, capturing fab performances, photo-shoots, media encounters, backstage delirium, fan interviews, even dancing at Rodney Bingenheimer’s E Club (the precursor to his English Disco).
You can’t beat Iggy for range: balletic posturing, arrhythmic shape-throwing, hand-held-high swaying (with mic lead clamped between teeth), the imploring bit on the knees and all-out floor-grovelling, they’re all here in this clip from 1977.
Rocket From The Crypt and Sympathy For The Record Industry were a great combo, and reached some kind of apex on 1995’s CD-hating 5″ single tribute to The Music Machine.
Continue reading Vinyl: Rocket From The Crypt Plays The Music Machine 5″ single
Last week I recovered this from the back pocket of a pair of trousers; a page torn from a copy of Mojo found on the tube a few months back.
This composition of images by Derek Harris from Christopher Gray’s Situationist text Leaving The 20th Century makes plain the significance of the visual vocabulary of the 60s anarchist movement on punk in general and Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood’s Anarchy Shirt in particular.
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 3
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)?
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 2
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.
Continue reading Blessed & Blasted: Roots of the Anarchy Shirt part 1
