Test Pressing – Iggy and the Stooges 'Raw Power'

In May 2020 a test pressing of Raw Power went up for auction on eBay, the price eventually going beyond the few shillings I had saved, but I kept the images that were posted

Dated December 8, 1972, three months before its US release in March, 1973. it should be in a museum or even better in my collection, it’s a one-off (or one of a very few). It would be the jewel in any collector’s crown. – a fetish item for the ages. But, you know, it is just a white label pressing of a stock copy, I’ve got a couple of those and, having not won the auction, I’ve still got the coin in my pocket.

But take a closer look. The timings suggest side one and two were flipped, which adds to the uniqueness. Then look again, side 1 has five tracks, not the four on the release version, and side 2 has only three.

So what was the running order? Dave Marsh’s hyper-enthusiastic review in Creem’s March 1973 edition gives a couple of clues.

He lists the title track as the second band on the top side, so my guess is it still kicks off with ‘Search & Destroy’, but which mix I wonder? Iggy’s? Or Bowie’s as found uniquely on the original UK release? Whatever, ‘Gimme Danger’ is the third track. After that no more clues from DM.

Working with the timings given on the white labels, and some some addition and subtraction on my part, Side 2 must be:

Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell

I Need Somebody

Death Trip

Side 1 then would look something like this:

Search and Destroy

Raw Power

Gimme Danger

Shake Appeal

Penetration

How’s that play in your head? While you’re pondering over this sequence and whether it rolls better this way than it does following Tony Defries’ edict that the songs needed to go fast one, slow one, fast one , as was eventually released, Dave Marsh wrote that their are ‘nine songs’ on the album, not the eight we have and love, perhaps he was shit at counting or adding up . . . or he had a different review copy. Think on that dear collector.

For those Raw Power devotees out there, here’s Mick Rock’s little known review of the album in the UK skin mag Club International (July 1973). More of this kinda thing is buried deep in Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll. Available to preorder or in the shops early next month . . . Get Some!

London Rock: Birth of an Edwardian

A chance encounter in a local record shop, the jacket so grubby it might almost have been a revenant from 1959. But what a great sleeve it is, a superb design that looks like the cover of some titillating true crime or confidential magazine pushed out by some back street Soho publisher.

The price asked for the beat up copy was too high so I skipped on it and went home and checked on-line. A tenner for the mint copy you see here.

I thought at first this white label boot on Velvet Touch Records might have been something that slipped out from behind the counter at Rock On around the same time as Ace and Charly were putting out all those rockabilly 10 inch discs, but this all feels a little too arch and artful for the early 1980s.

All, apart from the Bern Elliott and Tom Jones unknown to me, and those two tracks I’d always thought of as more Beat Merchant material than Rock n’ Roll even if they make perfect sense in the present company.

Most first generation British Rock ‘n’ Roll comes across as if it was conceived as a novelty recording backed by jobbing big band jazzers. That’s not hidden here, especially with the inclusion of The Basil Kirchin Band, who have that swing thing down, and Clay Morton’s ‘Tombstone No. 9’ which is delivered in an execrable cockney accent, or Tommy Bruce who is so burnt up by his girlfriend he has to call for a fire engine. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman telephoned in that composition.

Adam Faith’s reworking of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ as ‘I Vibrate’ has some fire in its groin and Dean Shannon’s ‘Ubangi Stomp’ drives the cool cats wild, but it still sounds like it was recorded in Teddington upon Thames and not anywhere near Memphis.

This is all clearly neither here nor there because the disc as a whole is a solid ‘Whoop Up’ as Johnny Keating and the Z-Men demonstrate. Brilliantly curated from the opening introduction from some Pathé newsreel warning of the latest folk devils to the last cut on side two.

