Lillian Roxon, Falling For Those Pale Skinny English Boys: Bowie and Bolan

July 26, 2022 Peter Stanfield

As 1972 moved into the Spring, Lillian Roxon had fallen in love again with pop and the teenage dream. Marc Bolan was her first true love of the new season.

Climbing out of her sick bed, Lillian sets off to meet her new teen idol. She is enchanted . . .

She’ll make at least two trips to London in 1972, in February she was part of the media circus to witness Bowie’s coming out as Ziggy Stardust. The Garbo look has been replaced by short-hair and Star Trek jumpsuits. . . ‘restoring a little of the stud image he’d lost’. The Lou Reed influence on Bowie is pushed to the fore

When in London, go shopping . . . This represents perhaps the earliest US press appearance of Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood’s Let It Rock. Lillian calls it Paradise Garage, which had ceased trading in November 1971. The confusion is understandable, as Paul Gorman reminded me the Let It Rock sign was not in place until March ‘72.

The salesmen have long hair, all right, but it is greased back into high shiny pompadours. When they’re not wearing motor cycle jackets they sport authentic drape shape coats with velvet lapels.

Bad sound and the wrong audience spoilt Lillian’s enjoyment of T. Rex’s Carnegie Hall gig. In her two accounts of the show she mentioned Marc ad-libbing sexually explicit lyrics: ‘You could actually hear people asking each other in amazement if they’d heard right’. So, what was he singing? I need to know.

In June she interviews Bowie during a 3 day promotional visit to NYC. Both watch Elvis. Bowie plays on the idea of being a fabricated pop star, imagining a doll in his own image with hair that grows and that can say things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I like to dress up’. Lillian hopes it will come with the full Ziggy wardrobe.

And then she’s part of the press junket arranged for American critics with a Bowie show at Friars, Aylesbury and the Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges sets at King Sound, King’s Cross.

Bolan is back and playing at the Academy of Music, but it’s still not working:

this is a man who should never be allowed to work without at least two hundred screaming young girls crammed into the first ten rows . . . Playing to the torpid mob at the Academy of Music, he was like Raquel Welch trying to do a strip for the Daughters of the American Revolution. Namely, not fully appreciated.

Meanwhile, Bowie is about to make his debut US appearance . . .

A star is born . . . whose ‘carefully stylized movements give us an updated (though deceptively frail) ‘70s version of the ‘50s teenage hood’.

*Sydney Morning Herald* (December 10, 1972)

Lou Reed given the ultimate plug for his forthcoming Transformer . . . evil

Fats Domino plays the Club International – David Parkinson was there

April 1, 2022 Peter Stanfield

Fats Domino’s sell-out Hammersmith Odeon appearance in April 1973 was covered by Waxie Maxie in the July ‘73 issue of Club International (volume 2, number 7). As per his self-given remit, his lead into the story managed a sex scenario that featured rock n roll records and a little ultra violence between the day’s youth cults . . . Perfect Max in fact. Fats bought his own band, which must have disappointed the Allstars, but none of that matters much because we’re not here to celebrate Teddy Boy Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mr. Domino or even Mr. Needham. My purpose here is to give your peepers the chance to glance over David Parkinson’s photographs. The one above being all you will ever need to see in order to understand the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll in 1972–73.

I can’t let this post go by without also noting that this is all in the same issue that David Parkinson ran a spread on Malcolm McLaren’s Let It Rock clobber that ran for seven pages. Style and attitude never better displayed . . . visit Paul Gorman’s webpages for a fuller account of Parkinson, Mclaren and Club International, be warned you will get lost in there: https://www.paulgormanis.com/

For anyone looking to track down a copy of this issue of Club International here’s the cover, which features Iggy Pop on stage at the King Sound July 1972 gig, as photographed by Mick Rock

Doo-Wop-Sha-Waddy-Waddy – the 1970s R 'n' R Revival Staggers on

October 12, 2021 Peter Stanfield

Variations on a theme . . . Game magazine in June 1975 ran a seven page spread using four Teddy Boys and a beat-up 1952 Pontiac Chieftan as props. It’s all a little obvious in its hoodlum poses, but the model’s two outfits, what there is of them, look to have been borrowed from the racks of 430 King’s Road. Though I’m no expert, the string vest looks like a leftover from Let It Rock and the black top with asymetrical zips, rips and patches might be something worked up for Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die/SEX.

