Scenes of mild peril, salty talk and super-tunes were the order of the day as the glam-rock tornado and High Priestess of Funk that is Fee Doran joined us for Podrophenia last Thursday, bringing the glitziest dressing up box in the known universe with her..
Buckle up for tales of Justin Hawkins knickers, the Scissor Sisters furry bits and the voodoo doings and roots of THAT Kylie catsuit ... all fitted for your listening ears in the latest Podrophenia
Rock Chic is the vibe at Fee Doran's newly re-housed glam-grotto. Originally occupying a fifth floor space Clerkenwell way - Mrs Jones new lodgings, currently parked up along Hackney Road, are Mr Benn goes Bowie at Kensington Market. Housed in a glittering club-house where handmade one-offs are racked and stacked alongside a set-dressing of black sprayed mirror balls, the coolest cult collectables and an assortment of sparkles, spangles and funkily feather-cut numbers. All of which make a visiting the emporium feel like a rummage around Eno's Warm Jets era wardrobe..
Stylistically Fee Doran's designs trace a line from the Wonder Workshop and Biba's widescreen scene via Mr Freedom and Alkasura to Roxy Music meets Worlds End. Dig about the Mrs J website and you'll find a client list that reads like a Burke's Peerage of the glossily trendy gentry - Kylie, Goldfrapp, Scissor Sisters, Madonna. Dig about the multi-coloured pop shop's stock, and bespoke bits or unique 'pop star droppings' are yours for the bagging.
Mrs Jones Emporium can be found 49 Hackney Road, E2....Mrs Jones can be found on the web and Twitter..
A tune that seems to match the mood of Mrs J's is this Roxy rarity.
Rarity rating being: a Peel session (4th Jan 1972) from before the band signed to Island and featuring Davy O’List on guitar and Graham Simpson doing bass duties
Before my single season (90/91) of enthusing and actively supporting Southend United, there had been an earlier run (1976 - 78) of total football craziness. Although mostly, it was peripheral bits - sticker books, Shoot magazine, facts and fashion - that had me hooked rather than the game itself.
Facts: The bottom-feeding fortunes and shifting positions of underdog clubs, Workington, Grimsby and similar were followed like a weekly soap opera. If asked (not often) I could rattle off the home grounds, away colours and club nicknames of any English league team.
Fashion:76 - 78 were the seasons when Admiral become the Kings of Club Kits. Sweeping aside the regulation ringer shirts, or pre-war style plain tops for futuristic, space-age designs: flared tracksuits, sleeve stripes, inverted chest stripes, multi-coloured collars all snappily badged and branded with the Admiral logo. For me the absolute cracker in the catalogue was the sky blue Coventry tram line design (or egg timer as some call it). Genius! Available in four colour variations - blue (home) red, yellow (away)and the legendary brown outfit (2nd away).
It's no understatement to say I was entirely obsessed by the Coventry kit (sky blue variant) and other tramline variations - Wales, Dundee, Saudi Arabia. As 'soccer' began to break in the States Admiral's magic could be spotted dressing dynamically named US clubs: San Francisco Fog, Detroit Express, Philadelphia FuryL.A. Aztecs (I found an Aztecs shirt in charity shop in '91, but binned it eventually. Worth a fortune now)
Footballing ledge George Best spent two years with the Aztecs, and provides the source material for today's musical motif.
"My name is Malcolm McLaren, I have brought you many things in my time"Malcom introduces himself in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle
Given a multiple choice of Malcom McLaren's talent and character, where do you place a tick: genius or jinx, myth-maker or manipulator, situationist or self publicist? The correct answer is - all of the above.
McLaren's early history is one of fractured families, student riots and art college sit-ins. In 1971 he opened a profitable outlet for his outsider stance through the most English of institutions - shopkeeping. Kicking against the trends of glam, hot pants and heavy rock, McLaren, and girlfriend Vivienne Westwood, sold fifties outfits and rock 'n' roll accessories to Teddy Boys and bikers at the wrong end of King's Road (430: formerly the site of Hung On You, Mr Freedom and Paradise Garage) nestling like a neighbour from hell next to the Chelsea Conservative Club.