I’d love to know who put this together and when, but if I live the rest of my life in ignorance I don’t much care as the sleeve is the real thing, pure 100% rock ‘n’ roll

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

Jacket slick . . . Publication date March 14, 2022

Matched Pairs in Monochrome: MC5 and J. Geils Band 1970

A love letter to Zip-Gun Teenage Punk Thunder from The Garage Band Appreciation Society, Maidenhead, May 1976

Just 18 catalogue entries separate the MC5’s Back in the USA and The J. Geils Band’s debut on Atlantic, released in March and December 1970 respectively. The matched pair share the same sleeve photographer, Stephen Paley, stripped back aesthetic and belief in full-throttle rock ‘n’ roll that spins out of the garage greased up, burning alcohol and smoking its own exhaust fumes.

The two albums were reviewed in Rolling Stone, in May ‘70 Greil Marcus covered the MC5; he thought Back in the USA a valid but flawed effort: 

Phil Spector once talked about the difference between ‘records’ and ‘ideas’ – ‘The man who can make a disc that’s a record and an idea will rule the world’, he said in his typically moderate fashion. The MC5 album for the most part, remains an idea, because in the end it sounds like a set-up. ‘Teenage Lust’ and ‘American Ruse’ and ‘Human Being Lawnmower’ break through, and they belong on singles, and on the charts. All the way up the charts.

Bostonian, journalist and the MC5’s producer, Jon Landau reviewed The J. Geils Band’s debut in January ‘71. He loved it all:

The best album I’ve heard in sometime . . . It is a goodtime, modern piece of rock and roll; it is also totally devoid of the self-consciousness and pretentions that usually mar this kind of thing.

Where Back in the USA was all edgy, dry and hard-wired, the J. Geils album pulled in the oppositie direction with keys and harp filling out the middle and the upper reaches. The J. Geils Band’s choice of producers were Atlantic in-house Muscle Shoals and Critierion studio tyros Dave Crawford and Brad Shapiro, producers who brought the funk with them. Landau’s neophyte production of the MC5 careens into the corners and then skitters down the lanes. Crawford and Shapiro play for a less immediate impact. It is a more comfortable ride, but equally thrilling when they pile-in and threaten to spill out of control. Landau took what he heard here and used it to help shape the E. Street Band.

On the otherside of the Atlantic ocean, the matched pair's impact was most keenly felt in Essex, in its suburbs and in Southend and Canvey Island. Wilko Johnson was an admirer of the MC5 after witnessing their performance at Wembley in 1972. He was there backing Heinz, (you can catch him in the movie of the gig if you keep your wits about you. His hair is long, so be warned) and one of the few who wasn’t throwing cans at Rob Tyner. In April 1976, Eddie and the Hot Rods told the NME’s Max Bell that they were ‘bored to tears with long songs. We play short and punchy . . . We don’t want to be a heavy albums band. We come on with high energy . . to get the MC5 feel from Back in the USA, bang, two minutes, over and carry on.’ J. Geil’s ‘Hard Drivin’ Man ‘was a keynote cover version in their live set and in Lew Lewis they had, at least for a while, their own Magic Dick and his lickin’ stick.

The Feelgoods and Hot Rods never exactly hid their debt to either band, it’s written all over their lp sleeves.

The J. Geils Band’s ‘Wait’ was a Lew Lewis Reformer showstopper. Like J. Geils, the Feelgoods covered Otis Rush’s ‘Homework’ (on Stupidity), but the influence of the Beantown band on Canvey’s finest doesn’t really show through until Gypie Mayo gets on board. ‘Milk and Alcohol’ had copped its lyrical imagery from John Lee Hooker’s ‘It’ll Serve You Right to Suffer’ – “Your doctor put you on milk, cream and alcohol” – but they (and co-writer Nick Lowe) most likely nicked it from the J. Geils Band, who on their debut had taken the song uptown, downtown and all around. The whole of Be Seeing You, Otis Clay’s ‘Baby Jane most evidently, is cut from the same cloth .

