STYLE HISTORY CULTURE
AUTUMN 2013 A FREE QUARTERLY
VOLUME 1 ISSUE 8
©
“I could have gone through sheet metal, I had so much belief in it.”
www.jocksandnerds.com
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THE BROOKLYN SALSA COMPANY. A new generation of salsa makers inspiring global flavor with local, sustainable ingredients. Meet the rest of the BKLUXÈ crew at GANT.com/GANTRUGGER @gantrugger_uk #BKLUXÈ
Contemporary British Menswear peterwerthâ—†com
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DAVID RICHMOND Occupation Fishmonger Location Steve Hatt's Fishmongers Islington ◆ London ◆ N.1
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STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©
VOLUME 1 ISSUE 8 Cover star: Jonny Owen photographed by Marcus Agerman Ross Jacket by Stone Island; top by Fred Perry Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com Commercial Director Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@tack-press.com Editorial Assistant Chris Tang tang@jocksandnerds.com Associate Editor Chris Sullivan chris@jocksandnerds.com Staff Photographer Ross Trevail ross@jocksandnerds.com Designer Colin Christie Sub Editor Rosie Spencer Original Design Phil Buckingham Interns Hannah Ellis Shanice Martin Edward Moore Alena Tolstikova Design Intern Anna Holden Financial Director Marcus Bayley accounts@jocksandnerds.com Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@tack-press.com Subscriptions subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com Contributors Mark Anthony, Savannah Baker, Janette Beckman, Pelle Crépin, Kevin Davies, Kingsley Davis, Soraya Dayani, Paul Farrell, Horst Friedrichs, David Goldman, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Paolo Hewitt, Adam Howe, Marcus Love, Karen Mason, Chris May, Laura Mazza, Mischa Notcutt, Perry Ogden, Mattias Pettersson, Michael Schmidt, Shapersofthe80s, Richard Simpson, Graham Smith, Ben Speckmann, Paul Sturridge, Dave Swindells, Andy Thomas, Paul Vickery, Gavin Watson, Mark Webster, Will Wiles, Kasia Wozniak Special thanks to Isola Akay at All Stars Boxing Gym, Volt BMX, Ally Goodwin at One Fell Swoop onefellswoop.co.uk, Greg Harding, Drew Holmes at Nigel Cabourn, Matt Ingham at Cherry Red Records cherryred.co.uk, Spencer Leigh, Mitch Lorimer, Kathy McIntosh, Zoe Miller at Mute Records mute.com, Jon & Tea Pollock, Benedict Radcliffe, ReeRee Rockette at Rockalily Cuts rockalily.com, Neil Scaplehorn at Ace Records acerecords.co.uk, Cody Smyth, Derek Solomons, Paul Stewart at Brooklands Museum brooklandsmuseum.com, Sara Taves This issue is dedicated to the memory of Milo with the white button, 17 February 1997 to 8 August 2013 Jocks&Nerds Magazine, Tack Press Limited, 283 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AS Telephone +44 (0)20 7739 8188 jocksandnerds.com facebook.com/jocksandnerds Twitter: @jocksandnerds AIM: JocksAndNerds Jocks&Nerds is free magazine published 4 times a year, printed by Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk If you would like a copy delivered to your door contact us at subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com Postage prices UK £5, Europe £10, North America £12, RoW £14 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in the magazine are that of the respective contributor and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Jocks&Nerds is published by Tack Press Limited ©2013
Anton Wormann, Model
Carlo Alberto Silvestri, Visual
Photographer: Joel Meyerowitz
syn o nym o us & A NTO NYM O US
EVERLASTING STYLE. A BRAND NEW WAY TO SHOP shop online at baracuta.com #baracutasynant
p148
66–69 BULLETIN: Levi’s Vintage
Clothing Orange Tab takes us back to hippy-era denim
70–77 CINEMA: Muscle Shoals
is home to FAME Studios, where southern soul flourished
p112
Contents
78–85 HISTORY: The Aesthetic Movement was a reaction to the horrors of industrialisation and a return to beauty
p10
134–141 STYLE: Britannia Hospital
Photographs Gavin Watson Styling Mark Anthony
86–93 STYLE: Why New York?
142–147 GALLERY: Nigerian
10–17 SEEN: Psychobilly is a music
Photographs Perry Ogden Styling Soraya Dayani
Monarchs still play an important part in the country’s modern day politics
18–31 NEWS: A collection of things
94–103 COVER STORY: Svengali is actor/writer Jonny Owen’s first feature film
148–157 CULTURE: The Wag Club was a place where London’s most exciting creatives partied and invented
104–111 HISTORY: Vivian Maier
32–41 PEOPLE: Saying something;
created some of the most important street photography of the last century
158–161 CINEMA: Irvine Welsh refuses to rest on his laurels, pushing forward with new work for both print and screen
42–47 DETAIL: Priory Grove
112–119 STYLE: Freddie Gyamfi Photographs Paul Vickery Styling Adam Howe
162–165 CULTURE: Simon Blumenfeld
48–51 PROFILE: The Art Alibi is a new platform that helps people to own street artwork
120–121 BULLETIN: Pendleton
166–173 STYLE: West End Lane
Thomas Kay recognises 150 years of the classic American brand
Photographs Paul Farrell Styling Richard Simpson
52–57 MUSIC: Simon Fisher Turner
122–127 MUSIC: ESG ushered in the club age with their post-punk funk
174–175 BULLETIN: Barbour Beacon
and style scene driven by fun and a thumping double bass
to get excited about this autumn
wearing it best
Photographs Kasia Wozniak Styling Savannah Baker
has the uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time
58–65 STYLE: CA Smith
Photographs David Goldman Styling Marcus Love
128–133 SPOTLIGHT: Badges have
been making a statement for over 200 years
wrote some of the most vivid stories of life on London’s streets
Heritage by Norton&Sons brings some of the Barbour archive up to date
176–188 FOLIO: Africa Oye Festival.
Go Hard Boyz. Ace Cafe Ton-Up Day, Brooklands Museum
190–191 ICON: The Sweatshirt moved from the American college football pitch to every man’s wardrobe
p142 p70
SEEN
Psychobilly Photographs Mattias Pettersson
Like all great movements, the psychobilly scene is a great example of appropriation and wit. Considered to have started in the UK in the early 1980s with bands such as The Meteors, it took the name from The Cramps via a Johnny Cash song, played around with the iconography of 1950s
rockabilly and fused it with a punk sensibility that also looked to comic book art and horror movies. Severe buzz cut back and sides and gravitydefying pompadour hairstyles are common among the men, while both men and women mix bold primary colours with the staple black. The
thumping, stand-up slap double bass that drives the music is symbolic of the energy and revelry of psychobilly gatherings. It is one of the few subcultures to never really seep into the mainstream or be appropriated by marketing gurus – which is exactly how those who live the lifestyle like it.
Peter Jagusch, 40, from Stockholm wears vest by Felon; trousers by Tiger of London What’s so special about psychobilly? No politics, no religion, just fun. Describe psychobilly in three words. Rockabilly. Punk. Horror. Who’s your style icon? Johnny Cash. Who’s your favourite band? The Vibes. What’s your favourite movie? Hellraiser.
Anthony Dolan, 30, sous chef, from USA wears T-shirt by Machete Describe your style. Anything that’s comfortable. Describe psychobilly in three words. Go fucking mental. Who’s your favourite band? Mad Sin. What’s your favourite movie? Braveheart.
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SEEN | Psychobilly
Ruby Fortune, 28, model, singer and promoter, from Liverpool Describe your style. A mix of pin up, punk rock and psychobilly. What’s so special about psychobilly? It isn’t political; it’s just fast, fun and loud. That slap bass driving it just gives it a fantastic sound. Describe psychobilly in three words. Wild. Loud. Drunk. Who’s your style icon? Traci Lords’ character Wanda Woodward in the movie Cry-Baby. Who’s your favourite band? The Brains.
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Emma Jacobs, aka Coco Cake, 27, tattoo artist, from London Describe your style. Rock ‘n’ roll cowgirl punk meets Kermit the Frog. What’s so special about psychobilly? It’s a musical mongrel; a combination of styles, tattoos and mad rad big hair. Describe psychobilly in three words. Demented slapbass rhythm. Who’s your style icon? Nadia G. Who’s your favourite band? The Cramps. What’s your favourite movie? Cry-Baby.
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SEEN | Psychobilly
Chris Setzer, 43, DJ and martial arts instructor, from London wears jeans by Levi’s Describe your style. A cross between rockabilly and punk. What’s so special about psychobilly? Great music, cool people and no politics. Describe psychobilly in three words. Wild. Crazy. Dangerous. Who’s your favourite band? The Meteors. What’s your favourite movie? House of 1000 Corpses.
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Russ Surfer, musician, from London What’s so special about psychobilly? It’s a small community. Rockabilly Psychosis is a great way to describe it. Describe psychobilly in three words. Rockabilly. Punk. Beer. Who are your style icons? Kirk Brandon. And Bal Croce of The Sting Rays. Who’s your favourite musician? The Zipheads, King Kurt, Texas Mongols, to name a few. What’s your favourite movie? Anything directed by Alex Cox or David Lynch.
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SEEN | Psychobilly
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NEWS
C.P. Company
Original named Chester Perry, C.P. Company has been through a few guises in its 30-year history. However, one thing has always remained at the heart of the brand – to create exceptional quality Italian casual clothing. At that it is, arguably, unsurpassed. The hooded jackets with inserted goggles that the firm creates each year in honour of the Mille Miglia car race are coveted by fans around the world like no other jacket. Despite the Italian identity, it is the return of an Englishman, Paul Harvey – who originally took over the creative reigns from Massimo Osti when he left the company in 1994 – that heralds a new era of this fantastic brand. No doubt many more enticing garments will be rolling out in the future. cpcompany.co.uk Photograph Horst Friedrichs Drivers Sam and Emily Car 1928 Austin 7
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NEWS
Sly & The Family Stone CD boxset
Sylvester Stewart, aka Sly Stone, was of course a pioneer for creating a multi-ethnic, male and female band at a time when equal rights, both for race and gender, seemed a complete fantasy. And the tales of communal-living debauchery both at home and on their bus only add to the mystique of the man and his band. But that wouldn’t have been enough to create the legacy that exists today. For that, you need to create some good ol’ fashioned, down and dirty, funky tunes. And that’s exactly what you get on this extensive boxset, which includes previously unreleased recordings of some of their most famous songs, alongside a definitive four-CD catalogue of their work. It also includes a 104-page booklet with a wealth of information and anecdotes. Higher! by Sly & The Family Stone is out on 27 August slystonemusic.com Photograph Lee Marshall
Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson is one of the most important living photographers. Although his work is often described in terms of its scale (vast sets built on sound stages created by a veritable ant colony of production staff, relying heavily on modern post-production techniques), at the heart of his imagery is often a narrative both soft and personal. Naturally these single image vignettes of life have been compared to the cinematic medium that informs so much of his work. But it his ability to create an extraordinary and unique colour palette within his beautiful compositions that draws so many viewers into his work. This book covers the full spectrum of his 30-year career and offers the opportunity to see many of his collections of work side by side for the first time. A series of short stories by the novelist Jonathan Lethem have been commissioned to sit alongside the photographer’s work. Gregory Crewdson is published by Rizzoli rizzoliusa.com
Timberland 40th anniversary
Not many people know the importance of the Abington Shoe Company in fashion history. But it is significant, because without the Abington Shoe Company there would never have been Timberland. Started in the early 1950s, the company relocated to New Hampshire a few years later. Sidney Swartz, one of the sons of the founder, conceived the idea of creating a fully waterproof leather boot to deal with the snow and rain in the winter months – at the time a completely new and inconceivable idea. This was 1973, and the boot was the famous Timberland yellow boot. Although born out of a need to protect people against the elements, it was adopted as a style staple, most defiantly by a bunch of rich kids in Milan, the Paninaro, in the late 1980s. They, in turn, spawned the head-to-toe style that filtered throughout Europe and even back to the USA, where a new wave of hip hop musicians adopted it. To celebrate the 40th year of Timberland and the yellow boot, the company is releasing 1,973 pairs of four styles of the yellow and Timberland hiker boots. timberland.com Jack wears boots by Timberland; jacket by Duvetica; trousers by Levi’s; T-shirt by American Apparel.
Photograph Chris Tang Styling Mischa Notcutt Paninaro Jack Driver Location Hoxton Bakery, 238 Hoxton Street, London N1 facebook.com/hoxtonbakery
HATTERS SINCE 1676 James Lock & Co. Ltd., 6 St. James’s Street, London SW1A 1EF Tel: +44 (0) 20 7930 8874, www.lockhatters.co.uk
NEWS
Shackleton Epic Expedition
Ed Wardle wears sweater by North Sea Clothing. Tim Jarvis wears sweater by North Sea Clothing. Nick Larsen wears vintage anorak.
In 2008, Alexandra Shackleton, granddaughter of Sir Ernest Shackleton, approached renowned adventurer Tim Jarvis to discuss the idea of re-enacting her famous grandfather’s incredible expedition of 1914. Jarvis rose to the challenge, forming a six-man team that set about retracing the footsteps of this treacherous deed – remaining true to the original mission in terms of authentic detail as it would have been for the explorers a century ago. A three-part documentary of the expedition will air on the Discovery Channel this autumn. A book, Shackleton’s Epic, by Tim Jarvis is published by HarperCollins shackletonepic.com northseaclothing.com Photograph Chris Tang Explorers Ed Wardle, Tim Jarvis and Nick Larsen
Unseen McQueen by Barry Feinstein
Barry Feinstein was a close personal friend of Steve McQueen, which meant he had unprecedented access to the star and style icon. Due to the actor’s trust of the photographer, Feinstein was able to capture intimate and unguarded shots of him both at play and at work. This book, lovingly crafted by bespoke publishers Reel Art Press, brings together a wealth of previously unseen images, which will delight all those McQueen fans and completists out there. reelartpress.com
Heaven’s Gate DVD
Michael Cimino’s follow up to the hugely successful The Deer Hunter became equally well known but for all the wrong reasons. Given complete artistic freedom by the studio, United Artists, Heaven’s Gate went four times over budget and essentially bankrupted the studio. To compound the issue, the film was ill-received by both critics and audience, who stayed away in their droves. Like many movies before, however, time has been kind to Heaven’s Gate. It is now often hailed as a “true masterpiece” and seen as a hugely important piece of work in American cinema. And huge it is. The newly restored version, overseen by Cimino himself, comes in at 216 minutes. Thirty-two years after it was first released in the cinema, audiences can finally see the completed film that the director had originally envisaged.
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NEWS
Hollywood Dogs
The film The Artist took the general public back to a magical age of cinema, when the story was driven by visual language and facial expression – the age of silent movies. For some, this was the greatest era for the medium. But the film was also popular for another reason – the star of the movie, as was apparent in the opening sequence, was a fourlegged charmer of a Jack Russell named Uggie (or Jack, in the film). Dogs have been an integral part of the Hollywood scene, whether up on the big screen or as a star’s companion. This lighthearted book will no doubt appeal to all those cinema fans who also share a love of man’s best friend. johnkobal.org
Afro-Beat Airways 2. Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983
In the 1960s, Ghanaian highlife was the most influential popular music in West Africa. In the 1970s, Nigerian Afrobeat took its place, its success overshadowing similarly innovative, post-highlife styles that were emerging in Ghana. Rare groove label Analog Africa collected some of this wonderful but relatively uncelebrated music on the 2010 album Afro-Beat Airways: West African Shock Waves Ghana & Togo 1972-1979. A second Afro-Beat Airways volume, Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983, is released this September. The 13 tracks are split between evolving, highlife-era stars such as singer K Frimpong and the African Brothers band, and younger, one-hit wonders such as Los Issufu & His Moslems and Tony Sarfo & His Funky Afrosibi. Veteran highlife guitarist Ebo Taylor guests on the only Afrobeat track, which is credited to his vocalist son. The 44-page booklet includes evocative contemporary shots taken by photographers from Accra’s Modern Photo studio, which was located next to the Tip Toe dancehall where many of Ghana’s top bands played. analogafrica.com Words Chris May
Hummel 90th anniversary
In 1923, a German named Albert Messmer found himself watching a football match in the pouring rain – some might say a downright daft act considering the inclement weather conditions. Yet it was one that was to change both his life and sportswear history. Whilst watching the players faltering on the slippery surface, Messmer had the idea of mounting cleats onto the soles of their boots. Hence the modern football boot was born. He chose the bumblebee as the company logo because of its reputation as a creature that, in theory, shouldn’t be able to fly. It seems somehow fitting for a brand that celebrates its 90th birthday this year and has chosen to remain relatively small and humble in the age of global überbrands. hummel.net Photograph Chris Tang Styling Mischa Notcutt DJ Charlie Bones ntslive.co.uk
Orchard Beach by Wayne Lawrence
Most urban dwellers both desire and require some outdoor relaxation. And for most that means a lounge around in the local park. But some cities boast the ultimate in urban chilling – a beach. Barcelona has one within walking distance of the main shopping district, and New York offers several just a simple metro ride away. You’re probably thinking of Coney Island and the stretch leading all the way up to the Hamptons, but there’s another beach in New York and it’s not one on the tourist map. Orchard Beach is in fact the closest seashore to the Bronx. Wayne Lawrence, a New Yorkbased photojournalist, decided to portray those who frequent the beach and give it its alluring character. This isn’t a trussed-up, commercialised spot but a chance for all kinds to escape the heat and frantic pace of the city for a few hours. prestel.com
A London Trilogy: The Films of Saint Etienne 2003-2007
Starting with Finisterre in 2003, Saint Etienne has worked with filmmaker Paul Kelly to create a series of films that document London. For the first time three major works, which also include What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (2005) and This is Tomorrow (2007), are available in a DVD boxset, alongside some rare and previously unseen shorts. The DVD also contains an illustrated booklet with an introduction by Paul Kelly, and newly commissioned essays by Bob Stanley, novelist Sukhdev Sandhu, architecture writer Owen Hatherley and design critic Tom Dyckhoff. The collection gives personal insights into a metropolis both loved and unknowable. bfi.org.uk
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NEWS
Viyella 1784
With a nod to its heritage roots, classic British brand Viyella has created Viyella 1784, a new shirt collection. Partially launched last year at Milan boutique 10 Corso Como, the range exploits the brand’s archives and highlights its familiar house check and tattersalls. viyella1784.co.uk Photograph Chris Tang Styling Mischa Notcutt Undergraduate Nathan Hudson
Classe Tous Risques
Claude Sautet’s directorial debut was somewhat overshadowed by the birth of the Nouvelle Vague, when Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle hit the cinemas just a week later in 1960. The fact that three of France’s most important directors – JeanPierre Melville, Robert Bresson and Bertrand Tavernier – all considered Classe Tous Risques a hugely important film must surely be praise enough for any self-respecting cineaste. Based on a book written by ex-con José Giovanni, Classe Tous Risques plays around with clichéd themes then prevalent in the gangster genre. More than 50 years later, the BFI is bringing this forgotten classic back to the big screen. In cinemas from 13 September bfi.org.uk
Nathan wears shirt by Viyella 1784; jeans by Levi’s; belt, stylist’s own.
Brutus Jeans
Brutus quickly found itself a Mod staple with the check shirts that made the brand famous. But the mainstay of the business from the early 1970s onwards became jeans, which took on a life of their own. There were TV commercials shot by David Bailey (one even starring a jobbing, up-and-coming musician called Gordon Sumner, who later changed his name to Sting) and chart-topping pop songs; Brutus Jeans became a brand in itself and perfectly reflected the times. It is not surprising, therefore, that Jonathan Freedman, son of one of the founders and in charge of the firm today, has decided to bring denim back with this first collection. brutus-trimfit.com Jamie wears jacket and jeans by Brutus Jeans; T-shirt, stylist’s own; trainers by New Balance; socks, model’s own.