Bob Carlos Clarke directed the shoot, ‘ A wet dream from those rockin’ fifties’.

addenda: turns out I was part way right on the model’s shirts, the black top, Paul Gorman tells me, is a detourned Let It Rock shirt made for the London R n R Show at Wembley and then cut up for TFTL/SEX. He’ll be posting something on these images and others from Game at somepoint so we’ll know more . . . As for the string vest, who does really know . . . and, I should also add, the Teds, Ian, Pete, Andy and Len were all well-known figures on the London scene, but you can tell that can’t you?

GAME v.1 #3 (March 1974) ‘Teddy Boy Memories’. Why do ‘70s Teds always come from Tooting? Is this Max Needham? Let It Rock gets a mention: ‘pushing drainpipes and brothel creepers to the King’s Road trendies’.

Sex: Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die

January 27, 2021 Peter Stanfield

Toward the end of last year I chanced upon the news that one of my favourite CD compilations was finally getting the deluxe vinyl treatment, Marco Pirroni’s 2003 collection of jukebox picks from 430 King’s Road. The mix of British RnR (Vince Taylor, Lord Sutch, Joe Meek), Beat (Troggs), Freakbeat (The Creation), a slew of 60s Nuggets, (Spades, Sonics, Strangeloves, Castaways, Count Five), some classic RnB (Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, Arthur Alexander, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) is filtered by the more contempary sounds of Alice Cooper’s ‘Eighteen, Flamin’ Groovies’ ‘Shake Some Action’ and The Modern Lovers ‘Roadrunner’, and then topped off by Johnny Hallyday and Loretta Lynn. It’s not a particularly eclectic blend, or maybe that’s just hindsight provided by living in a post-Nuggets world and the fact that that so many of the featured bands and tracks came to have an importance in 1976/77 – dj’d at gigs and one or other of the tracks covered by just about any wannabe band moving out of the nation’s youth clubs and into the city. Still, I’m left asking where McLaren found a copy of The Spades (pre-Thirteenth Floor Elevators) ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’/’We Sell Soul’, both sides featured here. Originals go for four-figure numbers these days, though it did get booted circa 1976. Perhaps he got a repro copy from Marc Zermati at his L’Open Market in Paris or at one of Ted Carroll’s Rock On outlets?

The track selection on Sex isn’t that distinct from that offered on the 2008 Ace CD that celebrates Carroll’s shops and market stores. There’s nothing on that set that McLaren wouldn’t have approved of, including as it does Jerry Byrne’s ‘Lights Out’ that forms one side of the bonus 45 that comes with the first 1000 copies of the new vinyl edition (the flip is Ian Hunter’s sublime ‘Once Bitten, Twice Shy’). The difference is that the Ace CD has less of the English part of the equation, and none of the camp asides that Sutch, Meek, Hallyday, Lynn and Jackie and The Starlites provided on the Sex jukebox. Rock On has that very British addiction to a certain strand of authenticity, that still appeals to me, but it was one that McLaren eventually rejected when he dumped the Teddy Boy clientele and the fifties retro mode and, post his encounters with the New York Dolls, switched to Sex and the Sex Pistols.

1973 album of RnR covers by anonymous session musicians, but does credit the stylist – ‘Clothes: Courtesy of “Let It Rock” 430 Kings Road London’. Who are the models, because I bet they never drank at the Black Raven?

The deluxe vinyl edition with the bonus 45 can only be bought from Hackney’s Stranger than Paradise, a store named after one of my most beloved of films. Here. Perhaps they’ll also release on vinyl Marco Pirroni’s other two Only Lovers Left Alive collections Granny Takes a Trip: Conversation’s Dead, Man and Biba; Champagne and Novocaine.

