The Hard Sell: Pin-Ups 1972

‘This intensely researched, vividly detailed book plunges you into the electric moment of 1972 – as year as revolutionary in rock history as 1967 or 1977.’

Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy and Rip It Up and Start Again

‘Peter Stanfield has scavenged the ruins – foxed paperbacks, illegible underground press layouts, yellowed national newspaper cuttings, tatty pages from Disc and NME and creased copies of curious sex magazines (including Curious) – to join the dots between art and artifice, from avant-garde interiors and anti-fashion boutiques to wayward rockers, glam-Mods and anachronistic Teds. Pin-Ups 1972 is an exhilarating ride through po-mo popular culture at its peak.’

Paul Gorman, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion

An Introduction to Flash

When he described his pop ideal, Cohn invariably labelled it ‘flash’. The adjective had a peculiarly English application; it was not much used in the pop vernacular of the day by American critics. But it summarized the perfect pop attributes, suggesting in its two syllables the flaring, pulsing surge of the ephemeral pop moment: the splashy, garish display of the pop star; the sharp, concise impression left by the hit of a pop single; the sham, counterfeit emotion used in pop marketing; and the illicit, underworld attraction of flash-men, flash-coves and flash-Harrys who occupied the pop world, especially those trespassers who tunnelled under or climbed over the cultural and social borders of the suburban greylands that restrained others. To have ‘flash’ meant you lived in the moment, without regard for yesterday and without thought for tomorrow. You thrived in an accelerating world, ahead of the game, blazing brightly enough to leave an impression – to have made your mark with attitude and style.

A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk

April 1971 edition of Esquire, ‘the magazine for men’, Richard Woodley provided ‘An Introduction to Flash’ for American readers

The ‘flash’ – what others might call ‘style’ – is important on the street. It’s in the clothes, it’s in the cars, it’s in the eyes, the walk, the talk. “you got to have flash”, Jimmy said. “I guess it’s like acting. We all know it’s acting, but people recognise the flash on the street. People get to know you by the flash. They suspect you’re somebody. Like, a lot of people on the street sort of know who I am. They know but don’t know. They know a little. Who’s that? Somebody will say. That’s Jimmy, they tell him. Oh yeah? The dude will say

Woodley’s piece is the story of a Harlem hustler who sells “top-shelf coke. Super-fly.” Whether or not his article was a source for the 1972 film starring Ron O’Neil, directed by Gordon Parks jr., it was certainly part of the cycle of blaxsploitation. Jimmy tells his inquisitor how the game works and as evening falls he looks down on Lennox Avenue where “the pimps’ Cadillacs were beginning to gather and double-park.” Getting ready to join them on the street, Jimmy primps himself before a full-length mirror,

Touching his Afro, smoothing his trousers, touching the butt of his automatic. He started toward the door, then came back to the mirror. He looked straight ahead at himself, icily. Then he opened the apartment door and looked down the hall. He strode to the elevator, got in, pushed the button, and rode down into the Harlem night.

Though sold as an authentic report, the piece reads more like fantasy and not so very far removed from Nik Cohn’s ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’ (1976) that formed the basis of Saturday Night Fever. It hardly needs retelling that Cohn was cavalier with the facts about the Brooklyn disco scene and imported the language, style and attitude of Goldhawk Road Mods to boost his story. Woodley’s introduction to ‘flash’ feels like he was doing much the same thing.

The story was expanded for Dealer: The Portrait of a Cocaine Merchant (Hardback 1971 and a 1972 pulp paperback the following year). Yeah, you gotta have flash.

I Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star

Marc Bolan in his Little Venice flat, 1971. Photo by Kieron ‘Spud’ Murphy (but I coud be wrong about that and everything else)

A random post on Twitter caught my interest, not because of the picture of Bolan posing in his Little Venice flat but because a comment by @StuartPenney1 drew my attention to the album partly obscured by the guitar and to the left of the inner sleeve of Electric Warrior and Sticky Fingers. It’s an Elvis bootleg – I Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star – released like the other two albums in 1971.

Around the time the photograph was taken, Pete Frame, in Zigzag #21, visits Bolan at home where he finds him on the balcony with his earphones on listening to 1956 Elvis. The crux of the interview is concerned with Bolan’s new found fame, the shift from being a Freak in the Underground to being a star on Top of the Pops. At this moment in time, then, the Elvis album must have been a kind of totem for him, representing a similar pivot point when Presley shifted from Memphis to Hollywood. Well, maybe . . .

My interest in the record is that it looks like the kind of platter that The Firm, Ian Sippen and Pete Shertser, would put out on the Union Pacific label a year later. I wrote about those albums here (and their early Red Lightning blues albums here). It’s on Viktorie (RCA Victor geddit?) with sleeve notes by the immortal Vincent Lust. His older brother designed the sleeve, a raw cut n’ paste job.

Even if the bootleg has nothing to do with The Firm, it’s still getting filed next to UP003 their Little Richard album. That album’s sleeve notes are partly dedicated to a review of the Wembley appearance by the Georgia Peach, his very self, at the 1972 London Rock n Roll Show, which is described as his ‘darkest hour . . . Richard failed for the first time ever to communicate with his audience.’ Oh well, Ian and Pete have a stack of old records of his they wanna share regardless, so on with the ‘healing music that makes the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead rise up!’

You don’t get sleeve notes like that anymore . . .

Eugene Lust, Vincent’s bastard son

baby, baby, where did our love go?

Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook

Performing at the IoW Festival with her band using The Who’s gear

In June 1973 Marsha Hunt went to court for an affiliation order that cited Mick Jagger as the father of her two year-old daughter, Karis. Before flying from Heathrow to Rome with his wife and their 18 month-old daughter Jade, Jagger was asked by reporters for his view on the matter, somewhat quizzically he said: ‘What’s the title of her latest record?’. Jagger was too subtle for the reporter for the Daily Mail who didn’t follow up his line of enquiry, but just let the question hang in the air. The answer was ‘Medusa’ a heavy glam rocker on Vertigo. The single was her first release since the run of three singles released on Track between April 1969 and March 1970.

Vogue January 1, 1969

Back then her afro was not girded with serpents, but it was the nation’s most talked about head of hair. It was discussed nearly as much as her TOTP’s performance of Dr John’s ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’ where she momentarily held viewers in thrall with her barely concealed bosom. Such were the days.

Vogue January 1, 1969

The child of a psychiatrist, she had been an undergraduate at Berkeley but quit her studies to travel to London in 1966. She hung around the rock scene, putting herself into Alexis Korner’s sphere, becoming part of Long John Baldry’s show and getting a bit part in Blow Up. In between she married Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, but the union didn’t last.

July 1967 part of the Long John Baldry Show

She’d achieved some notoriety for her part in the cast of the London presentation of the ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ Hair. The show opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968, Robert Stigwood was among the producers. It was the first new production to be staged following the abolition of theatre censorship, which meant more than the usual fuss was made over its celebrated nude scene. The Stage reported positively on its premier though it also noted the show was greeted with ‘cheers and boos’. It made no attempt to explain just why there was such consternation in the audience, but then they’d not previously encountered Mick Farren who was living above the theatre at the time:

When the wretched show first opened we gullibly took the advertised nudity and audience participation as an open invitation to stroll into the auditorium and maybe even play an impromptu part in the proceedings. We discovered the error of our assumptions the first time we tried it, when we were immediately and bodily ejected by the burly commissionaires who hadn’t been told about the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

–      Give the Anarchist A Cigarette

Track ad in Zigzag for ‘Walk On Gilded Splinters’ with David Bailey photo credit

In April of the following year, Billboard reported that Track were rush releasing her debut single, produced by Tony Visconti for Tony Hall Enterprises. It entered the Record Retailer charts at 46, earning her the TOTP’s appearance, but didn’t get any higher. In September Rave magazine reported she would shortly have an LP released and was ‘spending her time modelling and making live bookings’. She was among the acts who appeared that month at the Isle of Wight Festival. The Daily Mirror reported she would perform ‘topless’. She didn’t, but the tabloids ran pictures of her regardless. Who could doubt she was a better prospect than the festival’s headliner, Bob Dylan?

Daily Mail ‘wriggles and writhes’ over Marsha Hunt

The Daily Express gets in on the action . . .

