In Memorium One Year On: Karen Black WAS the Seventies

In early 1970s, there was a surplus of straight-haired slap-free studiedly nonchalant actresses in Hollywood – Katherine Ross, Jennifer O’ Neill, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw - all supposedly embodying the fruits of freedom as borne by the stinking sixties. In truth though, the New Hollywood was Testosterone Town, and Ross’s appearance in The Stepford Wives in 1975 would seem to be the logical conclusion of the half-decade.

This was also the late Karen Black’s time, but she’d be forever an outsider in said sorority. Her ripe-lipped rapaciousness and blazing sapphire eyes marked her out as too bizarre for romantic leads and too sexy for character roles. She looked - always - as though she’d dine on leading men, so it was a constant source of amazement to me that Tarantino never snapped her up from the cult straight-to-home-viewing treadmill she was on for the last 25 years of her career, in order to play a no-restraint-brooking leather-clad motorcycle mama, or something.

The former Karen Blanche Zeigler was born in Illinois in 1939 and paid her dues on the Great White Way before her pal Jack Nicholson cast her as an acid-tripping whore in 1969’s Easy Rider. The following year she turned in an Oscar-nominated performance as Nicholson’s trashily endearing girlfriend Rayette, in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Probably her most revered role, it’s a mercy in some ways that her character’s persona wasn’t an indication of things to come. For Rayette is needy, clammy and passive. It hardly seems accidental that she’s got ‘Stand by Your Man’ blaring from her Dansette when we first see her. But she’s also warm, loyal, romantic and real.

As Rayette in Five Easy Pieces (1970)

As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds. Nicholson’s class-tourist treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s heart burst.

With Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1972)

From here, Black switched between cult credibility (opposite Kris Kristofferson and several bricks of hash in Cisco Pike, as a smack-addicted hooker in The Pyx) and blockbuster corn (the stewardess called upon to fly a cast of ageing legends to safety in Airport 75).

In Nashville (1975)

But it was in Hollywood’s partially faithful versions of the cream of American literature that she truly shone, playing two working-class girls who meet premature ends before their respective bitterness curdles their beauty, which may be the only power they have. (In some ways, she was continuing a tradition previously served so well by Gloria Grahame.)

Jazz Age Jezebel: As Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (1974)

Her Myrtle in The Great Gatsby was a million miles away, physically, from the fleshy slattern that F. Scott Fitzgerald described, but, moving languidly across the screen, her hair the colour of dried blood, Black’s Myrtle is bursting with sensuality and frustration, bringing a desperate pathos to the shimmering soft focus of what’s ultimately an interesting failure.

In John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, adapted from Nathaniel West’s savage, nihilistic novel about Hollywood’s Depression-era desperados, she was wannabe starlet Faye Greener, cruel and sexy in a solarised, platinumed bob, lashing out like a burned cat at the kind acts of Donald’s Sutherland’s tragic simpleton. Her portrayal of that vile, talentless, narcissistic, spite-ridden girl was a study in soft-focus sadness; in short, she was the rotten heart of a movie dealing with (in West's partisan view) a rotten town.

Hollywood Gothic: Day of the Locust (1974)

 She took the lead in all three sections of Trilogy of Terror, almost upstaged in the exoticism stakes by a Zuni doll, which chases her around her apartment with hilarious, murderous intent, and even stood out amid the constellation of stars in Robert Altman’s Nashville, where she’s disturbingly convincing as a dumb, arrogant broad. The following year, 1976, she was bewigged, ruthless and cool as a julep in Hitchcock’s pitiful swansong, Family Plot.

It's got TEETH! Trilogy of Terror (1975)

Only in Hollywood could a woman of prodigious intelligence (Black entered higher education at 15) and singular looks be thought unlucky. But starting at the top, she seems to have managed to exploit said qualities handsomely: her filmography suggests a work ethic of Leviathan proportions and a total lack of cultural snobbery (e.g. House of 1000 Corpses and Stuck! Steve Balderson’s 2009 homage to ‘70s babes-in-the-slammer flicks in which Black co-starred with Mink Stole, would struggle to claim even cult status.)

Giving Jennifer Coolidge sleepless nights in House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Black sang too – and even did so once with L7, of all people. She also sang in Nashville and Gypsy 83 (2001), in which she was touching as a sad-eyed, never-was lounge-pop crooner, chuffing on cigarillos and flicking her marabou stole. But her standing in the musical world is arguably stronger in terms of her name than her (good) voice, all thanks to schlock-horror performance-art metallers and underground legends, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. They’ve never been known to make their audiences comfortable, much like their strangely beautiful and beautifully strange namesake.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Being  all '70s, like

the 1970s version of the 1930s at its zenith, in Day of the Locust (1974)

Smokin'

"Hey Honey - don't call ME Mac!" Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Fay takes a break from spite. Day of the Locust (1974)

