Paul Gorman

Caroline Coon

Totally Wired: Music publications that made a difference

When he launched the small-format 32-page song sheet The Melody Maker in 1926, Tin Pan Alley music publisher Lawrence Wright sparked the media revolution that created the music press.

This multi-million pound business eventually straddled the Atlantic and simultaneously proved a fertile breeding ground for generations of writers, photographers, film-makers and performers who made their mark in the wider world.

Everyone from Bob Geldof, Chrissie Hynde and Neil Tennant to Danny Baker, Caroline Coon, Julie Burchill, Barbara Ellen, Caitlin Moran, Miranda Sawyer and movie directors Cameron Crowe and Anton Corbijn (and even Michael Winner) cut their teeth on music magazines such as Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Rolling Stone, ZigZag and Smash Hits.

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Caroline Coon: The Great Offender’s first solo exhibition

//World Hotel Room from The Brothel Series, Caroline Coon 1998, Oil on canvas, 122 x 153cm. Photo: Richard Holttum//

“For this solo exhibition to happen in the same year that we celebrate 100 years since some women were legally considered human and therefore entitled to vote is deeply significant for me. The formation of my feminist project always meant that I needed to be a figurative painter – this made me, right from the start as an art student in the late 1960s, a ‘girl’ outlaw in the then Greenbergian-ruled art establishment. I am what Linda Nochlin called, in her 1973 essay, a Realist Criminal.” Caroline Coon, 2018

Liverpool’s The Gallery is staging yet another must-see exhibition: the first solo show by painter, writer, thinker and countercultural figurehead Caroline Coon.

Entitled Caroline Coon: The Great Offender, it is curated by Martin Green and James Lawler, who have selected 29 of Coon’s works and are mounting the show as part of their ‘Perpetual Provocateurs’ 2018 season.

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Cunst Art: Caroline Coon’s hand-rendered Laid Bare Diary 1983-1984

I once asked gallery owner Angela Flowers for her definition of an artist. Without hesitating she said: “That’s easy. An artist is someone who simply has to paint every day.” Caroline is the personification of that description.

Charlotte Metcalf from her editor’s note, Laid Bare Dairy 1983-1984

A fascinating and frank document of the period of the artist’s personal life conveyed by the title, Caroline Coon’s Laid Bare Diary 1983-1984 is also a  lovingly realised bookwork.

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Sighting of Barney Bubbles in BBC 1971 doc New Horizons: The Alternative Society

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//Barney Bubbles pasting up a page layout at Friends office on the upper floors of 305 Portobello Road, 1971//
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//Caroline Coon in interview about Release at the drug charity’s premises at 50a Princedale Road, W11//

The BBC TV documentary The Alternative Society is an intelligent snapshot of London’s Notting Hill-based early 70s counterculture.

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She’s A Punk Rocker UK : An antidote to male musings on 1976 and all that

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You would literally paint the news on your t-shirt that day and became part of the news, part of the progress with your artwork and your music…the women in punk were doing that; their style was a demonstration of their visual art, about what they were, where they were at and what they believed in.

Caroline Coon, She’s A Punk Rocker UK

She’s A Punk Rocker UK – Zillah Minx’s 2010 celebration of British female non-conformity – is a fantastic antidote to the current male musings on 1976 and all that.

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‘Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming’: 40th anniversary of their first review

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Today is the 40th anniversary of the gig at central London venue The Marquee by the Sex Pistols which generated their first substantial media coverage, a prescient 200-word review by Neil Spencer on page 31 of the February 21, 1976 issue of the New Musical Express.

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Christopher Logue Poster Poems at Rob Tufnell September 30 – November 7

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//Gone Ladies, with Ian Cameron, 1966. Off-set litho, 58 x 44.5cm,(edition size unknown). Published by Vandal Publications for Gear//

One of the exhibitions I’m most looking forward to visiting this autumn is London dealer Rob Tufnell’s presentation of the so-called “poster poems” produced by the late Christopher Logue.

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Ms. Caroline Coon: Radical person recalls Pauline Boty’s My Colouring Book and the first time she heard Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett – at Derek Boshier’s Ladbroke Grove studio

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//From Radical People, Vol 1, No 2//

Great to see heroine Caroline Coon among the subjects/contributors to the second issue of Radical People, Reba Maybury’s celebration of quinquagenarian-plus non-conformists.

Continue reading Ms. Caroline Coon: Radical person recalls Pauline Boty’s My Colouring Book and the first time she heard Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett – at Derek Boshier’s Ladbroke Grove studio