Photograph Chris Tang Styling Mischa Notcutt Illustrator Jamie Burbridge damnsonblog.tumblr.com
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Drive Style by Horst Friedrichs
Previously photographer Horst Friedrichs has focused his lens on Mods, rockers and cyclists. The latest to come into focus for this snapper of subcultures are the owners of beautiful and old cars. Friedrichs’ series of books is building into an indispensable compendium of the style and culture of the current generation. prestel.com
Kezia, Rythm Riot 2012
Lee 101 collaborations
Lee 101, the premium jeans line from Lee, has collaborated with three partners this season to create some key pieces for its collection. To create a waterproof jacket, the brand hooked up with British Millerain, manufacturer of waxed cotton. To provide some natty knitwear, Lee 101 has designed some pieces with French nautical brand St James. And finally, if you want to keep your jeans dry from the random downpours prevalent in the UK, you can apply a healthy layer of Otter Wax specifically created to make them waterproof. lee101.com britishmillerain.com otterwax.com saint-james.com Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross
Sailor Steve Gaull
Unreal City by Michael Smith
The narrator of Michael Smith’s book Unreal City is a creative fallen on hard times, who travels through the world of seedy city back streets, parties and digital age confusion. This unique edition book consists of unbound texts gathered in a sleeve and annotated by music producer Andrew Weatherall, who is Faber’s current artist in residence. Weatherall has created a six-track original composition that accompanies the book. Michael Smith and Andrew Weatherall will be reading and performing at Rough Trade East on 5 September. They will also be appearing at the Faber Social/Caught by the River Stage at Festival Number 6 fabersocial.co.uk roughtrade.com festivalnumber6.com
NEWS
Twenty Feet From Stardom
We’ve all done it at some point. We’re at a gig or festival watching a fave band. The music’s hitting just the right spot, the crowd is feeling it, and then… you realise those amazing vocals you’re hearing aren’t that of the band’s lead singer. In fact, you don’t even know the singer’s name; never seen them before, probably never will again. In fact this is exactly the experience A&M Records bigwig Gil Friesen had at a Leonard Cohen concert. This got him thinking about creating a documentary film about the unsung heroes and heroines of live and recorded music. The result is Twenty Feet From Stardom, directed by Morgan Neville. Although there are some big names featured in the film, such as Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger, for once, the real stars are the ones who are usually stood just a little bit out of the limelight. twentyfeetfromstardom.com
Lisa Fischer
Wayne Hemingway
Festival of Thrift Darlington
“Thrift is very close to our hearts as we, along with many others, are concerned at the disposable nature of our society.” So explains Wayne Hemingway, one of the founders of a new festival that sets out to celebrate the value of upcycling and other aspects of reimagining and reusing things we already have in this time of austerity and ecological concerns. Lingfield Point, Darlington, 21-22 September festivalofthrift.co.uk Photograph Chris Tang
Scott Fraser
Scott Simpson has had a successful career buying and selling vintage gear for the past few years through his website, styleandclassics.com. Like many people interested in classic clobber, he began to realise that the best, most wearable pieces are becoming harder and harder to source. So he created his own clothing and bag range, which has just launched. Not simply recreations of archive pieces, Scott Fraser reimagines them using the finest quality fabrics and finishings. scottfrasercollection.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Designer Scott Simpson
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The Clash Sound System
The 43 Group by Morris Beckman
Most servicemen and women who fought the fascist terror that was the second world war breathed a huge sigh of relief when it finally ended, and tried to resume a happy, decent, civilian life. Well, one would hope so. Except this wasn’t the case if you were Jewish. Sadly, Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts hoped to continue where Hitler and Mussolini had left off, on the streets of London. Morris Beckman, a Jewish ex-serviceman, founded the 43 Group to challenge them. Their numbers soon swelled and included many brave Jewish folk, including a young Vidal Sassoon. Beckman’s gripping account of this domestic battle has recently been republished, fittingly in the face of today’s climate of mistrust and division. thehistorypress.co.uk
For the first time all five Clash studio albums, which have been remastered, are available together, alongside a selection of demos, singles and rarities. The boombox packaging, designed by bassist Paul Simonon, also contains film footage by Don Letts and Julien Temple as well as live footage and videos. There is so much stuffed into this completist’s paradise, we couldn’t possibly mention it all here. theclash.com sonymusic.com
Photograph Janette Beckman
The Freedom Festival
The Freedom Festival in Hull is an arts event that began in 2008 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of one of its favourite sons, slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce. As part of its contribution to 2013’s festival (6-8 September), the Museum of Club Culture – founded by Mark Wigan (see our history of Badges on page 128) – in Humber Street will host two special events. One, entitled Ziggy, will feature Hull-born photographer Peter Hardy’s images taken on Bowie’s 1973 Ziggy Stardust Tour. The other includes photographs, histories and Top 10s from 100 leading DJs, including Judge Jules, Graeme Park, DJ Milo, Keb Darge and Chris Sullivan. Both exhibitions run until 24 October. freedomfestival.co.uk museumofclubculture.com Words Mark Webster Photograph Peter Hardy
NEWS
Henri Lloyd Black Label
Henry Lloyd was conceived as a functional sailing outfitter 50 years ago, but it hasn’t stopped the firm’s technical gear being appropriated by every conceivable group of lads over the years – whether it be swaggering Casuals or hip urban aristos. The brand finally acknowledged the adulation from these landlubbers in the early 1990s when it hired the legendary designer Massimo Osti to create a range called the Black Label. To mark Henri Lloyd’s half century, the Black Label has been relaunched this season and will be available in select retailers around the country. henrilloyd.com Photographs Chris Tang Sailors Andrew Gale and Daniel Kennedy
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PEOPLE
Elliott Power
“A recording artist” is how Elliott Power refers to himself – which is a smart way of avoiding the clichéd categories he stoically fails to fall into. “Much of it is spoken word,” he tells me on the eve of the release of his second single, ‘Sugar Free’, for Marathon Artists Records. “But it’s not rap, I’m not a hip hop person. And I sing, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a confident singer. There’s a naivety there though, a vulnerability. And I hope people think that works for me.” What is clear from the way Power is laying down music is that he has fresh ideas and genuine ideals. A young west Londoner who took a degree in photography and art history, he started messing about with demos with his friend and musical collaborator Dorian Lutz only a couple of years ago. It took a year, but eventually his style and their sound began to make an impact (via his first song ‘Sink/Swim’), and soon led to the record deal that will also deliver a debut album in early 2014, Once Smitten. Yet all of this is not some masterplan to help turn him into a pop star; something the forthcoming single addresses with real honesty. “It looks at the whole sugar-coated life of ‘the business’. But I’m part of that life. It’s about that divide between reality and the music business.” For a man so early into his career, and at a time when Saturday evening light entertainment is just as likely to create the next big thing as any other method, Power has his head set in just the right place. “I’m not trying to be a pop star,” he continues. “I’m looking to make good music, from perhaps a left field place. So it’s at least true and honest. It’s upsetting that there are those who don’t want to be good, just famous. If what I do crosses over one day, great. I’ll leave my mark one day, maybe. And if I have my moment – I’ll take it!” elliottpower.com Photograph Kevin Davies Words Mark Webster
The Twilight Players
Dancers don’t get much hipper than this trio of brothers from Hertfordshire. Sinbad Phgura, Ammo “Too Sweet” and Jimi “The Quiff ” are thankfully very global in their outlook, which means their influences in dance, dress and attitude take in Latin, ska, Indian, 1950s Havana, funk and then some. They have created their own brand of the Open Hand style, which was first pioneered by a UK group called Cool Pockets. Open Hand predates breakdancing and bodypopping and is a true spectacle. Which is exactly why these guys are as likely to end up in a Bollywood movie as working with Madonna or entertaining crowds at the Glastonbury festival. twilightplayers.com Photograph Mattias Pettersson
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Death
Formed in Detroit in 1971 by three brothers, David, Dannis and Bobby Hackney, Death took inspiration from the hard-edged garage music that came out of the city with bands such as MC5 and The Stooges and, in particular, Alice Cooper, who they had seen in concert. With an album’s worth of songs in the bag, the brothers thought a record deal was assured. Columbia Records stepped up to the mark, but eventually refused to release the album because the band wouldn’t change its name. This was the era of Motown, when black musicians were seen as soulful and smooth, not raw and hard-edged. Fast forward 30 years and a hidden demo was discovered by a new generation ready to embrace this proto-punk band. A film telling their story, A Band Called Death, is currently being played at theatres around the USA and Europe. deathfromdetroit.com drafthousefilms.com Photograph Janette Beckman
Francois Nordmann
PEOPLE
Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, Francois Nordmann was a member of the 1980s skate/punk band Little 5 Points, named after the bohemian district of his hometown. Since then, Nordmann has travelled the world and is now residing in London. Here he divides his time between creating his own line of jewellery, SWS of London, and running two shops in Camden; the Three Amigos skate shop at 118 Camden Road, NW1, and his Vintage King market stall at Unit D-04, Camden Stables Market. When he’s not busy designing and selling, he also finds time to DJ under the name Francois Dirty South. swsoflondon.com Photograph Ross Trevail
Keziah Jones
Singer, songwriter and guitarist Keziah Jones was born in Lagos, the son of a prominent Nigerian industrialist. He was educated at private schools in England, and when he turned 18 he dropped out and became a bohemian, living in squats in London and Paris. He was discovered by his manager – Phil Pickett, previously keyboard player with Culture Club – while busking in Portobello Road. Jones’s “blufunk” style sets politically savvy lyrics to a gritty hybrid of post-Hendrix rock ’n’ roll, AfricanAmerican blues and Nigerian roots music. Jones will release his sixth studio album, Captain Rugged – the story of a fictional African superhero and a satire on modern Nigeria – this autumn. “It’s a country always on the edge of crisis, and everybody tries to fix it and it just gets worse,” says Jones. “Captain Rugged thinks he’s got superpowers and can put things right, but it’s his hallucination. The album plays with the fallibility of power, Nigerian culture and magic.” A 128-page graphic novel, also titled Captain Rugged, will be published alongside the album. Jones collaborated on the book with two Lagosians: artist Native Maqari and playwright and film director Biyi Bandele, who honed the storyline and dialogue. Next up, Nollywood? keziahjones.com Photograph Mattias Pettersson Words Chris May
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Daniel Rachel
Daniel Rachel is a guitarist of critical acclaim who has toured with the likes of Billy Bragg and The Rifles. With a couple of albums and a top 40 hit under his belt, he has most recently been working on a book, interviewing 25 musicians. Entitled Isle of Noises. Conversations with Great British Songwriters, Rachel sat down with some of the country’s best songwriters to discuss their working processes and what drives them to write. Interviewees include Ray Davies, Robin Gibb, John Lydon, Mick Jones, Chaz Jankel and Lily Allen. Rarely has this thoughtprovoking subject been tackled in such an engaging and insightful way. danielrachel.com picador.com Photograph Paul Vickery
PEOPLE
Hawleywood Barber Shops
Started by Donnie Hawley in Los Angeles 14 years ago, the staff at the Hawleywood Barber shops take as much pride in their own appearance as they do in their customers’. Relying heavily on the traditional craft of hair cutting, as opposed to styling, Hawley and his team have created an environment that illustrates the quality and values that used to be standard at these establishments. But it’s not just the cuts and the interior that they strive to get right. Hawley’s extensive collection of tunes are always played and the banter is constant and lively. And his style has attracted the attention of both Dickies and Vans, who have created bespoke pieces for him in the past. Today, Hawley boasts his own grooming range called Layrite, and there are plans to open more barber shops in the UK, Japan and the rest of the world. hawleywoods.com Photograph Tim Hans
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PEOPLE
Edward Sexton
“My old boss, Fred Stanbury, used to say that we make suits for the three Cs – the crooks, the cranks and the cripples. The crooks have got the money, the cranks will never be happy and the cripples can’t go anywhere else,” says legendary tailor Edward Sexton. “Being a run-of-the-mill tailor producing bog standard single- and double-breasted suits was never good enough for me. I’m a great believer in creating an illusion and, as a sartorial sculptor, I fit the clothes but also supply something else.” Sexton, with business partner Tommy Nutter (the legendary tailor who is credited with creating the Beatles’ suits on the cover of Abbey Road), revolutionised and reinvigorated Savile Row at Nutters of Savile Row, which opened in 1969. While Nutter was the flamboyant frontman who made the connections, Sexton was the expert cutter in the back room who turned his partner’s often inspired notions into reality. “I started in 1955 with Kilgour, French & Stanbury on Savile Row. We dressed everybody and I still do. The essence of great tailoring is fit and style, but also it must be made in the true tradition of Savile Row with a true hand foundation, because unless that is made correctly the suit won’t fit. It has to be moulded and sit on the handmade canvases, on the handpadded lapel and the hand-padded collar, not like all of these machine-produced foundations that people use. You just end up with a flat jacket.” For Sexton, the man who trained Stella McCartney, the handmade suit will never die out because, as he says, “While there are people with money who can pay for the best, they will always buy the best there is.” edwardsexton.co.uk Photograph Kevin Davies Words Chris Sullivan
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Jabosh
When a passion is so strong, ultimate it leads you – which is exactly what happened to Jabosh, who had a sensible, secure career as an engineer before deciding the path of a street musician was the one he must travel. Without the strictures of a nine to five, Jabosh has travelled the world playing his jazz-funk saxophone, including a six-month spell living with Tibetan monks in the Himalayas. He can be found in Camden and Brick Lane in London before he jets off to Asia and then Miami later this year. He is also currently working on his first album, which is due for release early next year. Photograph Paul Vickery
Shot at Umit & Son, 35 Lower Clapton Road, London E5
Liam Saint-Pierre
A director and cinematographer by trade, it’s hardly surprising that Liam Saint-Pierre has a passion for the medium of film. Yet it was the chance discovery of a discarded projector and book on French New Wave cinema that led him to start his film club Ciné-Real. Not sure whether the projector worked or not, he remembered an Aladdin’s cave of a shop in Clapton, London, specialising in all manner of predigital movie merchandise and hardware. Umit, the store’s owner, did some tweaks on the projector, during which time they fell into conversation about the dying art of screenings on celluloid. This led to the creation of their 16mm film night, where Umit and Saint-Pierre gather together London’s cineastes for one-off screenings of classics, ranging from Jaws to The Lady from Shanghai. liamsaintpierre.com cine-real.com Photograph Chris Tang
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Louis Mendes
If street photography isn’t exactly a dying art, it is most definitely a changing art. Now everyone has access to a camera and a personal blog to post their snaps, street photography has morphed into a stock pile of generic, uncared for series of portraits for an Instagram generation, to be viewed in the blink of an eye. Which is why it is ever more important to acknowledge the work and career of Louis Mendes. For, once upon a time, street photographers were akin to alchemists, creating an instant portrait for you to take away, there and then. And it is this era that Mendes belongs to. In fact, he still works with his 1959 Speed Graphic camera. (That’s the iconic one you always see the press clicking away on in old black-and-white movies). Mendes has shot everyone from the common Joe to New York’s celebrity elite. A new book charting his career has just been published, so at least Mendes’ work won’t be lost on the internet’s wind. Louis Mendes. Monumental: An American Experience by Raymond A. Ortiz louismendes.com Photograph Janette Beckman
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PEOPLE
The Thirst
Old prejudices die hard. Even in 2013, the kneejerk assumption about a black band from London is that it will play funk or reggae, not indie rock. It is an expectation that The Thirst has battled with since its formation. The Brixton born and raised quartet – brothers Kwame (bass) and Mensah Hart (vocals, guitar), Mark Lenihan (guitar) and Marcus Harris (drums) – has been together since 2007. “When our first album came out, we pitched a video to MTV,” says Kwame. “They didn’t know what to do with it. MTV2 said, ‘You’re better suited to MTV Base,’ and MTV Base said, ‘You’re better suited to MTV2.’ We felt like the music we’re playing doesn’t want us and the people who we supposedly come from don’t want us either. Some people are still shocked to find we’re black guys.” The shock is felt by black as well as white people. “There are those who think we shouldn’t play rock,” says Mensah. Tell that to Little Richard and the late Jimi Hendrix and Arthur Lee. As it happens, some of The Thirst’s latest songs have a funk flavour. But the band’s core remains rock, right down to the backbeat. Dodgy expectations recalibrated here. thethirst.co.uk Photograph Kingsley Davis Words Chris May
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Alexander Chard, actor, wears hat by Vivienne Westwood World’s End; shirt by Woolrich; glasses, model’s own.
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DETAIL Cassius Clay, student and stylist, wears hat and jacket by Lanvin; T-shirt by Acne; necklace by Sam Ubhi.
Priory Grove Photographs Kasia Wozniak Stylist Savannah Baker
Anthony Chin, musician and songwriter, wears hat by Pokit; jacket from The Vintage Showroom; trousers by Vivienne Westwood; sweater by John Smedley.
DETAIL | Priory Grove
Andrew Lettman, engineer, wears hat by Lock&Co.; jacket by A Child of the Jago; shirt from The Vintage Showroom.
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Chris Wright, retoucher, wears hat by Agnes b; jacket by Pele Che Coco; vest, model’s own.
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DETAIL | Priory Grove
Sonny Miles, songwriter, wears hat by Kangol; sweater by Guns Germs $teal.
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PROFILE
The Art Alibi Street Art. Turf War. David Walker. War Boutique Words Will Wiles Portrait Pelle Crépin
In the mid-2000s, Jo Dunne was at the epicentre of the street art boom, as outsider stencil-jockeys such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey were spectacularly catapulted into the mainstream. All of a sudden, the walls were sprayed with gold as collectors and the public scrambled for a share of the market. Dunne worked with Steve Lazarides, the gallerist who represents street art royalty from Banksy down, on the definitive shows of the era, including 2003’s ‘Turf War’, the annual ‘Santa’s Ghetto’ event, and the fabled 2007 show in Palestine. Dunne built up a great collection of contacts during this time – “I have met artists in the most unusual circumstances. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with art, we just happened to meet, quite naturally,” she says – and now she is fulfilling a long-held ambition to set up her own business within that circle. The Art Alibi is an online outlet for limited editions, with a new, original work released every month or two. It’s a way of bringing the artists Dunne loves to the public at an affordable price. “People always think you’re really rich in the art world – ‘you work with Banksy, you must be a millionaire’ – not, unfortunately,” says Dunne. “I don’t care really, that’s not what motivates me.” The Art Alibi, which launched in July, sells short-run artwork one at a 48
time. Artists get paid up front – “If the big galleries did that, everyone would be laughing,” Dunne says, ruefully – and the editions of 50 limit the risk while giving the buyer real rarity value. The first to go on sale was a colourful spraypaint portrait by David Walker. “People still refer to this as a print, but it’s not, it’s a hand-sprayed painting, each and every one of them is, so they’re all individual,” Dunne says. “I’ve known these artists for years and they don’t mind going the extra mile for me… David Walker spent fucking ages doing these pictures, at one point he was like, ‘I can’t believe I agreed to do this.’ But it worked. He created something unique and special.” Dunne’s flat in north London is an Aladdin’s cave of street art – mostly gifts from the artists themselves hung on bare brick walls, in particular a large canvas of a squatting figure with angel’s wings by Eelus. There are spray cans, a golden candle in the shape of a skull, and Beastie Boys-style VW medallions. A copy of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids – a reminder of an earlier career as a music industry PR – lies next to a neat pile of vintage editions of Interview magazine. There’s an early iBook laptop that must qualify as an antique of some kind, along with a more up-to-date model, as well as a fish tank and a black rabbit. London is baking in a heatwave, and the noise of
the Archway Road drifts in through the open windows. One of the first things Dunne does when we meet is hand me a four-page written statement. It includes all she is prepared to say on the subject of Banksy. The pseudonymous graffiti artist turned art-world sensation has become something of a headache for her. Not him, precisely – it’s the people who want to know who he is that have her reaching for the paracetamol. “I really didn’t want to be the person that blew it,” she says, laughing. And she would only agree to talk if there weren’t any questions about Bristol’s noted rat-fancier. So what does the statement reveal about Banksy? Not much, as you’d imagine. “The first rule of Banksy is: you do not talk about Banksy… Whether I actually met Banksy remains a mystery, even to me, despite endless requests to divulge information I do not have or know,” she writes. “If I had a pound for every time I’m asked their identity I’d be able to afford a Banksy canvas by now.” What was it like to be at the heart of a phenomenon like the street art boom and working with the man at the centre of it all? “He wasn’t big, Steve Lazarides, he was a cool guy, I really liked him,” Dunne says. “He works incredibly hard, but then all of us did.” When did she realise that it had >
Jo Dunne. Founder of the Art Alibi
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gone far beyond what might normally be expected of a gallery? “By the time we did the 2006 Santa’s Ghetto show in Oxford Street it was evident that it was big,” says Dunne. “We had about 5,000 people a day coming in to see that show.” “It was long hours that we worked there,” she continues, “and when we left at night I found it difficult because there were people already queuing up. We were going home and there were people already outside in a huge queue waiting to sleep out all night to be the first to get the Banksy release the next day. This was in December. It was pretty harsh conditions.” After that she “booked her ticket to Thailand”. Back in Dunne’s baking north London flat, the phone rings. “That’s War Boutique,” she says. “We’re working on something together, our next project [for the Art Alibi]. He’s a big ’un. Again, [like Walker] he’s gone the extra mile. We’ve done a sevencolour screenprint – all the background is watercolour and all the details are hand-painted.” War Boutique was the head of textiles and design at the Ministry of Defence for 16 years, “then realised he was a pacifist”, says Dunne. “When I first met him I was flabbergasted by his story.” As designer of the police stab vest, War Boutique made “Metropolitan Peace” versions for Banksy’s shows – one hangs on Dunne’s wall. His other work has included stab vests for children, produced at the time of a spate of youth knife crime in London. As you might expect from a CV like that, War Boutique’s work will have a more activist edge – focused on the decline of the bee – and that’s something Dunne wants to encourage in the artists working for the Art Alibi. Matt Small, another artist in the mix for future releases, is planning a work responding to the police harassment of the family of Stephen Lawrence. STATIC, the collective behind the Chinook Chandelier canvases, are on the schedule for October and can also be expected to make a political point. “The people I work with, we somehow just click – we do often have common ground,” Dunne says. “I’m
Metropolitan Peace. War Boutique 2007 Photograph Peter Santi
quite interested in political work, to send positive messages.” She wants to inject a new sincerity into a sometimes overheated scene, by working closely with artists, nurturing them, and giving them an outlet for work that’s
‘THE PEOPLE I WORK WITH, WE SOMEHOW JUST CLICK’ more “risqué” than might be permissible in a gallery setting. The artists’ enthusiasm for this approach has encouraged Dunne “not only to explore… uncomfortable topics but to
also embrace ideas and causes that we are passionate about.” Art should be an expression of the times, she says; in her written statement, she continues: “That’s not to say that everything I release will be directly political, [but] throughout history in times of economic austerity beauty, humour and the unconventional artist have often proven hugely successful.” Does this mean that the Art Alibi is in a way a campaigning organisation – change.org with limited editions in place of petitions and writing to your MP? “What I don’t want to do is be too overtly political,” Dunne emphasises. “I don’t want to limit myself – I do like a lot of political art, I’m quite stimulated by that… but I also like brilliantly visual art, I like pop art, and that’s not particularly political, most of it. Not everything has to be political.” theartalibi.co.uk
PROFILE | The Art Alibi
Untitled. David Walker 2013
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Simon Fisher Turner Film Scores. Derek Jarman. Jonathan King. Portsmouth Sinfonia. The Epic of Everest Words Richard Simpson Portrait Kevin Davies
In the 1970s he was a teen pop idol and actor, performing alongside the likes of Robert Mitchum. He has since created an impressive body of musical work, both in the charts and for cinema. Yet the name Simon Fisher Turner doesn’t naturally trip off the tongue. Despite a few lines, his handsome, youthful visage disguises Turner’s 58 years on this planet. And considering the tales of adventure and indulgence, it would come as no surprise to find a festering portrait up in his attic. Beginning his career as a child actor, Turner’s beautiful, boyish looks quickly attracted the pop Svengali Jonathan King, who released his first album. But Turner soon turned back to his first profession, continuing to act for several years, as well making music personally. A chance meeting with Derek Jarman led to a lifelong friendship and professional relationship, which, in turn, brought the once cherubic pop star into contact with the punks and the proto-New Romantics. Later he joined Alan McGee’s Creation Records at the height of its powers in the early 1990s, alongside bands such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream. Today, living in west London, Turner is happily married, still creating original music and film scores, and signed to Mute Records. You’ve had quite a life. Where did it all begin? I had a military upbringing. Dad was in the Navy. Back then that was very harsh. I literally never saw him as a child. I didn’t even meet him properly until I was about 14 – tragic really. And that meant various boarding schools – horrible, vicious places. Luckily one of them was a choir school where I discovered a love of music. The first album I ever bought was The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. It was that era. Then my dad did something amazing. It probably set the course for my life. Because he 52
was travelling all the time he brought us back exotic gifts. One time, he brought me home a cassette recorder. It’s a machine that let’s you record sound. Now that seems incredibly mundane and universal, but back then it was like something magical. In fact, I still have it. Then it all changed, I left boarding school, and it was like a polar opposite. Suddenly, I found myself lodging with a family above the Shaftesbury Theatre in Grape Street in the heart of Soho.
too young to be allowed into bars and clubs, so I went to the movies a lot. I remember once I went to see a double bill of Performance, Nicolas Roeg’s film with Mick Jagger and James Fox, and George Lucas’s first film THX 1138. Everyone there was much older than I was. I guess they were all completely stoned but at the time I couldn’t have known that. Everything was new – one’s sexuality, the music, cinema. And I was totally unsupervised by anybody.
This must have been 1968? Yes. Can you imagine? There I am, a rather well-mannered, middle-class military family boy, wet behind the ears, dropped into the heart of bohemian, theatrical London in the late ’60s. It totally blew my mind at first. Of course, there was so much I didn’t understand. I was just sort of left to develop on my own as a person. And I went to this strange school; a ballet and drama school. There were about 130 girls there and about 13 boys, so I was exposed to a very female world; for a boy of my age and background, that was really peculiar. Women, music, theatres. My life changed dramatically that year. The musical Hair was on at the theatre where I lived – naked people on stage. It doesn’t seem that risqué to us nowadays but back then… Put it this way, the opening of the play had to be delayed until the abolition of the Theatres Act went through parliament. The younger generation were changing attitudes and morals but the old establishment was still very much in charge. And I guess that was the world I had been brought up in. That was just “wow” to me then.
It sounds amazing. Who didn’t dream of that freedom as a teenager? Of course, I experienced amazing things beyond my years then, which was great in one way, but not necessarily in another. For one, I was really lonely. I didn’t really have any friends, so much of what I did was on my own. By this time I had an agent and was a bad young actor. I was getting gigs for radio and TV, kids’ series and stuff like that. It was a bit weird. There I was at 16 and I was earning more money than my dad. But no one was teaching me the value of money so I’d just throw it around. If I wanted something, I’d just go and buy it. That kind of independence at that age… Well, it can be very pleasurable too. It’s probably fair to say I had a rather confused childhood.
What else were you exposed to? I just loved music, so as soon as I discovered live music I was totally on top of that. I think one of the first bands I saw live was Tyrannosaurus Rex at Olympia. I was still so young so I didn’t really understand everything I was seeing, but I just loved it. I was still
So this is about 1970. Were you famous at this point? No, but I’d get recognised from time to time. I lived in Angel then – not the gentrified place as we know it today, it was really quite dodgy then. I’d get whacked now and then simply because someone recognised me “off the telly”. In 1973 Jonathan King released your first album, touting you as the “British David Cassidy” and hoping to make you a teen idol. It was an album of cover versions including David Bowie’s ‘The Prettiest Star’. How did that come about? I was in a show on the BBC, The Silver Sword, with an called actor Rufus >
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credited with starting the whole New Wave movement, stuck me the studio. He hated what I did so that was the end of that. I knew some people at the RCA and they gave me a 16-track that I had in my flat in Chelsea, which I could record onto. Marianne Faithfull lived downstairs from me. John Lydon lived on Edith Grove so there were all sorts of people around that area then. Frampton, who knew Jonathan King. Rufus must have known that what I really wanted to do was make music. So he introduced me to him. I’d heard of King because he’d had a smash hit with ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’. Naively I thought we were going to create something interesting, but he didn’t give me any control and wouldn’t let me out of my contract. Needless to say, the record was rubbish. It wasn’t what I had in mind with my music. So I went off and made a record with the reggae artist Judge Dread called ‘Hello, I’m your Heart’, which didn’t get released. Someone else recorded it and it went to number one. But I did it originally; reggae style. That was when I realised I really wanted to do music properly.
as The King of Luxembourg [1988] was very commercial, the second one wasn’t. I really like the second album because of the arrangements of all the orchestration. It has lots of weird things like Elizabethan instruments. Mike Alway, founder of Él Records, who released the album, insisted we had no bass too, which added to the oddity of that record. The first album was all cover versions. Mike came with a list of about 50 songs and we chose the final ones from that. Likewise, with the name – I chose the one I liked from a list he made. It didn’t have any real significance. I like that collaborative process. I’m all for other people bringing an opinion to my work.
Did you know Eno then? No, not at all. I’ve never really known him. It’s only through Derek Jarman, when he let me record music for Derek’s film Blue in his house in Suffolk.
We’ve spoken a lot about the musical career. What about the acting? I was, I suppose, a professional actor from about 14 to 25. I was in Michael Winner’s remake of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum and Candy Clark. At the same time punk was becoming really important. I got a copy of the first Sex Pistols single and that was it. I took Robert and Candy down to the Vortex, which was a key club for the punk movement. Candy had been shopping at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothes shop on the Kings Road so we were all bondaged up. Suddenly those people who used to beat me up were giving me respect. I actually got to know a lot of people at this time, like Johnny Thunders and Leee Black Childers, who was Bowie’s road manager. I was just having a nice time, being actually pretty poor.
Was your album with Jonathan King your only concession to commercial pop music? Very much so. Although my first album
Were you losing interest in acting then? I guess. After seeing the Pistols, I tried to get a record deal. Seymour Stein, who started Sire Records and is
You played clarinet with Brian Eno on the Portsmouth Sinfonia album in 1974. The whole point of the Portsmouth Sinfonia orchestra was that you weren’t allowed to play any instrument you already knew how to play, or you were a complete non-musician. The idea was to create music without the restrictions of understanding correct musical diction. They’d already made a studio album and it was only natural that people wanted to see them perform live. A friend of mine, music writer Ray Fox-Cummings, suggested I join them for the gig at the Royal Albert Hall.
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I heard that John Lydon encouraged your music. Yes. We just met one day. I knew his brother Jimmy a bit. He seemed very good and honest. I think we talked about money a little bit. I saw the Pistols by accident because I passed the Screen on the Green in Islington the night before they were going to play there with The Damned and it was incredible. No one knew what to expect. But all the Bromley Contingent were there – 17/18 year olds with attitude 150 per cent. Later I covered PiL’s [Public Image Ltd] ‘Poptones’ when I was doing King of Luxembourg. I guess what he did resonated with me. His lyrics were really sharp and relevant, considering how young he was at that time… You’re right. But he was interested in things. He wasn’t closed off. He was really vocal about his respect for Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator back then. He had a very broad spectrum of taste. So I always thought he was good. I liked the Pistols. And I liked The Adverts and X-Ray Spex. But I didn’t really like anybody else. The Clash’s London Calling was a great album. And then it was over. It was one summer as far as I could see. And then the Pistols were gone. With the Ronnie Biggs stuff it just got silly. You had an altercation with Sid Vicious, didn’t you? Yes, he beat up me outside the Speakeasy. I’d forgotten about that. It was a place where we used to go a lot. Sid was there one day at the door, and he just whacked me and kicked me in the balls. Did you meet Derek Jarman while he was filming Jubilee?
MUSIC | Simon Fisher Turner
It’s kind of crazy how I met Derek. I was sitting on the Kings Road and he came up to me and said, “You’re Simon Turner, I interviewed you when you were 16 for a magazine. And you were really really pretentious. And you wore aviator sunglasses and… you know… you were really rude.” And I was pretty surprised. But anyway, he said, “What are you doing? Do you need a job?” and I said, “Yes”. He gave me a job just helping out in his office. Then he found out I could drive so I drove him around too. He’d just finished Jubilee, which starred Adam Ant and lots of the key people from the punk scene. The people who produced the film also looked after Adam Ant so I ended up driving Adam and the Ants around. Jordan, who famously managed the McLaren/ Westwood shop on Kings Road, managed them, which was a hoot. Then you worked with Matt Johnson in The The? I worked at Cherry Red, which published Matt’s records. He just said one day, “Do you want to join my group?” So I worked on the album Burning Blue Soul. It’s an absolutely amazing record. Matt’s guitar playing is incredible as well. We used to do those songs live. We were a trio – Matt, Colin
Lloyd Tucker and myself. We all played guitar and somebody would play bass. We tended to swap instruments. Then Colin and I left and started our own label and did our own thing. Which was Deux Filles? Yes. We went off and decided to dress up as two girls and do quiet instrumental music.
Rough Trade and I was sitting opposite Simon Edwards, who used to work for them. And Simon looked at me and said, “You look incredibly like this girl you’ve been pretending to manage for the last couple of years.” The albums are very innocent. What’s good about them, maybe, is that they are really simple. It’s not more than four things going on at the same time.
‘AT 16 I WAS EARNING MORE MONEY THAN MY DAD’
You created some tragic story for the two girls. Yes a really tragic story [laughs]. A friend of mine, Phillip, and I, we wrote that story over a weekend in a pub. It was a Guinness-inspired story with tragedy and humour. But a lot of people thought it was true, which is really difficult to believe.