Two further singles followed, in November and then in March 1970, but the album remained in the vaults, perhaps because of her pregnancy. It would eventually be released in December 1971, too late to build on all the publicity she garnered over the previous two years. It was also too late to exploit her return to public performances when she shared the stage with P. J. Proby in Jack Good’s Catch My Soul – a rock musical version of Othello, which she joined 12 months earlier.

What Josephine Baker was for Parisians in the 1920s Marsha Hunt was for Londoners in the 1960s/1970s.

To tie-in with her appearance in the show, The Guardian ran a short profile of the single mother, the interview was overripe with racist and sexist tropes of the kind that had been a staple of her media profile since her role in Hair. The reporter described her afro as a ‘black golliwog fuzzball’ and thought that she ‘resembled ‘a cross between a Hottentot and a 50oz ball of wool’. She was to the mainstream media and to the Underground as Josephine Baker had earlier been for Parisian sophisticates – an exotic American delight. In the editorial that accompanied her Patrick Litchfield images for Vogue, she was described as a ‘jungle cat, cave-girl kitten, all-American girl’. She was extraordinarily beautiful but, like Jimi Hendrix before her, she was expected to play to British racial stereotypes.

IT advert which beggar’s belief . . . In the following issue they apologised. Didn’t Track provide their own print ready materials?

Those prejudices undoubtedly filtered into the decisions made with regard of the type of music she would record for Track; it would certainly have been a factor in her cover of Dr. John’s ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’ from his celebrated 1968 debut Gris-Gris. The New Orleans voodoo schtick worked easily with the image of her as a sexual primitive doing the ‘danse sauvage’ for the counterculture. Tony Visconti tightens up the extended meandering of the original, which ran just over seven minutes, to construct a more concise, pop orientated three minute potion. Hunt doesn’t sing the song as someone in thrall to the needle, which is how Dr. John positioned himself, but as the enchantress Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, casting spells. There’s no ‘I’ in the title of Hunt’s version. Otherwise, Visconti’s production is remarkable true to the original’s arrangement. The congas pattering out the rhythm.

Daily Express review: ‘she looks like a delicious golliwog’

Track ad in Melody Maker

The blueprint for the single was taken up again and used for what would become the album’s title track, Bobby Goldsboro and Kenny O’Dell’s ‘Woman Child’. The two tracks echo with a taint of the bayou and French Quarter, with Cajun accents and voices that have breathed in the same foul air as Buddy Bolden. The single’s flipside swaps Louisiana witchery for the more materialist interests of Marc Bolan’s ‘Hot Rod Poppa’. It is a liberating switch. The shift from ‘Mama’ to ‘Poppa’ somewhat effaced Bolan’s conflation of gender and sexual positions, with his greased up Levi’s and baseball boots above his head, to make the song much less ambiguous. Hunt’s version has a revved-up phallic charge; a propulsive glide that was already there on the much earlier John’s Children’s version. As the lead track on My People Were Fair . . . album, ‘Hot Rod Mama’ sounded more a rattling T-Model struggling to make the quarter-mile on the long drag down Ladbroke Grove. Hunt’s version put it back into the race.

An International Times editorial assistant plays the park bench perv . . .

Given Visconti’s close relationship with Bolan, it’s not particularly remarkable that he would offer his songs to Hunt, but it is surprising that she recorded so many and did them so well. Track followed ‘Gilded Splinters’ with a Bolan double-header of ‘Desdemona’ and ‘Hippy Gumbo’. The latter more a drift through Little Venice than a walk down Bourbon Street.

Kit Lambert and Vicki Wickham (co-writer with Simon Napier-Bell of ‘You Don’t Have to say You Love Me’ and producer on Ready Steady Go!) get the production credit for ‘Desdemona’. They stay pretty true to the John’s Children original with their arrangement but bring in an electronic piano that bounces things along and has Hunt chasing after the tune. The effect is to leave the punk sneer of Andy Ellison’s vocal, backed by Bolan and The Who inspired psychedelics of over-amped guitars and cymbal splashes, a long way behind.

Zigzag #6 front page pin-up of Marsha in the graveyard

‘Hippy Gumbo’ didn’t make it to the album with ‘Hot Rod Poppa’ and ‘Desdemona’, which is a shame, but a fourth Bolan cover was included, ‘Stacey Grove’ from the album Prophets Seers and Sages. The Tyrannosaurus Rex version is a whirling incantation about a man, a nice cat with a hat full of wine, who picks ticks off his dog, Hunt’s recording is gifted a fuller arrangement with wind instruments and a harmonium creating a rich texture, but leaves out the quirks.

Though Bolan and Hunt had a romantic fling, he didn’t participate in the recording of his own songs but did provide a screeching back up vocal to her cover of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You’, which is from the same school as Vanilla Fudge’s overblown ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ .

Track ad in Zigzag for ‘Desdemona’ or is it ‘DesdAmona’?

Kit Lambert produced the two sides of Hunt’s final Track single, the top-side a cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Keep The Customer Satisfied’. On the downside was an undistinguished original, ‘Lonesome Holy Roller’. Both tracks a let-down after the pop frenzy of the predecessors. The Simon and Garfunkel tune made it to the album, a 12 track affair pulled together from various sessions by Track staffers Mike Shaw and Bill Curbishley — it’s a hodgepodge. If Visconti had been left to bring it to fruition the LP would have been a whole lot more coherent, I’d wager. The Americana of ‘Long Black Veil’, Dylan’s  ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, the pastiche spiritual ‘Moan You Moaners’ and even Traffic’s ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ are all unremarkable, plodding vamps that distract from the pop urgency of Bolan’s songs and the witchery of ‘Gilded Splinters’ and ‘Woman Child’.
The album finishes with ‘Wild Thing’ making that Hendrix/primitive connection. Ron Wood, Ian Maclagan and Kenny Jones are said to be the key players, and I can believe that as I can the rumour that Pete Townshend laid down the slashing guitar. Apart from listing the producers, the album doesn’t give any credits other than a mysterious thanks to ‘“George” at Apple Studios’; The Faces no doubt remained anonymous for contractual reasons. It’s a shame they didn’t do more with Ms Hunt.

Marsha Hunt as The Seeker or a Storyville chippy. Track ad in Zigzag

Were other Bolan songs recorded by her? Probably not, but I like the fantasy of a ‘Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook’ album. What we do have are the four tracks which would make for a superfine 12” EP, with ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, ‘Woman Child’, ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ and ‘Wild Thing’ as a bonus disc. Whatever the format and track running order, Marsha Hunt’s sessions with Visconti, Lambert and Gus Dudgeon deserve a decent reissue.

Bolan’s songs from before the golden age of his big hits are all highly idiosyncratic and personal, intimate turns, performed as if he were playing in a cramped and damp parlour in some Notting Hill dump of a house. To hear them appropriated by someone else, even with the continuity that Visconti provides, is to realise just how deceptively well-crafted his songs are – perfect pop vignettes, like no others.

German Polydor and UK Track releases. The latter has a very cheap flmsey card cover, same as the label’s Backtrack budget releases. The Polydor is full laminated so that’s the one to get!!!!

German reissue of Woman Child retitled Dedemona and German and French pic sleeves

Reverse of German reissue and French, Norwegian and German pic sleeves

Keith Moon does his bit for Marsha and Track Records . . . Club (January 1971)

Cheese cake for the men’s mags. Club July 1970

Skinhead Apocalypse – The Charlie George Disco Spins on Forever

1971, 13 years-old. I wore Doc Martens, monkey boots sometimes, tonik trousers and orange tag Levi’s, but not a Crombie. My mates had Crombie imitations but I had a Millets parka (what was that about? Some shallow echo of Mod fashion?). I wasn’t a Skinhead or a Suedehead not even a Bovver Boy, though I followed Chelsea as much as any suburban New Town teen might. We lived for football; at school we played it in the breaks and in PE. We played in the park after school and at weekends we played more football or we played Subbuteo. And we went to football matches; Spurs, Arsenal, OPR and Watford were who my closest friends supported. I went with them to see their teams as much as I went to see mine.

