Here’s another treasure from the trove of Design magazines given to me by the designer Paul Walters; the invitation for the opening of Paul Reeves’ west London boutique Universal Witness in November 1970.
In October 1974 Malcolm McLaren conjured an unusual group name for four young musicians who congregated at his shop at 430 King’s Road.
At the time the transition from the premises’ previous incarnation as Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die to Sex was nearing completion; in fact the teenagers Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock (who was also a sales assistant on Saturdays) and Wally Nightingale assisted McLaren in applying the finishing touch with the erection of the pink vinyl shop sign constructed at his direction by carpenter Vic Mead.
The spirit of great British boutique culture is summoned by a couple of lots in next week’s Pop Culture sale at Christie’s.
One is a previously unpublished June 1967 photograph of Jim Hendrix not in Carnaby Street as captioned, but outside the tobacconist Finlay’s, which was in Foubert’s Place. It’s evident from the carrier bag in his famous left hand that the guitarist had just visited I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, which was next door to Finlay’s and the place where he bought the Hussar’s jacket worn in this photograph and at Monterey Pop that same month.
Continue reading Golden age of British boutiques evoked by Christie’s Pop Culture sale
This is the front of the jacket of my new book Mr Freedom – Tommy Roberts: British Design Hero.
Continue reading Cover of Mr Freedom – Tommy Roberts: British Design Hero
Psychedelics – in the form of art, design, drugs, literature, music and the counter-culture – dominate the latest catalogue from BeatBooks.
Just came across this card from one of my heroines, Caroline Coon.
Year-ends and beginnings naturally bring a sense of loss, of time passed and experiences weighed.
For me, 2010 will always mark the deaths of two individuals of personal import and also of lasting significance to our culture: Charlie Gillett and Malcolm McLaren.
These apparently disparate individuals – Gillett 68 and McLaren 64 at their time of passing on, respectively, March 17 and April 8 – shared several characteristics, not least idiosyncratic and uncompromising viewpoints and an abiding interest in bringing vanguard music into the mainstream.
Charlie was among folk and popular music’s most prominent enthusiasts – though he never liked the phrase, it is his achievement that “world music” entered western lives – and, as art consultant Bernd Wurlitzer wrote in 2008: “Malcolm McLaren is and has been an artist in the purest sense of the word for his entire adult life.”