Eddie and the Hot Rods finally got around to releasing ‘Hard Drivin’ Man’ on their second EP, about the same time as they backed Rob Tyner on his solo 45. Their keen pursuit of amphetamine psychosis meant they never really acquired the funk n’ grease of the J. Geils Band but that attack strategy did help them align with the MC5’s razor-edged rock ’n’ roll, even if it was more a shared attitude than aptitude that took them up and down Shakin’ Street. Whatever their merits, and there are many, I got to the MC5 and J. Geils Band by riding in the slipstream left behind as the Feelgoods, followed by the Hot Rods, pelted along the A127

Letters page, The Garage Band Appreciation Society, Maidenhead, Sounds (May 8, 1976) no doubt Hot Rods’ manager Ed Hollis’s concoction but mark me down for membership

Rockabilly Psychosis Redux

Teds, Rebels, Hepcats and Psychos: The Story of British Rockabilly 1966-1988 (Rockin’ 4 Life Publications 2021)

Running close to 750 pages (and no footnotes or index to pump up the count), Paul Wragg’s self-published volume on British Rockabilly (the only sort that counts) starts in 1966 when the first record collector heads to the States to bring back a casket of pirate treasure, colonial plunder, and ends in 1998 when Charlie Feathers slipped away. 32 years of listening, playing and dancing to the rockabilly beat. Wragg presents his long history of the music’s style and attitude through a series of step-changing fads and trends told in first-hand accounts that makes this monumental volume something akin to McNeil and McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996), only better.

I doubt many will read the book from start to finish, but whatever draws you to it you’ll not be disappointed. For myself, I wanted to know more about the collectors, fanzine writers, curators and reissue labels that first pulled the term ‘rockabilly’ out of the trash bin of history and invested it with the identity we know today, or think we know. So finding out more about Bill Millar, Martin Hawkins, Colin Escott and the like was my aim. I also wanted to know more about the Teddy Boy scene, the rock ‘n’ roll revivalists who had their moment in the sun at Wembley in the summer of 1972, and how they fed and then lost out to the rockabilly rebels who followed. I wasn’t disappointed.

You wanna know the story behind the 1970s bootlegs of rockabilly discs which are all but indistinguishable from the originals? Then you also need to know about Dan and Faye Coffey, who sold 45s bought back from trips to America and essentially created the market Henry Mariano and his exacto-repros then developed. And you absolutely have to know about the Bill Millar curated series of rockabilly compilations, each focusing on a label’s output, which are as seminal as Nuggets and any of the sets of sixties garage punk LPs that followed.  The importance of Millar’s series in the scheme of things is nailed when Tim ‘Polecat’ Worman explains that the Stray Cats initially got their look from Levi Dexter and the Rockats and their set list from Imperial Rockabilly Volume 1, but then what rockabilly band didn’t mine that vein? The story of collectors providing the material on which three generations of young musicians will find their stimulus and inspiration is vividly captured by Wragg.

While Crazy Cavan is the ship’s figure head, loved by most, respected by all, for Wragg the core of the tale he really wants to tell begins as the great man’s strength starts to fail. Without selling any trend short, Wragg is most interested, I think, in the late-1970s and early 1980s when rockabilly became a significant element among Britain’s teenage tribes and momentarily goes mainstream with chart toppers and TOTPs exposure. While the bands that helped form and rode this wave are all given a generous amount of space to tell their part in things, the real story belongs to the adherents and scene makers, those who danced to the records and supported the bands, the young kids who took the music, style and attitude to heart and remade the world in their own image.

If I started to lose interest with all the rockin’ weekenders in Caister and Hemsby it doesn’t much matter because by then my pockets were already loaded with gold and others will find that final part as fascinating as I found the first half and a bit.

Because these tales have rarely had an audience outside of the social groups Wagg documents, the stories are as fresh as the day they were first told, presented without guile or perfidy. Given the scope of the project, Teds, Rebels, Hepcats and Psychos is an extraordinary achievement, a luminous oral history, superbly compiled, organised and edited by the author. If this book had been supported by an established publisher it would still have been an heroic achievement, to have done it independently is a true testament to the spirit of rockabilly that Wragg sets out to celebrate. You need this book, your friends and family deserve their own copies too.