At the youth club we kicked footballs about and watched the girls dance in formation. At my mate’s house, after school, after the kick about, we listened to his older sister’s records, Max Romeo’s ‘Wet Dream’ and Prince Buster’s ‘Big Five’ over and over again. Out of reach, a distant figure, his sister seemed impossibly hip. There was no one in my family like her. But these things soon passed, as orange tag Levi’s were exchanged for Skinner jeans and Sta-Prest for channel-seamed flares. That was the sum of it for me, a fleeting moment before my interest switched from football to music – to Roxy, Lou Reed, Bowie, Alice and Slade.

Illustration by Malcolm Harrison, NTA, that accompanied Basil George’s ‘Let’s Dance’ Game v.1, n.12 (1974)

Late 1974 and Skinheads are figures of the past not only for me but also for Game magazine’s Basil George. 1974 was a long way from the point in time when Skinheads joined youth culture’s ‘long line of apocalyptic syndromes’, he wrote in his introduction to a lurid story about the contemporary dance scene. Since his Mod days at the Flamingo and Marquee, George hadn’t spent much time in the clubs, his last memorable experience on the dance floor had been at another Soho dive as the 60s turned into the 70s:

There in a dingy, smoky tomb I fumbled through a few half-hearted and fearful dances with a succession of apathetic girls with hair so short even the dim, bloodshot light failed to conceal horrifying glimpses of feminine scalp . . . Even more extreme than the short hair of the girls were skinny, but none-the-less menacing boys with their hair shaved to the point of baldness. And the boys all wore check Ben Sherman shirts, old fashioned braces, jeans cut short as much as six inches above the ankle and the mandatory ‘bovver boots’.

This scene was not for him, but the dancers held his fascination. Along one wall, the boys lent back and moved only their hips to the music. In touching distance, the girls faced the boys and moved in time. ‘Sure enough the girls dresses were pushed high up at the front and here and there was the glint of an open fly.’ The dance of sex played on.

Paul ‘Smiler’ Anderson and Mark Baxter, Scorcha! Skins, Suedes and Style From The Streets 1967-1973 (Omnibus Press, 2021)

In Paul Anderson and Mark Baxter’s Scorcha!, a sumptuously illustrated history of Skins, Suedeheads and street style, 1967-1973, you can find numerous examples of the scene described by Basil George, though the prurient aspect, the hitched skirts and open jeans are not on show. Decorated throughout by literally hundreds of record labels, this is a book about music, fashion and dancing. The football side of things is a backdrop, not the centre of the action, which wasn’t quite how some saw it at the time.

Suggs and Paul Weller provide endorsements for the book, not Alan Hudson or Charlie George. Both musicians were old enough to be aware of Skin and Suedehead fashion but, like me, just a little too young to be fully a part of it. Suggs was 11 years old in 1971 when Suedeheads took hold of his imagination, a ‘mind-blowing’ encounter. For Paul Weller, two-years older than Suggs, this style evolution was his formative experience: ‘The music, the look, they’re the things that shaped who I am’.

It’s the fantasy of self-determination that Weller and Suggs longed to emulate, one which they sensed belonged to the older style leaders and it’s one they will take with them into their respective bands, The Jam and Madness. In turn, what these two do with that fantasy will form the doctrine the book’s authors follow. ‘It was probably around 1970 or 1971, I would have only been 5 or 6 years old’ writes Anderson of his first memory of Skinheads. “I can see them now’ writes Baxter, ‘I was only 8 or 9, but boy, did they make an impression’. Both came of age for the Mod and Skinhead revival. Each generation carried within itself that frisson of envy. With their Mod older brothers, the original Skinheads also shared that yearning desire to have been part of that which is always, tantalisingly just out of reach; a time that seems more exciting, more vital, more alive than the present.

Anderson and Baxter have pulled together a fascinating array of first-hand accounts and primary source material, published and private, that makes Scorcha! easily the most important text on the topic – as definitive in its own way as Richard Barnes’ Mods and Johnny Stuart’s Rockers are with their subjects

According to the co-authors, one of the earliest media reports on Skinheads was carried in Rolling Stone (#38 July 26, 1969) of all places. This is somewhat less surprising if you know that the feature appeared in the short-lived UK edition and not in the American version. It was published early enough in the scheme of things that the youth cult hadn’t yet been fixed to the point where its name could be agreed on. In ‘Skinheads and Cherry Reds’, Gerry Stimson wrote:

They are the people you may see on the fringe of things, at free concerts shouting out for their favourite football team when everyone else wants to listen to the music, hanging around outside the Roundhouse trying to annoy people with long hair, or you may see them just hanging around on the street. They are the kids who have short cropped hair, wear boots and levis with braces. They don’t really have a name, bullet-heads, spike-heads, thin-heads, bother boys, or agro boys.

In February of the following year, American Rolling Stone (#52) did get around to covering Britain’s latest youth craze, by then it had been named. Like Stimson, Jan Holdenfield focused on the Skinhead’s antipathy to Rock culture and their identification with football, but also provides some class analysis. In ‘Skinheads: Working Class Gladiators’, he wrote:

British football has a glamour of its own, provided by often-pretty/always-tough players from the working class who have made it on grit and physical style. Rock stars are heroes for the middle classes.

That’s a cultural shift, from music to football, that Pete Fowler, writing at the height of T. Rextasy, thinks tells a tale worth listening to in order to demolish the idea that Marc Bolan, third-generation rock ‘n’ roller, had universal teen appeal like Elvis and the Beatles had with their respective audiences. Bolan doesn’t compete with them in terms of sales and is, anyway, Fowler thought, a ‘self-made Fabian’ rather than Elvis’ heir. More significant than any of this was the schism in teen culture, which meant T. Rex could never compete with those who went before. The Rock/Pop audience had fragmented, a division that was exposed by the cult of the Skinhead.

Fowler reckoned the Skins to be ‘by far the biggest single group among this country’s teenagers . . . For every one little middle-class girl with sequins around her eyes, there must be two-dozen in their two-tone Mohair suits. It’s a walk-over’. The Skins predecessors were the Mods but unlike them that culture was intimately linked to pop music: ‘If the Mods idolised their Faces, the Rock stars in return loved the Mods – it was this dialectic that was responsible for all the good things that happened in British Rock in the mid-60s’. Except for The Beatles, the Mods’ favourite groups were all accessible, you could see them at ‘your local Big Beat Club’. My generation was a united generation. The international success of British groups destroyed that intimacy as did the internationalisation of rock music with the shift in focus to the West Coast sound, all indicative of the fact that Rock had been ‘taken over by students’. ‘1967 was the great divide for Rock’, it became music for the court of intellectuals and stopped being accessible and meaningful to all. The arrival of the Skinhead in 1969 symbolised the backlash to this state of affairs.

The rejection of Rock’s new community of long-haired students is mirrored in the Skinhead’s embrace of black American and West Indian music. This was not self-indulgent music, but music for dancing. The scene is not the live gig but the club disco. When the key venues for Rock shifted from clubs to university halls the audience changed, working-class kids were shut out.

Music, Fowler convincingly argued, was not central to Skinhead culture as it was for the Mods, it was peripheral; football was at the core of their style. The distinction, Fowler suggested, is similar to that between George Best, who personified a Mod’s consumerist instincts, and, Charlie George, who despite his long hair, embodied the Skinhead’s attitude that was best displayed when he raised a two-finger retort to Derby fans after he scored for Arsenal: ‘When the Skins root for Charlie George at Highbury – they are rooting for themselves’, wrote Fowler. Just as the Mods who danced in front of The Who at the Railway Hotel were doing it for themselves.

This, really, is why Marc Bolan isn’t as popular as he likes to make out. He’s made no positive impression on the Skins at all. Bolan is popular . . . but the basis for his support is very narrowly confined. To be accurate, Marc Bolan is idolised by Grammar School girls between the ages of 11 and 14. (Skins who might buy T Rex records to dance to, don’t idolise or identify with Bolan at all).  

. . .

The bovver boys look like becoming the first major sub-cultural group not to produce any major rock stars! They, for Rock, are the lost generation . . . The survival of Rock has depended on its position as the core of Male Teen Culture. But the bovver boys have rejected Rock’s traditional status which explains the lack of vitality in British Rock in the early 70s.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the significance of The Jam and Madness lies less in their role leading a Mod and Skinhead revival than in the idea that they put bands, not football, at the centre of that resurgence. In doing so they created a circuit with the original Mod movement that Skinhead culture had broken. Audience and bands were reunited, music was at the very heart of the revival’s subcultural activities and interests. Scorcha! reflects this aspect of revivalism in the way in constructs its history of Skins and Suedeheads as foremost a music and fashion phenomena when some might well argue it was really all about Charlie George.