And you played live under this disguise? We did, supporting The Monochrome Set. The good thing about the venue was there were curtains, so when the curtains opened we were there, sat already, and we played along to backing tracks for 25 minutes. It was very sweet, but then we left and the curtain didn’t close, so we had to get up and walk out in our beautiful frocks and wigs and everything. It was a diversion. We fooled the world until one day I was in
There’s quite a bit of the dressing up as The King of Luxembourg too, isn’t there? I’m all for dressing up. I think it’s good to be a bit flamboyant, but The King of Luxembourg was ridiculous and unbelievably unsuccessful. Our only gigs were in Japan. I performed on TV there. It’s on YouTube so my kids have seen it. They were a little surprised – “Wow, Dad, you’re a popstar” – and I said, “No, I really wasn’t.” That was > 55
It’s true. And when Channel 4 screened it I didn’t have anywhere to live and I ended up having to watch it on a blackand-white telly [laughs]. It was great. You ended up on Creation Records in 1990. At the time they had Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine. And then we made a very strange record, with Tilda Swinton. We’ve always done bits and bobs together; she’s really cool. We just sat in the studio with long tape loops going, absolutely gobsmacked with what she was saying. We had candles going and it was very, very strange; we just let her go. And it was really amazing. Alan McGee was horrified, the poor thing. I really think he was expecting Tubular Bells Part Two. Bobby Gillespie liked it. Bobby thought, ‘Hey, it’s Tilda Swinton. It’s really cool!’ But I don’t
just once. It was late at night; it was this very strange show. I’ve never done anything like that before, or since. I enjoyed doing it and it was fun – if it had been successful I would have carried on doing it. The King of Luxembourg coincided with the soundtracks you made for some of Derek Jarman’s films. I did five film scores for Derek. First I soundtracked some of his work on Super 8. Then I did Caravaggio, The Last of England, The Garden, Edward II and Blue. That was obviously a whole other life, where this filmmaker gives you extraordinary images and lets you go with it. Caravaggio was very difficult because I had never done it before. I didn’t have a clue. I never wanted to do this. It was weird. Working with Derek was fantastic and obviously lifechanging. He asked me to act in Caravaggio too. Was this the first acting you’d done since The Big Sleep? Yes, and I was pretty nervous. Thank 56
God he cut my lines. I just had to walk in the door looking pained. Derek’s anarchic filmmaking was fantastic. We loved it. We all had a really great time doing it. Lots of people came out of it very well. It changed my life, how I work and how I think. Did he give you free rein in your recordings? Not at the beginning. He wanted the music for Caravaggio to be authentic(ish), 17th century. It was very nerve-racking and distressing because we recorded a lot more music than was actually used in the film. So when the music appeared in the film, I thought I’d failed. But then we put out the album and it was fine. It was extraordinary working with Derek. I really loved him enormously. Lots of kids don’t know about Derek Jarman, which is a shame. His work is incredible, unique. Blue is such a poetic film. It’s rare that a filmmaker can find a completely new voice in that medium.
‘I’M ALL FOR DRESSING UP. I THINK IT’S GOOD TO BE A BIT FLAMBOYANT’ think anybody else thought it was really cool at all. But yeah, to be on Creation was… it was lovely… Alan should listen to it again. And since then? Mostly film soundtracks with Daniel Miller at Mute Records. Using sound collages. That’s where it all started with the cassette recorder? Yeah, it’s gone full circle. Daniel put out the soundtrack for The Last of England and The Garden, and then Blue. He’s been terribly supportive. You have over 30 albums out… Is it that many? I don’t know. What are you working on now? The British Film Institute have restored
MUSIC | Simon Fisher Turner the documentary of the ill-fated attempt by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine to reach the summit of Everest, called The Epic of Everest. It was shot in 1924 so, obviously, there is no sound. I’ve done the soundtrack to that. It’s 84 minutes long and there’s nothing, so you are literally starting from scratch. I recorded it all at home. I had this great vision. I thought, “Yes, I can do this. I can use a trumpet player and I can use all these musicians and everything,” and I ended up just using horn players really. Cosey Fanni Tutti, from Chris & Cosey and ex-Throbbing Gristle, plays cornet. I was sitting around one day and suddenly thought, “Cosey would sound amazing playing on this.” So I just sent her an email and she said it was great. I met a family from Nepal and started recording with this man called Madan. We’d look at the movie on the computer and play along to stuff, and then he’d play drums and I’d bring it home and put it all together. And it was really a treat. So you’re still using your old technique of collaging? Absolutely. That way you know what goes with what. Like gate squeaks are always brilliant; bashing bits of metal is great. You always get something unique when you hit it. So I’m always hitting things and recording things. The new film took a year to make from top to tail. I started recording the wind. First I went on YouTube and recorded stuff that people had shot on their cameras from the top of Everest because all that wind sound, it’s all there online. So it’s real, but it takes time. I tended to go back to original ideas. There’s lots of location recording, lots of bells and gongs recorded in churches. I’m not trying to compose as such, more just trying to let stuff happen. Somebody sent me a recording the other a day from Battersea Power Station. They were hitting a big gas cylinder, so that’s a new sound. They’re pulling it down in a few months, so it won’t be there much longer. Had you worked with Cosey Fanni Tutti before? No, I knew Throbbing Gristle through
Derek. I used to be petrified of Genesis P-Orridge, he scared the living daylights out of me. I saw them at Heaven once when Derek was filming them. I recorded them. It’s possible that some of Cosey’s cornet playing is sampled on the soundtrack to The Last of England. But you’ve played with Iggy Pop and David Bowie? That was everybody completely wound up and messing around. I’ve got the tapes somewhere. Jimmy [Iggy Pop] was really nice. He’s done some great records. I suppose Bowie’s influenced me in lots of ways, like the messing around with identities. But he’s also a
great actor and songwriter. I’m not sure I would have known about people like William Burroughs and Andy Warhol if it wasn’t for him. He was important for educating a lot of us at that age. Derek was the same. He was like a teacher who taught you without realising he was a teacher. Bowie’s the same really. There are key people in your life who do that. You’ve got to keep your ears and eyes open these days. There’s so much out there now. The Epic of Everest is in cinemas on 18 October. The soundtrack is released on 21 October mute.com bfi.org.uk 57
Coat and shirt by Yohji Yamamoto.
STYLE
Waistcoat from Carlo Manzi; trousers and boots by Yohji Yamamoto; sweater by Umit Benan; hat by Lock&Co.; jewellery by Sparrk Vintage.
CA Smith
Photographs David Goldman Stylist Marcus Love Styling Assistant Jessica Draper
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Coat from Carlo Manzi; sweater by Cos; scarf, stylist’s own.
Coat by Alexander McQueen; trousers and shirt by Yohji Yamamoto; sunglasses by Han Kjøbenhavn; scarf by Margaret Howell; ring by Sparrk Vintage.
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STYLE | CA Smith
Jacket, trousers and boots by Yohji Yamamoto; sweater by Cos; hat by Margaret Howell; handkerchief from Carlo Manzi; ring by Sparrk Vintage.
Coat from Carlo Manzi; trousers by Alexander McQueen; hat by Lock&Co.
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STYLE | CA Smith
Overcoat and jacket from Carlo Manzi; overalls by Lou Dalton; boots by Yohji Yamamoto.
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STYLE | CA Smith
Jacket by Margaret Howell; trousers by Yohji Yamamoto; hat, stylist’s own.
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Coat by Lou Dalton; suit by Umit Benan; shirt from Carlo Manzi; boots by Mr Hare; hat by Lock&Co.
BULLETIN
Levi’s Vintage Clothing Orange Tab Photographs Michael Schmidt Styling Laura Mazza
Hippies Todd Blubaugh toddblubaugh.com, Neal Schofield soundcloud.com/carolinian and Lindsay Trachtenberg visionlosangeles.com
When Levi’s launched its Orange Tab label in the 1960s, it was aimed at the burgeoning teenage market of the day. This was an era when the humble jean was synonymous with the new free-spirited hippy movement that
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came out of Levi’s hometown, San Francisco. This more affordable line morphed through the following decade as the tastes and fashions of the market place changed. Now, Levi’s Vintage Clothing has delved into this archive
to relaunch the Orange Tab for a new retrospective audience. levisvintageclothing.com
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BULLETIN | Levi’s Vintage Clothing Orange Tab
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CINEMA
Muscle Shoals Rick Hall. Southern Soul. FAME. Alabama Words Chris Sullivan Photographs courtesy of FAME Studios fame2.com and Ace Records acerecords.co.uk
“These guys from Muscle Shoals are just so steeped in soul history it is mind blowing,” says Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie. “And what’s amazing is that these were all poor, white, southern guys from Alabama, so their existence and sheer body of work blows this whole thing about who’s got soul and who’s got the blues right out of the water.” Indeed, the litany of truly great music that’s flowed from the small conurbation of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, is utterly remarkable. ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ by Percy Sledge, ‘Sweet Soul Music’ by Arthur Conley, ‘I Never Loved a Man’ by Aretha Franklin, ‘Tell Mama’ by Etta James, ‘You Better Move On’ by Arthur Alexander, ‘Patches’ by Clarence Carter, ‘Mustang Sally’ by Wilson Pickett and, later on, rock ’n’ roll classics such as The Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’, Bob Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock and Roll’, and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Muscle Shoals, population 13,000, sits on the shores of the Tennessee River, “the river that sings”, according 70
to Native American legend. WC Handy – the influential American composer who turned the blues from field holler to a nationally dominant music form – was born here. As was Helen Keller, the deaf and dumb pacifist, suffragist and socialist. Another was white sharecropper’s son Sam Phillips, who worked for the Muscle Shoals radio station WLAY in the 1940s and, in 1951, recorded the first ever rock and roll record, ‘Rocket 88’ by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (led by Ike Turner). A typical Muscle Shoals man, up until 1956 Phillips recorded purely black acts such as Rufus Thomas, Little Milton and Bobby Bland for his label Sun Records. BB King and Howlin’ Wolf made their first recordings with him. Today, Phillips is known as the man who discovered Elvis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, but, as he said, “Elvis was my second best discovery. My first was Howlin’ Wolf.” And, in a way, it is with Phillips that the Muscle Shoals story begins. It
was his young protégé Rick Hall, the main subject of forthcoming documentary film Muscle Shoals, who started the ball rolling. Born in Mississippi to a family of very poor farmers in 1932, like many of his contemporaries (including Phillips) he was raised in the midst of the huge Dust Bowl of the Great Depression of 1932, when poor was poor and little differentiated starving white sharecroppers from their emaciated black counterparts. “I grew up with no running water or toilet in the shack we lived in,” explains Hall. “So I really wanted to do something special.” After his mother left to become a prostitute, Hall was raised by his father. Drafted for the Korean War in 1950, he became a conscientious objector and found himself in an army band, later returning to work in an aluminium factory in Florence, Alabama. Disaster struck when his new bride died in a car he was driving, followed two weeks later by the death of his father. He became a hobo, lost focus and had a >
Rick Hall, founder of FAME Studios
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Little Richard, Bumps Blackwell and Rick Hall
Travis Wammack
good go at drinking himself to death. But still he wrote songs and drifted the area playing guitar, mandolin and fiddle at square dances with Carmol Taylor and the Country Pals. Later he formed The Fairlanes, a rhythm and blues band, with saxophonist Billy Sherrill and Dan Penn. The three soon began knocking out the tunes in earnest, peddling them to a publisher in Florence. As a result, ‘Aching Breaking Heart’ was recorded by George Jones, ‘Sweet and Innocent’ by Roy Orbison and ‘She’ll Never Know’ by Brenda Lee. In 1959 he teamed up with recording studio owner Tom Stafford, who bankrolled a new music publishing company called Florence Alabama Music Enterprises, shortened to FAME. However, Hall’s rather brusque, acerbic manner ended the partnership. “I kept the name FAME and started my own little studio in Muscle Shoals,” says Hall. “It was in an old tobacco warehouse with egg crates on the walls and carpet from an old theatre, and I started writing songs with black
CINEMA | Muscle Shoals
Brothers Unlimited
Calvin Scott, Etta James, Billy Foster, Jimmy Johnson and Albert “Junior” Lowe
writers and doing their demos.” One was Arthur Alexander, a bellboy at the town’s Sheffield Hotel. “He couldn’t play an instrument but sang me a tune – ‘You Better Move On’ – and for me it was a hit straight away,” says Hall. “It had the Ben E King
‘IT HAD EGG CRATES ON THE WALLS AND CARPET FROM AN OLD THEATRE’ ‘Stand by Me’ groove, which was very popular at the time. We cut it in ’61 with four microphones, a small recorder, and we used the bathroom as an echo chamber. I took it to Memphis but all the executives were strictly country and
knew nothing about black R ’n’ B. So I brought it back and gave it to a radio DJ. And it became a big hit.” The song subsequently hit the number one spot in the UK in 1964 as recorded by The Rolling Stones. “Girls adored it,” says Mick Jagger in the film. “We had no idea where it was made but realised later the band was the original first wave Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.” The backing band comprised local musicians – teenage white boys David Briggs, Norbert Putnam, Terry Thompson and Jerry Carrigan, more resembling barndancing hillbillies than the session guys behind the country’s best rhythm and blues sound. Using the proceeds from the Alexander hit, Hall moved his operations to a new recording studio on Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals and, in 1963, recorded ‘Steal Away’ by Jimmy Hughes, who had previously worked on a local rubber plantation. >
George Jackson
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“There was no interest in the record,” says Hall who, replete with curled handlebar moustache, looks more like a military man than soul producer. “So I pressed the sides myself, toured the south in my car and gave the record to all the black radio DJs. And it was another hit. That’s how I started in rhythm and blues.” “I was in a band and the likes of Elvis were very popular in 1960,” Hall continues. “Ray Charles hit the big time with ‘What’d I Say’ and Chubby Checker with ‘The Twist’. We were expected to play those tunes so we got into it. But I’d always liked it. I’m a country boy and country music and black music are very true to their culture. But we, in the music business, are colour blind. Much of the arts are colour blind. We listen with our ears. Black singers had no problem with a white rhythm section and a black horn section. They just wanted to make great records. When we worked with Aretha [Franklin] and Wilson Pickett we had musicians three deep waiting to step in for a session as, if one man couldn’t play the lick, he was eliminated no matter the colour. I just used the best guys I could find regardless of colour.” “These white hillbillies made some of the funkiest records ever made and the only black fella on the records was the singer,” says Gillespie. “All this racist shit from both sides – black and white – is just nonsense. There was no black or white in their studios. It was just these musicians coming together and making great music.” More remarkable is that this racial amalgam was producing such groundbreaking soul music at the height of the Civil Rights struggle, just 200 miles away from Memphis where Martin Luther King was later shot. All they had in common was poverty and a love of soul music. “I had no problem with black people,” stresses Hall. “I had problems with white people who didn’t like me recording black music and hanging out with black people.” But no matter what the local crackers thought, things were moving on for Muscle Shoals. In 1966, producer Quin Ivy recorded Percy Sledge’s ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, having 74
heard him sing the song at a frat party at the University of Mississippi. “I’d worked in the cotton fields and was an orderly at a hospital and found that my singing would help people get to sleep,” explains Sledge in the film. “I was asked to come to the studio and was shaking like a leaf. But these guys made me feel so special. In the streets we had to say, ‘Yes sir, no sir’ to white folk but with these guys in the studio – it was all first names.” The folk that made the singer feel good enough to belt out one of the finest performances in soul history were a gaggle of white, rather square, farmboy sidemen. Spooner Oldham on organ, Marlin Greene on guitar, Albert “Junior” Lowe and David Hood on bass, and Roger Hawkins on drums; the legendary second line-up of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. They would become the one of the most accomplished rhythm sections in the
‘WE HAD THIS ROUGH, FUNKIER SOUND’ history of music. In their time they backed James Carr, Candi Staton, Billy Young, Maurice & Mac, Bettye Swann, James Govan, The Blues Busters, Willie Hightower and many others. “We couldn’t do smooth,” says Hawkins. “So we had this rough, funkier sound.” “There was a Motown sound, there was a Nashville sound, there was a Memphis sound, and I said, ‘Muscle Shoals sound,’” explains Hood. “And we all thought that was just the funniest thing. And then after a bit we thought, ‘Heck, why not.’” Looking at the map one can draw a triangle from Nashville to Muscle Shoals and Memphis – the former being the centre of all things country, the latter blues, while Muscle Shoals seemed to combine both into its own unique sound. Having received a recording of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’,
Atlantic Records’ Jerry Wexler put it out in a heartbeat. Consequently the tune, sung by a hospital orderly and backed by a bunch of square-dancing hillbillies, became the company’s first gold record, and a hit around the world. Brooklyn-born soul aficionado Wexler wasted no time in getting down to Muscle Shoals, striking a deal with Hall. On his next visit he brought Wilson Pickett to record ‘Land of 1,000 Dances’ and ‘Mustang Sally’. “When I walked in I said, ‘What am I doing with these crackers when I can see my people still picking cotton out the window?’” laughs Pickett in the documentary. “But the drummer was fantastic. He was there all the way. Wexler was impressed. He said ‘Yeah, baby, it’s funky.’” “When Wexler told me I was a great drummer,” says Hawkins, who looks like he could work in a DIY megastore, “I relaxed and I became a great drummer.” The Atlantic boss consequently brought a cavalcade of legendary soul singers to front the anonymous band, including Arthur Conley, Otis Redding and Don Covay. Next up was Aretha Franklin, who hailed from nearby Memphis. She’d enjoyed a modicum of success with Columbia Records but, as the company’s executive John Hammond said, they didn’t understand her gospel background or how to properly utilise it. “Jerry told me he had this great studio with these great cats and ‘You’re gonna love them’,” recalls Franklin. “But when I saw them I was, like, ‘They’re pretty white.’ They were a bunch of white guys who looked like they worked in a supermarket. We really didn’t expect them to be as funky as they were; they were like white hillbillies in dungarees and check shirts. I was, like, ‘Man!’” The First Lady of Soul was also taken aback by their modus operandi. “There was no real music,” she continues. “They would just listen to what I was singing and play around it.” “We couldn’t find a place to start,” says Hall. “We had the beginnings of a song and an artist and no one knew what to do with it. Then Spooner came up with this organ piano riff and Aretha jumped on it and within >
CINEMA | Muscle Shoals
Otis Redding and Rick Hall
Clayton Ivey, Candi Staton and Bob Wray
Wilson Pickett
Bobbie Gentry
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20 minutes we had a hit. The song was ‘I Never Loved a Man’.” The song would hit number one all over the world and sell millions. It was also the turning point in the careers of Franklin and Hall. Naturally Wexler was chuffed, until a fight between Ted White (Franklin’s husband) and a musician broke out in the studio after White accused him of flirting with Franklin. The singer’s spouse stormed out of the studio with an enraged Hall in hot pursuit. “We argued at his hotel,” remembers Hall. “And we started wrestling, trying to throw each other off the balcony. Wexler had told me to stay put and was livid.” But, seeing a great formula, Wexler soon flew the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section to New York to provide that all-important signature sound for Aretha classics such as ‘Respect’, ‘Natural Woman’, ‘Call Me’ and ‘Chain of Fools’. “One of the great anomalies of soul music is that some of Aretha’s finest music was made with a gang of Caucasian southern boys,” adds Gillespie. Ultimately, though, Wexler wasn’t happy with the bombastic Hall and severed their ties. Hall then went to Chess Records where he started working with Etta James on her landmark album Tell Mama. “Rick Hall was the first white man I ever met that had soul,” espouses the singer in the documentary. “Sometimes I couldn’t see his point of view but he was always right.” “Rick is a joy and a pain to work with,” says singer Candi Staton in the film. “If it takes three days to get what he wants it will be because most of the time he doesn’t know what he wants until he hears it. He is an imperfect perfectionist.” But Hall’s obsessive personality could work against him. And it did in 1969 when the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section – comprising David Hood, Roger Hawkins and Jimmy Johnson – having played on hundreds of best selling records, sided with Wexler and went freelance. At Atlantic they cut tracks with Franklin and Pickett, 76
as well as Solomon Burke and King Curtis. Hall opened a new studio that same year, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio at 3614 Jackson Highway. “It was war,” he says. This marked a new chapter in the town’s history and put that unique sound into millions of living rooms. First off the bat were The Rolling Stones. Huge fans of the studio’s output, they sauntered in, holed up for a few days and recorded, among others, ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’. “The sound was in my head before I got there,” recalls Keith Richards on camera. “When it is better than that, you’ve gone to rock heaven. It was one of the funkiest sessions we ever did. We did four songs in two days, which is going some for the Stones. I’ve always thought that if we’d done Exile on Main
THEY WOULD BECOME ONE OF THE MOST POLISHED RHYTHM SECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC Street there it would have been funkier. But it couldn’t have happened as I wasn’t allowed in the country at the time.” Given such patronage, the studio took off. Stax Records artists including The Staple Singers – who recorded ‘I’ll Take you There’ and ‘Respect Yourself ’ – worked there. The likes of Boz Scaggs, Herbie Mann, Bob Dylan, Duane Allman, JJ Cale, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt and many others flocked to Muscle Shoals. A line from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ immortalises the crew: “Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers/And they’ve been known to pick a song or two.” In the 1970s, while Hall produced the likes of The Osmonds at the FAME
studios, said ‘Swampers’ embarked on a tour with Steve Winwood’s art/jazz/ folk/rock combo Traffic. “It wasn’t for us,” stresses bassist David Hood. “We love being with our families and not the gypsy lifestyle. I love it here in Muscle Shoals. It is my home and people come to us.” “They came to London and we rehearsed with Roger Hawkins and David Hood for three weeks and we were really humble around these guys,” says Bobby Gillespie. “It is mind blowing; they are funky as fuck. When we were in Muscle Shoals we went out on the river with them and they warmed to us. They have played on more truly great records than anyone in the world but are just good, down-toearth, decent, moral people without any pretensions or airs-and-graces; no showbusiness affectations. I think it’s because they have stayed there. Their humbleness blew us away. We’d get smashed after the session on Long Island iced teas and I’d be saying that I can’t believe I am playing with the blokes on ‘Love Me Like You Mean It’ [by Percy Sledge]; and they couldn’t believe how much a twentysomething bloke from Glasgow could love a B-side.” And there’s the nub. UK workingclass youth culture has always been based on an affinity with American black music – whether it be jazz for the modernists, soul for the mods or funk for the soulboys – while the whole Northern Soul movement is the embodiment of this rather anorak, obsessive ethic. Indeed, we think nothing of a blonde bloke from Essex devoting his life to amassing a collection of rare 1960s black American 7" singles, even in this digital age. For us, it’s quite normal and, dare I say, really rather British. Such dalliance isn’t that common in the US – especially in the 1960s, and particularly in the peckerwood south. And that is what makes Muscle Shoals so very, very special. Muscle Shoals is out in October muscleshoalsmovie.com The Fame Studios Story boxset is out now acerecords.co.uk
CINEMA | Muscle Shoals
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The Second Rhythm Section (Albert “Junior” Lowe, David Hood, Barry Beckett, Jimmy Johnson and Roger Hawkins)
HISTORY
The Aesthetic Movement Arts and Crafts Movement. Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Great Stink. Walter Pater. Café Royal Words Chris Sullivan
According to Isaac Newton’s Third Law, for every action there is a reaction – a force equal in size and opposite in direction. This is a rule that also exists in art, style, music and culture, which often reacts against both the prevailing style of the day and socio-political and economic trends. This was never truer than in the mid-19th century, when a gang of barking mad, decadent and hedonistic artists and writers formed what became known as the Aesthetic Movement. Their clarion call was “Art for art’s sake”, and they believed that one’s taste in all things is paramount. They held that art should have no moral or didactic purpose, but should be simply beautiful and reward the viewer with a pleasure solely drawn from aesthetics. As such, they embarked on a mission to inject overwhelming beauty into their new Britain, where every aesthetic consideration had been bludgeoned to death. What followed was an outpouring of paintings, objets d’art, interiors, sculptures and calligraphy full of swirling lines, exotic birds, flowers and oriental sensuality tinged with a soupcon of medievalism. Consequently, architects, writers, philosophers, poets and craftsmen jumped on the conceit that dominated every aspect of British 78
culture for over 40 years, and which would the influence the world. Arguably, the Aesthetic Movement was the first “youth” cult, albeit upper middle class, which, like punk rock, was spearheaded by some of the most controversial libertine figures in England. It had its own mottos and contentious manifesto that selfconsciously rebelled against staid Victorian morals. It had its own dandified, often rakish, style of dress – the women, often thin, deathly pale and intense, wore long diaphanous gowns (long red hair being very much in vogue), while their narcissistic, often effeminate, men favoured long hair, green breeches, extravagant silk neckwear, canes and complex jacket configurations. The green carnation as a buttonhole – very much a mainstay – suggested sexual ambiguity. The movement also had its own writers, propagandists and liberal, sexual, drugtaking mores. Opium was all the rage, as was laudanum – a most potent morphine tincture that, sold without prescription as cough medicine, was very much abused. Cocaine, then considered a harmless stimulant, was a much fashionable substance later in the period, as illustrated by Conan Doyle’s
coke-sniffing aesthete Sherlock Holmes (first published in 1887). The aesthetically inclined dandy Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (published in 1886) over a six-day binge on the marching powder. Thrown in for good measure was the psychosis-inducing absinthe (with the original wormwood extract) that, as the favoured tipple of Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Van Gogh, Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, reached sales of some 36 million litres a year in France in the early 1900s. The Aesthetes were all over those racy continental ways, never afraid to suck influence from whatever quarter. Primarily, though, the Aesthetic Movement was a reaction against the industrial rape of Britain. The industrial revolution had not only changed almost every aspect of daily life but had scarred the landscape beyond our imagination. In less than 60 years it had gone from a largely arable community where most people worked the land to a country governed by cities full of factories, where every concern (including the workers’ wellbeing) was superseded by the financial feeding frenzy. Centres of industry were hastily knocked up and, in their wake, ugly slums to >
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
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Aubrey Beardsley
accommodate the influx of poor workers. Manchester boasted around 1,600 mills, where children as young as 13 worked day and night producing cloth for the western world. “The noxious sulphuric smoke from the factory chimneys was so dense no object could be seen from 100 yards away and sunlight never penetrated,” wrote French historian Alexis de Tocqueville after a visit to Manchester in 1835. “The foul smell mixed with that of rotting uncollected refuse and dormant animal and human excrement permeated the air… Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.” London had also grown out of all proportion, its population housed in overcrowded ghettos where sanitation was nil and cholera was epidemic. The latter killed some 25,000 people in London, culminating in the Broad Street outbreak in 1854. John Snow, the doctor who discovered it was the result of drinking water contaminated by raw sewage, described it as “the most 80
terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom”. People were throwing buckets of faeces up river while others were drinking from it down stream. Gong farmers made a nice living collecting human and animal excrement from the river’s edge and selling it to “proper” farmers as fertiliser. Subsequently, in the summer of 1858, the sewage problem hit an all time low when the Great Stink brought the whole of London to a standstill. Due to the overflowing of 200,000 cesspits into the street, the stench was so bad that Parliament soaked its heavy draped curtains in chloride of lime, and people walked the streets with handkerchiefs over their noses. I’d like to think that such olfactory excess prompted artists to return to a time when things were beautiful, less industrial, and their world didn’t smell of fresh faeces… but I might be wrong. Yet, if one considers that this stinking outrage was just one manifestation of the horrors of the industrial revolution, then it might well be true. Certainly the movement rebelled against the filth, squalor and extreme
capitalism that gripped the country, but it’s hard to put one’s finger on exactly when it actually began. Some say it was 1861, when renowned socialist William Morris opened a design studio, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown et al – whose aim was a return to an age when individual craftsmanship was paramount. These pioneers stood in obstinate opposition to the era’s destitute decorative arts, and the asinine covetousness that had swallowed up the country. Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement’s protagonist, had been influenced by architect, designer, artist and critic Augustus Pugin – who was himself a trailblazer of the Gothic Revival – and the much travelled poet, writer, art critic and patron John Ruskin, who later tutored Oscar Wilde. The latter championed environmentalism, sustainability, craftsmanship, medievalism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Morris’s cohort, Rossetti – who art historian Dr Anne Anderson described
HISTORY | The Aesthetic Movement as the Johnny Depp of his day – alongside William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais (all barely 20 at the time), had pre-empted Aestheticism by forming the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) in Gower Street, London, in September 1848. The Brotherhood believed that liberty and accountability were indivisible and, particularly fascinated by medievalism, had used their often otherworldly art as a stand against industrialism. Deliberately borrowing from the Italian Quattrocento school – whose artists such as Botticelli painted in the surreal International Gothic style – they too believed that the past could be harnessed to revitalise the present and throw whimsy, colour and elegant lines into their filthy, smog-infested behemoths. As much as the PRB raged against the machine, it was the machine that made them the first celebrities of the embryonic modern world. Their works were mass-produced as bestselling prints, while the burgeoning popular press sold copies off the back of their madcap antics that titillated the general public. They were the first media stars. Accordingly, drug addiction, insanity, infidelity, obsession, neurosis and sexual anxiety were there in abundance. So notorious were they that even their life models risked being ostracised by posing for them. Thus the gang went off on the nightly prowl in search of beautiful women to paint, finding barmaids, prostitutes and seamstresses willing to pose and readily coupling with them. The Aesthetic Movement carried on from where the Pre-Raphaelites left off – both hedonistically and ideologically. They also followed the writings of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde’s mentor, who, in the conclusion to his book of Renaissance essays published in 1873, advocates living for the moment. “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end,” he wrote. “To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life… Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake…” Pater also refers to Victor Hugo, a leading figure in the French Decadent movement, which is often compared
with Aestheticism. Other “Decadents” included Baudelaire, who first translated the works of Aesthetic idols and fellow opiate addicts Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas De Quincy into French and, in 1845, maintained that “everything that gives pleasure has its reason”. Fellow “Decadent” Théophile Gautier coined the “Art for art’s sake” motto, which itself had been adapted from a phrase in Poe’s The Poetic Principle of 1850. Aestheticism was one big tangled mess of influence. And just like punk rock, or more like New Romanticism, Aestheticism was formed from the ether – the combination of influences swirling around in the smog that, once settled, became a craze that morphed and embraced the prevailing winds of the day, its adherents sensitive to every new cultural nuance and import.