£15 paperback and £25 hardback plus shipping. Contact: paulwragg68@btinternet.com

Glamour is a Dream Machine Says Nik Cohn

‘Private and Public Glamour, Nik Cohn Sifts the Stardust’ Harpers & Queen (February 1973)

The bookends:

Once, in Las Vegas, I was sitting in the lobby of the International Hotel, browsing through a magazine, when I was suddenly afflicted by a buzzing in the back of my skull. I turned my head: there was nothing to look at but a stretch of bare wall and a corner. I stared at the wall for perhaps thirty seconds, feeling most foolish but unable to do otherwise. The buzzing trapped me; I knew that something enormous would happen.

It did. Suddenly Elvis Presley appeared round the corner, flanked by half a dozen body guards. I will not describe him; he was God. Shimmering, he swept away across the lobby and was gone. After a moment the buzzing subsided and I went back to my magazine.

Yet again, as so often when it comes to matters of weight, I return to P. J. Proby. I remember him once at a concert in Leicester, halfway through a riot, grovelling and shrieking on his knees, when suddenly he stopped dead, stared out into the darkness and, in that curious mock-prophetic style of his, spake with tongues. ‘It seems that I must be the greatest thing on earth’, he declaimed. ‘Why, look at you all – screaming and yelling and fighting, loving me, hating me, dying to touch me, dreaming of breaking my neck. You run behind me like lapdogs and shucks, I don’t even exist . . .’

In between, a disquisition on glamour. What is it? What isn’t it? Who has it? Who doesn’t have it?. He asks everyone, except Bobby Dylan, The Beatles and Timothy Leary. ‘New Generation’ artist Patrick Procktor told him glamour is ‘the essence of irresistible allurement, overwhelming all aesthetic judgements’, which works for me and part explains Cohn’s devotion to Proby.

Glamour changes down the decades marked by how the object of enthralment shifts: the fifties was about a sexual physicality, sixties a counter-reaction with aura replacing a sex-glam syndrome – ‘A triumphant return to freakishness, decadence, insanity; lots of violence, swilled down with a dash of perversity; early and melodramatic death where possible, or at least a glut of suffering.’  

Andrew Loog Oldham had the ‘flair’ that defined glamour in the sixties and Cohn extols his virtues and vices in his profile of Marianne Faithful for Nova (April 1971), who, after the Stones, was Oldham’s greatest invention. When Cohn meets her she has moved away from the pop limelight, living with her child and mother in a timbered cottage in the Berkshire downs. He describes her as overweight and seemingly ‘exhausted and muffled by inertia’.

After the flair of the Sixties, the seventies had nowhere else to go but to turn to nostalgia, glamour as pastiche of lost dreams.

One of his chosen throwbacks, reincarnations, is David Bowie who Cohn had met and interviewed six months previously. Bowie wants to be a star:

Not a Superstar or a Rock star or any kind of star in particular; just a star, period.

And what was a star? He didn’t know, he couldn’t define it, but he could recognise it by instinct. Then he paused, looked coy; ‘a star is me,’ he said, fluttering his lashes, and suddenly it was. 

Harpers & Queen (September 1972)

Rock Dreams, Peellaert and Cohn. Pop’s three generations

As if to make sense of all of this, Cohn returned to his own creation, Arfur the Teenage Pinball Queen. It was a postscript on the media mirage, the ways in which ‘Pop phenomena may be created absolutely out of nothing . . . ‘shucks’ said Proby, ‘I don’t even exist’.

Harpers & Queen (January 1973)

More on Arfur over the page, here

Rock 'n' Roll's Evolutionary Tree: James Taylor v Groin Thunder

In March 1971 Time put James Taylor on its cover and inside explained that his popularity was the result of the ‘fading out of ear-numbing, mind-blowing acid rock’ and ‘the softening of the youth revolution’. What was being listened to on campuses across the nation was a’ kind of Americana rock’, which celebrates such things as

country comfort, Carolina sunshine, morning frost in the Berkshires. What all of them seem to want most is an intimate mixture of lyricism and personal expression—the often exquisitely melodic reflections of a private ‘I’

Which was why James Taylor was ‘marked for death’ by Lester Bangs who thought the future lay in the past. Pop was evolving into the new chamber music and what he wanted was more groin thunder . . .

