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.
NAME: Jeff Dexter
RESIDES: North London
OCCUPATION: Man about town
Trace the progress of popular culture over the last six decades and you’ll find Jeff Dexter at some of its crucial stages of development: demonstrating the twist to modernists at The Lyceum Ballroom and advising the Beatles on which boots to wear in the early 60s; DJing for the noonday underground at Tiles a few years later and then moving into London’s counter-cultural underground as a mainman at Middle Earth and The Roundhouse, where his Implosion nights set the scene for the rise of such friends as Marc Bolan and David Bowie.
There’s Jeff hanging out at Hung On You, booking bands for the first Glastonbury and Isle Of Wight festivals, managing chart-topping America, announcing The Clash at one of their early gigs and DJing for Paul Weller at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire a couple of years back as part of the Island 50 celebrations.
And now he’s answered the Blokes Of Britain questionnaire:
Hi Jeff. What’s with your look these days?
Eclectic and vintage. I mix anything from the past, from another culture, with the standard look which has been ingrained in me since childhood. I looked at some photos today and realised I’ve been doing this since 1968!
A couple of weeks back I and writer Teddy Jamieson strolled the length of the King’s Road for his piece on the thoroughfare for the Herald Scotland.
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)
I bought this beauty at a second-hand bookshop at Willesden Green underground station in 1983.
I see from the pencil marking on the back it cost £2. Measuring 39″ x 20″, it turns out it is quite the rarity.
Continue reading Posters: The withdrawn Carry On Cleo by Tom Chantrell (1964)
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.
Reading Amanda Lear’s engaging out-of-print memoir My Life With Salvador Dalí brings back memories of a visit to the Dalí Theatre-Museum (“the largest surrealistic object in the world”) in Figueres in 1988.
In the tower of the museum, the “seedy old conjuror” (per the description by John Richardson in his waspish collection of art world pen portraits Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters) was lying on his sickbed; Dalí died just a few months later, in January 1989.