THEIR CLARION CALL WAS ‘ART FOR ART’S SAKE’ During the 18th and 19th centuries the British Empire had grown eastwards. Travellers such as Lord Byron had returned to Britain with cases full of arcane foreign treasures, pots of opium and tales of adventure that unveiled a corporeal, distinctly non-British emancipation. New trade routes opened. Traders became rich. Curios were all the rage. Then, in 1858, after 200 years of no trade, Japanese goods flooded Europe, inspiring a new artistic conceit. In Paris, Japonisme, as it was called, was a huge fad amongst fashionable Bohemian circles. When American painter James McNeill Whistler moved to London from Paris, he encouraged artists and designers to embrace all things Japanese. Subsequently, the movement became highly influenced by eastern aesthetics – flowers, plants and birds all delicately realised on vases, glassware
and interiors. The highly successful painter Edmund Leighton (whose father and grandfather amassed a huge fortune as doctors to the Russian tsars) painted everyone of note, including Queen Victoria, and added an Arab Hall to his magnificent Holland Park house in 1877 to complement his Greek statues and Arts and Crafts wallpaper. The finest of all the easterninfluenced Aesthetic interiors was the Peacock Room, designed for the notoriously rude Liverpudlian shipping magnate Frederick Leyland’s magnificent Prince’s Gate pad between 1876 and 1877. The room was originally created by interior architect Thomas Jeckyll, and Whistler – whose painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain sat in pole position – slipped in and offered to retouch some of the walls, leaving Leyland to go back to his business in Liverpool. In his absence the American let rip and made the interior his own, painting over the whole room. Whistler wrote to Leyland, telling him that his dining room was “brilliant and gorgeous while at the same time delicate and refined to the last degree”, finally advising his patron to stay in Liverpool until the room was completed. Whistler then, unbeknown to Leyland, threw lavish parties in the house for both press and guests to show off “his” creation. His employer’s response was to cut Whistler’s fee by half. Whistler’s retort was to paint two huge peacocks on Leyland’s expensive, rare leather walls – one aggressive bird, an obvious caricature of the shipping tycoon, and a deprived and slighted peacock representing himself. The artist was declared persona non grata and never saw the room again. It is now installed in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Yet, however belligerent, no one can doubt that fellow Aesthetes held Whistler in the highest esteem. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1834, he spent part of his youth in St Petersburg and London, enrolled in West Point military academy (but was dismissed for poor grades) and trained as an artist in Paris from 1855. While in the French capital, he was part of the great Gustave Courbet’s group, which included > 81
William Morris
Edward Burne-Jones
painter Édouard Manet, the aforementioned Baudelaire and Gautier. Whistler, who often passed himself off as a wealthy southern gentleman, moved to London in 1858 and was subsequently attracted by the artistic flavour of the time – Albert Moore’s cadenced friezes of toga-clad Greeks, Burne-Jones’s medieval mysticism and Thomas Armstrong’s proto surrealism. Whistler constantly crossed the channel like a bee pollinating both sides with the other’s Bohemian notions. And everyone listened to this erudite, combative Yank, whose signature was, characteristically, a butterfly with a sting in its tail. Accordingly, Whistler, with curled moustache, monocle and the ostentatious attire of a dandy, was the main man behind the Aesthetic Movement. His 1862 painting Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl, was in many ways a precursor to the entire oeuvre. It was, however, overshadowed by Manet’s controversial Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), which features a nude woman at lunch with two fully dressed, rather foppish men in a woodland copse. The Frenchman’s work was a deliberate affront to the propriety of the time and thus a major influence on the Aesthetic Movement. But, undeterred, Whistler went back to his easel, and in 1864 created The 82
Golden Screen, featuring his mistress in a kimono in a profoundly Japanese interior. The same year he also painted Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, with the same girl in Chinese garb surrounded by ceramics. And just as the Sex Pistols defined the punk milieu with ‘God Save the Queen’, these works defined the Aesthetic genre. After a visit to Chile, the mad Yank moved back to London and painted a few outstanding paintings such as Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea
THEY HELD THAT ART SHOULD HAVE NO MORAL OR DIDACTIC PURPOSE Bridge (1874), which is similar to a work by Whistler’s favourite Japanese artist Hokusai (The Great Wave off Kanagawa). Whistler’s picture achieved a certain notoriety after Ruskin wrote that the artist “was asking 200 guineas for throwing a pot of paint at the
canvas”. Whistler, in bristling form, sued for libel and received one farthing in damages, which he forever wore on his watch chain. Unfortunately the court costs – together with the debts he had accrued building his lavish pad in Tite Street, Chelsea (designed in partnership with EW Godwin) – bankrupted him in 1879, causing an auction of his work, collections, house and chattels. Leyland oversaw the sale. His obituary in the New York Times on 18 July 1903 described him as “the maker of paradoxes, the epigrammist and the master of the ‘gentle art of making enemies’”. While Whistler had pioneered on canvas in the early 1860s, up the road Morris had been busy reinventing the Victorian interior with his distinctive wallpapers, tapestries and textiles. These harked back to England’s Arthurian folklore and, in an attempt to create a beautiful utopian ideal, merged with the flowing lines of eastern art. All the rage in the late 19th century, any posh bohemian home wasn’t complete without Morris wallpaper or textiles. Accordingly, the time was nigh for commercialising the ethic. In 1874, modish entrepreneur Arthur Lasenby Liberty, previously a trader of eastern bric-a-brac, opened a store off Regent Street in London and took to producing the hitherto handmade Arts and Crafts/
HISTORY | The Aesthetic Movement
Oscar Wilde
James McNeill Whistler
Aesthetic objects in bulk, employing craftsmen to design and oversee production. One such was Archibald Knox who, having been raised on the Isle of Man and becoming expert in enamel, pewter and silverware, reverted back to the intricate Celtic imagery so common on his island. Another was ceramicist Mary Watts, who created the magnificent, medieval-influenced Arts and Crafts shrine, the Watts Cemetery Chapel in Compton, Surrey. The results, via the auspices of the recently realised mail order catalogue, made Liberty a global brand. In Italy, Art Nouveau, the child of Aestheticism, was known simply as Stile Liberty. It is via home furnishings that the most famous of all the Aesthetes, the veritable latecomer Oscar Wilde, stepped into the fray. He appeared on the London scene in the early 1880s, describing himself as a Professor
of Aesthetics and an arbiter of taste, but was entirely bereft of any knowledge of art and had no published works to his name. His one credit had been as editor of The Woman’s World, where he promulgated the ideas outlined in The House Beautiful, a book written by Clarence Cook in 1871. He became an art critic and breathed fresh air into the Aesthetic milieu. His late arrival was greatly derided by Whistler, who embarked on a severe rivalry with the Irishman. On one occasion Wilde is alleged to have commented in response to a quip of Whistler’s, “I wish I had said that,” to which Whistler replied, “You will, Oscar, you will.” Wilde and Whistler perplexed the Victorian public. In 1879, humourist George du Maurier embarked on a series of satirical cartoons in Punch, entitled “Nincompoopiana”, which
mocked the Aesthetes’ every step. Patience, an opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, ridiculed their affectation, and Royal Worcester fashioned the “Patience” teapot – half of which depicts a caricatured female Aesthete and the other her male counterpart. They were big news. Yet Wilde, with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), encapsulated the Aesthetic ethic by exploring themes of decadence, duplicity and beauty while also outlining their corrupt and dire consequences. Hooked on the chance to explore Aesthetic consideration with a larger social commentary, Wilde took to penning plays and soon became the most successful playwright of his day. His work was shown regularly at the Criterion Theatre, after which he and his minions would retire to the magnificent Criterion Bar and > 83
Robert Louis Stevenson
HISTORY | The Aesthetic Movement Restaurant. Established in 1894, it is a true testament to Aesthetic interiors. Another of his hangouts was the Grill Room at the Café Royal, where he met the young man who would usher his downfall, Lord Alfred Douglas – a profoundly camp young man who, 16 years his junior, became his sexual partner. Subsequently, in 1895, on a visiting card at Wilde’s club, the younger man’s father, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, had described the Aesthete as a “sodomite”. The playwright sued for libel and the marquess (who was responsible for initiating boxing rules) was arrested. The trial became the talk of the town and front page news, but Queensbury’s lawyers turned the screw on Wilde, describing him as a degenerate, predatory homosexual who preyed on young innocent men. He threatened to call a barrage of young male prostitutes associated with Wilde to testify. Wilde dropped the charges and was bankrupted by court costs. Consequently, the marquess sent the evidence of Wilde’s bawdy ways to Scotland Yard and the writer ended up with two years hard labour and abject humiliation in Reading Gaol. He exited a broken man, his health and reputation in tatters, went into exile and died, ten months after Queensberry, at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris on 30 November 1900. Although Wilde, with his foppish, extravagantly camp demeanour, had scandalised Victorian society, he still garnered myriad devotees who took up the Aesthetic flag. One such adherent was the young Aubrey Beardsley, who travelled to Paris in 1892 and – having seen the poster art of Wilde’s friend Toulouse-Lautrec and the French fascination with Japanese woodcuts – returned to London with enough chutzpah to approach Wilde with an offer to illustrate his play Salome (1894). An immediate sensation, Beardsley – who was also influenced by Burne-Jones, Morris and Whistler – was catapulted into the upper echelons of the Aesthetic Movement. His simple use of pen and ink, “whiplash” line and block colour, which marked him as the first exponent of Art Nouveau, immediately flagged him as a genius
of the age. He died of tuberculosis aged 25 in 1898. By the turn of the century, with the exception of the stubborn Whistler who died in 1903, all of the major Aesthetes – Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Wilde and Beardsley – were all dead, and thus, some might argue, was the movement. But not so – the idea had spread worldwide, morphing into Art Nouveau. In 1899 architect George Skipper designed the Royal Arcade in Norwich, in what is arguably a purely aesthetic Art Nouveau style, and engaged the services of ceramic sculptor and Arts and Crafts artist WJ Neatby to tile his creation. In 1902 Harrods pulled Neatby in to design its food hall in an Aesthetic style, depicting a medieval Arcadian Albion that, albeit
IT WAS A REACTION AGAINST THE INDUSTRIAL RAPE OF BRITAIN magnificent, never existed. And the trend continued. Neatby went on to design even more Aesthetic/Nouveaustyle shopping arcades (the forerunner of shopping malls) nationwide. In Glasgow the notion was taken to its splendid conclusion by undervalued Aesthetic visionary Margaret MacDonald and her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh. As young art students they had been influenced by Beardsley’s hugely controversial drawings. The couple went on to create a style that was purely Aesthetic, leaning heavily on the restraint of Japanese design. This was most evident in the magnificent Glasgow town house they designed to showcase their talents. Now preserved at the city’s Hunterian Museum, it is a temple to faultless design and gentle understatement. But just like their southern counterparts,
Mackintosh and MacDonald were derided by the press and moved to France in 1923. MacDonald died in 1933, leaving £88. In 2008 her work The White Rose and the Red Rose (1902) was auctioned for £1.7 million. Austrian artist Gustav Klimt admitted he had been hugely influenced by the frieze MacDonald exhibited at the 8th Vienna Secession in 1900. One could say that Aestheticism was the one British art movement that influenced the whole world for decades. What were Klimt and his Viennese Secessionist pals if not a branch of the Aesthetic Movement? Alphonse Mucha, the undisputed king of Art Nouveau, was entirely influenced by Aestheticism. René Lalique, the great glass designer, took a large leaf out of their book. The bisexual dancer Isadora Duncan was 100 per cent Aesthete, while composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie were simply the Aesthetic consideration applied to music. Curiously the movement lived by sucking in influence from all over the world and ended up influencing the entire globe. Its reign ended quite appropriately as the first world war and its new industrial killing machines smashed every consideration bar survival out of the ballpark – and a darker, more cynical and destructive ethic took centre stage. The party was over. But what is most impressive about the Aesthetic Movement is that, unlike us inhabitants of the age of complacency, they did not let the tide of industry, globalisation, capitalism and greed sweep over them. They made a stand, albeit only artistically, and, no matter their detractors, changed the way the world looked and the way we looked at the world. Their influence is still evident. Only today I saw a burly Yorkshireman in the park with a bald head and tattoos, one of which was a Celtic design that was pure Archibald Knox, and another a copy of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The Aesthetic ideal lives on. An American in London: Whistler and the Thames is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from 16 October until 12 January 2014 dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk 85
STYLE
Why New York? Photographs Perry Ogden Styling Soraya Dayani
Photographic Assistant Ricardo Beas Styling Assistant Ali Malter Casting Soraya Dayani, Perry Ogden and Cody Smyth
Robert James, 40, designer, wears jacket, waistcoat, shirt, tie and pocket square by Robert James; hat by Barbisio “I applied to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology and they were crazy enough to let me in. I came to the city with my letter of admittance, $700 and no place to live. It’s the place to be if you’re in fashion, and for a young brand like mine to incubate. It’s just the best, with all these creative people around, the community we’ve built round here. I’m in love with the Lower East Side.” byrobertjames.com
James Nares, 60, artist, wears shirt and jeans by Lucky Brand “What brought me here was my interest in American art and the people who were making it back in the early 1970s. None of my teachers in school knew anything about them but I knew that they were here. I decided to find out for myself what was going on and that was it, I never went back. In those days New York seemed like it was more separate from anywhere else in the world, but now it’s more homogenised with everything and everybody else. It’s lost something that was very special to me when I first came. But still, it’s a city I love.” jamesnares.com
Adam McEwen, 48, artist, wears T-shirt by John Varvatos; trousers by Costume National; trainers by adidas “I find it inspiring. I find the city gives me a lot of energy and raw material. I get a kick from the density and scale of the chaos in New York streets, from the size of a wheel on the side of a dumpster truck. I find I can use it. That’s why a lot of my work uses stuff you see around you because it’s engrained with a pop optimism that has life in it. But it’s voracious and insatiable – it wants all of your energy. That’s kind of ruthless and brutal.” gagosian.com 87
Jordan Betten, 40, designer and artist, wears shirt and trousers by Jordan Betten; trainers by New Balance “New York is the centre of the universe. It really is. It’s the centre of the earth for creative people. For me it was a no brainer. It was the only place. And since I’ve been here I only believe more and more that New York is the centre of the earth. If you can create your niche here then you will be accepted with open arms anywhere else in the world. It’s like the song – if you make it here, you’ll make it anywhere.” jordanbetten.com
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STYLE | Why New York?
David Alexander Flinn, 26, artist, wears coat by Albright Downstairs; jeans by Oak; shirt and boots, model’s own “New York has this magnetic energy that gives you the opportunity to do things you can’t really do anywhere else. It’s gritty, but that allows for people who are curious to constantly reinvent themselves and find new things whenever they decide they want to get out of their comfort zone. I’m always learning something new about the city. There are very few places in the world that have that ability to constantly adapt and keep people interested, keep people guessing.” davidalexanderflinn.com
Reid Watson, 21, model, wears coat by BLK DNM; jeans by Left Field NYC; sweater by Melet Mercantile “I had a girl that I met in Austin. She’s from New York and she decided that she didn’t want me to be in Austin any more and that I needed to get out. So she sent a bunch of photos to modelling agencies and got me signed and sent me on my way. And then later she moved up here. Back home everything is like black and white. New York is like a giant grey area. You’re seeing new things every day, living in new scenery, just discovering things, walking around. No matter what, you always see something that you’ve never seen before. And it’s just kind of fascinating that way.” rednyc.com 89
Steve Pyke, 55, photographer, wears suit and shirt by Paul Smith; shoes by vintage Patrick Cox; tie by Lafayette; rings, model’s own “I first came here in June 1976 during the heatwave and completely fell in love with the city, the people, the pace. I have been working here on and off ever since. Most of my friends and the people I work with are based in New York.” pyke-eye.com
Joseph Dean Daly, 31, musician, wears vest and jeans by Levi’s; jacket by Straight To Hell; boots, model’s own “No matter what you want it’s here. It’s either a blessing or a curse. It’s full of surprises. As I started getting more into playing music and being in bands I realised that New York had all the clubs, all the scenes, everything was happening. I decided it had to be here or Los Angeles or Philadelphia. I stayed in New York because there’s so much more of it. As much as it’s a struggle to be in New York and be creative, you’re not going to get the same opportunities anywhere else. It just doesn’t work that way.” facebook.com/awkwardgirls
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STYLE | Why New York?
Ruben Toledo, 52, artist and illustrator, wears jacket by vintage Isabel Toledo; trousers by Carhartt; shirt by Brooks Brothers; shoes by Alden; socks by J.Crew “New York is like a brother to me. It’s got its own personality. It’s just as rude, unexpected, bizarre and collagelike as I am. It allows for everything. I can be anonymous. I love that about the city. You can be invisible and run around and do what you need to do.”
STYLE | Why New York?
Luke Rathborne, 25, musician, wears coat by Melet Mercantile; jeans by Levi’s; T-shirt, model’s own; boots by Dr Martens “If you grew up on the east coast, New York is the mecca of where you see yourself ending up. It’s this place of dreams and kind of like how Hollywood is for some people, but there’s something real about it. I’m from a rural area in Maine and I moved here when I was 18. It has had an influence on everything I do and it affects the way that you approach other people. When I go back to Maine I find that I interact with people differently than I ever did before I came here. I think it makes you more empathetic – if you can stick with it and remain strong.” lukerathborne.com
Domenic Ming, 19, skateboarder and photographer, wears sweater by Nudie Jeans; jeans by Volcom; hat by Melet Mercantile “New Yorkers are amazing. You can’t walk on the same block and see three people wearing the same outfit or with the same personalities. Manhattan’s really small and the amount of people that fit in is amazing because it’s all built vertically. It’s magic.” domenicming.foliohd.com
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Urs Fischer, 40, artist, wears T-shirt by Rogan; shorts and trainers by adidas “I never wanted to come here in the first place. When I was younger, in Switzerland, I thought, ‘Every arsehole moves to New York so that’s the place I don’t want to move to.’ But later on I started to come here more and more and at a certain point I just said, ‘That’s it.’ Now I’m here and think, ‘How can I leave this place?’ But I learned how to live in the city. You just have to leave a lot.” ursfischer.com
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COVER STORY
Svengali Trilby. Alan McGee. The High Numbers
Words Mark Webster Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Karen Mason Styling Assistant Harry Bartlett The Svengali Jonny Owen The Premature Congratulations Dylan Edwards, Joel Fry, Michael Socha and Curtis Lee Thompson Location The Griffin, 93 Leonard Street, London EC2 Meet the man
It turns out you can teach an old pub new tricks. On the surface the Griffin, on the corner of the quite beautifully named Ravey Street in Shoreditch, is a genuine throwback; the kind of boozer that seems to have been forgotten or ignored for decades. But pull up a chair and you’ll notice a few little affectations that suggest this solidly old-fashioned public house is quite happily functioning as a contemporary go-to venue. There are posters on the wall for quality music nights, leaflets on the window sills for exhibitions, and assorted thoughtful haircuts and wellobserved clobber on much of the clientele – all coming together to suggest that in an ever-reinventing part of London there’s at least one place that remains comfortable in its own skin. It’s exactly the kind of pub Jonny Owen feels totally at home in. When he’s working in this part of town it’s where he’s always happy to seek solace. And when he was looking for a pub to be, well, “a pub” for his debut film as writer and star – Svengali – it was the Griffin that took on a supporting role. We are sitting at a table in said pub as his “band”, The Premature Congratulations, take part in our photo shoot. Owen is happy. Firstly, because he does love a pub. “It’s not unknown for people to say this about me,” he laughs, lowering his drink. “But I am at my happiest having a pint with a bunch of people. And the more traditional the 94
pub, the happier I am. I remember a girlfriend saying to me once, ‘I used to think you were good at networking – but you just like people, don’t you?’ I like the conversation, I like the beer – it’s the social lubricant in my life.” The second reason Owen is in fine fettle is because he is enjoying watching the group of young actors he put together to be “The Prems” really just behaving like they are, indeed, a band. “I was meticulous in the process of putting these boys together,” he tells me, as we watch them drink and giggle between shots. “I’d built the personalities; the characters. They were absolutely people I’ve met in the music industry.” “In a parallel universe, I’m a rock star. But it just didn’t work out,” Owen tells me, as we settle down to discuss how he arrived at this point in his career – with his debut film as writer and star about to receive a national release. But the boy from the Valleys would need a few more universes to cover all of the things he has been in his life. Now in his forties, he has never, as he puts it, “been afraid to get my hands dirty”. “My father had a strong work ethic, and I inherited that,” says Owen. “I’m from what the broadsheets and chinstrokers hate – a happy, traditional, working-class background, with a big extended family and a good comprehensive school education. I grew
up strong, fit and happy in ’70s and ’80s Wales. My dad was an electrician who worked underground at the steelworks. It sounds like it’s from a different era, but thousands and thousands had that. Most of my classmates were the same. Then the plug was pulled.” Owen made a go of being a professional musician and was signed to a major label with his band, The Pocket Devils; previous to that he was a junior Welsh Boys Club boxing champion. He eventually saw that “the music career was sort of petering out” when he was offered an acting part in a Welsh TV drama, Nuts and Bolts. “I can remember a really nice guy called Peter Edwards – he was head of drama at ITV in Wales – pulled me to one side and said, in those immortal words, ‘You can act, son.’ So I thought, well maybe there’s a career in this,” Owen recalls. Acting steadily provided him with work in what he calls “the staples” – British dramas and sitcoms, and independent, domestic films – but he also learned a few tricks from other areas of broadcasting. “My degree was in history and when ITV found that out they gave me some documentaries to work on. Then they found out I was a massive football fan [Owen is a fanatical Cardiff City fan] so they’d send me off to interview football managers, because so many of the kids coming straight out of Cardiff Film School into TV didn’t know anything >
Jonny wears jacket by Duffer Japan; shirt by Brutus Trimfit.
about football. Those old managers just sent them packing.” All of this is adds up to what Owen refers to as “a perfect education; my apprenticeship”. When he spotted a new avenue opening up in which he could utilise all of this experience, he was not slow to respond. “The internet was still early doors. YouTube was a cat falling off a skateboard and getting loads of hits. So one rainy night in Soho, we thought we’d set out to see if it was possible to put something up, tailored to fit, and with a story arc.” The other half of that “we” is celebrated writer Dean Cavanagh – a regular writing partner of Irvine Welsh – and the “something” was the original internet series of Svengali. From around 2008, the series of short films based around Owen’s character Dixie – “a young chancer who comes to London to try his luck. Pure Dick Whittington” – and his attempts to make it in the music business began to build a serious audience. It also attracted the eye of some important media, as well as some highly influential individuals. “Alan McGee saw it and wanted to get involved,” recalls Owen. Creation Records chief McGee became one of the impressive cast (which also included Sally Phillips, Matt Berry, Boy George and Martin Freeman). “And he became the [trilby-wearing] Svengali of the story. Which was perfect, because Svengali was the character in the book Trilby – which is where the name of the hat came from.” “I wrote the script from a place of incredible melancholy,” Owen tells me, without even a lick of self-pity – just a stoic honesty. “I’d just split up with my wife, I’m in my cousin’s spare room and it’s weird, because the whole experience of writing a comedy film became very cathartic. But I could have gone through sheet metal, I had so much belief in it. You just have to hang on in there.” This belief was not unfounded – the script went on to attract the attention of production company Baby Cow, owned by Henry Normal and Steve Coogan, who became executive producers of the film. McGee reprises his role as the trilby-wearing music figure, and still at the heart of the film is Owen’s Dixie – 96
who Owen thinks is summed up perfectly by celebrated British musician Carl Barât. “Carl gave the boys some rock star training,” he tells me, “and he said to me once, ‘We’ve all been Dixie – you don’t just get born cool.’ And that sums him up really. He’s a trier. He knocks on doors.” Alongside Owen in the film is Vicky McClure, who became his girlfriend during the course of filming. “I’d heard her interviewed on the radio, and she was really funny,” he says. “So I wanted to get a script to her. The weekend she got it she had eight other scripts too. But because I could also send her the original viral she saw that and picked ours over everyone else’s. And so there I was, playing a Welshman
‘THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY PEOPLE I’VE MET IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY’ living in London, hawking something around, who was in love with Vicky McClure. It was a real fucking stretch!” One of the real stars of the show is, naturally, the music. But not necessarily in the way you’d expect. As Owen points out, “We had a character saying, ‘Here they are; the best new band in the country, The Prems.’ And I realised that as soon as you’d hear them play, they wouldn’t be the best band in the world. So I left it open to whatever you imagine they sound like. But a rough template for me was something like The Stooges or The Clash.” Where you do get to hear some serious music is on the soundtrack, and that was always going to be as important to Owen as the writing, producing (with his partner Martin Root) and performing. He even takes that passion on the road as a DJ. “I’m happy playing Britpop to Motown and Stax. Modernism is a broad church,
which is what it should be.” “I worked really hard on getting the soundtrack right for the film,” Owen adds. “Ian Neil, director of music for film and TV at Sony, helped us out. He’s done Danny Boyle and Guy Ritchie films. Classic soundtracks. And it turns out he’d asked to work on my film because I’d put in a request for Georgie Fame’s ‘Somebody Stole my Thunder’. I’d set out to include music from every decade since the 1950s, so it would be timeless – and we did that. It
COVER STORY | Svengali
Curtis wears jacket by Baracuta; jeans by Edwin Jeans; shoes by Paul Smith. Joel wears shirt by Duffer Japan; sunglasses by Persol. Jonny wears shirt by Fred Perry. Michael wears polo shirt by Peter Werth; jeans by Lee 101; shoes by Fred Perry. Dylan wears sweater by Farah; trousers by Duffer Japan; shoes by Hudson.
was a serious process. We tried songs that didn’t work, but I really loved. The director John Hardwick brought two fantastic songs – ‘Sea Diver’ by Mott the Hoople, and a song by The Fall, ‘F-’oldin’ Money’.” The cast got serious about it too, in particular a man who was reprising his role from the original online series, and is himself somewhat obsessive about his music. “Me and Martin Freeman were sat in the record shop that he owns in the film, and we were chatting about
what would be played behind him,” Owen tells me. “Now I wanted to tip my hat to Quadrophenia – the film that was the biggest influence on me – and as we chatted we decided we’d both love to use ‘Zoot Suit’ by The High Numbers, which was the original name of The Who. So I had to write to Pete Townshend to ask him and, bless him, he let us use it.” As a selected film at the Edinburgh Film Festival and some rave reviews via some of this summer’s music festivals
under its belt, Svengali is all set to present itself to the rest of us this autumn. But regardless of how the film is received, the man himself is all set. “Would I take the devil’s dollar in the next ten years?” Owen ponders, with an exaggerated stroke of his chin and an intense squint running across his eyes. “Yes,” he laughs. But wherever his multi-faceted career takes him next, he’ll still be there with pint in hand, a top man down the boozer. > 97
Curtis wears shirt by Fred Perry; jeans by Edwin Jeans; shoes by Clarks Originals. Joel wears shirt by Farah; jeans by Stone Island; shoes by Paul Smith. Michael wears polo shirt by Peter Werth; jeans by Lee 101. Dylan wears shirt by Fred Perry; trousers by Duffer Japan; shoes by Clarks Originals.