The Troggs don’t feature in the magazine’s family tree of rock, Reg Presley never evolved into a balladier like Van Morrison, he never tapped his inner well of melancholy. Such desperate times called for a Manifesto for Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll . . . 1972 would right so many wrongs.

'Two-Lane Blacktop' – The Jukebox is Playing

Casting two musicians with zero acting experience (and without much ability in that field) in the leading roles and then not catering to their fan base by exploiting the very thing they are actually good at, is just perverse. But such obstinacy is also entirely in keeping with Monte Hellman’s intent to shut down any ‘detrimental empathy’ such musical moments might generate. In Two-Lane Blacktop James Taylor doesn’t get to sing and Dennis Wilson doesn’t sit behind him on drums or provide harmonising vocals because in the film one drives a car and the other keeps it on the road. That’s it.

The important thing was the characters Taylor and Wilson were playing, Driver and Mechanic respectively. Having them sing would have diminished their parts, helping to undermine an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief and forge an identification with the protagonists. Taylor performing ‘Sweet Baby James’ would have been a distraction. Besides, Two-Lane Blacktop was a film that worked assiduously against cliché and convention. This was a movie about a race that never gets going and so is never concluded; it’s a road movie that goes nowhere. It’s also a love story between two men and a woman that might evoke Jules et Jim or Bande á part but generates so little frisson between the three leads that it is, in contrast, a despondent and loveless affair.

Excluding any music that doesn’t have an identifiable source, especially that for which the actors are known for, was therefore non-negotiable for Hellman. Following Easy Rider, a soundtrack filled with contemporary recordings must have been part of the film’s financiers’ expectations along with the anticipation of seeing it replicate the box office appeal of Hopper and Fonda’s little picture.

In the Spring of 1971 Esquire put an image of the Girl, played by Laurie Bird, hitchhiking on its cover and gave over thirteen of its pages to the film’s screenplay, an unprecedented bit of promotion for any movie:

 ‘Read it first! Our nomination for the movie of the year: Two-Lane Blacktop – Where the road is and where it is going: the first movie worth reading.’

The hype crashed on the film’s release and Esquire turned on it:

‘the film is vapid: the photography arch and tricky and naturally, therefore, poorly lit and unfocused; the acting (only one part is played by a professional) amateurish, disingenuous and wooden; the direction inverted to the degree that fundamental relationships become incidental to the film’s purpose. The script has become the victim of the auteur principle’.

The film is remarkably faithful to the published screenplay, there are around half-a-dozen small scenes that didn’t make the cut, including a couple of sex scenes and some nudity, but those differences would not be why the magazine considered the screenplay a success and the film to be a bore. Hellman said he took out the skinny dipping scene because it held up the action, but what action? One thing the screenplay does that the film hides and obscures is to give the reader the sense that pop music, of various sorts, accompanies and comments on what’s being shown on the screen, giving it the same level of heightened interaction that was experienced when watching Fonda and Hopper scoot down the highway as Jimi Hendrix or Steppenwolf played over the cinema’s sound system.

The portrait of Taylor that sold him to Hellman as the man for the part of Driver, Sweet Baby James

Taylor never saw the film and never acted again, but he did like Richard Avedon’s publicity photographs enough to use a couple on his 1974 album Walking Man

Four Rolling Stones recordings are mentioned in the screenplay, ‘Satisfaction’, ‘I’m Free’, ‘Time is on My Side’ and ‘Honky Tonk Woman’, each one would work as a meta-commentary on the action, just as Ray Charles’ ‘Hit the Road Jack’ or Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline’ and ‘No Money Down’ run in parallel, supporting or satirically pricking what is being seen. The Doors’ ‘Break on Through’ and Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘You Got What You Wanted’ are others that fitted, in this manner, directly into the scheme of things.