Three years later they refitted the shop as SEX, retailing rubberwear to suburbanites and creating a catalogue of inflammatory imagery that brought police raids, confiscations and later an arrest for wearing the infamous two cowboys shirt in public. Still at 430 King's Road, Seditionaries: Clothes For Heroes opened in '77, with a collection consolidating all that had gone before: rock 'n' roll and cultural icons reformatted in shock-horror collages, under-the-counter imagery posterised in cartoon colours or stenciled with situationist slogans - and adding spiky new lines: tartan bondage suits, long sleeve muslins, Spider-man boots and parachute shirts.
By the mid-seventies, following a brief period managing the New York Dolls (dressing them in red patent leather and hammer and sickle imagery), slow-shifting whispers about the hate couture on sale at 430 King's Road drew new blood to the shop, becoming something of a club house for a handful of bored teenagers. And, like a dayglo Fagin, McLaren focused and stoked this shapeless momentum into a movement of Molotov cocktail combustibility. When punk, the Pistols and all hell finally broke loose, it was just another chapter from the McLaren scrapbook of anarchy, chaos and controversy, but a chapter that perhaps overshadowed his other hits and highlights..
Recruiting college chum and member of Suburban Press Jamie Reid as punk's graphic designer
Creating the template of historical references and Burundi Beats for Adam Ant
Spotlighting Boy George's potential as frontperson (George performed with a pre-Annabella Bow Wow Wow)
Styling Bow Wow Wow’s pirate chic, which, underwrote the new romantic wardrobe.
Breaking Hip Hop in the UK by way of Channel 4 'Tube' special.
Putting world music on a world stage with his Duck Rock album
Whatever you're take on him is, the fact remains, McLaren was a career subversive, a serial situationist and a repeat offender - before, during and after punk. His real skill was technique more than talent, mixing and matching mediums - film, fashion, politics and Pop Art - although music was always a key ingredient (just lend an ear to the SEX jukebox). Whether dressing New York street-toughs in red leather, London bovver boys in Destroy shirts or discovering adolescents in launderettes and Harlem based break dancers - mixing street level chic with with art school concepts for maximum publicity was his signature style. I'll leave the final word to Barry Cain, who worked with McLaren on his (still unreleased) autobiography.
"He’s the Brian Clough of pop who should’ve managed England. Knowing Malcolm, I think love got in the way – he’s an incurable romantic. But we should all be thankful he turned the world dayglo"
The New York Dolls - Red Patent Leather Recorded while McLaren was the Dolls manager and taken from a live set that also includes Something Else later covered by Sid Vicious.
This really is a marvellous, marvellous piece of footage. Taken from the Dress For Pleasure documentary it uncovers SEX's bread and butter customers. Watch out for the chap who looks like Stanley Unwin, casually chatting at home in his black rubber number.
In the years BC (before Corduroy) Addison brothers (Big) Ben and (Great) Scott were the creative wonder-twins behind power-pop art, mod-rockers Boys Wonder - a high kicking explosion of Spock crops, polka dots, futuristic fashion student chic, Carnaby Street chords and Anthony Newley style show-vocals.
After only a handful of singles Boys Wonder made a stylistic switcheroo, trading in the Clockwork Mod clobber and space-punk sounds for shuffling dance drums, choppy house-style piano patterns and wah guitar riffs - along with a new wardrobe of long sleeve tees and British knights trainers. The Boys Wonder version 2 tunes were bubblegum with muscle. Cut and pastiche pop, borrowing from soundtracks, TV ads, other bands lyrics, horn riffs and guitar parts or rebranding corporate logos into Boys Wonder designs.
While other indie-kids were making woeful Mini-Morrisey moans, dressing in black DMs and floppy bobs, Boys Wonder were preempting the indie/dance crossover and Brit pop's cocky posturing. By the time the rest of the runners and riders had finally caught up, the trail had gone cold and the brothers Addison had moved onto Anglo-flavoured acid jazz (several steps ahead of the mid-90s lounge revival). But that's another tale for another time.
The first two tracks are from the Radio Wonder mini album. The third is ripped from the extremely limited white label only release of Keep It Up
And this is me! Summer 1980 (aged 14) on my first shopping trip to King's Road, Chelsea - wearing my 'just been bought' Anarchist Gang shirt.*.