Meet the band
“John, the director, always described them as ‘a bag of puppies arriving on set’,” laughs Owen. The Premature Congratulations were designed to be a four-piece combo that embody the classic range of pop stars. Dylan Edwards is the singer (“I wanted a Bob Dylan; a poet,” says Owen), Curtis Lee Thompson is on bass (“Someone fresh, new, untrained”), Michael Socha is on guitar (“a stroppy northerner”), and Joel Fry is the drummer – a real drummer and multiinstrumentalist, and the only musician of the four. Most of them have become familiar through TV work such as This Is England, Pramface and Plebs, while Thompson is taking the sideways step from modelling and kickboxing. Socha is shortly off to Canada to work on the ABC series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, so this gathering is something of a fond farewell. And fond is clearly the word as they swap stories and gently jibe each other. They relive the dynamic of their time together with a tale about playing “live” at the Old Blue Last (Vice magazine’s 98
pub/music venue just round the corner). “They were chucking bottles at us and everything,” says Thompson, with more joy than you might imagine. And Edwards is positively wistful as he remembers, “I’d got pushed off stage; I was being carried back on and there was that poor camera woman who’d passed
‘I WROTE THE SCRIPT FROM A PLACE OF INCREDIBLE MELANCHOLY’ out because of the heat.” He relives the moment, lying down on the floor. “I shouted out to her, ‘Did you get that?’” “Yeah,” chips in Socha, faking annoyance, and pointing down to where the hapless camera operator is lying unconscious in this reenactment.
“‘I did my job. You do yours’.” “I think it never felt complete until all four of us were together,” says Edwards. “It never made sense. I did a bit on my own, and it wasn’t right. It was like, ‘Where’s my band?’ And you know what the tragic thing is; we’re not really a band.” And Owen’s not really a band manager. But faking it came easily, as he shows with a story about getting to know each other in a hotel in Bethnal Green. “I was in my room; it’s seven in the morning and there’s a knock on my door. So I opened it, and Socha was standing there, two of the boys behind him, and he goes, ‘Alright Jonny. Do you know where McDonald’s is?’ And I was like, ‘What? Oh right. Yeah, down the road 200 yards.’ And he says, ‘Thanks. You want anything?’ So I start saying, ‘Er, yeah. I suppose a bacon and egg… Hang on! I’m not your actual fucking manager, mind.’” Svengali is in cinemas in October svengalimovie.com
COVER STORY | Svengali
Curtis wears coat by Baracuta; jeans by Edwin Jeans; shoes by Clarks Originals. Michael wears polo shirt and shoes by Fred Perry; jeans by Lee 101. Dylan wears shirt by Fred Perry; trousers by Duffer Japan; shoes by Clarks Originals; sunglasses by Persol. Joel wears shirt by Farah; jeans by Stone Island; shoes by Paul Smith; sunglasses by Shaun’s Shades of California.
Dylan wears jacket by Duffer Japan; shirt by Woolrich.
Michael wears jacket by Levi’s Vintage Clothing, polo shirt by Fred Perry.
COVER STORY | Svengali
Joel wears jacket by Carhartt x A.P.C; T-shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing.
Curtis wears jacket by Baracuta; jeans by Edwin Jeans; T-shirt by Farah.
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Joel wears T-shirt by Wesc; jeans by Stone Island. Curtis wears Jacket by Baracuta; jeans by Edwin Jeans; shirt by Pretty Green. Jonny wears jacket by Stone island; jeans by Levi's; shirt by Duffer Japan. Dylan wears jacket by Levi's; trousers by Duffer Japan; polo shirt by Pretty Green; hat by Lock & Co; sunglasses by Persol. Michael wears jacket by Penfield; jeans by Lee 101; polo shirt by Gabicci.
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COVER STORY | Svengali
HISTORY
Vivian Maier Nanny. Street Photography. Chicago. Lisette Model Words Chris May Photographs courtesy of the Jeffrey Goldstein Collection vivianmaierphotography.com
It is a story as strange as fiction. The sale of a hoard of photographic prints and negatives at a bric-a-brac auction in 2007 in Chicago – the dispossessed owner was in arrears on a storage rental agreement – led to the discovery of one of the most gifted American street photographers of the 20th century, someone who had until then been wholly off the radar. None of the 200,000 images on sale had ever been seen in public. The identity of the photographer, active from the early 1950s to the early 2000s, was unknown. Then, in 2009, an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune linked a deceased 83-year-old woman to the find. Her name was Vivian Maier. Maier worked for most of her adult life as a live-in nanny in the Chicago suburbs. But her story is not the familiar tale of a great artist rejected by the outside world who dies in undeserved obscurity. Maier remained unknown all her life because she chose to remain unknown. She never sought to join the photographic community. She never tried to have her work published. She took around a dozen shots a day, almost every day, for 50 years, but only developed a tiny fraction of the images. Most of her work remained on the spools that were taken out of her camera and packed away in boxes. Only the families who employed her, to whom she only rarely showed her work, knew Maier’s life as a photographer. In each of the homes Maier lived in as a nanny, she kept her room locked. If there was no lock on the door when she moved in, she asked for one to be fitted. If she had a private bathroom, 104
she turned it into a darkroom and kept that locked too. She was obsessively private. She never discussed her personal life or her photography, which were, it seems, inseparable. A child Maier nannied once asked her what she did. “I’m a sort of spy,” Maier replied. Like a good spy, she left few traces behind her. Much of what has become known of her extraordinary story is told in the soon-to-be-released documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which is itself full of riddles and shadows. The film was co-produced by one-time Chicago real estate agent John Maloof, a flea-market habitué who bought around 150,000 of Maier’s images, sight unseen, when they were sold by the storage company. He paid $380. Maloof thought the collection might include photographs of Chicago landmarks that he could use in a local history he was writing. Two other collectors, Ron Slattery and Jeff Goldstein, bought smaller lots at the same auction. Maloof glanced at the images occasionally over the next year without at first appreciating their quality. “I didn’t have any expertise to know what I was looking at,” he says. “But little by little I realised how good the photographer was. I bought some books by street photographers and I thought, ‘Doesn’t anybody know her?’” Maier’s combination of great talent and self-imposed obscurity is seemingly without precedent. In the foreword to Vivian Maier: Street Photographer (edited by Maloof ), the writer Geoff Dyer, searching for a comparable figure, posited the novelist John Kennedy Toole – author of the comic masterpiece
A Confederacy of Dunces. But while there are parallels between the posthumous discoveries of Maier and Toole, the distance that separates them is more significant. Unlike Maier, Toole worked hard to get his work published. He submitted his manuscript to several publishers and each time it was turned down he produced revised versions. He spent the best part of a decade trying to find a publisher, before committing suicide in 1969. A Confederacy of Dunces was finally published in 1980. Toole craved validation from critics and the public, while Maier went out of her way to avoid it. In 2008, Maloof posted some of Maier’s prints on a street photography blog, asking for feedback. He woke up the next morning to find more than 200 offers to buy. He was soon spending all of his non-working hours scanning and cataloguing the images and, when he realised the enormity of the task, gave up his day job to work on the project full time. Maloof was also trying to identify the photographer, finding the final clue in April 2009. Coming across the name Vivian Maier on a wallet of prints, he Googled it and got one result: an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune, dated a few days earlier, which referred to Maier as a “photographer extraordinaire”. Making contact with the family who had placed the notice, he began piecing together Maier’s story. Vivian Maier was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1926 to a French mother and an Austrian father. Her mother worked as a seamstress and domestic servant. Her father’s occupation is unknown. Maier was the >
New York (Self-Portrait, Circular Mirror) c1951-55
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Chicago (Man with Paper Bag) 1970
couple’s only known child. According to a New York City census, her father was no longer living in the family home in 1930; he does not reappear in Maier’s story. Around this time, her mother and her were living with Jeanne J Bertrand. French-born Bertrand had been a successful portrait photographer in 106
New York and Boston in the 1900s; among her acquaintances was the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who went on to found the Whitney Museum of American Art. Maier’s later decision to take up photography may have begun here. It is the first of many ifs and maybes in her story.
Maier and her mother lived in France from the mid-1930s until the outbreak of the second world war. When the war ended, the pair again travelled to France, where in 1949 Maier took her first known photographs. Using a simple box camera, she shot landscapes and village life. Maloof says he has evidence
HISTORY | Vivian Maier
Chicago (Boys Posing on Street) 1968
that Maier may have attempted to sell the images to a picture postcard printer, but he has yet to make that evidence public. If she did attempt to sell the shots, it was the first and last time she tried to have her work published. Maier returned to New York in 1951, without her mother, who at this point apparently disappeared from her life. Like her mother, Maier supported herself by working as a seamstress. She was already a competent photographer. In January 1952, still using a box camera, she took two posed portraits of the artist Salvador Dalí standing outside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). There follows a 12-month gap in the historical record, during
which Maier acquired her first Rolleiflex, the camera she used almost
ON A NANNY’S WAGES, MAIER COULD NOT AFFORD TO WASTE FILM exclusively for the rest of her life. She appears to have taken February 1952 to January 1953 out, learning how to use
the Rolleiflex and not keeping any of her negatives. Maier is generally believed to have been self-taught. But there is tantalising circumstantial evidence from this period that allows the possibility of tuition from the influential New York photographer Lisette Model. In January 1952, MoMA was showing the exhibition Five French Photographers [italicise? Or quote marks?], which included the seminal street photographers Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Had Maier gone to MoMA to visit the exhibition? If so, she may have attended two other MoMA shows, in 1951 and 1953, which included Model’s work. From the early > 107
Wilmette, Illinois (Boy with Pipe at Shoreline) 1968
1950s onwards, two key elements of Model’s style are to be found in Maier’s work: the ease with which she entered, and was accepted into, her subjects’ personal space, and, while it was not as extreme as Model’s, her fascination with people on society’s edge. There is no direct evidence that Maier took lessons with Model – who, coincidentally, like Maier was part French, part Austrian – but the possibility is intriguing. In 1950, unable to support herself as a photographer, Model turned to teaching, privately and in New York City colleges. Among those institutions were the New School for Social Research and other organisations that catered to students on low incomes such as Maier. One of Model’s known students around this time was Diane Arbus. Arbus committed suicide in 108
1971, and Model died in 1983. Whether Maier studied with Model will probably never be known.
MAIER REMAINED UNKNOWN ALL HER LIFE BECAUSE SHE CHOSE TO Maier’s interest in the work of other photographers is certain, however. Among her surviving personal
belongings, bought by Maloof in the same job lot as her photographs, is a sizable collection of hardbacks by contemporary photographers. (There are also home movies and audiotapes). Unfortunately for researchers, Maier did not annotate the books. However she acquired her skills, Maier’s 1953 images are astonishingly mature. Her flair for composition and her awareness of light and shade are assured. So is her gift for getting in close. Using a Rolleiflex, Maier had to stand within three feet of her subjects for a close-up. Any apparent eye contact is illusory: Maier’s subjects were in reality looking into the lens of the Rolleiflex, held at waist height, which Maier, too, was looking down at, in order to focus. The degree of separation between photographer and subject
HISTORY | Vivian Maier would have helped diffuse Maier’s proximity. Many of her subjects seem unaware of her presence. A life-long characteristic of Maier’s work, in place even at this early stage, was her reluctance to take multiple shots. She never went “click-clickclick”, hoping for the best. On a nanny’s wages she could not afford to waste film. What is known about her reveals, in any case, a frugal rather than profligate nature. Maier waited for the right moment – “the decisive moment”, as Cartier-Bresson famously described it – taking one picture and moving on. She usually shot just one film during the course of a day, as though she was keeping a diary. The high proportion of hits among Maier’s one-take images amazes photographers and exhibition curators as much as the quality of the images themselves; there is rarely a dud. Maier’s lifelong concern for the marginalised also shines through her early New York images. “One of the people who knew her called her ‘a patron of the poor’,” says Maloof. “So you see a lot of people who are on the margins of society – the homeless, the poor, the elderly, the young. It seems like she was interested in saving that moment or giving them a voice. It’s anybody’s guess, but that’s the character that I formed of her.” The New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz has formed a similar impression. “Her basic decent humanism is evident everywhere in her photographs,” he says. He is also moved by the “wit and surprise and playful spirit” that suffuses Maier’s work. In 1955 or 1956, for reasons unknown, Maier moved from New York to Chicago, where she lived for the rest of her life. In 1956, she answered a newspaper ad for a live-in nanny at the North Shore suburban Chicago home of Avron and Nancy Gensburg and their three sons. She remained with the Gensburgs until 1972, and the family are the source of many of the known facts about her. Maier arrived for her interview, says Nancy Gensburg, “looking a bit like Mary Poppins. She wore a heavy coat, stout shoes and a long skirt with a slip and she had an enormous carpetbag. She dressed differently. She was a classy
lady”. She spoke with a strong French accent, which she never lost. The Gensburg boys adored Maier. “She must have been a really, really awesome person to hang out with if you were a kid,” says Maloof. “She would take them on these wild adventures, that only the coolest kids would think of doing. Or she would bring home a dead snake to show them, or convince the milkman to drive them all to school in his delivery truck. If you were a child and Vivian was your nanny, she would be the coolest adult to know.” Maier took the boys on many outings: screenings of art films, the monuments in Graceland Cemetery, the Chinese New Year parade, motorcades held by politicians and visiting celebrities, hunts for wild berries in nearby woodland. And she always carried a camera.
Chicago (Vivian’s Shadow with Flags) 1970
“Her trademark was her camera,” says Nancy. “She always had one round her neck.” Maier would occasionally show a print to the Gensburgs, but she never made gifts of them. “If you wanted a picture,” she says, “you had to buy it. Someone had to want it more than she wanted it. It’s like an artist who would paint something and then hate to get rid of it. She loved everything she did.” According to the Gensburgs, Maier appeared to have no family or friends, and in 16 years never took a personal phone call at the house. She never talked of meeting up with friends, and there was no hint of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Some days she would lock herself in her darkroom all day. “We were not allowed in,” says Avron
Gensburg. “She had a very strong, very determined, very ‘don’t interfere with my space’ kind of attitude.” Throughout her adult life there was always a distance between Maier and those around her, but over the years she nannied for them, the Gensburgs picked up clues to her beliefs. They remember her as a feminist and socialist, who did not like going to doctors because “so many other people can’t afford to”. She also thought Americans “smile too much”. “If anyone called her ‘Mrs Maier’,” says Nancy, “she’d respond, ‘I’m Miss Maier – and proud of it.’” Maier took regular holidays in the 1950s and 1960s. Characteristically, she never told the Gensburgs where she was going, only when she would be back. The family believed she was the cobeneficiary of the sale of a family farm in Alsace, France, money from which financed her holidays. From 1959 to 1960, she took a six-month break and travelled to Egypt, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, France and Italy. Ron Slattery has an album of snapshot-sized prints Maier compiled after the trip. Despite her acute need for privacy, Maier was a much loved member of the Gensburg household. She remained with them long after she was really needed as a nanny, until the youngest son left home for college. After she left the Gensburgs, she continued working as a nanny in Chicago’s North Shore, but it is harder to find traces of her. For a while she looked after the children of the liberal TV talk show host Phil Donahue. From 1987 to 1989, she nannied for Zalman and Karen Usiskin. At Maier’s interview, say the Usiskins, she told them: “I have to tell you that I come with my life, and my life is in boxes.” “No problem,” the Usiskins replied. “We had a large garage,” says Karen. “But we had no idea. She came with 200 boxes.” They put the boxes, most of them packed with undeveloped films, in storage, where they remained until Maier left a year or so later. After leaving here, Maier worked for the Baylaender family until 1993. She began her interview the same way she had with the Usiskins. “When she > 109
arrived,” says Maren Baylaender, “she said, ‘I come with my life and my life is in boxes.’ We were never allowed into her room. It was stacked up to the ceiling with boxes, and there were many more boxes stored in our basement. First thing in the morning she comes downstairs with a camera round her neck, a hat on her head, and off she goes.” In the mid-1990s, nearing 70, Maier gave up nannying and began to live alone in central Chicago. She seems to have existed on social security, although among her personal possessions Maloof has found uncashed cheques and share certificates, possibly bought when the French farm was sold. From the mid-1990s to the mid2000s, Maier was a regular visitor to the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. According to the then manager, Jim Dempsey, “She visited two or three times a month. We thought she looked like she might be homeless. She came to see classic Fellini and Antonioni and German noir films. She would happily talk about films but not about herself or about photography. She usually had a camera round her neck.” Dempsey sometimes wondered if Maier ever used the camera. Now co-owner of a Chicago art gallery, he got on well with Maier, but a few of his staff thought she was borderline crazy. “Some people found her pretty abrasive,” he says. In 2007, Maier stopped paying the rent on the storage lockers containing her boxes of prints and negatives. Local auctioneer Roger Gunderson paid $250 for them. “A truck and a half load of stuff,” he says. “A Paris sticker caught my eye. I thought maybe there’s going to be some perfume or jewellery.” Gunderson had acquired almost all of Maier’s life work. He bundled it up and sold it on to Maloof and other collectors. Whether Maier would be gratified by her posthumous fame, and the multi-thousand dollar price tag just one of her prints can command, will remain unknown. But everything that has been learnt about her suggests she would be indifferent – or horrified. “I’ll never know, of course,” says Maloof. “But I have an audiotape in which she spoke about what happens when you die and when people take up 110
things after you. ‘Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever,’ she said. ‘We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on. And somebody else takes their place.’” “I hope she’s OK with what I’m doing,” continues Maloof. “She had no love life, no family and really nobody that was close to her. The only thing that she had was the freedom of her camera to express herself, and I think the reason she kept it secret is because it’s all she had.” Maloof ’s original $380 investment in Maier’s work will make him a millionaire several times over. But he insists he has other reasons for devoting himself to Maier’s legacy. “I’m doing this because I think I have to. I’m not doing it for the money. I’m sure it’s
SHE TOOK AROUND A DOZEN SHOTS EVERY DAY worth a lot of money. I don’t know how much. I haven’t really had the time to find out.” Watching Maloof in Finding Vivian Maier, you are inclined to believe him. Meyerowitz believes Maloof ’s motivation is noble. “I’m as moved by Maloof as I am by Maier,” he says. “There’s a kindness to his act.” Maloof ’s motivation is not, however, the most pressing concern. What worries some observers is the selection and editing process that he and his colleagues are engaged in. Maier developed around 5,000 of her negatives, and, according to Pamela Bannos of Northwestern University, Illinois – who is researching Maier’s work – she usually cropped them. “When she printed,” said Bannos in a 2012 interview for WTTW’s Chicago Tonight show, “she would crop the sides of the square to
emphasise the people at the centre of the frame. She had one of her prints [of two elderly women and a middleaged male street sweeper] hung on her bedroom wall. And it was cropped. There is a valid concern about who is editing and cropping her work now.” Carole Evans, who coordinated a Maier exhibition at London’s Photofusion gallery in 2011, felt a similar concern when she visited Maloof in Chicago that year. “My impression of Maloof was, ‘Wow, he’s so young.’ He was living in this flat with all these boxes in the attic and he seemed so green. I thought, ‘Is her work in the right hands?’ Those men who’ve got that archive are not photographers and they’re not photographically educated. Who is editing these pictures? But now that curators are getting involved, it’s been shown in the museum in Chicago, and galleries are showing the work, they are probably starting to have guidance. I’m hoping.” Some museums have been reluctant to show any of Maier’s work other than the prints she made herself, which leaves another 195,000 images. Maier would probably welcome that. Maier kept in touch with the Gensburg family all her life, although sometimes a year might go by without them hearing from her. In her final years, the family bought her an apartment and, later, paid her nursing home bills. It was they who placed Maier’s obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune in April 2009: “Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully on Monday. Second mother to John, Lane and Matthew. A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her. Always ready to give her advice, opinion or a helping hand. Movie critic and photographer extraordinaire. A truly special person who will be sorely missed but whose long and wonderful life we all celebrate and will always remember.”
A documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, by John Maloof, is set for release this year findingvivianmaier.com
HISTORY | Vivian Maier
Chicago (Elderly Woman, Policeman) 1968
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STYLE
Jacket by Stone Island; trousers and shirt by Work Not Work; trainers by Converse; hat by Swaton; watch by G-Shock.
Freddie Gyamfi Photographs Paul Vickery Styling Adam Howe
Photographic Assistant Dominic Livingstone Styling Assistant Jordan Victor Harrison Location Quaker Street Bowl, Silwex House, Quaker Street, London E1 quakerstreetbowl.com
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Jacket by Maharishi; shorts by Work Not Work; trainers by Gourmet; Watch by G-Shock.
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Jacket by Hardy Amies; shirt by Rapha; hat by Paul Smith.
Jacket by Paul Smith; shorts by Gant Rugger; trainers by Converse.
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STYLE | Freddie Gyamfi
Jacket by Paul Smith Jeans; trousers by Dickies; shoes by Folk; hat, model’s own.
Jacket by Paul Smith Jeans; trousers by Dickies; shirt by Harry Stedman; shoes by Folk; hat, model’s own.
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STYLE | Freddie Gyamfi
Jacket by Rapha & Raeburn; trousers by Number Six; hat by Swaton; watch by G-Shock.
Shirt by C.E; trousers by Plectrum by Ben Sherman; shoes by Gourmet; hat by Paul Smith; watch by G-Shock.
Jacket by Ebbets Field Flannels; shorts by Rapha; trainers by Converse.
STYLE | Freddie Gyamfi
Gilet by Carhartt; trousers by Rapha; shirt by Billionaire Boys Club; trainers by Gourmet; hat by Paul Smith; watch by G-Shock.