Two-page spread from Show magazine that puts the emphasis on Laurie Bird, naked if she wants to (stills from a scene cut from movie)

Cassettes are popped into GTO’s deck throughout the screenplay, bluegrass at one point, which would have evoked Bonnie and Clyde’s mad dashes down country roads. Hank Snow plays on the radio, like the bluegrass emphasising the not-so-merry band’s movement through rural communities. The Girl, who can’t hold a tune to save her life, sings old blues stanzas in the back of the Chevy, including a few lines from ‘Easy Rider’ giving a knowing nod to the movie’s predecessor. Cumulatively, the song references make for a potentially great soundtrack and imply a set of personal, finger-snapping connections, moments of familiarity with a shared cultural locus that had the potential to cement a relationship between the viewer and the film in the same manner as Mean Streets. But what you get is something else.

Under the noises of revving engines and chatter the Doors’ ‘Moonlight Drive’ plays on

Here’s the song list as used in the film (it’s from  IMDB with a couple of amendments):

• ‘Moonlight Drive’ – The Doors

• ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ – Kris Kristofferson

• ‘Maybelline’ / ‘No Money Down’ –John Hammond Jr.

• ‘Stealin'’– Arlo Guthrie (and Laurie Bird)

• ‘Hit the Road Jack’ – Jerry Lee Lewis

• ‘Satisfaction’ – Laurie Bird

• ‘Taylor Made’ (Instrumental) – Hal Mooney

• ‘Song in Gee’ – Lisa Gilkyson

• ‘Early Cocktail’ – Ole Georg aka Henrik Nielsen

•  ‘Peace in the Valley’ – anonymous

• ‘Cattle Call’ – Eddy Arnold

• ‘Girl of My Dreams’ – James Kenelm Clarke

• ‘John Henry’ – Kentucky Colonels with Clarence White

The cost of licensing the Stones precluded their inclusion, though Laurie Bird sings an off-key version of ‘Satisfaction’ as she gravitates toward a pinball machine in a diner. One contemporary account reported that she also attempted to sing The Doors’ ‘When You’re Strange’, but that’s not included, and ‘Break on Through’, referenced in the screenplay, is replaced by ‘Moonlight Drive’. The latter is buried deep within the mix beneath revving engines and squealing tyres. Chuck’s songs are present but sung by John Hammond, Jerry Lee Lewis deputises for Ray Charles and, instead of Hank Snow, we get Eddy Arnold. Ike and Tina don’t make the grade in any form, faded out alongside the ambition the filmmakers once held for the role of commercially available recordings.

Laurie Bird in Elvis shirt, not featured in the film and neither was the horse

The one song that does get a platform in the film is Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’. Cover versions had been hits on the Country and Pop charts for Roger Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, Charley Pride and was a posthumous number one for Janis Joplin. Even Jerry Lee Lewis took it into Billboard’s Hot 100 before the end of 1971. The song is not listed in any of the published screenplays. Much of this interest in it took place in the latter stages of the film’s post-production, which meant the song had a contemporaneity and an immediacy that would have connected with the film’s original audience. On the other hand, ‘Bobby McGee’ is the very thing Hellman had elsewhere avoided, cliché. But there it is, all but asking the audience to make a connection with its romantic sentiments – detrimental empathy – even as the film elsewhere refused to be drawn in that direction. Besides, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ was also featured that year in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie.

Writing for Show magazine, Shelley Benoit spent a week on location with crew and actors in Tucumcari, New Mexico. One of those days was spent filming in a diner: ‘The jukebox in this forlorn spot affords one Beatles, no Stones and a whole lot of Merle Haggard’. Two-Lane Blacktop seemed to have become stuck with that selection. Such a fact probably hurt the film at the box office and with its critics, but 50-years on from its release Monte Hellman called it right. Have no doubt.