Pete Fowler’s essay ’Skins Rule’ was first published in Charlie Gillett (ed.) Rock File (NEL, 1972)

Nick Kent is ill . . .

The final issue of Frendz (January 6, 1972) was a thin affair and was not helped by Nick Kent having missed the deadline for his copy. He got his mum to phone in his excuse . . .

Bowie had confused Doug Yule with Lou a year earlier and it seems their identities were still getting mixed up, but, you know, Transformer was still two months away from its November release, so who did know what he actually looked like?

Whatever, the front cover is a graphic delight. A new logo and the use of colour within san serif typefaces that left a now jaded Underground aesthetic behind and signalled the pop/punk age to come. Apparently it is not a Barney Bubbles concoction, but surely that is a Pennie Smith image from July’s King Sound gig?

Regardless of the legend of Nick ‘the zeitgeist-surfing dark prince of seventies rock journalism’ Kent, I find his output in 1972 endlessly fascinating as he works out a stance and discovers his voice. His attitude was already in place with his first published reviews in Frendz (March 3, 1972); his take on Quicksilver and Moby Grape is a quick shuffle through the ashes left after second generation rock ‘n’ roll had burnt out. All he finds is a lingering nostalgia for when The Grape were a ‘genuine rock ‘n’ roll band’, which is as true as anything he ever wrote.

Kent hasn’t yet figured out what the third generation would look like, but he knew Lou Reed was going to be important and that a taste for the pure sixties pop of Motown (and others) was the basis on which the new decade would turn.

. . . and who wouldn’t want to hear that Laura Nyro album after reading this.

When the next lockdown hits, and I find the motivation, I’ll post an annotated bibliography of his reviews and interviews from the year of the pin-up.

Rock Scene (May 1975)

Photographing Iggy and the Stooges at King Sound, Kings Cross, 1972

MICK ROCK WAS NOT ALONE . . .

pic Byron Newman

Much of the research for Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll was with the magazines and newspapers of the era. Not just NME, but now forgotten journals like Strange Days and Cream. The latter had nothing to do with the more infamous American monthly Creem. Quite why it chose such a banal name is anyone’s guess; it ran from May 1971 until October 1973 and published some outstanding pieces by Nik Cohn and early reports by Ian MacDonald and Charles Shaar Murray. Nick Kent’s fulsome tribute to his hero, Iggy Pop, ‘Punk Messiah of the Teenage Wasteland’ appeared in the October 1972 edition. The two images that accompanied his piece, both shot at the King’s Cross gig in July, were credited to Pennie Smith and Byron.

The November issue of Cream had Alice Cooper on the cover and a report on Fear and Loathing in the Top 20, it was illustrated by another image of Iggy at King Sound credited to Pennie Smith. Her work at Frendz and later at the NME would leave a photographic legacy every bit the equal of Mick Rock, but unlike him, her Iggy and the Stooges images have not much featured in her portfolio. I sometimes think, though, we may have been looking at them all the time and taking it as a given they were the work of Mick Rock.

Byron was a new name to me and it took awhile to find out his surname was Newman. With that information he is not so hard to Google. He photographed Bowie in 1972 alongside work for soft porn magazine Men Only and, later, Game. He would eventually make his career (and I guess fortune) with Playboy. Other than the onstage shots at King’s Cross, he also photographed James Williamson in a London cemetery and, in some places, is credited with the only known picture of the Iggy and James working in a London studio during the recording of Raw Power

from the booklet for the deluxe reissue of Raw Power. The Stooges Unofficial Facebook page has posted four more Byron Newman pix from the recording session

One more from Byron, this is from a 1972 edition of the French magazine Actuel. I found this on Deadnest’s facebook page [here]

A fourth photographer at King Sound was Alec Byrne. I’ve not found any contemporary use of his pictures, at least not with his credit, but two are beautifully reproduced in his collection London Rock: The Unseen Archive (2017)

Mojo #346 (Sept. ‘22) plugs Bryne’s book and looks through his archive of images from the gig but only reproduces the one. The outside possibility of a slim dedicated volume is raised and an exhibition in LA this summer . . . O Blessed we would be . . .

additional images have been posted on Alec Byrne’s Instagram: [HERE]

Patrice Kindl was the fifth photographer on the scene, so to speak. His images are known through their use on a couple of live albums, featuring performances from the Whiskey Ago-Go, which were released in France by Revenge in the late 1980s. Cropping and reversing of images might suggest otherwise, but there’s a good amount of duplication across the two sleeves and on the CD Search and Destroy: Raw Mixes Vol. 3 (Curtiss). Getting his subject in focus wasn’t Kindl’s strong point.

King’s Cross Cinema 1971

Unheard by all but the few hundred in attendance, the images from the gig, however, have left an indelible mark; a set of traces that the next generation, using Mick Rock’s sleeve design for Raw Power as their north star, would follow.

Interior King’s Cross Cinema . . . the balcony was closed for Iggy’s gig but open for Lou Reed’s – a detail that suggests something about attendance numbers for the two gigs. A special platform was built for Iggy which extended toward the seating area. This photo and the one of exterior are taken from Jane Giles, The Scala 1978–93 (FAB 2018)

After London, Iggy got high in the Hollywood Hills and it would not be until 1976 that he climbed down. Nick Kent would remain a true believer, sending back a report from around the time Iggy and Williamson were demoing the tracks that would eventually be released as Kill City. A little earlier Sounds put Iggy on their cover with a report on his Toronto gigs. Inevitiably it was illiustrated with photographs from King’s Cross, uncredited again, but my guess is these are also a mix of Byron and Pennie Smith.

pic. Byron Newman

In April 1974 the NME carried a news item announcing an impending UK tour, nine venues had confirmed, among them the Rainbow Rooms at Biba where the New York Dolls had played. Iggy would also make an Old Grey Whistle Test appearance. Another Pennie Smith (?) image from the London show was used to illustrate the hype. The gigs of course never happened and the King Sound, King’s Cross pictures were left alone to reverberate in splendid isolation until next needed to confirm the image of the World’s Forgotten Boy.

The above was run in the January/February 1975 issue of Edinburgh’s Hot Wacks fanzine (#5) to fill a gap left by the non-arrival of advertising copy from Camden’s Rock On shop. To my radar eye these are not from Mick Rock’s archive, but if not who took them?

Sounds (September 18, 1976) Pennie Smith

Disc (March 3, 1973) . . . Iggy to make film . . . now there’s a thought. Pic is Mick Rock (heavily cropped)

Per Nilsen and Carlton P. Sandercock’s coffee table assemblage of Stooges performances and recording sessions, 1967-74 is as essential as it comes . . . Features a good few previously unpublished Byron Newman images, same for Pennie Smith. Patrice Kindle are mostly familiar but in much better quality . . . Mick Rock and Alec Bryne are not present, too expensive to license I’d guess. Get your copy here

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

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’.

Exploring the 21st Century City: On the GAME with Mick Farren

A chance encounter recently bought me to Game magazine, an example of 1970s top-shelf pornography previously unknown to me (but then I’m not a connoisseur). It was published between 1974-1978 and Mick Farren, I discovered, was a regular contributor. He had earlier paid the rent with fiction and the odd article for Paul Raymond’s far superior Club International, which I’ve documented in Mick Farren’s Fiction Factory. His work for Game appears to have been a more regular gig and I’ll list and comment on whatever reportage I find here; the stories will eventually be grouped together and added to the Fiction Factory page or in a new sub-section.

Photography: Joe Stevens

In early 1975 Farren submitted a two-part article to Game on the pleasure spots of Los Angeles. Part one was subtitled ‘freeways, smog and the superboppers’. The city’s car culture sets the scene before a long dive into Rodney Bigenheimer’s English Discotheque. Farren’s tour guide is Candy, ‘a typical L.A. superbopper, only the last thing she’d enjoy being called is typical. The night we met she was doing a passable imitation of Lana Turner, circa 1948.’ Given the context, the piece is heavily slanted toward the sensational and the salacious, Rodney’s having the ‘exact balance of innocence, fantasy and sleaze . . . the perfect nightspot for the pre-purberty set.’ Farren is less sneeringly patronising than most who wrote about the scene on Sunset Strip and he is unwilling simply to write it off as a ‘pathetic trend that will soon pass. Unfortunately’, he writes,

the same thing was tried with the screaming rock kids of the fifties, or the hippie dopers of the sixties. They grew older, modified and matured, but never basdically changed. It seems unlikely the glitter kids will be any different.’