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BULLETIN
Pendleton Thomas Kay Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Bartender Matty Binz Location The Fox, 372 Kingsland Road, London E8 thefoxe8.com
There are few brands out there that feel more purely American than Pendleton, which turned 150 years old this year. Yet the brand was in fact founded by a Yorkshireman, Thomas Kay, who upped sticks and moved to America’s Northwest. To celebrate this
landmark anniversary, Pendleton has created the Thomas Kay Collection in honour of its founder. As one might expect, the collection mixes together staples of the Pendleton trademark – quality flannels and Jacquard materials – with refined, quintessentially English
garb such as wool blazers. This unique combination creates a collection that reaches across the Atlantic and gives it a feel that is both historic and contemporary. pendleton-usa.com
MUSIC
ESG
South Bronx. 99 Records Words Andy Thomas
American band ESG was named after its members’ birthstones – emerald, sapphire and gold – by a mother who bought instruments to keep her four girls off the streets. They went on to become one of the most influential groups of New York’s post-punk “no wave” scene. The records they released on Ed Bahlman’s 99 Records were as raw and urgent as anything on that cultish label. But their minimal yet polyrhythmic sound was somehow apart from the other bands emerging from the New York underground – untainted, pure and primal. “ESG were from a different planet,” Richard McGuire, from 99 label mates Liquid Liquid, told journalist Simon Reynolds. Youthfully soaking up what ESG vocalist and lead guitarist Renee Scroggins would later call the “savage drive” of beats from their South Bronx neighbourhood, ESG produced a naive but acutely funky sound all of their own. “I don’t feel like a disco group, I don’t feel like a punk group, I feel like a funk group, maybe like Rick James says, ‘punk funk’,” said Renee, speaking to Collusion magazine in 1983 about the hybrid music she and her teenage sisters created in the early 1980s. “I feel we’re right here, in between, we’ve got something for everybody.” Straddling funk, punk, hip hop, proto-house and mutant disco, ESG’s unique place in dance music history was cemented by playing the opening night of Manchester’s Hacienda and the closing night of Paradise Garage in New
York. Tracks such as ‘Moody’ and ‘UFO’ sounded like the future to a New York underground ripe with cross pollination, played hard by DJs such as Larry Levan and providing some of the most borrowed breaks in the history of hip hop. After years of sampling, bootlegs and legal wrangling, ESG finally got some official recognition thanks to the Soul Jazz compilation A South Bronx Story in 2001. Thirty years on and The ESG Story, a documentary by filmmaker Greg Harding, is going to tell their story properly for the first time. That story begins in the South Bronx projects in the late 1970s; a scene of devastation and danger. The decay had begun when the Cross Bronx Expressway, completed in 1972, displaced workers from their jobs. By then, white flight and further economic strife had created a poisonous concoction. “The area we were growing up in was very rough,” Renee tells me from her home in Atlanta, Georgia. “Full of drugs and gangs in the projects; it was really crazy. Our mom didn’t like what she saw outside and knew that I was interested in music. And she promised to get us these instruments. I didn’t believe her but one day there it was. Her love of her children was more than her worrying about how she was going to get the money.” Renee was joined by her sisters Valerie on drums, Deborah on bass and Marie on percussion, and they started rehearsing in their front room. “We began doing cover songs – which were
awful,” says Renee, laughing. “So I said to Valerie, ‘You know if we turn around and start doing our own songs nobody will ever know we are messing up.’ So that’s how we started writing.” Their mother, Helen, looked for places for the girls to perform in local talent contests. “She didn’t enter us in anything until she thought we had got to the point where we were good enough,” says Renee. “Every Friday after she finished work we would put on a little show for her of songs we had been writing. She’d usually say we needed more practice, but after two or three years she said we were ready.” A spot was eventually found in a talent show in Manhattan, sponsored by CBS Records. “Ed Bahlman was one of the judges,” Renee recalls. “He took my number and called up that night. I thought, ‘Oh my god we’ve won.’ He said, ‘No, but you girls have something special and I’d like to be your unofficial manager and get you a couple of gigs around Lower Manhattan and see how you do.’” Bahlman was dating British expat Gina Franklyn, who ran a clothing boutique at 99 MacDougal Street in the West Village. “It was a time in New York when the punk scene had started to get a bit more fun in terms of style. And Gina was really part of that,” explains Vivien Goldman, journalist and punk authority. Franklyn agreed to let Bahlman sell records alongside the post-punk threads. During a buying trip to London she introduced him to Geoff Travis from Rough Trade >
Deborah Scroggins, Renee Scroggins, Marie Scroggins, Tito Lebron and Valerie Scroggins, 1981
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Records and a seed was planted for his own record label. Soon 99 Records was releasing music from the many corners of New York’s downtown scene, with early releases by Glenn Branca, Y Pants and Bush Tetras. Goldman remembers how the 99 releases became as in demand in London as those from Rough Trade were in New York. “Honestly those US 45s coming into the Rough Trade shop; people would wait for them. It was like a cargo cult.” With his finger on the pulse of the downtown scene, Bahlman used his contacts and knowledge to secure ESG gigs at many of Manhattan’s underground clubs. “I’ll never forget 124
our first professional show as ESG at this club called Popfront at the Mechanics’ Hall,” says Renee. “That was a totally strange culture shock for us. Here were us girls coming from the Bronx, where the majority of people were black and Hispanic, and we played this punk club with an all-white audience. But they loved us.” The girls also appeared at other key venues including Club 57, the Roxy, Mudd Club and Danceteria, supporting bands such as Public Image Ltd (PiL), Gang of Four and The Clash. “Ed exposed us to a whole new culture of music and clubs,” says Renee. “It was an amazing time because you would be on a bill
with a rapper, a punk band and the crowd would just take it all in.” For Goldman, ESG brought something different to this counter-cultural amalgam. “They were unique. Very little is new under the sun but they had their own place. Just their creativity put them outside what were the expectations for their race, age and class.” As with Rough Trade, Bahlman was starting to forge a relationship with another influential UK independent label with growing links to New York. While New Order’s trips to clubs such as the Funhouse were creating a new dance floor direction for Factory Records, label mates A Certain Ratio
MUSIC | ESG
(ACR) were also feeling the funk of New York. The austere Manchester funk outfit had been booked into East Orange studios in New Jersey by Tony Wilson. ESG were to support ACR at Hurrah in what was a pivotal moment in the girls’ career. Wilson was in the audience that night. “I had no idea who he was,” says Renee. “But he was watching our sound check and afterwards he came up and said, ‘Hey, I really like what you are doing. How would you like to make a record?’ I didn’t take him seriously because we had been bugging Ed for two years about releasing us.” With ACR finishing the To Each LP three days early, ESG were offered their last three days studio time. The studio sessions introduced the teenage sisters to Factory Records’ genius producer Martin Hannett. “It’s so funny because everyone talks about him and I’ve seen the movie 24 Hour Party People, but this was not the guy that I met,” says Renee. “The guy that I met was calm; he was respectful. I had no idea who he was, that he was this big important producer because he was just a cool guy. He took me in and showed me around the mixing boards and after we’d record something he’d ask if I liked it.” The three tracks that Hannett produced in his inimitable haunting style, ‘Moody’, ‘UFO’ and ‘You’re No Good’, would become ESG’s signature tracks, great slabs of ominous funk that
sound as raw and alien today. Often labelled as minimal, the group’s sound actually owed as much to the polyrhythmic complexity of Latin music. “Our neighbourhood was predominately black and Hispanic and growing up we would hear all this music coming from the parks,” says Renee. “The congas, cowbells and timbales would be playing all night. So that gave us our Latin influence. I think
‘THEY DIDN’T JUST TAKE IT DOWNTOWN, THEY TOOK IT EVERYWHERE’ it just soaked in and became almost subliminal because when you went to sleep you heard this all night. At first you wanted it to stop because you had to go to sleep but soon it was one of the things that was luring you to sleep.” The group’s rhythmic, heavy sound, which was augmented by neighbourhood friend Tito Libran on congas, had another source. “Growing up my other major influence was James Brown,” Renee explains. “He really inspired my style of writing, because he
would ‘take it the bridge’. And when he did, this musical breakdown was let loose and I was like, ‘Man, why can’t a song always just be a breakdown?’” By honing in on the breaks, ESG mirrored the early block party DJs such as Kool Herc, who were extending the percussion section of tracks such as James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’. Drummer Valerie Scroggins recently told Tom Tom Magazine: “The sound comes from being in the street and being around other kids in the parks and stuff like that. It was just something in me. I started beatin’ on pots and pans and on my thighs and legs at school.” But what made their sound unique? “Because we never had any training we didn’t realise you’re not supposed to mix things,” explains Renee. “Like there is only supposed to be one tempo. So I think the fact that we had no knowledge that these things were not supposed to go together had a lot to do with how we sounded. Otherwise we might have sounded like everyone else. We never thought, ‘This is jazz’ or ‘This is funk’. We just used to throw it all together.” Released on Factory (and a few months later on 99), their first EP created a buzz amongst influential journalists, including Adrian Thrills at the NME. “Any group who are touted as a cross between Public Image Ltd and Tamla Motown deserve to be heard,” he wrote in April 1981. > 125
The release would strengthen the links between New York and Manchester, with ESG invited to play at the opening night of the Hacienda. “They had brought us over specifically for that gig,” says Renee. “But it was really, really funny because the club wasn’t even ready. There was sawdust everywhere.” The idea for the Hacienda was conceived during visits to Paradise Garage by Tony Wilson and New Order manager Rob Gretton, which became just one of the New York clubs to embrace ESG. While ‘Moody’ was a favourite at clubs in both New York and Chicago (with Chip E sampling the tune for his early 1985 house cut ‘Like This’), DJ Larry Levan would also spin their lesser-known 1987 mutant disco cut ‘Standing In Line’ (also given heavy rotation by Tony Humphries at Newark’s Club Zanzibar). Produced by Renee and self-released on the Emerald, Sapphire & Gold label, it was one of the tracks the girls would play on the final two nights at the club. “Paradise Garage was fabulous,” says Renee. “Of all the clubs we played, that had the most fantastic sound system I ever heard. It could really hold bass, drums and congas, that heavy funk sound.” After the second EP for 99, ‘ESG Says Dance to the Beat of Moody’, the group released their first album, Come Away with ESG. The cut-and-paste collage on the front cover of a Panasonic boom box and adidas shelltoe shoes was reflective of the downtown scene at clubs such as the Roxy. Recorded live in the small Radio City Music Hall and produced by Bahlman, the sound is perhaps more refined than on the first EP, but just as agitated – especially on ‘Dance’ and ‘Parking Lot Blues’. At their most sparse, ‘Tiny Sticks’ brings to mind the words of Liquid Liquid’s Richard McGuire. “The songs were held together by nothing. A couple of clacking sticks and a simple bassline.” With ESG’s place in New York’s disco underground assured, the group would soon become even more influential to a hip hop culture in search of the ultimate break. It was in fact through the Ultimate Breaks and Beats LPs that many hip hop producers were drawn to the stark alien sound of 126
‘UFO’. “I had just seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and at the end the aliens are communicating to the humans through music,” Renee explains. “And I was, like, ‘I wonder what it would be like if this spaceship landed in the middle of projects.’ So that’s the sound of the chaos.” The first two samples of ‘UFO’ were on Big Daddy Kane’s ‘Ain’t No Half Steppin’ in 1988, followed shortly after by Public Enemy’s ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’. Sampling remains a raw
issue for Renee. “We were playing in the Peppermint Lounge, which used to show these films on the wall. And this guy showed us this film of Afrika Bambaataa and there was ‘UFO’. I guess the guy thought I would be excited but I was upset. And after that I would hear it everywhere. At the time there were no sample laws, nothing to protect your rights. We didn’t make a dime while they were making all this major money. We were still living in the projects trying to hustle to get by.”
MUSIC | ESG
Marie Scroggins, Renee Scroggins, Tito Lebron, Valerie Scroggins and Deborah Scroggins, 1981
The same issues became even more consuming for Bahlman. Torn apart by the legal case against Sugar Hill Records for Grandmaster Melle Mel’s disputed use of the bassline from Liquid Liquid’s ‘Cavern’ for the huge hit ‘White Lines (Don’t Do It)’, he closed 99 Records in 1986. Although Bahlman finally won the case after several years, he then withdrew from public view after being bankrupted by the case and driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown, by what people
have claimed was intimidation by Sugar Hill. “That is presumably what sent Ed over the edge,” says Goldman. “What the hell scared him so much?” With 99 gone, ESG released their 1987 mini LP ESG II on their own Emerald, Sapphire & Gold label. Then came the even more low key release ‘Party Music’ on Popular Records in 1988. This was followed by an EP on the small Pow Wow imprint in 1991, including the rebuke to old boyfriends ‘Erase You’. Two years later an equally stern message was sent to the hip hop fraternity in ‘Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills’ on Nega Fulô Records. It would be another 10 years before ESG would start to receive due credit. A South Bronx Story, released on Soul Jazz Records, brought their music to a new audience who had lived through a decade of club music and were keen to understand some of this music’s background. One of those was filmmaker Harding. “A friend where I worked played me that and, for a good year solid, I pretty much couldn’t listen to anything else. That LP just blew me away and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard them before. And as the years went by I couldn’t believe other people hadn’t heard of them. So once I found out more I was, like, ‘Man, their story has to be told.’” The release of A South Bronx Story also inspired the band, returning to the studio in 2001 with producer Pete Reilly to release an LP dedicated to their mother who passed away in November of that year. Step Off found the group stripping their already stark sound down to the basics to stunning effect, aided by the youthful guitar and bass of daughters Christelle and Nicole. The ESG sound continues to influence musicians such as New York’s LCD Sound System. “The empty space is just as important as the notes played and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That was a huge influence on LCD,” said LCD drummer Pat Mahoney, speaking to Daily Note, the Red Bull Music Academy’s 2013 newsletter. Goldman thinks ESG’s influence is even more far-reaching. “Not only did they transcend expectations by just getting on the 6 train [the subway line that links the
Bronx to downtown] to open up their own world, they made a lasting impact on pop. They didn’t just take it downtown, they took it everywhere. But they were operating completely outside the conventions.” Despite last year’s self released Closure LP suggesting it could be the end of ESG, a new LP is on the way to accompany Harding’s film. “The fact they have decided to keep going is great,” says Harding. “When I contacted Renee about doing the film they were talking about Closure being their last album and final tour. But I feel like they are a band that is so passionate about their music they just can’t stop. And anything I can do to
‘THE SONGS WERE HELD TOGETHER BY NOTHING. A COUPLE OF CLACKING STICKS AND A SIMPLE BASSLINE’ help get their name spread even further is great. They are a lot more important than a lot of people realise as far as the history of music is concerned.” More European gigs to promote the new LP and documentary will hopefully follow up a recent trip to Brazil to perform in Rio. “ESG has always been able to cross over and be accepted by all races and all cultures,” concludes Renee. “That’s what I love and believe in; music as an international language. When we can’t say anything else we can understand each other through music.” The ESG Story will be screened at the CBGB Music and Film Festival in October theesgstory.com cbgb.com 127
SPOTLIGHT
Badges
Words Mark Webster Photographs Ross Trevail
Audie Murphy wasn’t really much of an actor. But he was very Hollywood. Hollywood likes its heroes, and Murphy was the real deal. Born in Texas in 1925, he was still only a teenager when he was awarded his first Purple Heart having been injured on the battlefield in northeastern France in the second world war. It was one of the many medals he was awarded, making him one of the US’s most decorated soldiers. It’s what led to a movie career that included arguably his most impressive performance in the film of the great American Civil War book, The Red Badge of Courage. It was the perfect fit for Murphy: a study of the psychological effect of war, which had been an issue in his own life, with the title alluding to being wounded in battle – earning your stripes, as he had done. The Purple Heart that Murphy won twice was originally established by George Washington as the Badge of Military Merit. Writ large in the life of Murphy is one of the world’s most significant symbols. It is tempting to refer to it as the “humble badge”. But this is to underestimate the potency, eloquence and elegance of this tiny adornment. Through the image displayed on what has become a simple, cheap, massproduced product, you are flying your flag, taking sides, making a statement, establishing your authority, wearing your heart on your sleeve. Or just about anywhere you care to pin it. The badge can be traced back as far as the Middle Ages, when in essence it did the job it still does now. It 128
proclaimed your heraldic allegiance. It signified pilgrimages you may have taken. Or, in other words, that circular RAF target badge tells everyone you are from the House of Mod. And that you’re happy to let everyone know you had a great time on that trip to Bournemouth. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that the badge was mass-produced. But when it was, it went off with a bang, conveying a startling message – one that flew in the face of both law and tradition. The name Josiah Wedgwood is most commonly associated with his high quality, now highly expensive, antique pottery. But in 1787, the liberalminded, non-conformist businessman issued a porcelain badge (effectively a medallion, that would then be pinned) decrying the slave trade. Featuring the image of a kneeling, chained man and the words “Am I not a man and a brother?”, this was an astounding stance to take at the time. Yet it proved to be a significant one, acknowledged by abolitionist William Wilberforce as having had a significant impact on the ultimate passing in parliament of the anti-slavery bill. When Wedgwood’s badge started to circulate through polite society, his friend Thomas Clarkson – founder of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade – wrote that “at length the taste for wearing them became general, and thus fashion”. So as far back as 200 years ago, the badge was doing the exactly the same thing it’s been doing for the past 50 or 60 years. “The first badge I ever had was,
I think, ‘I am 3’”, laughs Mark Wigan – graphic artist, university lecturer, and founder and curator of the Museum of Club Culture in his native Hull. He is chatting to me on a recent trip to London, but he’s a man who understands that a badge (or in Wigan’s case, quite a few of them) is perfectly capable of doing most of the talking. “It’s broadcasting an image, a slogan, an icon,” he says, “and even that simple statement – ‘I am 3’ – is doing that exact same thing.” Wigan gets the badge. He is wearing a lapel-full of them, and he has a pocketful of them. There are badges that date back years (he is wearing the aforementioned ‘Bournemouth’ badge – “it reminds me of the Mud Club weekenders there”), and ones he has just bought in a shop around the corner. Back in Hull, his museum is festooned with badges garnered from decades of dance, all beamed down on benevolently by one of the badge’s greatest hits, the Smiley. In the mid-1980s, working at i-D magazine, he started adorning MA-1 bomber jackets with arrays of badges. This was an idea that very quickly translated into a genuine fashion staple. Clearly for Wigan, the badge is not simply a frivolous, cheap piece of jewellery. “They’re a visual, graphic language,” he explains. “I see them as a bit of social history. As an archivist, they pinpoint different times and places, and changes in the social and political landscape. They can also convey the message that you belong to a tribe – and only certain people will understand the message. It’s inclusive >
Marvin Sordell, footballer, wears 200th anniversary Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion marvinsordell.co.uk Sordell’s foundation supports the Sophie Hayes Foundation, sophiehayesfoundation.org, which was set up to raise awareness about human trafficking and modern-day slavery. “When I first found Sophie’s book and read it, it blew me away,” says Sordell of Trafficked, Hayes’ personal story. “It was horrifying, but also empowering. It made me want to go back and look into the work of William Wilberforce.” 129
but it also alienates people who don’t understand it.” The political descendants of the original Wedgwood badge have been popping up for decades. The CND peace sign has remained staunchly popular since Eric Austin first adapted Gerald Holtom’s original design as a badge in the 1950s. In the 1960s, Richard Nixon’s campaign “pins” were infamously sent up by his opponents. The face of Chairman Mao remains one of the badge’s most popular images. In the 1970s, the school prefect badge was given an ironic new lease of life as a punk anti-establishment accessory. Badges have remained so important to one of punk’s most significant figures, John Lydon, that he has both Public Image Ltd (PiL) and Sex Pistols badges as icons on his website. It was also a significant decade for another of the badge’s personalities – as pop memorabilia. In the 1950s, Colonel Tom Parker was one of the first to see the value in the badge when he started creating them as merchandising to support the burgeoning career of his young rock ’n’ roll singer, Elvis Presley. Pop groups of the 1960s all knew the power of the badge – it was The Who that introduced the target as a badge idea – while pop art of the period also reflected it. The great exponent of the style, Peter Blake, painted ‘Self-Portrait with Badges’ in 1961 and it remains one of his most popular pieces. He has even made his own limited-edition range of badges, including a set for Paul Weller’s Stanley Road album release – something that many artists choose to use as a way of promoting their work. The Blake portrait was recently echoed in a work of art when Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller included a badge-adorned denim jacket (from another rich vein of popularity – trade union badges) in his piece The Battle of Orgreave Archive (An Injury to One is an Injury to All). A seminal badge company created in 1976, Better Badges, has had a huge influence on British culture, an influence still felt keenly today. Craig Ford’s company A Number of Names, which represents clothing ranges such as BAPE, Billionaire Boys Club and 130
Craig Ford, owner of A Number of Names anumberofnames.org
Ebbets Field Flannels, worked with the firm on its branding.
YOU ARE FLYING YOUR FLAG, TAKING SIDES MAKING A STATEMENT Ford, who also runs the highly respected men’s trade show Jacket
Required, tells me, “I’ve always been into branding – always aspired to it.” When it came to creating an image for his company, it was the art of film that he turned to for inspiration – and one 1984 movie in particular that made a significant impact on him. “When I was setting up my company about five years ago, I remember seeing the film Repo Man by Alex Cox on the TV,” says Ford. “A character goes into a supermarket where all the products have this generic styling – like ‘beer’, ‘bread’, ‘soap’ – and I thought Alex must have made the packaging himself, to send up consumer culture. So I chased up Alex Cox and asked him what font he’d used. But it
SPOTLIGHT | Badges Huggy Leaver, actor, wears vintage Highwayman ‘Georgian’ jacket by Lewis Leathers
Kosmo Vinyl, artist Kosmo Vinyl was what he describes as “winder up-er” for Stiff Records in the 1970s, which is when he first began working with Ian Dury & The Blockheads. This is how he came to co-curate the first show of Dury’s art, ‘More Than Fair’, this summer at London’s Royal College of Art, where Dury studied under Peter Blake. “Stiff couldn’t afford to compete with the majors, so needed to be more interesting, more creative,” says Vinyl. So when he worked on The Blockheads’ first single, ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’, they created a badge series that instantly became collectable.
turned out that was the actual packaging from a place called Ralphs supermarket in LA. He basically just filled his set from there. And that was it. I just had to make ‘badge’ the corporate identity of my company. But then I had to think about who I’d want to do the badge with – someone with whom it would mean something. So I thought – Better Badges.” Behind the door at 286 Portobello Road in the mid to late 1970s there lived a contradiction – an old hippy who was friend to the punks. Joly MacFie, founder of Better Badges, had been tour manager for Pink Fairies – a psychedelic rock outfit from Ladbroke Grove. And when they went on the
road, MacFie would knock up some badges. “He’d also do pin badges at festivals, because all he needed was an easily transported machine with a little arm on it,” says Derek Harris, owner of Lewis Leathers, who went to work at Better Badges in 1981. “You could write your own messages, or take along photocopies. Plus he was making his own badges, like the one with a cartoon of a joint and the words ‘pass it this way’ written on it.” However, it was once MacFie had established himself at the north end of Portobello Road, the pop-cultural melting pot of an area above the Westway, that Better Badges blossomed into an integral part of British culture.
Harris picks up the story: “He was always really interested in the music scene. And he was always looking to help bands out. And when the punk explosion happened, it was perfect for Joly because it was very much in the spirit of the DIY mentality that he himself had. So, to start with there would be the bootleg badges, promoting the bands. Getting their name out there. And that was something he paid for. But he would also give the band loads of freebies so they could make a bit, too.” “Joly got to meet the Sex Pistols early on, so his was the first Pistols badge,” Harris continues. “He also did the first official badges for The Clash, > 131
Anthony, footwear designer and creative consultant, wears badge and jacket by Nigel Cabourn “My love of all things Cabourn starts with the man – a character like no other. His work demonstrates how good design is timeless and future proof.” The badge Anthony is wearing is perfect proof of the Cabourn ethic. He found the original version on a military jacket in a Parisian flea market – a German lapel buttonhole ribbon bar to carry military awards. For his version, Cabourn includes the British Broad Arrow mark, frequently adapts the materials and colours, and provides one with each of his garments.
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SPOTLIGHT | Badges
Mark Wigan, artist and owner of the Museum of Club Culture, Hull museumofclubculture.com
and there were a whole range of Jamie Reid badges, which were terrific. And you can’t underestimate their importance at the time. This was media without the internet, so with bands springing up all over the country, but no record out, you had to get the badge. I remember reading about Joy Division before they got a deal. But I got their badge.” When Rob Gretton ordered a batch in his first act as the band’s manager, they were made by Better Badges. Of course, there is nothing specifically new or unusual in the manner in which the badge was used and viewed during this era. But that is really the point of the badge. It is a thing that is constantly changing and
updating, while remaining fundamentally the same thing. It is
THE BADGE CAN BE TRACED BACK AS FAR AS THE MIDDLE AGES why it belongs to myriad groups, but also just about everybody. Anyone can have a piece of the action, and with it
perhaps even a little piece of history, as Harris proved in his first tentative dealing with Better Badges in 1979. “I always used to look at their badge adverts in the NME,” recalls Harris. “Then I’d come up and buy them on my trips to London. And I saw that they had this DIY service – minimum ten badges – for your band, or cause. And it was around that time that [fledgling rockabilly band] the Stray Cats had first come over from the States. And all my mates decided they wanted a Stray Cats badge, because no one had heard of them at that stage. So I drew one. And I made the pilgrimage. I went up there and rang the bell at 286, showed them what I had, and Joly said, ‘OK, come back in a couple of weeks.’ But before that happened he’d got in touch and said, ‘Look, we like this design and we’d like to do it, you know, for a small fee.’ And it got printed. The funny thing is, once those badges got out there, once the band had seen them, a redrawing by a professional artist actually became the Stray Cat’s official logo.” At Lewis Leathers, Harris remains close to the source of what the badge means to a certain group of people, as both catalyst and communicator. The biker and his array of (in particular, enamel) pins is as strong an image of the power of the badge as you are likely to see. In the shop are some genuine collectors-item biker jackets, simply dripping with vintage badges that Harris says are “never coming off ”. These emblems proclaim legendary brand names and infamous destinations. It was a tradition that goes back as far as the 1930s, but in 1960, as Harris points out, “The Lewis Leathers catalogue decided to show you how to customise your jacket. You could buy studs, come to the shop and get it painted, and you could start collecting the badges. And different brands would give them out, like little pieces of advertising. We ourselves are reintroducing a few of our classic badges every year. Because the thing is, you’d buy only one jacket – but you’d want to keep contributing to it.” Changing appearances, changing attitudes – the badge may only be a tiny thing, but it continues to punch well above its weight. 133
Reg wears jacket by Paul Smith, polo shirt, stylist’s own; T-shirt, model’s own.
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STYLE
Britannia Hospital Photographs Gavin Watson Styling Mark Anthony
Inmates Phil Bush, Felix Forma, Joe Hunter, Sebastian McCluskey and Reg Traviss
Joe wears sweater from Cassie Mercantile; jeans by Edwin Jeans; shirt by Scotch&Soda; hat by YMC.
Phil wears sweater by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shirt and hat by YMC.
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STYLE | Britannia Hospital
Felix wears sweater by Alexander McQueen; hat, stylist’s own; belt from Cassie Mercantile.
Sebastian wears cardigan by YMC; jeans by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; sweater by Alexander McQueen; hat by Plectrum by Ben Sherman; belt from Cassie Mercantile.
STYLE | Britannia Hospital
Reg wears suit by Mark Powell; shirt by Original Penguin.
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Phil wears sweater, stylist’s own; sunglasses by Cutler and Gross.
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STYLE | Britannia Hospital
Joe wears jacket from Cassie Mercantile; jeans by Edwin Jeans; sweater by John Smedley.
GALLERY
Nigerian Monarchs Words Chris May Photographs George Osodi
Born in Nigeria in 1974, George Osodi began working as a photographer on the now defunct Lagos-based Comet newspaper in 1999, and was a photojournalist for Associated Press in Lagos from 2002 to 2007. He says he took up photography because he wanted to “document Africa from an African perspective”. Osodi’s work straddles photojournalism and art photography. The two strands are indistinguishable on his best known project, Oil Rich Niger Delta. Shot between 2003 and 2007, the project documented the environmental destruction of the Niger Delta by multi-national oil companies. Photojournalists struggle to be accepted by the art world, which tends to consider news photography as a lesser, more ephemeral medium. Osodi made the transition after his Delta photographs were shown in 2007 at the influential contemporary art exhibition ‘documenta’ in Kassel, Germany. Oil Rich Niger Delta has since been shown in art galleries and museums around the world. Osodi’s latest project, which will be exhibited at London’s Bermondsey Project gallery this October, is titled Nigerian Monarchs. It is a collection of portraits of traditional Nigerian kings, their entourages and regalia. While Oil Rich Niger Delta was often horrifying, a modern Armageddon, Nigerian Monarchs is an affirmation of Nigeria’s cultural heritage. Osodi hopes the collection will help foster national unity. African monarchs only began to be portrayed as Osodi photographs them – from an African perspective – in the past few decades, following the colonial era. Photographs of Africa and Africans taken by Europeans between 142
the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries mostly portrayed the continent as an example of backwardness. African culture was primitive, European culture was progressive. “The colonialists would take photographs of themselves with the traditional rulers whenever they conquered a territory,” says Osodi. “You can see the kings are not happy to be there. They were being photographed for and by the colonial masters, not for themselves. They look sad.” These Victorian and Edwardian photographs resemble contemporary trophy portraits of “white hunters” showing off their kills. Nigerian Monarchs is the antidote to that. The quiet dignity of the kings in Osodi’s portraits is as moving in its own way as the images in Oil Rich Niger Delta. When the portraits are viewed together as a single artwork they acquire a collective potency. The Bermondsey Project exhibition will harness this cumulative effect through an installation in which around 200 slides will be shown one after another in rapid succession, each flashed up for five seconds. There will be no accompanying text or soundscape. The same device was used in Oil Rich Niger Delta, with considerable impact. Between 35 and 40 large-scale portraits of the kings will also be hung in the gallery. When the missionary Dr David Livingstone set off to preach to the people living along the Zambezi River in 1858, he took along a photographer. He also took along a magic lantern on which to show illustrated Bible stories. Livingstone described his lantern as “the oxyhydrogen light of civilization”. George Osodi is shining the light right back.
What led you to become a photographer? I took up photography for the love I have for my continent and my country. We don’t really document our history. Most photographs of Africa have been taken by foreign photographers. I want to document Africa from an African perspective. What is the idea behind Nigerian Monarchs? The kings are the custodians of our cultural heritage, and my idea is to mirror that culture through their personalities. As well as their portraits, I am documenting the kings’ environments, where they live, the people around them, their architecture and fashion. I also want to highlight their traditional role as peacemakers. The kings often resolve disputes in their kingdoms or with the central government, and this is particularly needed in Nigeria right now. My intention is to present the collection as a symbol of national unity rather than evidence of division. How many kings are there? Honestly, no one really knows. There are no statistics. I estimate there must be over 2,000. Nigeria is a vast country with hundreds of different languages. There are around 250 different ethnic groups and that is just the major ones. We should be happy with such an abundance of diversity rather than allowing it to create discord. Bringing together portraits of our traditional kings, from a broad range of ethnic and geographic centres, makes this point. Looking at the images as a group, there is so much that is shared by all the kingdoms that the degree of diversity ultimately suggests unity. >
HRM Pere Donokoromo II, Pere of Isaba Kingdom
HRM Alhaji Ado Bayero, Emir of Kano Kingdom
How many kings have you photographed? I am planning on photographing 100 kings. So far I have done about 50. The number 100 is symbolic. In 2014 Nigeria celebrates the 100th anniversary of the amalgamation of the northern and the southern protectorates by the British colonial government. All the kingdoms were meshed together as a country in 1914. In 2014 Nigeria will have 100 years of living together as one entity.