You Can’t Put Your Arms Round A New York Doll

May 21, 2020 Peter Stanfield

Paul Gorman’s biography of Malcolm McLaren is a thing of wonder, monumental in size and scope; a definitive account of the man. I burned through its 800-odd pages but paid especial attention to the King’s Road years. His account of Let It Rock and McLaren’s amour fou with Teddy Boy rock ’n’ roll is without parallel, a brilliant encapsulation of the 70’s resurrection shuffle.

His story of McLaren’s interaction with the New York Dolls is also the most authoritative that we have and are likely to get. In Sylvain Sylvain’s memoir he claimed to have first met McLaren in New York in 1971, bought clothes from him and Westwood when they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He’s emphatic that their paths first crossed in the spring of that year. He chides others who said it must have been the summer of 1973, he gives his evidence, which all sounds reasonable enough. But as Gorman makes clear in a footnote, that Spring 1971 date is impossible because McLaren was still a student at Goldsmiths and Westwood was still a teacher. Who you gonna believe? Well, not Sylvain who later writes about the halcyon days of 1972, when the Dolls were conquering Manhattan, that he has ‘no idea today of the chronology, if indeed I ever did.’

Even if he spends too much time disputing song writing credits and contesting who was responsible for what, Sylvain’s autobiography is a funfair ride, a pleasure to read, but he is an unreliable witness. That said, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane is even worse. For all its undoubted charm, his memoir is full of misremembered events, half-recalled occurrences, forgetfulness and simple errors. None of which is surprising as Arthur was pretty much out of it throughout the band’s whole existence. His is a story of an alcoholic stumbling from one blackout to another, from one bad hangover to next, from a desperate and ever on-going search for a bottle and oblivion. His time in the Dolls reads like a nightmare, a delirium tremens. The bitterness he feels towards his management team (and toward Johansen) is palpable at times, he fumes away at being left to deal with things on his own, yet they could hardly take responsibility for his addictions, his acts of self-destruction.

Kane’s time spent in England recording demos in Kent, playing support to the Faces at Wembley and Billy Doll’s sad demise in a bath tub in SW7 is little more than a drunk’s set of impressions, albeit a compelling read. When not recording or travelling to one cancelled gig or barely remembered show, the Dolls hung out at the Speakeasy. One night, the band rouse themselves to get up on its stage and bang out a couple of numbers. A drunk loudly and boorishly heckles them: ‘He kept screaming and cursing at us as we tried to finish one of our songs. He was loud, totally obnoxious, and completely distracting’. The rowdy is Mick Farren.

I couldn’t recall if Farren had mentioned the incident in his memoir, Give the Anarchist A Cigarette, but it’s my favourite autobiography of the 60s and 70s scene, so I was happy to return to it and perform a little detective work. In the past I’ve probably given it too much credence when it comes to questions of fact and veracity, but I know better now. I already knew that Farren had misremembered some things, such as reporting that Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges played together on the same night’s bill at the King’s Cross Cinema in July 1972, but that sort of error is easily forgivable – amphetamine psychosis, or too much to drink, or even just the passing of time, can collapse two shows into one, especially when they were only 24 hours apart. But, on the following page, he loses not a day but a whole year, a good 12 months. There’s no mention of his harassment of the Dolls at the Speakeasy, but he was there to watch them at Wembley:

The Dolls set was interesting is so far as bass player Arthur Kane was dressed as a ballerina, but they had very obviously never played to an audience of more than 300 and were lost in front of 13,000 Faces fans in the cavernous and echoing auditorium.

Never mind, because a few days later they are playing Biba’s Rainbow Room and making a lot more sense: ‘They had clearly returned to the Deviants’ ethic that rock ’n’ roll should not be the exclusive preserve of virtuoso players.’ You can’t argue with that, or at least I wouldn’t, but the Dolls played Wembley on 29th October 1972 and Biba’s on 26th and 27th November 1973.

If you want to know what happened and McLaren was involved, you can trust Paul Gorman, and if you want a great read about how pop culture shifted and changed across the course of McLaren’s 30 odd years of stirring it up then I can think of no better guide either.