The Coolest Place In England – Richmond Upon Thames

Andrew Humphreys, Raving Upon Thames: An Untold Story of Sixties London (London: Paradise Road 2021)

Counter to the prevailing idea that culture is disseminated from a hip centre by an irrepressible centrifugal force, in truth the worthwhile things take form first at the margins and then are dragged toward a hub, Soho say. Andrew Humphreys’ wholly enjoyable and needle-sharp history of the bands and venues, entrepreneurs and audiences in and around Richmond in the sixties is a testament to the fact that the real stories, those that matter, belong first to the suburbs.

From 1960, but could have been from anytime from then until the end of the 1980s. The title page from a Weekend exposé of the Eel Pie Island scene. Reproduced in Raving

The availability of venues – The Station Hotel, Richmond Athletic Ground and Eel Pie Island – can partly explain why Richmond became the centre for the early activities of the Stones, who were closely followed by the Yardbirds and all those bands that thought they could read their own names in the contrails left in the wake of Mick Jagger. But more importantly, it was the art schools, teacher training colleges and further and higher education institutions, in and around the area, that meant there was a big enough demographic of young people who wanted to make a culture of their own, which in turn created the scene. The Stones and the ‘Birds found that audience as much as the audience found them.

Humphrey’s book gives a small cameo to The Others who produced one of the finest RnB pounders of the era and then vanished into utter obscurity

1964: The Others from the same management stable as The Pretty Things and The Fairies and with the same poise, attitude and style

My parents met in the mid-1950s, my mum was studying at Maria Grey teacher training college, opposite Richmond Lock. I doubt they went to Eel Pie Island to dance to the jazz and I know they never looked as wonderfully bohemian as their peers pictured here. My dad’s second wife did, however, see the Stones at the Station Hotel. She lived in Gunnersbury about two and a half miles from the venue, after one of the gigs Brian Jones had given her the bus fare she needed to get home. She missed her bus or chose to walk, either way she kept his gift. When I got to know her in the early Seventies she still had that pile of pennies, which she kept on the mantelpiece.

Common room tea dance, Maria Grey teacher training college, circa 1954. My mum is the centre of the photo facing toward the camera

Eel Pie Island, circa 1960

Inside the dance hall Eel Pie Island

That brief moment before a band moves from being entertainment for the in-crowd to becoming revered is the story told in Raving Upon Thames. The Stones and the Yardbirds have a ready familiarity but that is more than compensated for by Humphreys’ fine-eye for contextual detail and the way he so effectively musters myriad walk-on parts for those who may have left only the faintest trace of having passed that way. With the eye of a detective he shows how their trails, when pulled together, make up a map of the times more revealing than any star’s biography.

One such trace was the pen letter a 16 year-old, Andrea Hiorns, wrote to her American friend, it is a perfect encapsulation of why Humphreys’ history is so much more than just about the local.

Wednesdays are good days. I go to my Island. I must tell you all about it, it is an important part of my life. It’s in the River Thames. You cross a steep bridge over the river and pay a toll of 4d to an old lady called Rose. Then walk along a winding road with bungalows on either side. There’s lots of trees and its dark and mysterious. You turn a bend and see a large decrepit hotel and a crumbling façade. You hear loud blues music. Walk through the gates and you are in another world. All material cares disappear and we are the only people who exist.

There’s a large converted barn, you go down some steps after conning your way in with 6d – it’s usually 3/6d – your wrist is stamped and you go down. It’s very dark with just red and green lights. Long John Baldry is singing with his band at one end of the hall. The walls are white flaking and full of cobwebs, with cartoons, murals and names printed over them. People dance there crazily. Next door is the pub, where we and the musicians all congregate, we con drinks and play the jukebox and talk to everyone. I often go there on my own but always end up meeting someone I know to dance with.

Outside there is a long strip of grass down to the river with large stone nuts and bolts lying around and convenient bushes where couples make love and smoke hash. It’s the coolest place in England, there’s nowhere else like it.

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 fully 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