HRH Obi Imegwu II, Obi of Aboh Kingdom
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How did you choose which kings to photograph? What is most important to me is the age of the kingdom. Does it have a rich culture, in terms of architecture, fashion? And how much impact has a particular monarch made in his community? How big a contribution does he make? I also want a broad geographic scope, with all regions of the country included equally.
GALLERY | Nigerian Monarchs HRM Felix A Mujakperuo Orhue I, Orodje of Okpe Kingdom
How do the Nigerian people regard the kings today? They are still regarded with high esteem. In the old days, many of the kings were almost worshipped. They were believed to be the link with the gods and spirits. People would lay down their lives for the king. It was very intense in the pre-colonial era. But under colonialism, many of the traditional structures of government were dismantled and new ones put in their place, and later a central government was introduced. So the kings became less influential and the respect that they enjoyed from the people was reduced a bit, because they were no longer fully in charge of their kingdoms. What is the role of the kings today? Today the kings tend to be supplementary to the central government. They do not have constitutional power. They are
consulted and they advise. They are seen as peacemakers and conflict resolvers. They are still seen as the custodians of a kingdom’s culture and they are far closer to the people than the government. The central government is the all-in-all, but the kings are still very important. There are some bad eggs among them, of course. In the Delta, for instance, some of the kings tried to prevent the harmful things the oil companies wanted to do. Other kings only thought about the money they could gain. They were part of the problem and their greed led to problems for their region. But other kings have worked hard to end the conflict. Are the kings hereditary or elected? Most are hereditary, some are not. Sometimes the position of king rotates between several families. Some of the kings can trace their line back several thousand years; some were created more >
HRM Benjamin Ikenchuku Keagborekuzi I, The Dein of Agbor Kingdom
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HRM Oharisi III, Ovie of Ughelli Kingdom HRM Agbogidi Obi James Ikechukwu Anyasi II, Obi of Idumuje Unor Kingdom
HRM Oharisi III, Ovie of Ughelli Kingdom
recently. Groups of people can still come together to form new kingdoms today. Having survived colonisation, is globalisation putting the kings under new pressure? The same thing is happening, this time through technology. It’s OK to look at other people’s culture, but we should not just abandon the world that existed here for many centuries in favour of western culture. Now there is crosscultural interference, especially with the younger generation. It is easy for them to see the kings and what they stand for as irrelevant in modern Nigeria. So it is important to me to bring back evidence 146
of the culture that existed before even the colonial era, when we lived in harmony. We have to look back to where we are coming from and appreciate our identity if we are to live together in peace. When will the project be completed? Because Nigeria is so big, this project involves a lot of travelling, often over very long distances. That takes time here. Just getting permission from the kings takes a lot of time. They are very important people and it’s difficult to get access to them. You have to go there and present yourself and explain your project, and then they get back to you if they are interested. It often involves
travelling twice to a kingdom. The first time, you deliver a letter requesting a sitting with the king. Then you go home and wait for a call. Then you go back to take the photographs. Just one king could involve travelling thousands of miles. I started last year and my target is to finish by the end of this year or early next year. I want to complete it before the 100th anniversary celebrations begin. Nigerian Monarchs is at the Bermondsey Project, 46 Willow Walk, London SE1 11 October to 3 November bermondseyproject.com georgeosodi.photoshelter.com
GALLERY | Nigerian Monarchs
HRM Oba Alayeluwa Saheed Ademola Elegushi Kusenla III, Elegushi of Ikateland Kingdom
CULTURE
The Wag Club Whisky a’GoGo. Soho. 1980s Words Chris Sullivan
Thirty years ago, the Wag Club moved from being a weekly London club night to a fully fledged sevennights-a-week venue. For us, who used to run parties in disused warehouses on zero budgets, this was a mighty step. We had come of age, and all those who would make London such a creative hub converged under its roof and made it more than the sum of its parts. A club is only as good as those who attend. In 1979, most places wouldn’t let me and my friends in. If they did we’d always get in a fight. Being a club promoter and manager was never a career move and I never set out to make money out of it. I was happy to see my friends enjoy themselves trouble-free while I could sip free drinks and choose the music. We’d found a niche, first Billy’s and then the Blitz, but soon felt the wind of change. With Robert Elms, Steve Mahoney and Graham Smith, I started a Monday club night at the St Moritz, a basement under a Swiss restaurant in Soho. In May 1980, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, of Blitz fame, offered me a partnership in their twiceweekly spot, Hell. I DJ’d a mixed bag of funk, Latin and rockabilly until it closed after an outbreak of LSD. Then came my band, Blue Rondo a la Turk. By 1982 I realised the time was nigh for something new. The Wag came about after I’d been doing the door at Le Beat Route on Ollie O’Donnell and Steve Mahoney’s landmark Friday night. We heard that Whisky a’GoGo was looking to fill a Saturday night. We met the new proprietors Tom McCabe and Andre Abbey and sat amongst the club’s four customers on plastic pub garden chairs. The carpets were so sticky they’d whip your Weejuns off, the toilets were positively Elizabethan and the bouncers were mostly thugs. Still, we were all over it like a rash. 148
The idea behind the club was simple enough. Although influenced by New York’s Mudd Club and Les Bains Douches in Paris, and my favourite 1970s soul clubs – Crackers in Wardour Street and the Lacy Lady in Ilford – the Wag was unique. We wanted ex-punks, trannies, funky rockabillies, hepcat bikers, fetishists, gay and straight, black and white. I got in touch with my old Northern Soul DJ cohorts Paul Guntrip, who did the funk room at the Yate all-dayers, and Hector Heathcote, who span the tunes after Blue Rondo’s gigs. The result was the finest selection of music I’ve ever heard – Latin and Afro alongside the rarest 1970s funk. We kicked off in October 1982. The queue was 200 yards long and people turned up an hour before opening. The club had a capacity of 400 and the faithful regulars, dressed up to the nines, were my main priority. If you looked the part, no matter if you had 2p or £2 million, you were allowed in. The venue’s owners offered us a partnership and a profit share, and we insisted on a refurb. Most clubs back then were black holes with disco lights, so we covered the walls in cubist and fauvist murals and created our own 1960s-style furniture. We re-opened in April 1983 and, with the paint still wet, had to stump up an extra few grand to replace the customers’ ruined clothes. The weekly line up went like this: Monday was the Jazz Room with DJ Paul Murphy playing heavy bebop and Latin; Tuesday was Total Fashion Victim, the forerunner to Taboo; Wednesday was Paul Guntrip’s Heavy Duty with hip hop acts from New York; on Thursday I would book bands drawn from our crowd, such as Sade and The Pogues as well as the likes of Desmond Dekker, The Last Poets, Slim Gaillard, Les McCann, Mark Murphy and the
JBs – because no one else was booking them; for Friday, promoter Rene Gelston followed a rare groove theme; on Saturday Hector pushed a more disco/Paradise Garage vibe that was later honed by Fat Tony, who pulled in Tim Simenon from Bomb The Bass to DJ and attracted a camper crowd. By April 1985, when we opened the second floor, we had truly made our mark. Spandau Ballet, Madness, Culture Club, The Specials and Ultravox were all part of our scene. Yet still we played underground tunes with not the slightest nod to commerciality. Keeping it busy for 18 years was hard work. Luckily, Tom McCabe had every faith in me even when I was hanging by a thread. We were the first club in the UK to do hip hop, rare groove, house, mod jazz, jump ’n’ jive and bhangra. We had tea dances, live graffiti nights featuring Goldie, meat raffles, film screenings, tranny soirees and Northern Soul all-nighters. We didn’t consult marketing twats and we definitely did not have a VIP area. We did not ring up paps when the famous bowled up and no cameras were allowed in the club. If you weren’t a regular, no matter how rich or famous you were, there was no guarantee of entrance. Finally, to put the record straight, the Wag was not a New Romantic haven. It was a club that catered to an ever-growing gang of non-conformists primarily obsessed by underground black music. It was all about being yourself and not following fashion. There simply wasn’t any other option. A boxset celebrating the Wag Club is out in November on Harmless Records demonmusicgroup.co.uk/harmless Chris Sullivan’s book We Can Be Heroes with photographs by Graham Smith is out now
Chris Sullivan and Ollie O’Donnell 1983. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
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The venue of the Wag has played a massive part in the UK’s club counter culture. It was here, beneath the Wag, in the Flamingo that the whole modernist movement began. They played imported jazz, soul and ska to a crowd of young groovers on speed and black American servicemen who traded in their MA-1 flying jackets and parkas in return for spliff. Run by the Gunnell brothers, acts like Zoot Sims and Georgie Fame played live. Ella Fitzgerald popped in for a jig. After that came Whisky a’GoGo, a hang out for The Beatles and The Who. The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham had his office upstairs. I like to think we carried on a tradition when we started the Wag. Chris Sullivan, host of the Wag Everyone who worked there from the top to the bottom was truly eccentric. Tommy [McCabe] and Chris [Sullivan] liked employing them. As long as they were funny they remained. Chris said he was doing his bit for care in the community. They had cleaners who couldn’t clean, handymen who weren’t handy and secretaries who couldn’t type. I worked there painting and decorating and was utterly useless. Curnow Gillis, regular at the Wag
Steve Strange, Holli Hallett and Phil Lynott. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Chris Sullivan was, without doubt, London’s most influential club host in the swinging ’80s. He assumed his rightful role running the Wag club, powered by what he called a “sense of beano”. David Johnson, journalist
Slim Gaillard. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Bruce Oldfield and Jenny Mathias. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Because I’d booked Lee Perry I turned down a Prince after party/jam session. The club was packed but I couldn’t get the tiny toaster onto the stage. He demanded cocaine, which was duly found. He did it all in one go. He then performed his new single 15 times on the run. By the time he’d finished the club was empty. Chris Sullivan, host of the Wag
Alex Gordan, Pat Fernandez and George Michael. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
CULTURE | The Wag Club
Phil Dirtbox and Kevin Rowland. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
It wasn’t all about the music. It was also about the people. You’d always have a great intelligent conversation with someone. Kevin Rowland, frontman of Dexys
The Wag was one of the most debauched places I’ve ever seen. There were drugs, over-indulgence of all sorts and people having sex in the loos, on the dance floor, even in the lobby. It was one of the last truly elitist West End clubs before things started opening up. Dylan Jones, editor of GQ magazine
Rubber Ron. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
It was a very cool place run by cool people for cool people. It was for eclectic people who were into things. I could rely on the music. I never thought, “Why are they playing this shit?” Kevin Rowland, frontman of Dexys
Kate Garner, Jeffrey Hinton and Princess Julia. Photograph by Graham Smith
We had the first house night in the UK sometime in 1986. I remember I paid £350 in total for Kym Mazelle, CeCe Rogers and Marshall Jefferson to perform. Chris Sullivan, host of the Wag
The Wag was the place where anything could happen. Jazz dancers doing their thing, happy to be watched and admired by anyone who cared. New music being pioneered, old music being rediscovered. Reverence and irreverence in the same breathe. The Wag pushed boundaries at the same time as acknowledging its musical roots. It was an exciting time and a cultured time when dumbing down wasn’t an option. Looking back it was an astonishing feat to be holding so many varied nights in one venue in London’s West End. Christos Tolera, artist and frontman of Blue Rondo a la Turk
Boy George. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
The Raid 1987. Photograph by Dave Swindells
CULTURE | The Wag Club
Harry Edwards and Mel Lapper. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
The thing I most remember and miss about the Wag is that it felt like it belonged to us. Christos Tolera, artist and frontman of Blue Rondo a la Turk I recall one of the Beastie Boys getting thrown out for staring up girls’ skirts on the upstairs dance floor and RunD.M.C. doing an impromptu set. Louise Neal, receptionist and secretary of the Wag
Chris Sullivan and Winston. Photograph by Paul Guntrip
I met Chris Sullivan in New York in the early 1980s. He was on tour with his band Blue Rondo a la Turk. I didn’t know cats were laying it down like that in London. He told me about his club and that he could hook up my band The Uptown Atomics with a residency. Nothing ever happened like that club. All kinds of people, and every night was different. It’s weird how much of an organic scene it was. Real people, real music. Jon E Edwards, singer, actor and film producer
I remember going there when I first toured the UK and I thought, “Wow. I never knew these British guys were into the same shit as us.” The music was as good as it gets with the funk and the Latin. And those cats had style. August Darnell, aka Kid Creole Pinkie Braithwaite and Holli Hallett. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Pat Fernandez and friends. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
So many famous people came there; every actor, musician and artist. They were all so normal and no one paid them any heed. You could talk to them and they’d buy a beer and not expect free champagne. I remember George Michael who’d been a regular coming in with his bodyguard and everyone laughed. Alan Campbell, manager of the Wag
One night at the Wag in the late 1980s we (Derek Delves, John Harris and Ian Simmonds) were hosting one of our early pre-Sandals protobeatnik clubnights that eventually evolved into Tongue Kung Fu. It was called The Girl with Three Noses and we would turn the upstairs of the Wag into a kind of psychedelic clubhouse and emporium, decorating it with plastic bead curtains, kitsch paintings, props and objets d’art, boardgames, traffic signs, flowers, flashing road lamps and pretty much anything we could beg borrow or steal in Soho, and then turn the furniture upside down. In fact anything to completely piss off the management, one of whom was the legendary Winston, doorman and security, and the humourless hardman Gerry. Wildcat Will, aka William Blanchard, artist and drummer
Photograph by Dave Swindells
I moved from being a suburban DJ playing Northern Soul in Ilford to playing Friday night at the Wag in the mid-1980s. It was like stepping into a new world. I felt that I had actually arrived in London’s underground clubland as a proper DJ. And I was right. It was THE place to play and I will always be grateful to Chris Sullivan for giving me that chance. I still have the flyer. Eddie Piller, founder of Acid Jazz Records Jane Rogers and Eve Cameron. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
The Wag Club was not only the best and most unique club in London but also the best and most unique club in the world at that time. There will never be, and nor could there ever be, another club like it. Paul Murphy, original Wag DJ It quickly became the centre of a very small world; it contrived to make you feel special for being in there. There weren’t private members’ clubs then but the Wag was an unofficial members’ club. It had the atmosphere of a house party. Robert Elms, broadcaster and writer
Total Fashion Victim was Stephen Linard’s only foray into club-running and this was the first time I had a go at DJing. It was a very tongue-incheek type of affair. We basically got drunk and ran around the club. Princess Julia, journalist and DJ
Steve Dagger and Chris Sullivan 1984. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
One of my abiding memories is watching Robert, who became Marie after a sex change, become the receptionist and how casually everyone treated the transition. Funny thing was she dressed like a member of the WI in twin sets and pearls, a bit like Maggie Thatcher. She wouldn’t even have been let in had she not had the change. Most people didn’t know she’d been a bloke. I think that appealed to Chris Sullivan. Christos Tolera, artist and frontman of Blue Rondo a la Turk
Shane MacGowan and friends. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
The Wag crowd represented the straight boys of the scene and consisted of Robert Elms, Christos Tolera, Graham Smith, Dylan Jones, Martin and Gary Kemp, and Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet, etc. The club had its roots still in Bowie and stuff but also recognised Latin, jazz and rhythm ’n’ blues as valid styles of dance music. These boys were snappy dressers, their look was tailored and they took inspiration from film noir, 1950s rockabilly and variations on the soul boy look. Princess Julia, journalist and DJ 153
CULTURE | The Wag Club There was always plenty of action in the toilets. Lots of people used to lock themselves in and have sex and we’d have to get them out at the end of the night. Alan Campbell, manager of the Wag George Michael was a regular and one night while he was number one with ‘Careless Whisper’, he passed out in the toilet at the Wag and I had to go and sort him out. He had no money on him, despite being number one, so I had to take him home in my cab. Stephen Linard, fashion designer I’ll never forget Alan, the manager, pulling me aside one night and asking me why everyone was so happy. I popped another pill and said, “I have no idea mate!” Karl Adams, former manager of Haircut 100
You could feel the Wag getting nearer as you walked down Wardour Street; the “hipness” quota rising, the sense of anticipated revelry cutting the already thick Soho air. Then when you got to the doorway with the steps rising steeply behind and Chris Sullivan won the door, always immaculate, always promising elevated entertainment, so the pulse quickened and the synapses snapped. You are now at the Wag, the centre of this intense little universe where the night is a thrilling, dangerous place. Robert Elms, broadcaster and writer
Peter Godwin and Marco Pirroni 1984. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
Keren Woodward, Gary Crowley, Peter Barrett and Paul Simper 1983. Photograph by Graham Smith
A young Patsy Kensit arrived in her school uniform and they let her in. Claire Morgan, regular at the Wag
I remember one night Keith Richards brought his new wife, Patti Hansen, down. Sullivan had met him at Julien Temple’s wedding. In the Evening Standard newspaper the following week there were Keith’s top things to see in London. Number one was the Houses of Parliament, number two was Westminster Cathedral and number three was the Wag. Steve Walsh, frontman of Manicured Noise
Wag regular. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Cherry Chatters and Chris Sullivan. Photograph by John Chatters Chris Sullivan, Winston and Ollie O’Donnell 1983. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
I recall getting the knock back from Dee C Lee [vocalist in The Style Council] for dance floor sex. Wise move on her part. Also having a drink round the corner with The Clash waiting for the Wag to open. They were gents but too scared to go in as they thought they wouldn’t get in. Sullivan’s door policy was “shoes maketh the man/woman”, which I follow still. Derrick Furnival, club promoter Haircut 100 1984. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
If you weren’t welcome anywhere else you were welcome at the Wag. And you could be anything you wanted to be there… except boring. Suggs, frontman of Madness
Steve Strange and Philip Sallon. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
On one night it started to kick off, which was extremely rare as there were never any fights in the club. I was standing behind Afrika Bambaataa, who is a big old lump, and he just banged that big stick he carried with him on the floor a few times and it all stopped and people carried on dancing. Suggs, frontman of Madness
I used to go there a lot with Marco [Nelson] from the Young Disciples in the 1980s when we were doing The Style Council. It had that mod mentality of purity of style and music. You’d not hear a bad record all night and everyone dressed up to go there. Paul Weller, musician
Kathy McIntosh and Gina Vassiliou. Photo courtesy of Kathy McIntosh
Steve Walsh. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Vaughn Toulouse and Fat Tony. The Raid 1987. Photograph by Dave Swindells
There were a lot of tribes in London at the time and in the Wag you’d see them all – rockabilly, psychobilly, beatboy, buffalo boy, mod, cowboy, you name it. It was an oasis of individuality. It was the one place where you always felt comfortable. Suggs, frontman of Madness I remember George Michael dancing to his own records at Fat Tony’s ABBA night. The miners and the ANC benefits in the 1980s. Vaughn Toulouse’s funeral wake in 1991. Brad Pitt coming in on a Thursday night with Thandie Newton and Tom Cruise while they were in London filming Interview with the Vampire in the early 1990s. Louise Neal, receptionist and secretary of the Wag
It was one of those places with an old Soho ethic; a community spirit. But it was very much where the lifestyle of it would take its toll on some of its regulars. Princess Julia, journalist and DJ
George Michael. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
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It was for people that were into dressing up. If you weren’t into that, “Fuck off.” There were plenty of places that cater to those who want to dress high street so stay there. Kevin Rowland, frontman of Dexys
Steve Strange and Chris Sullivan. Photograph by Holli Hallett
Best club. Best music. Best bands. Best people. Best time. Karl Adams, former manager of Haircut 100 Tranny Paul and friends. Photograph by Paul Sturridge
Right at the heart of the Wag’s pioneering years supporting the British jazz dance scene, I remember in particular a night when platinum hard bop drummer Tommy Chase took his band there. Dark, sweaty and absolutely throbbing with Chase’s pounding beats, the place was jumping with the flying silhouettes of the boys who have found a new way to dance to a timeless music. You knew it was important. Mark Webster, broadcaster and writer
Hector Heathcote 1983. Photograph by Shapersofthe80s
Phil Dirtbox, Jay Strongman and Rob Milton 1983. Photograph by Graham Smith
Princess Julia. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
Robbie Gordon was the very excellent bass player with Gil Scott-Heron’s band during much of the 1980s. He was living in London and trying to launch a solo career as a hip hop artist, so I got him a gig at the Wag. His percussion player was a lovely large gentleman by the name of Wendell who had undergone a recent heart transplant. It was a miracle he was walking. At one point in the gig Robbie told the audience about Wendell’s medical adventures and did a call and response thing: “Everybody say ‘Wen-dell’, say ‘trans-plant, trans-plant’.” Needless to say the Wag crowd rose to the occasion and gave maximum props to Wendell. It was quite surreal to hear the audience chanting “transplant” for this guy on the stage. Only at the Wag. Steve Walsh, frontman of Manicured Noise 156
I remember one night when Chris Sullivan’s pals from his home town turned up with two big coffee jars full of dried mushrooms and gave them out to everyone. I was dressed like Richard III with a big fur collar and thought I was a wolf and was crouched in the toilet on top of the sinks for hours. Afterwards I carried on the idea and ended howling like a wolf on top of some scaffold in Soho Square. Derek Delves, frontman of the Sandals
We were high out of our minds as usual and laughing so hard, which made it worse, and ended up having to literally barricade ourselves behind furniture and props in a corner upstairs by the fire exit. Then someone grabbed a fire extinguisher and turned it on and let him have it before we escaped onto the street. Wildcat Will, aka William Blanchard, artist and drummer
Because of that all the doors opened for me – this young creole soul boy from NYC. In there I met gangsters, models, punks, clowns and a galaxy of stars. It was a place where style took first place over fashion. I was in London recently and went to check out the building, and of course it’s now some kind of corporate beer hall for arseholes. Jon E Edwards, singer, actor and film producer
CULTURE | The Wag Club This was around the time when water was served at the bars instead of alcohol and nights like Dave Dorrell’s seminal LOVE at the Wag were so full of smoke machines and strobes and people tripping their tits off on ecstasy and acid you couldn’t see an inch in front of your face. On this particular night I painted “Fuck War” and peace symbols and flowers on a construction hat I nicked with oil paint, which takes weeks to dry, and placed it on a shop mannequin. The paint rubbed off on Winston’s brand new tux and he went absolutely fucking ape shit. I mean, he really wanted to kill us. Wildcat Will, aka William Blanchard, artist and drummer
I had the chance to DJ upstairs there when GQ threw one of their annual parties at the Wag, which naturally made for an eclectic crowd. The Wag always ensured that one of its many non-compromising stances was its music. So I bumbled through a selection of the right kind of tunes until I hit pay dirt and did the one thing I needed to do. I played Ramsey Lewis & Marlena Shaw’s ‘Wade In The Water’, and Howard Marks suddenly burst into life and danced the arse off it. Mark Webster, broadcaster and writer
When Chris took it on himself to redesign the whole top floor – everything from the skirting boards to the metal grills – and then hand paint the walls with futurist murals, he pushed himself to the edge. It was a mighty undertaking that took six weeks. I was helping prepare the walls. Near to the end he hadn’t slept for four days and was doing an interview for Harpers & Queen magazine about being a dandy. The only space was in the toilet so he did the interview there and he was covered in paint – his face, hair, boilersuit. The interviewer, Hamish Bowles, started asking questions and Chris fell asleep midsentence. When he woke up an hour later, Hamish was gone. Chris was mortified. Curnow Gillis, regular at the Wag We had a strict door policy to protect the patrons. Soho, back then, was a rough red light district full of sex shops, brothels and the people those places attract – pushers, pimps, pickpockets, muggers, serviceman, drunks, stag nights, skinheads – it would have been nonsense not to employ a stringent door policy. The club was intended purely for our group and not for those who walked up off the street. In those days you’d be attacked for wearing a hat and the general public didn’t take kindly to the likes of Boy George dressed as a Geisha gal, Philip Sallon in full length sari and matching tiara and Miss Binnie walking around in nothing but an odd point of view. Chris Sullivan, host of the Wag
Steve Strange. Photograph by Chris Sullivan
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CINEMA
Irvine Welsh Filth. Hibernian. Miami
Words Paolo Hewitt Photographs Ben Speckmann
Fresh, raw, highly imaginative, wildly funny and very moving, the work of Irvine Welsh has established him as one of Britain’s leading authors. Over the course of 12 novels he has mapped out the consciousness and adventures of working-class Britain with incredible insight and wit. What’s more, he has channelled his bittersweet stories thorough a brilliant use of the Scottish dialect. The man is a “radge” par excellence. Four of his books have been turned into films and the latest, Filth – based on his 1998 novel – is out in September. Let’s talk football. You’re a Hibs fan. Your bitter rivals, Hearts, have just gone into administration. Happy? It’s not exactly been a shock; it’s been signposted for years. It’s a bit like a having a neighbour who is gorging themselves on steroids, and then starts self-harming. There’s only so many times you can say, “Maybe cut back on the old steroids there, mate” before you leave them to get on with it. Otherwise, it’s difficult to overemphasise my indifference without sounding paradoxically emphatic. What are you currently reading? I’ve just finished John Niven’s Straight White Male. I’m now reading DBC 158
Pierre’s Lights Out In Wonderland, which I started years ago but lost my copy, so it’s great to be reunited with it. What authors or books have recently inspired you? Apart from the above mentioned, I really like Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane. Any writing that’s excellent inspires you. A great book tells you, “That’s where I need to be”, while a crap one gives you the encouragement that you can do better than that. Did you spend a lot of time in the local library as a kid? I used to go a lot to the library at our scheme in Muirhouse with my mates Colin and Dougie. We went there as it was the only public building you could go to at night if it was cold and you were too young for the pub. We used to fart around a bit and were always getting chucked out by the staff. But my love of storytelling initially came more from people t han books; family members who’d had a drink at parties, older kids boasting of their sexual and fighting prowess outside the chippy. I drank all that stuff up. It was only later that I made the connection with books. I was always quite social, so I never felt isolated at that point. But you do need to get off on your own a lot to become
a writer, and I realised that I had to spend time alone. When I discovered books they became a guilty pleasure; I’m sure everybody thought I was masturbating all the time in my bedroom, when I was (usually) reading. What clothes do you like at the moment? When you get embedded in your fifties, the mirror becomes less a valued friend and more a sneering adversary. I’m still hanging on to the 1980s Casual style by the skin of my teeth, but favouring more shirts and jackets these days. I spend a lot of time in Miami so I like kicking around in shorts, tees and flip-flops; no real decisions to make. You spend a lot of time abroad. Why is that? The only reasons you live anywhere other than your own place are work, love and curiosity. With me it’s the latter two, as in my game I can pretty much work from anywhere. You have never appeared in Granta’s Best Novelists list? Do you feel like a literary outsider? I think there is very much a social class element to British literary culture. Anybody who knows anything of its machinations would have to be a fool, >
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CINEMA | Irvine Welsh or have an agenda, to deny this basic fact. That said, I’ve not always felt like an outsider, as I’ve been shown a lot of love from some literary insiders over the years. In some ways the perception of me as a literary outsider has very much worked in my favour; there are very few Booker prize winners of the last 20 years I’d be willing to swap royalty cheques with. When writing a book, how disciplined are you? You’re never disciplined enough. You can always do more. On some projects I’m quite easily distracted, moving in and out. In others I’m absorbed and lock myself in a room for days until they’re done. The strange thing is that these divergent approaches seldom result in much difference to the quality of what you’re producing. But you believe they do. Do your ideas come from hard graft or inspiration. Or both? It’s the old story, if you are grafting hard and obsessing over what you are doing, then good ideas are more likely to come thick and fast. But you can’t rule out that “on the beach” moment, when your mind is clear and something just pops into it. Why do you like the art of writing? There are two states; one is when you are having just fun and knocking down ideas, characters, scenes, dialogues, storylines, etc. The other part, when you try to mould this material into a book or screenplay structure is a bit more frustrating, and you have to fight through that, because it’s ultimately more rewarding. You’re making something rather than just messing about. I am a young man in a book shop. I see you and ask, “What is the best Irvine Welsh book to start off with?” How do you reply? I’d tell them to start with Skagboys, then Trainspotting, then Porno, then Glue. Are printed books now facing extinction and if so, is this a good thing?