Six months or so before Farren’s report, Adrian Henri, yes that Adrian Henri of LIverpool’s poetry scene, had also written for Game about Candy and her friends. His piece focused on Star magazine, a short-lived enterprise that documented the lives and fantasies of the kind of girl that spent time at the English Discotheque. His report is a good deal more purient than Farren’s take. If you care to see what they are fussing over the actual magazines have been scanned and made available here

Dave Marsh also covered the scene for Creem (August 1974), his is a much more cynical take:

‘What they think of as English chic is really American cheapo. To dress the way the English starfuckers really do requires money beyond the means of 15 year-olds anywhere’.

Farren’s second piece on L.A. for Game was more directly about the city’s sex economy. He ended the report as if it was one of his dystopian stories; a warning of things to come.

Photomontage by Dave Ashmore

Aggravation Time: Mick Farren v Nick Fury

Sid is geared up as the furthest-out all-time Rock and Roll Superstar – Mister Lizard King in his black open silk shirt, black flowing satin jacket, crotch-caressing codpieced black, velvet trousers, stack-heeled snakeskin boots and a gunslinger’s criss-cross of stud-crusted leather belts . . . Whammm! Blammm! The Power bombs and Energy bolts are exploding all over the stage and Sid starts prancing around doing joyful Hitleresque little dances . . .

‘Look at that’, says Sam over the roar of lusty young throats, ‘isn’t that just like Hitler at Nuremberg?’

It is no more than a bit of marginalia in the history of London’s Underground Freak scene that did not even merit a mention in Mick Farren’s autobiography, but the story of him threatening to go to court over his representation as Sid Barren in Nick Fury’s pulp novel Agro (Sphere 1971) readily caught and held my attention after I stumbled across it in my pursuit of the arcane for Pin-Ups 1972.

The Deviants! I claim my prize . . . Farren as good as openly identified in Frendz as a protagonist in Agro

In late October, early November, 1971, both IT and Frendz published dismissive reviews of the book. The former called it a ‘nasty cheap little tale’, a ‘piece of semi-porn that sets to score off individuals on the scene including Jeff Dexter, Mick and Joy Farren, Buttons, the Pink Fairies and others’. Who was the writer behind the obvious alias? An answer was demanded because Nik Cohn and Mark Williams were getting ‘blamed on the grapevine’. Frendz echoed IT’s demand and called the book ‘crap. Pure 100 per cent crap of the highest order . . . it really stinks’.

Then in February 1972 IT published a letter, printed over a caricature of Farren, that accused him of rank hypocrisy in threatening to sue Agro’s author for libel. The charge, it was said, had Sphere withdraw and pulp the pulp within days of it reaching bookshops. Whether or not the novel had any merit as literature, the correspondent, also hiding behind a comic book pseudonym, wrote, the ‘fact remains that the people have been denied the right to judge for themselves because a self-styled “revolutionary” has decided to play the paranoid ego-game and use the legal system which he claims to oppose to effectively ban the book’.

Below a quotation from Agro describing Sid Barren at a gig headlined by the Red Gnomes, Mick Farren penned his pointed response. He had no problem with parody, he didn’t mind his, or other’s, character defects being used (‘God knows they’re obvious enough’), but that’s not what Nick Fury had done. It was the wholesale invention of ‘hang-ups’ behind the most transparent of pseudonyms that peaked Farren’s righteous wrath. The Pink Fairies as the Red Gnomes being only the most see-through of the aliases and no one on the scene could miss who Sid Barren was. Fury hadn’t even bothered changing the names of the two key women in Farren’s life at this point in time, Joy and Ingrid.

Farren explained that he had at first contacted Sphere to find out who was the person behind the mask, but they weren’t telling. They did say, however, that the book was to be turned into a film. One way or another, Farren finds out the author was someone who had ingratiated himself into his life under false pretences. Rather than being a brother Freak, Fury was in fact ‘mainly employed as the house-hippie for a sexploitation movie company’. Now, Farren explained, he could give the author the good kicking he deserved, and risk being busted for assault, or he could get his lawyer to call Sphere. He did the latter and the publishers, as good as acceding to his charge, pulled the book immediately.

Sure I used the legal system to deal with the situation. It was the quickest and easiest way to show Nick Fury what I thought about his book . . . Don’t give me this shit about ‘self-styled revolutionary’ and ‘paranoid ego-games’. I don’t intend to fight my battles with one hand tied behind my back because you think it’s ideologically impure to use a system that I don’t like. The world is not perfect, and hiding behind fancy pen names and throwing shit at me is not going to improve it either.

The quoted depiction of ‘Sid mincing around’ on the stage with the Red Gnomes, ‘grooving on the recognition and adulation’, was not particularly flattering but it was hardly libellous. So what had aroused Farren’s ire?

If finding a copy of The Tale of Willy’s Rats was hard enough, tracking down the Sphere edition of Agro seemed next to impossible. A copy is listed in the British Library catalogue but, like Farren’s novel, it has been ‘mislaid’, which I guess means ‘stolen’. For the best part of two-years I’ve had no luck finding a copy on auction sites or book seller lists. Then I got lucky, through Twitter I made contact with Jonathon Green who kindly lent me the battered copy pictured here.

As it turns out the book does stink and is crap and maybe even semi-pornographic. Around the same time Sphere attempted to distribute Agro it also published Jamie Mandelkau’s Buttons: The Making of a President, which sold as the true story of the London Chapter of the Hells Angels, England. The stories told by both books are fundamentally the same in dealing with the tale of an Ace Cafe Rocker who aspires to be the leader of the most feared and infamous biker gang and the arrival of genuine San Francisco outlaws in London. Where the two differ is in the use of skinheads. Agro gives them equal billing with the bikers, ‘the Underground’s SS’.

I had some hope for the book when early on Fury describes Terry Staines and his brother skins, Chelsea FC’s finest, with an eye for detail that wholly escaped Richard Allen in his NEL published tales of Joe Hawkins. Staines wears a Crombie, ‘the type you only used to see in Burlington Arcade, neatly waisted, with a high, zig-zag collar and a neat breast pocket, showing a flash of Chelsea colours . . . and it feels just right, and he’s the only member of the crew wearing one, so everyone can see he’s the leader, or, as he thinks of himself, The King.’ Other skins in the gang wear sheepskin coats, the kind ‘male models in the ads wear as they drive their Lotus Elans through the overgreen countryside to the rugby club’, while further down the pecking-order two of the gang sport ‘blue knee-length gaberdines,

A little ordinary maybe, but they look good when you wear them unbuttoned and are leaning against the bar with hands in pockets crooked back like you’re about to whip out a couple of pearl-handled colt 45’s in the Final Gundown. Yeah, they look good, but not as good as Crombies which is why Terry is the Leader.

And on the description runs through American windcheaters (Harringtons), Levi’s, boots (Doc Martens and cherry reds) and haircuts:

Most cropheads look ugly; their shaven heads magnify facial characteristics, give them a disproportionate look – big ears, noses and teeth like horses. With The Face added, they resemble coarse, dull-witted peasants, slack-jawed and projecting a mongoloid surliness; giants brought down to size, fumbling over fi-fo-fum.

Elsewhere, other observational bits catch the eye such as Sid listening to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’, which, even though the lyrics are misquoted, might just be the first fictional refence to Lou and co: ‘The sounds erupt – raw jangling guitars and an asexual singsong of self-abuse, a plaintive heart-cry of New York street-sophistication’. Such minor things can impress, a snap shot of a moment in time caught through incidentals. But in themselves they are not enough. I can forgive the clumsy story-telling and over reaching for sensation and impact, which comes with the territory, but if I was Farren I too would have drawn the line with the abject description of what Sid gets up to in private with the Velvet Underground and Nico as his personal soundtrack.

