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.