I can carbon date exactly when I bought my first Sex Pistols single - Tuesday 27th February 1979 - a group of us had spent the morning clustering around Kelleys Records in Hadleigh waiting for the Tuesday new singles delivery which included the Pistols 'Something Else' - not a classic by any stretch, but the anticipation of owning my first piece of 'as it happens' punky shrapnel (with the added bonus of some explosive effing and jeffing on the b-side) still had me giddy headed and punk drunk.
Rewind a few months and I'd had no interest in snotty, shouty, sweary spiky tops until an earful from a friend's older brother's - it's always the older brother - copy of NMTB got me switched on and tuned in to the 'now wave' of punk, with its high speed rage and rush mirroring my own hormonal hi-jinks. Hearing the Pistols properly for the first time, on a pair of Easter egg sized headphones, was a sonic seismic shift which exploded in a brain frying Everything You Know Is Wrong moment:I cut my hair, changed the way I dressed (and didn't care what anyone thought) wanted to learn guitar and start ripping out those Sex Pistols riffs. Starsky was out Sid Vicous was in, and I signed on the studded line committed to slowly becoming a teeny punk.
'Something Else' was followed up with regular record buying bus trips to southend's John Peel and punk friendly shops - Kelleys, Golden Disc, Parrot but never Projection (which was all trendy-teacher types, thirty something ex hippies in hessian jackets, corduroys, Kickers or cowboy boots) - for The Damned, Dead Kennedys, The Undertones, Crass, UK Subs and one-off wonders like The Satellites, The Victim, Honey Bane and Magic Michael.
By 1980 it was punk pilgrimages to SW3 and the King's Road - with mum and dad -for punky togs . One year later and it was The Damned's 5th Anniversay gig with A. N. Other friend chaperoned by his older brother (see what I mean?)
So, cue shots of fly away calendar pages and fast forward to today as I hold in my hand two pieces of paper that have got me as clucked up as Charley Bucket (now there's a proto punk name) unwrapping Willy Wonka's choco' bar and finding that glint of gold.
Yes. It's tickets to the Sex pistols. Tonight. At Hammersmith Apollo. Piley'll be there, and I'll be hoofing along with Tronik the boy wonder.I haven't been this giddy and punk drunk since that misty Tuesday morning outside Kelleys Records in 1979.
*I bought three tops from BOY (Seditionaries was being refitted as Worlds End) on this visit. Two cheesecloths - God Save The Queen and Anarchist Gang (pictured)- plus a Vive Le Rock black tee, which circumstantial evidence suggests at this point in 1980, were possibly Seditionaries over-stocks being sold off at BOY - but unfortunately all were dropped in the bin yonks ago.
How badly do I want of these T Shirts? Enough to spend more hours than I really should scanning and scouring eBay for variations on the “Admiral ringer tee shirt” theme. I’d have to favour the sky blue flavour out of the three though.
And how about a manbag to go with it? - Perfect
So get your ringers on, have a quick freshen up with this - then it’s off here to shake a leg to tunes like…
Inspired by some recent rummage related posings from Davey H (vintage cassettes) and Ally (Postcard Records brochure), here's my contibution to lovelies from the loft - the BOY mail order catalogue 'Blackmail'.
When Seditionaries closed in 1980 to be refitted and restyled as swishy, squiggly World's End, BOY at 153 King's Road sold off any remaining Seditionaries stock and continued production of a few selected Westwood and McClarens designs along side it's own BOY and Kitsch 22 togs . These are a few of the items from the 1981 2nd edition catalogue - with titles, prices and (designs by in brackets). Check out the long sleeve muslins for £8.50!! - how much do they go for on ebay now?? I had two and binned them. Whoops!
Nigel Shirt (BOY) - £18.50 Stringy Pullover(BOY) - £15 Long Sleeved Muslin (Seditionaries) - £8.50 Adam and the Ants T shirt (BOY)- £4.50 Striped Jeans and Leopard Jeans (Modzart)- £17.50 Crazy Colour - £3.50 - Wraparound shades (BOY) - £3.95
And to continue the theme of New Wave nuggets here's.....