Sid is munching on peppermint chocolates, on his living room walls are posters of Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleever and napalm victims, but in his bedroom the imagery turns to more erotic fare, Elvis in furs, Jim Morrison shirtless in leather pants, freewheeling bikers and pictures of ‘chicks doing weird things with chains’. With cocaine mixing with the soft-centred sweets,  Sid’s senses flare with ‘Flash-back magnesium brilliance’. On the bedroom shelves, books on sado-masochism and concentration camp memoirs are mixed with Debray, Marcuse, The Illustrated Horror Chamber and Torture Through the Ages. In a closet hangs Sid’s leather suit and an S.S. Oberleutnant’s uniform – ‘not real unfortunately, but ripped off from a theatrical agency. It’s lost something of its original sharpness, has gotten rumpled and soiled’. This is less than a sketch for the kind of scenario Liliana Cavani achieved with The Night Porter a few years later. It’s not even the less reputable Nazisploitation of the Salon Kitty variety. Truthfully, it is about as decadent as a box of  mint Matchsticks eaten while playing a round of Mastermind in a tuxedo, yet as a direct attack on what Farren stands for it is undoubtedly libellous.

Quite what Fury had against Farren and why he thought such a scene of cartoon onanistic and fascistic depravation might be included without upsetting the object of his ridicule is lost to history. The story could have lived without it, as could the novel without the character of Sid. Barren appears in two other notable scenes; in one he trashes the offices of an underground paper, stealing the hi-fi and their records, which makes Farren the aggressor when in reality he was the victim. It was the IT headquarters that were ransacked. The second scene is where he shares the stage at the Globe aka the Roundhouse with the Red Gnomes. This is fair enough if you don’t like the man and his particular attitude and style, but I really question the idea of a Pink Fairies gig as a Nazi rally, that’s just dumb spite. And Farren as a Hitler figure? Oh please. While he had on one occasion dressed up in a Nazi costume he had done it with a certain point in mind and not as a fetishistic gesture (more on this in Pin-Ups 1972).

Strange Days #2 (September 1970)

Michel Parry was the name behind Nick Fury, later a prolific writer of fantasy novels and editor of anthologies of weird and supernatural tales. He died aged 67 in 2014. Other than Agro his link to the underground lies in a uncompleted film collaboration with Barney Bubbles, Alice in Wonderland, but even sad talented Barney gets hung out to dry by Parry in Agro.  

Parry returned to the novel with a heavily revised version in 1975. Some of the names are changed, Barney Doodles (see what he did there?) becomes Barnaby Nickle, Joy becomes Gay, Mick aka Buttons, leader of the London Chapter of Satan’s Saints, becomes a less recognisable Dennis with a reduced role and Farren and the Fairies metamorphosed into the generic rock band Wild Childe. Nothing left to get litigious over, besides the new edition was printed by Mayflower who also published most of Farren’s novels in the 1970s.

Whatever, the book still stinks, as do the publishers who used the image of bikers and skinheads indulging in ‘queer bashing’ as its key selling point.  And what was it with the misspelling of ‘aggro’ as ‘agro’? As I said, marginalia and perhaps well left forgotten.

Many thanks to Phyll Smith, Jonathon Green and Andrew Nette, without whom this story would have stayed properly buried.

If you’ve not yet checked out Mick Farren’s Fiction Factory then it is just a hop, skip and click away under ‘marginalia’ in the menu bar: here. For the real deal in 1970s bovver boy youth culture read Tevor Hoyle’s Rule of Night which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog: here

Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock 'n' Roll

Elvis, Eddie, Chuck, Gene, Buddy and Little Richard were the original rockers. Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones and The Who formed rock’s second coming. As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the crucial question was who would lead rock ’n’ roll’s third generation?

Pin-Ups 1972 tracks the London music scene during this pivotal year, all Soho sleaze, neon and leather. It begins with the dissolution of the underground and the chart success of Marc Bolan. T. Rextasy formed the backdrop to Lou Reed and Iggy Pop’s British exile and their collaborations with David Bowie. This was the year Bowie became a star and redefined the teenage wasteland. In his wake followed Roxy Music and the New York Dolls, future tense rock ’n’ roll revivalists. Bowie, Bolan, Iggy, Lou, Roxy and the Dolls – pin-ups for a new generation.

Here ‘Tis . . . the first look. From Reaktion, March 2022 . . . Get some!

Pretties For You: Marc Bolan – King of the Stamford Hill Mods

Iain Stewart’s interview with Bolan for Honey begins in medias res, the ‘Revolution is everywhere’, he wrote. But the routine forms of sedition, acted out by the Underground in Ladbroke Grove and its satellites, are momentarily stilled by focusing on what the ‘prettiest little thing you ever did see’ is wearing.

Marc is dressed in velvet trousers, a little jumper which ties at the front and shoes with straps. Against the desires fomented by the dreamers of revolution, Bolan’s small revolt against masculine display – his girlish garb –  may appear insignificant but it would have a bigger role in creating change than any form of insurrection that the Underground was then more loudly advocating.

A cornerstone in many of Bolan’s interviews of the period, and for a year or two after, was a section that reflected back over his Mod roots. In Honey it is used it to suggest his present distance from a base materialistic past.

Clothes were then, I suppose, wisdom and knowledge and getting satisfaction as a human being. In those days all I really cared about was creating a sort of material vision of what I wanted to be like.

But he can’t quite let go of his Mod beginnings. He may be rhetorically dismissing a materialistic Mod philosophy, but he is not rejecting it out of hand. In its place he offered a more positive form of  consumerism – acquisition that has a greater purpose.

If I go out and buy clothes now, it’s either because I feel down or because something looks nice. And if I wear that to do something it’ll make me do it better. But it is not the goal anymore you see.

Consumption as a solipsistic act is spurned, yet the Mod in Bolan remained unrepressed even as he saw the hopelessness of remaining true to its ideal.

if you designed a new suit or a pair of light green shoes with buckles all over them, it was like you conceived it and saved up for it – which might take you three months – and then you got the shoes, and those shoes were, for three months, the only thing that made you go. Whereas now it’s just a day . .

Buying clothes is a creative act, an act of Mod-ish discrimination, but keeping up with the pace of fashion is now near impossible; a vogue or an infatuation that once might have lasted a few months now collapses into a day.

The cost of things, a £400 guitar he has just bought, which with inflation is about £5,500 today, is not the criteria by which value is judged. The guitar is a necessity, the expense doesn’t blow his mind, but ‘a pair of shoes was like meeting God – it was a very strong buzz’.

Bolan never lost his Mod attitude to style, the drive to look good, to be an Ace Face, but something else was going on here in this interview from mid-to-late 1970. Even though he is ostensibly promoting A Beard of Stars, and is still some weeks away from Tyrannosaurus Rex’s transformation into T. Rex and the release of ‘Ride A White Swan’, Bolan has started talking directly to what will soon become his primary audience of teenage girls, readers of Honey. He spoke in the same codes they used, which made fashion a measure in their everyday transformation of self. Very prescient that and very Mod.

Have You Heard the News? Good Rockin' With Larry Parnes

Pete Frame, The Restless Generation: how Rock Music Changed The Face of 1950s Britain (2007)

1949–1959, the first ten-years of British pop music – the decade before The Beatles tore it up. The Restless Generation begins with jazz mavens Chris Barber and Ken Colyer, with side accounts of blues fanatics Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis before honing in on the caravan of skifflers that scuffled in the long parade behind Lonnie Donegan. Cutting across their tracks came Tommy Steele in his jukebox shaped charabanc. He brings in tow his own merry band of followers led by Larry Parnes’ circus of curiosities: Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Adam Faith, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, Terry Dene, Joe Brown, Johnny Gentle, Georgie Fame and Julian X (the last named wholly new to me). This mad menagerie is eventually eclipsed by Cliff Richard calling all before him. Retelling their storied teenage lives, Frame recalls the countless trips around the streets and alleys of Soho; the idling intent and bursting ambition of the 2i’s patrons and the nights out at cellar clubs and pub backrooms. Bigger stages followed with package tours to provincial towns and pantomime shows that never ended. The monocular-eye of television beckoned with the ‘Six–Five Special!’, ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘Boy Meets Girls’ and ‘Jukebox Jury’; and films too beginning with The Tommy Steele Story (1957). Lurking in the margins are Tony Sheridan, Joe Meek, Big Jim Sullivan, Micky Most, Vince Taylor and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Through it all Decca, Philips, Oriole and the EMI stable released a slew of bad records, a deluge of dreadful imitations of American rock ‘n’ roll that made The Beatles an absolute necessity; the saving grace of British youth.