I’m not so sure. I think it’s a bit like vinyl. People want artifacts; possessions, solid things to hold and look at, not just a digital entry on a list on Kindle and iTunes. I think we’ll be operating twotier; the electronic medium for looking at stuff but for an artist we really like, we want their proper shit. Happy childhood? Very happy childhood, somewhat troubled adolescence. Happy now? I’ve always been a happy camper. Even at my most low and miserable, there was always a side I reserved for joy and ecstasy. But I never thought I could be as happy as I am now.
‘MY LOVE OF STORYTELLIN’ INITIALLY CAME FROM PEOPLE MORE THAN BOOKS’ You worked recently with HBO. Tell me about it. We worked for ages on something that never got made. It was a very, very ambitious show in terms of numbers of cast and finances required, and eventually it just wasn’t something they felt they could run with given their other commitments. It was such an excellent experience for me, as they were amazing people to work with. The level of professionalism there was way beyond what I’d encountered before. So I’ve absolutely no regrets and would do it again tomorrow. Actually, I am doing it again, but that’s another story. A kid comes up to you and says, “I want to be a writer.” You say? Get used to spending time on your own. You need to have quite a big ego, but also the ability to get over yourself. Those two elements are very hard to
reconcile but every really good writer I know has them. Many of your books are now films. Pleased with the results? Yes. They all have different things going for them. Any independent movie adaptation is hard to do, and I’ve had four now with the prospect of more, so I can’t really complain. James McAvoy is a great actor. True or false? He’s the best. Filth will show this to be the case. Are you obsessed with anything on TV at the moment? Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Banshee, Boardwalk Empire – all those American cable shows. A dealer comes up to you in a bar and says, “I love your work; have an E on me.” You say? I just graciously take it and tell them I’ll have it later. Then give it to somebody else. It’s very rare that people give good drugs away to strangers. Have you ever experienced writer’s block? No. I don’t know what it is. Could you be anything else but a writer? No. I tried, I failed. Do you like American sports now? I love ice hockey and can get seduced by the easy charm of baseball. And when are you going to let me write my biography about you? I’m still in shark mode, going forward, not reflecting back. But it would be nice to sit down one day and let it all out. There are a lot of personal joys and pains in my early days that I’ve taken great effort to hide from the world, which I’m just no longer that bothered about. I suppose it’s the grace and perspective age confers. Filth is out in September filthmovie.co.uk irvinewelsh.net 161
Simon Blumenfeld, Not Forgotten Association annual garden party, Buckingham Palace, 1980
CULTURE
Simon Blumenfeld London Classics. The Stage. The Battle of Cable Street. Barnardo’s
Words Paolo Hewitt Photographs courtesy of Eric Bloomfield and Derek Solomons
This is the story of three men, bound forever by a book. Two of the men are dead, one is alive. Of the two who have passed, one was a God-loving Dubliner and the other an East End Jewish communist. The third man is a contemporary working-class writer, and that’s me. Simon Blumenfeld’s 1938 novel, Doctor of the Lost, is a brilliant, fictionalised account of the life and times of Thomas Barnardo, the man who created the famous Barnardo homes for orphans. It is a great novel – Dickensian in its ambition, brilliant in its evocation of the East End in the mid-1800s, full of life and great characters. You can smell the rotting rubbish, hear the noise of the crowd, find yourself immersed in a special London spirit. And it is a thrilling experience. I had never heard of the book or the writer. It was sent to me by a publishing company called London Books. They wondered if I, as someone who had grown up in care and written about it, would provide an introduction to the work. Intrigued, I started the book. Within two days, I was hooked. I could not put it down. I hated turning the page. It meant I was getting to the end.
I rang the publishers to signal my strong acceptance of their offer. I spoke to John King, the man who, along with Martin Knight, started London Books. Knight wrote Hoolifan: 30 Years of Hurt, one of the earliest and best accounts of football fandom in the 1970s. King is the author of The Football Factory, plus six other novels including Skinheads and Human Punk. He, like many other writers who are not university educated or middle class, felt the sharp rejection of the literary establishment in this country. Unlike many other writers, he fought back. London Books is his way of doing so. “I started London Books five or six years ago now, with another author, Martin Knight, and we did it because there were these great old London novels we’d read that had been out of print for decades and we couldn’t understand why,” he told me. “The authors were long forgotten – in some way marginalised, I think – and yet their stories and writing styles were more vivid and exciting than so much of the official canon. These books show every day, working-class London in a way it’s hard to find elsewhere. These are uncensored novels and they cut through time, don’t feel dated like so many other stuffy, plodding books
written by more conventional writers. To date, most of our London Classics were first published in the 1930s, but reading these books now they still feel alive and wonderful. We both have old family connections to London and in some ways it feels as if the books connect with our own histories, and certainly with our own writing. These London Classics are part of a tradition that has been dismissed, forced into the shadows, and we’re bringing them back into the spotlight.” The first Blumenfeld book London Books reissued was his debut novel, Jew Boy, originally published in the UK in 1935. The title is deliberately provocative and served its purpose, instantly bringing Blumenfeld great notoriety. When it was published in America it was renamed The Iron Garden. “The British title,” writer Ken Worpole explains in his introduction to the book, “was an act of cultural defiance, taking a term of abuse and turning it into a badge of honour – a rhetorical device later used by subsequent cultural groups who felt themselves excluded from mainstream culture.” The book is important, viewed as the founder of a literature that pertains wholly to the East End Jewish > 163
experience. Other key writers in this line include Isaac Rosenberg, Wolf Mankowitz, Harold Pinter, Steven Berkoff and Arnold Wesker. Blumenfeld’s main character in Jew Boy, Alec, is an interesting proposition. He belongs to a generation of young Jews who feel little allegiance to either their parents or the culture they have been raised in. Instead, with fascism on the march in Europe, they discover themselves in Left Wing politics. It was the likes of Alec, for example, who famously fought the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley on Cable Street in 1936; an event Blumenfeld would later write a play about. For Alec, read Blumenfeld. In his early teens Blumenfeld discovered communism through an East End Jewish network of social clubs and meetings. The impact was deep. He remained a Marxist all his life. Blumenfeld was to meet royalty, and exchange libations with the rich and the famous, but his convictions never wavered. “When you bury me,” he ordered, “place me in the communist corner of the Golders Green Crematorium.” And they did. Blumenfeld was born in 1907 in Whitechapel, and his father was a cap maker who also turned his hand to chicken slaughtering. The writer attended school in Stepney but had to leave due to financial restraints. As a young man he worked in the East End’s famous rag trade and in the evenings he either boxed or wrote. Although it is not Blumenfeld’s best novel, Jew Boy made his name. He followed it up with Phineas Kahn: Portrait of an Immigrant in 1937 before publishing Doctor of the Lost a year later. The work was based on interviews he conducted with Thomas Barnardo’s surviving widow, and in writing the book Blumenfeld looked backwards to the place that had helped shape him as a child. “He is essentially imagining the streets he grew up in as they were 70 or so years earlier,” John King told me. “I’ve long been interested in the old East End, and Doctor of the Lost is right there in its heart; it shows the deprivation suffered by so many people, but also how one brave and decent man 164
could make such a difference.” Barnardo was indeed a great man. Born in Dublin, he arrived in the East End in 1866 with one ambition: become a doctor and then move to China and work with the poor. He never got out of London. A man of strong religious convictions, Barnardo was appalled by the conditions he found himself in. Whole families lived in one room. The streets were filled with rubbish and excrement. Within a month of his arrival, he was helping to stem a vicious outbreak of cholera that was claiming hundreds of victims. His selfless actions ingratiated himself into the raw, suspicious community of the East End, a community that Blumenfeld never romanticises. One night, a young lad takes Barnardo on a walk and shows him the hundreds of young, parentless children living rough on the streets. Barnardo is shaken by the sight and
‘THESE ARE UNCENSORED NOVELS. THEY CUT THROUGH TIME’ knows he cannot turn his back on them. He looks to his God for help and then, against all the odds, sets about establishing one of the first ever children’s homes in this country. He did so against the wishes of an establishment made up of corrupt vicars and councillors, plus his own jealous contemporaries at university who sought to bring him down. Doctor of the Lost was Blumenfeld’s last novel. He entered the war as an intense, serious man, yet, remarkably, seems to have emerged from it with a far more flamboyant personality. Deciding that writing books did not pay enough, he joined the theatrical paper The Stage and took on the role of drama critic. Dressing in beautiful three-piece
suits – a legacy of his experience in the East End rag trade – with his moustache waxed and his bow ties straight and colourful, Blumenfeld became a great London character, espousing both communism and notable style. He caroused with the likes of Liberace, Bob Hope, Spike Milligan, Morecambe and Wise and Ringo Starr – yet he remained a humble man. It is telling that when, in the 1980s, Jew Boy was republished for the first
CULTURE | Simon Blumenfeld
Simon Blumenfeld, at home, 1933
time, no one at The Stage had any idea of his past career. Blumenfeld may have dressed to impress but he was never overbearing. As for his books, they not only serve to entertain and educate, they remain great snapshots of London past. In Jew Boy, work and the mores of 1930s society are the focus. Alec and his factory workers toil for 10 hours a day in gruelling conditions, while girls are thrown out of their digs for coming
home after 10 at night. When one of the characters, Olive, turns to prostitution, Blumenfeld charts this part of her journey in such a matter-offact tone that we are led to assume this was common practice among many women of the time. In Doctor of the Lost we see and feel the East End suffused in grime and dirt. We are also highly moved by Barnardo’s actions, which create a chain of events that will see thousands of
orphans given a home and a future their predecessors never enjoyed. Barnardo’s work, rooted in unswerving faith and deep compassion, tells us that the impossible can always be made possible. And, in varying degrees, that is the story that really binds together our Irishman, our Jew and our Londoner. london-books.co.uk 165
STYLE
Jacket by Vivienne Westwood; sweater by Agnes b.
West End Lane Photographs Paul Farrell Styling Richard Simpson Grooming Jay Zhang at ERA Management Musician Mojo Gavican-Camm of Two Jackals twojackals.blogspot.co.uk
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Jacket by Schott; trousers by Vivienne Westwood; shirt, necklace and belt, stylist’s own.
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Jacket by Vivienne Westwood; trousers by C.P. Company; sweater by Agnes b; shoes by Bass; hat by Christy’s; belt by Richard James; socks by Uniqlo.
STYLE | West End Lane
Coat by Rake; shirt by Alexander McQueen.
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Jacket by Paul Smith; top by Nudie Jeans.
STYLE | West End Lane
Coat by Paul Smith; trousers by C.P. Company; shirt by Medwinds; shoes by Bass; belt, stylist’s own; socks by Uniqlo.
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Jacket, stylist’s own; shirt by Paul Smith.
STYLE | West End Lane
Coat by Edwin Jeans; jacket by Albam; scarf by Paul Smith.
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BULLETIN
Barbour Beacon Heritage by Norton&Sons Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Karen Mason
Boaters Steve Gaull and Andrew Oxley
For this season Barbour has worked with Patrick Grant, of Savile Row tailors Norton&Sons, on its high-end line Beacon Heritage. With a nod to the brand’s original consumers when it started in 1894, this collection is inspired by fishermen and workers of the Northumbrian coast, who required
hard-wearing gear that protected them from the often harsh elements. Delving deep into the company’s extensive archives, Grant discovered materials such as felt and quilting, which have been used in modern ways to add subtle touches to garments as well as add comfort and luxury. Leaning on his own
expertise, Grant has created softtailored, finest wool blazers alongside some of the cosiest, most enveloping knitwear that will keep you warm and refined for the winter. barbour.com nortonandsons.co.uk
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FOLIO
Black Prophet and Richard Kpakpo Odametey
Africa Oyé Festival Liverpool’s Africa Oyé festival began in 1992 as a small indoor affair attended by a few hundred hardcore African music enthusiasts. Today it attracts 40,000-50,000 people to Sefton Park, a bucolic, 235-acre site on the south side of the city. The festival presents established and emergent artists, and this year’s June event included Mokoomba (Zimbabwe), Zong Zing All Stars (Congo), Atongo Zimba (Ghana/London), Son Yambu (Cuba), Jay (Cape Verde), Osibisa (Ghana/London), Black Prophet (Ghana), Dele Sosimi Afrobeat Orchestra (Nigeria/London) and Yaaba Funk (Ghana/London). The sun mostly shone and the music was magic. One of the particular pleasures of Africa Oyé is the diversity of its audience. Because it is free, supported by Liverpool City Council and Arts Council England, there are as many locals as visitors. Production values are high end, but front of stage it has the feel of a community festival, with black and white, young and old, well off and poorer people happily mingling. No other British festival of its size feels the same. “We call it the world in one park,” says Paul Duhaney, who joined as an Arts Council-sponsored trainee in 1999 and this year takes over as artistic director from Kenny Murray. That Africa Oyé continues to be free is due in part to the determination of its organisers. It also has something to do with Liverpool’s history. In the 18th century, Liverpool grew fat on the transatlantic slave trade, supplying ships that transported over two million slaves from Africa to the Americas. That’s a lot of blood money. In 1999, Liverpool City Council made a formal apology, and in 2007, the bicentenary of the abolition of the British trade, the International Slavery Museum was opened in the city. By underwriting an annual celebration of African music, Liverpool is again doing the right thing. “The ethos of Africa Oyé,” says Duhaney, “is that whenever you switch on the news, everything about Africa is negative. Poverty, AIDS, famine, wars. But I’ve spent time in Africa and I’ve seen the infrastructure they’ve got, and sometimes it’s better than ours. We’re saying, ‘hang on, there are positive things coming from Africa.’” In early 1999, Tottenham-born Duhaney, who organised raves in the late 1980s, was about to relocate to Los Angeles. “My friends organised a surprise leaving party, where I met this Scouse girl. We fell in love and I ended up moving to Liverpool. From LA to L8 [the Toxteth area postcode], as we say. A few weeks after I got here, all the arts organisations got together to recruit trainees. No one else wanted to be put in this strange leftfield organisation, but it attracted me.” Founding director Kenny Murray set up the festival after a serendipitous meeting in the 1980s. “I was working on a pirate radio station, Toxteth Community Radio,” says Murray. “I played a lot of African music, much of which I got from Sterns African Record Centre in London. I became friendly with Charles Easmon [co-founder of the new Sterns premises in 1983], and we thought, ‘why don’t we get some bands to come to Liverpool?’ I had some friends at the music festival WOMAD, and they sorted me out.” >
Fiston Lusambo and Mick Jo Lusala of Zong Zing All Stars
Drum Troupe
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Fiston Lusambo, Mick Jo Lusala and Saidi Kanda
Murray had no idea the festival would grow so big. “Liverpool is one of the most conservative music cities in the world,” he says. “The Beatles don’t do a lot of good in some ways. Reggae was never really popular here, hip hop and rap took a long time. But socially and politically, there’s no better place in Britain to have an African music festival. The audience here is astonishing.” The big challenge is to keep Africa Oyé free. Like most arts organisations, it has recently experienced funding cuts. “We’re
FOLIO | Africa Oyé Festival
Richmond Kessie. Bandleader of Yaaba Funk
becoming more self-sufficient,” says Duhaney. “We bring in more money each year through sponsorship and through the traders on site, the bar and merchandise, collections, our iPhone app.” “Africa Oyé is a real festival,” he adds, “where people gather to listen to music, to talk to each other, to eat and have fun, and we want to keep it free. There has to be something for people who can’t afford those big-ticket events.” africaoye.com Words Chris May Photographs Mattias Pettersson
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Black Prophet and Thunder Strike
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FOLIO | Africa OyĂŠ Festival
Helen McDonald of Yaaba Funk
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FOLIO | Go Hard Boyz Go Hard Boyz Dirt and quad bikes are, by their very nature, more likely to be found out in the wilderness tackling the roughest terrains. So it might sound rather odd to discover a group of men, women and children in Harlem, New York, who are finding all kinds of ways to ride these machines in the city. But that’s exactly what happened when a few trails’ riders were relaxing back on the stoop one evening in 1999. When Don Villenueva and Shea Evans started the Go Hard Boyz, the “movement”, as they like to describe it, had 10 original members. Today it boasts close to 100 members, which includes both recreational riders and extreme sports professionals. Due to their unique riding style and attitude, recognition has spread far and wide and the Go Hard Boyz are now supported and acknowledged by pro riders such as Larry Linkogle, Ronnie Faisst and Matt Vara. They like to customise their bikes in a flashy way, but that is nothing compared to the flashiness of how they ride them. Their logo, a face mask with a backwards baseball cap, defines their attitude – “Do it with style”. More importantly, Shea talks sincerely about creating a “brotherhood” and has even made safety helmets a style element of their group. As they say, “It’s bigger than bikes.” From humble beginnings, today the movement boasts merchandise including clothing. In 2001 they released a DVD called 12 O’Clock, which showcased their styles and stunts. Currently, Shea is working on a new documentary entitled, fittingly, 1Dream2Ride. ghbclothing.com
Shea Evans and GHB Harlemworldsterl
Photographs Janette Beckman
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FOLIO | Go Hard Boyz
Thirsty-reem
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FOLIO | Ace Cafe Ton-Up Day
Ace Cafe Ton-Up Day, Brooklands Museum As part of the legendary Ace Cafe’s 75th anniversary, on 23 June a ride out was staged from the Ace in London to the Brooklands Museum in Surrey, in the spirit of the original ton-up boys. The museum sits on the site of the world’s first purpose built motor sport venue, which opened in 1907. It closed in 1939, and today part of the famous banked track remains, as does the test hill that was created to test both breaking and acceleration capabilities on a variety of machines. As part of the Ace Cafe event, a host of vintage machines turned out. Some were simply too delicate and precious to do little more than be admired, but others were put through their paces on the test hill by all kinds of engineering enthusiasts. ace-cafe-london.com brooklandsmuseum.com Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross
FOLIO | Ace Cafe Ton-Up Day
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ICON
The Sweatshirt Words Chris Sullivan Photographs Paul Vickery Boxer Khaled Ramadan
Location All Stars Boxing Gym, 576 Harrow Road, London W10 allstars-gym.co.uk
The plain heather grey sweatshirt with the double “V” at the front and back of the neck plays a major part in any conscientious style monger’s wardrobe. Like all urban classics, it cannot be usurped. It is the pinnacle of its type. Its inception, like so many things, was born out of that mother of invention, necessity. Legend has it that one Bennie Russell, a college football player for the University of Alabama, complained to his dad, Benjamin Russell – who owned an undergarment manufacturer, the Russell Corporation of Alexander City – that the regulation wool sweaters his team used for practice were too itchy. Bennie suggested something more comfortable using the soft fleece or terry cotton of the Russell Corporation underwear. Russell Sr set about creating the “sweat”, as it became known, in 1926. Bennie’s teammates loved it and within months he had set up a nice little earner selling the shirts to other clubs. In 1932 they set up the Southern Manufacturing Company, which managed a designated athletics apparel division. The popularity was unbridled, seized upon by Ivy League football teams who emblazoned their college names on the front. Like jeans, the “double V” neck design was virtually ubiquitous. The “V” was simply a double layer of cotton jersey webbing, thicker than the cotton of the shirt’s body, designed to soak up the players’ sweat. It was also used on the collar 190
and cuffs. As with all utility clothing, such a detail, once unglamorous and purely functional, has come to denote a garment of quality and providence. The “V” has become a sign of authenticity, even though the “sweat” was never intended for anything other than sporting use. The sweatshirt made the big leap into civvy street when demobbed US servicemen took advantage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. This allowed them 12 months’ unemployment dosh, affordable mortgages, low interest loans and, most importantly, cash to attend institutes of further education. Suddenly colleges were awash with ex-servicemen who wore the clothes they’d been given while at war; work clothes such as jeans and the services-issue PE sweatshirt, sometimes called a Slap Shot. Russell Athletic made the bulk of these, as well as other manufacturers such as Sears, Roebuck and Company. The servicemen had a huge impact on the youth of the day in both clothing and attitude. Late 1940s America was a period of self-examination, with many young people, having seen their country drop two atomic bombs on Japan, becoming sceptical of their country’s rightwing leanings. Meanwhile the colleges, full of men in their twenties who had killed first hand and seen the futility of war, were sitting alongside impressionable teenagers. Much of what would develop into the beatnik, and then
hippy, movement emanated from these classrooms. As is the way with these things, the original sweatshirts were much converted, leading to cheaper copies. By the late 1950s, the “V” was usually a single layer of ribbed cotton, and by the 1960s it was purely decorative; a flat overlock stitch on the collar. By the 1970s it had disappeared altogether. However, the detail resurfaced in the 1990s via the style-obsessed Japanese, who had bought many of the original looms from the 1920s. With the authentic machinery they set about replicating the real deal. Around this time, one such company, Full Count, started by Mikiharu Tsujita, constructed its sweatshirts using cotton from Zimbabwe “harvested by hand as opposed to machines, which ensures that the cotton is not damaged and keeps its original integrity”, Tsujita explains. These garments are as longlasting as they are stylish. Today, companies such as Buzz Rickson’s are creating authentic replicas of the originals. Champion, responsible for popularising the sweatshirt, is again looking at the history of the garment, and the guys behind Heritage Research are launching Russell Athletic Archive next year. Despite, or perhaps because of, its simplicity and practicality, the sweatshirt garners legions of new fans with each new generation. russellathleticarchive.com
Khaled wears sweatshirt by Russell Athletic Archive.
Directory A Child of the Jago www.achildofthejago.com A.P.C. www.apc.fr Acne www.acnestudios.com Adidas www.adidas.co.uk Agnès b www.agnesb.com Albam www.albamclothing.com Albright Downstairs www.albrightnyc.com Alden www.aldenshoe.com Alexander McQueen www.alexandermcqueen.com American Apparel www.americanapparel.com Baracuta www.baracuta.com Barbisio www.barbisio.it Barbour www.barbour.com Bass www.bassshoes.com Billionaire Boys Club www.bbcicecream.com BLK DNM www.blkdnmcloseup.com Brooks Brothers www.brooksbrothers.com Brutus Trimfit www.brutus-trimfit.com C.E www.cavempt.com C.P. Company www.cpcompany.co.uk Carhartt www.carhartt-wip.com Carlo Manzi www.carlomanzi.com Cassie Mercantile www.cassiemercantile.com Christy’s www.christys-hats.com Clarks Originals www.clarksoriginals.com Collective Noun www.cn-london.com Converse www.converse.com Cos www.cosstores.com Costume National www.costumenational.com Cutler and Gross www.cutlerandgross.com Delicious Junction www.deliciousjunction.co.uk Dickies www.dickies.com Dr Martens www.drmartens.co.uk Duffer Japan www.joix-corp.com Duvetica www.duvetica.com Ebbets Field Flannels www.ebbets.com Edwin Jeans www.edwin-europe.com Farah www.farah.co.uk Felon www.felonclothing.com Folk www.folkclothing.com Fred Perry www.fredperry.com G-Shock www.g-shock.co.uk Gabicci www.gabicci.com Gant Rugger www.gantrugger.com Gourmet www.gourmetfootwear.com Guns, Germs, $teal www.gunsgermssteal.com Han Kjøbenhavn www.hankjobenhavn.com Hardy Amies www.hardyamies.com Harry Stedman www.harrystedman.com Henri Lloyd Black Label www.henrilloyd.co.uk Herschel Supply Co. www.herschelsupply.com Hudson www.hudsonshoes.com Hummel www.hummel.net J.Crew www.jcrew.com John Smedley www.johnsmedley.com John Varvatos www.johnvarvatos.com Johnson Motors Inc. www.johnsonmotorsinc.com Jordan Betten www.jordanbetten.com Kangol www.kangolstore.com Lafayette www.lafayettecrew.com Lanvin www.lanvin.com Lee 101 www.lee101.com Left Field NYC www.leftfieldnyc.net
Levi’s Vintage Clothing www.levisvintageclothing.com Levi’s www.levi.com Lewis Leathers www.lewisleathers.com Lock&Co. www.lockhatters.co.uk Lou Dalton www.loudalton.com Lucky Brand www.luckybrand.com Machete www.machetemfg.com Maharishi www.maharishistore.com Margaret Howell www.margarethowell.co.uk Mark Powell www.markpowellbespoke.co.uk Medwinds www.medwinds.com Melet Mercantile www.meletmercantile.com Mr Hare www.mrhare.com New Balance www.newbalance.co.uk North Sea Clothing www.northseaclothing.co.uk Norton&Sons www.nortonandsons.co.uk Nudie Jeans www.nudiejeans.com Number Six www.numbersixlondon.com Oak www.oaknyc.com Oliver Spencer www.oliverspencer.co.uk Original Penguin www.originalpenguin.co.uk Paul Smith www.paulsmith.co.uk Pele Che Coco www.pelechecoco.com Pendleton www.pendleton-usa.com Penfield www.penfield.com Persol www.persol.com Peter Werth www.peterwerth.co.uk Plectrum by Ben Sherman www.bensherman.com Pokit www.pokit.co.uk Pretty Green www.prettygreen.com Rake www.rakestyle.com Rapha www.rapha.cc Richard James www.richardjames.co.uk Robert James www.byrobertjames.com Rogan www.rogannyc.com RRL www.doublerl.com Russell Athletic Archive www.russellathleticarchive.com Sam Ubhi www.samubhi.com Schott www.schottnyc.com Scotch&Soda www.scotch-soda.com Scott Fraser Collection www.scottfrasercollection.com Shaun’s Shades of California www.shaunscalifornia.com Stone Island www.stoneisland.co.uk Straight to Hell www.straighttohellapparel.com Swaton www.iknowswaton.co.uk The Vintage Showroom www.thevintageshowroom.com Tiger of London www.tigeroflondon.co.uk Timberland www.timberland.com Umit Benan www.umitbenan.com Uniqlo www.uniqlo.co.uk Vivienne Westwood World’s End www.worldsendshop.co.uk Vivienne Westwood www.viviennewestwood.co.uk Viyella 1784 www.viyella1784.co.uk Volcom www.volcom.com Wesc www.wesc.com Woolrich www.woolrich.co.uk Work Not Work www.worknotwork.net YMC www.youmustcreate.com Yohji Yamamoto www.yohjiyamamoto.co.jp
oliverspencer.co.uk
STYLE HISTORY CULTURE
AUTUMN 2013 A FREE QUARTERLY
VOLUME 1 ISSUE 8
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