On two 10" inchers . . . where the restless generation made their recorded entrance

Though the subtitle suggests it is a social history, The Restless Generation is a chronological tale of the era’s singers and musicians, scene-makers and pace-setters’ early careers. Society and politics play a part in Frame’s story but they are way down the call sheet behind biographical detail, anecdote, and the evermore heaving list of temporary creative alliances. Following Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, the second entry in Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees was ‘Cliff and the Shads’, The Restless Generation expands exponentially on that genealogy, 440 glorious pages based on 80 interviews and a lifetime of collecting ephemeral data, and still I wanted more, or at least a photograph of Julian X.

Here’s a favourite passage with Larry and his boys being interviewed by Chris Chataway for the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme:

The reporter turned to the boys: ‘Do you feel manipulated?’ ‘Nah, not really: it all amounts to having faith in your manipulator.’ ‘Do people tell you that your manager is taking you for a ride, making a lot of money out of you?’ ‘Very often’. ‘When your audiences go hysterical and shout and scream, what do you think of that?’ ‘We love it’. As Chataway sat there, at a loss to understand why anyone should want to inhabit such a world, the class divisions fell open for all to see. Chataway, an Olympic athlete with a plum in his mouth and an honours degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, soon to become a Conservative member of Parliament; Parnes, a Jewish trader, nouveau riche; and a bunch of ill-educated working-class lads. The interviewer homed in on Johnny Gentle. ‘What do you do for amusement?’ he asked. ‘I date girls’. ‘Anything else?’ ‘Not really, no’.

Ace Records’ Rockin’ Again at the 2’i’s digs deep into the era’s record legacy. Great notes by Rob Finnis. They Called It Rock ‘n’ Roll has the Decca label hits

At the book’s best, Frame pulls together parallel stories and creates a finely tuned image of the music and the musicians:

Elvis cut ‘That’s All Right’ during his first Sun session on 5 July 1954. Eight days later, Lonnie cut ‘Rock Island Line’. Elvis was 19; Lonnie was 23. Elvis had grown up with a rich diversity of music on the radio, surrounded by rednecks, rustics and blacks, a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River. Lonnie had grown up in East London, hearing only a smattering of black music on AFN and on records at the houses of friends. Elvis took ‘That’s All Right’, a 1947 song by black blues-man Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, and not only personalised but took it to another planet. Lonnie did the same on ‘Rock Island Line’, which he had learned from a 1942 recording by Leadbelly. The same propulsive acoustic rhythm guitar, same string bass driving it along, same souping-up of the original tempo, same sense of urgency and passion. Elvis had a warm, good-old-boy, sultry southern sexiness to his voice; Lonnie sang with a high lonesome nasal whine, a cross between East Virginny and East Ham. Both their styles had developed naturally, almost accidentally, born of admiration for earthy American roots music and uninfluenced by commercial considerations.

This passage is so vivid you don’t need to replay the two records back-to-back to hear whether or not he gets it right; agree with him or not, he has perfectly caught the spell both performers had almost simultaneously cast.

While others have told the history of this era, Rob Finnis and Spencer Leigh especially, no one has dealt with it in such loving and lengthy detail, yet something is still missing. While I’ll give anyone who proselytises on behalf of Billy Fury my time, the rest of the motley-crew arraigned here still feel at book’s end entirely interchangeable. I really couldn’t tell you what made Terry Dene different from Vince Eager or Johnny Gentle and, beyond The Sound of Fury and a handful of singles by Johnny Kidd and Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’, I can’t see myself ever expending the time, enthusiasm and cash to discover more about the music the restless generation made. Nothing Frame writes here drives me toward digging for a lost 45. It’s not the fault of his writing, it’s just how risible he makes their records sound when compared to the originals. Chris Barber, early Lonnie Donegan, Alexis Korner, Cyril Davis they all have my ear, but Tommy Steele too quickly gave up rockin’ with the caveman to play alongside Widow Twankey and a ‘Little White Bull’.

Even disregarding the bad records, something is still lacking; an absent presence that haunts Frame’s tale. The story it seems to me is Larry Parnes, but once again he is principally portrayed as a predator of young men (even in that endeavour he mostly fails to seduce his charges, if you believe what Frame is told). Parnes’ lack of any genuine appreciation of rock and roll, such as that Brian Epstein or Kit Lambert would acquire, further condemns him. In Frame’s tale he’s a shyster and exploiter of talent, not an enabler but someone who staunches the flow of hot blood, cools the sweat, and washes away the grease and grime with pink Camay soap and wraps his stars in cellophane. Parne rubs off their rough edges and tames their wild ways; a process of emasculation that readies them for the variety and pantomime circuit.  This may all be true, but Parnes is here sketched in such a shadowy fashion I can’t help but feel his story is yet to be told.

It is a story that will need to go beyond his sexuality; it would take into account a history of East End Jewish participation in the entertainment industry; give more attention to the death of the variety show, the continued importance of pantomime and the rise of the package tour. If you wanted a little theory in the mix it could play with the concept of a Warholian transposability of stars, or the shifting shape of post-war British masculinity. Most importantly, it should raise questions around the packaging and marketing of pop that is not skewered by a writer’s love of rock ’n’ roll that is fixated on the male fan rather than the female consumer. That’s a book I’d hope Jon Savage or Caroline Sullivan would write. Whoever the speculative author, Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation will be their urtext, the book on which their endeavour would rest.

Nik Cohn – Stuart Sutcliffe the Fifth Beatle

The Observer magazine (September 8, 1968), the first of two issues celebrating The Beatles.

Nik Cohn sends in his thoughts on the lost man, Stuart Sutcliffe:

If he’d never played with the Beatles, of course, he’d have been forgotten by now, but that doesn’t necessarily make him less intriguing. He never made records and his paintings were only a beginning. The most vivid things he left were Astrid’s pictures of him, the shades and the leather, the gaunt cheekbones, the restlessness, the basic energy and strength. Added up, it doesn’t come to much but it does remain oddly haunting.

Lou Reed Told Me . . .

Photo: Bill Ray (from Life magazine’s 1965 Hells Angels assignment)

Lou Reed, the leader of the Velvet Underground, told me that the 1965 Who electrified him into writing songs for the Velvets, which connected with the street lives of the kids around the jukebox, rather than with their fantasies – whether plastic or plausible.

Geoffrey Cannon, ‘The Who on record’ The Guardian (September 3, 1971), 8.

The Who – electronically violent, deafeningly strident

The Who This Month @BrianInAtlanta Tweeter feed tipped me to this Melody Maker review, which perfectly captures the band as both ordinary – tea-shirted [sic] Keith Moon and soberly dressed Townshend and utterly otherworldly. Hawkwind would have nothing on the Who at Yeovil:

The Who have a kind of bizarre science-fiction appeal – electronically violent, deafeningly strident, all rather removed from reality. There is no other group on the current scene remotely like them. . . there was a sort of sensual excitement about the performance – this in spite of the group’s doleful, deadpan expressions.

A Vicious Strangeness: The Who – Punk As Fuck

This bootleg could provide an alternative title and cover image for A Band With Built-In Hate, still might if I live long enough for a second edition. Discogs has it listed as a 1982 release, which I thought was fanciful as pretty much everything seemed to have been sourced from Thirty Years of Maximum R&B and subsequent CD reissues, but Jon Savage Tweeted that he’d bought his copy at the tail end of the 80’s (his is on the Brunswick label, mine is on Reaction). Consensus now appears to be early 90’s with a failed 1990 MCA box set as the source. Whatever, it doesn’t much matter, because this is not about rare cuts, instead it is all about surplus value: it’s the object itself that attracts me.

The image is, I’d guess, from around the time of ‘I Can’t Explain’, Spring 1965. Daltrey has moved back from the microphone, leaving a void at the centre that is now filled by the bootlegger’s rubber stamp. Here are four malcontents, utterly at odds with the conventions of pop promotion. Neither smiles or moody introspection, but a combined look that says not only ‘who gives a fuck?’ but more directly ‘who the fuck are you?’ How did that get translated into the pop conversations of the day?

In June 1965, Alan Smith writing about the band in the NME described the ‘four beatsters from Shepherd’s Bush’ as exuding a ‘sort of vicious strangeness’. But that conversation wasn’t taken up by others for another 11 years.

photograph by PTMadden sourced here

Indicator Columbia Noir #3: Johnny O'Clock

What’s In A Name?

Very proud to have contributed a short piece on a firm noir favorite, Johnny O’Clock, for the new Indicator Columbia Noir box set. They have produced another beautiful package. Five Stars

Below is my original, somewhat longer, unedited piece that I submitted.

Johnny O’Clock – what’s in a name?

Johnny O’Clock is a gambler who doesn’t gamble; a man who tries to stay above the low-life he has to mix with, a patriarch without a family, and a lover without a faithful partner. In a world without honour he tries to be a just man. He is also something of the dandy. As for the film he gave his name to, it was part of the cycle of post-Depression era crime movies featuring punk hoodlums that all had the name ‘Johnny’ in the title. A partial list: Johnny Apollo (1940), Johnny Eager (1941), Johnny Holiday (1941), Johnny Come Lately (1943), Johnny Angel (1945), Johnny Allegro (1949), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949),  Johnny One-Eye (1950), Johnny Dark (1954), Johnny Gunman (1957), Johnny Rocco (1958) and Johnny Cool (1963). As always, the Western got in on the action with Johnny Guitar (1954) and Johnny Concho (1956), but they were just sideshows to the main event.

 The cycle followed a long lull in the production of gangster films, a result of the moral backlash to movies such as City Streets, Public Enemy, Quick Millions, and Little Caesar (all 1931).  With the wartime and postwar relaxation of its regimen of self-censorship, Hollywood again exploited the figure of the hoodlum. This time out, however, the gangster’s ethnicity was less readily identifiable as Italian in origin. As a name, Johnny may not, as with Caesar Enrico Bandello (Little Caesar) and Tony Camonte (Scarface, 1932), been specifically Mediterranean in origin, but it could still carry the taint of the inner-city; suggesting a character raised in the tenements, educated on the streets and, depending on the name it was coupled with, still hold ethnic connotations. As the diminutive of John,  ‘Johnny’ was also juvenile, and it was certainly déclassé – entirely lacking in middle-class respectability.

In 1944, Dick Powell was looking for a little bit of that taint of the low to help revitalize his career. He had just turned 40 and the role, as a juvenile romantic lead, that he had once taken in films such as 42nd Street and Footlight Parade (both 1933), was no longer an option. Like Humphrey Bogart a little before him, he reinvented himself as a tough guy, beginning with the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet (1944) and followed by the equally hard-boiled Cornered (1945). The two films had been produced and directed by Adrian Scott and Edward Dymtryk respectively, both would be caught up in the Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy-era. The third in Powell’s run of tough guy films, Johnny O’Clock was directed and written by Robert Rossen, like Scott and Dymtryk also a one-time member of the American Communist Party. Filmmakers such as these brought to Hollywood a tougher, more authentic view of crime and the city; one that was formed by a direct experience of Jewish American ghetto life. The class politics of Rossen’s film may not be as pronounced as it is in his Body and Soul (1947) or in Abraham Polansky’s Force of Evil (1948), but it’s still right there on the surface, if you care to look.

‘“Johnny O’Clock”, that’s a funny kind of name’ the hotel desk clerk tells J. Lee Cobb’s policeman, Koch. The straight life isn’t for Johnny, he doesn’t get up until nine, PM that is. When more respectable folk are starting to think about going to bed, Johnny’s day is only beginning. His daily routine is an inversion of the good citizen’s and his domestic life is equally strange . . . He’s woken by Charlie, a younger, more obviously, proletarian man, who moves around Johnny’s apartment with an intimate’s familiarity. Over breakfast, Johnny gives him a shirt, in return Charlie gives Johnny a watch engraved with ‘To my darling with unending love’. Before there is time to do a double-take on this queer set up, Charlie explains the gift is from a dame. The relationship between the two men, nevertheless, remains entirely unsettled.

In the hotel lobby, Johnny passes a lecherous eye over a woman, caught in the act by Koch, he tells the policeman it is a habit; giving himself an alibi for a crime unspecified. Crime and sexual deviancy, in the parlance of the day, had long been figured as synonymous in Hollywood’s films, think Tony Camonte’s incestuous desire for his sister in Scarface or Rico’s unspoken love for Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) in Little Caesar. There are no shortage of women in Johnny’s world, most who make clear their availability, he can even play a convincing paternal role with Harriet (Nina Foch), though Koch misreads his intentions toward her. His one-time lover, Nellie (Ellen Drew), and now wife of his partner in crime, Guido Marchetti (Thomas Gomez), still wants Johnny; she gave him the engraved watch. But it’s with Harriet’s sister, Nancy (Evelyn Keyes), that the romance is played out (or begins to unravel). Nancy is smitten by Johnny from the moment they meet. Inevitably, she is curious about Charlie. ‘He’s my man’ Johnny says. ‘You say that like you’re used to it’, she replies. ‘He’s a guy who just got out of the jug, I give him a place to live. He’d cut off his right arm for me, right up to the elbow’, says Johnny, making the relationship between the two men even less comprehensible to her.

Johnny’s world is covered in a shroud of deception and dissembling. ‘What’s it all mean?’, asks Nancy admiring the Jose Clemente Orozco painting hanging in Johnny’s apartment. He tells her it can mean whatever you want it to mean, and then he tells her it is a reproduction and the fireplace it sits above is also fake and that things, anyway, look better with the lights off. She agrees with him, nothing is to be trusted , and yet she still wants Johnny to say sweet and pretty things and let her pretend they are true.  He kisses her but she pulls away and they then throw words at each other. The scene fades on a kiss and returns with Johnny having changed out of his Prince of Wales check suit into evening attire. What happened in that fade between the costume changes? Did they make love? The look they give each other could be post-coital or it could be so much more innocent. ‘You look nice’, she tells him. ‘A showcase for the suckers’, he says. ‘Let’s make the words mean what they say’, she says.

Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes admiring his print of Jose Clemente Orozco’s Zapatistas

What’s being teased out here is Hollywood’s time-honoured dance of ambiguity, what happened in the temporal elision is for the audience to decide. The story moves on regardless of whether their relationship went no further than what we actually see. It is the same for what goes on between Johnny and Charlie, are they friends or lovers? The homoerotic charge in their relationship is at times so strongly signalled it surely must have pulled asunder the Production Code tenet to use deniability whenever a film has the potential to become controversial, either sexual or political. But the censor’s notes on the screenplay offer not even the smallest of hints that there was ever any possibility of a misunderstanding of what went on between the two men.

Even after watching Johnny blow his pose of cool detachment, when he learns he’s been betrayed and savagely rips apart the shirt Charlie is wearing, we might have to accept that the erotic charge is not there at all; Johnny is just angry. Maybe seeing their relationship as sexual is just the effect of viewing the film with a modern sensibility; a viewpoint that puts us in a superior position from which to monitor the machinations of the characters. Such a position mirrors that taken by Johnny when he stands on a staircase above the bent copper who is trying to muscle him aside for a spot in Marchetti’s set up, or when he looks down on Guido’s vast living room that seems to have dropped a floor below the apartment’s front door, or when he takes the high vantage point from which he can survey the players in his casino. In these scenes, Johnny appears to have it all under control, though as we learn that is far from being the case. Maybe today’s viewer is just as deceived. Perhaps no one knows what time it really is, not even Johnny O’Clock.

Manhandling Charlie, Johnny rips off the shirt he gave him. Orozco print, once again in the frame. Hats off to Jeff Billington for saving my embarrassment after I mis-identified the painting as being by Diego Rivera (I blame Frank Krutnik)

Book Musik Podcast 045 – A Band With Built-In Hate

“The Who – colourful to see and hear, and probably the only group whose records disintegrate half way through”

– Record Mirror Nov. 20, 1965

Find out why by tuning into the latest episode of Kimley and Tosh’s Book Musik Podcast: http://bookmusik.com