In Killer Fish (1979)

With Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969)

Eternal Summertime Sadness: With William Atherton in Day of the Locust (1974)

Karen Blanche Ziegler 1939-2013

                                                                                                                                           

FOUR CAN PLAY: Mo-dettes

Hangin' high: the Mo-dettes in London 1979

My introduction to the Mo-dettes came in the form of a badge I found in a vintage clothes shop in Greenwich, south London, in 1999. It featured a drawing of a reclining, lantern-jawed, be-suited man - an ebony-haired hero straight out of an illustrated Jackie romance. His smirk suggested thoughts of a carnal nature, as well it might, since the thought bubble coming from his slick head read ‘Mmm… Mo-dettes!’ I was intrigued by the name. Was it a misprint? Surely they were called the Modettes? Or maybe the hyphen had run amok and it was supposed to be Mod-ettes? My confusion was further compounded a few months later when browsing through the paper mountains at VinMag in Soho, I came across a copy of The Face from September 1980 emblazoned with the tagline ‘Modettes a la Mode’ and featuring as the cover star Jane, the bassist, looking mischievously elfin. Surely such a clanging misprint wouldn’t have made it on to the cover - they must’ve been a mod revival band. And they must have been well fucked off about the badge…

But then I heard ‘White Mice’. All became clear, and a fan was born.

I later discovered the group had been fond of the word ‘mode’ and  added the latter half as an homage to the girl groups of the pre-swinging sixties (The Marvelettes, et al). Yet the three-decade-old misconception of them as a mod group hasn’t died out (they frequently appear on mod compilations) and in the 21^st century, the Mo-dettes remain a cult.

Thoughts of an impure nature

They say too much is made of punk and the way it democratised creativity, that those who run today’s media were so in thrall to in their youth that its cultural value is overstated. Nonsense - not enough is made of it. For one thing, it’s easily forgotten today how minimal the presence of female musicians was prior to punk. Before Patti Smith made her Shamanic assault on rock ‘n’ roll in 1975 (concurrent with The Runaways – who were a different beast altogether), many a young gal had fronted a band on the strength of her tits ‘n’ teeth appeal alone, but known female musicians that you couldn’t take home to your mother could until then be counted on one hand: Sparkle Moore had herself a slide guitar and a hot line in rockabilly hip-slinging but gave it up to be a housewife; the Velvets had Mo Tucker pounding the drums; Joan and Joni had their acoustics and Suzi had her electric. (And Janis? Janis pretty much preferred to be seen as one of the boys.) Jane Crockford, the Mo-dettes’ gifted bassist, complained to Kris Needs in 1979, “When I was a little girl I used to look at bands like The Beatles and go, ‘It’s not fair! They’re all boys! Girls can’t grow up and be in a pop group!’ I was really pissed off about it. It turned out alright though.”

"Small fish and large chips please, mate" Brighton 1979

The Mo-dettes formed in April 1979, when punk had succumbed to headline hype and become the ultimate phoney rebel stance. It had also regressed to a level of thuggery fuelled by Colt 45 and conventionality fuelled by careerism. Alas, this didn’t stop the lemmings-on-the-lam march from all points north to Chelsea, and ramalama three-chord thrash just kept on coming. But the music the Mo-dettes ultimately produced – rough-edged urban pop-punk – suggests that unlike scores of their contemporaries, they’d woken up and smelt the '80s. This is not to say their music contained the baby cries of hair metal, synthpop or richly syllabled new romantic horrors, but they clearly realised that punk’s first noxious wave had long since crashed on the shore and ebbed away. This was something different. They were not as angular and aggressive as the Slits, not as earthy and experimental as The Raincoats, but all three bands were progeny of punk’s first wave, which allowed anyone to throw off the shackles and discover the strange, delicious things that came with such freedom.

Vixens amid Vitrolite

Their 1979-1982 lifespan coincided with the post-punk era, and though the Mo-dettes were not ‘post-punk’ in the accepted definition of the term (i.e. complex, experimental, cerebral, avant-garde) with their melding of harmony, speed, pop, punk attitude, humour, sass, and “female chauvinism” they were at the very least, members of a halfway sorority house between the first wave of punk and its progeny. The dubby basslines and sixties girl-group sensibility was arguably an example of post-punk’s black/white fusion creeping into their sound, but ultimately, they bristled with too much energy and sarky-snarky humour to truly fit post-punk’s dry, sometimes po-faced model.

Likewise, they seemed to have little time for the often humourless, partisan feminist politics of the day. They appeared in NME’s “Women in Rock” issue on 29 March 1980 under extreme sufferance. Despite the journalist, Deanne Pearson, explaining to the girls that she was writing about women in rock, not feminists in rock, the interview went from bad to worse, with questioner and questioned almost coming to blows. While Jane Crockford conceded that they anticipated potential trouble with record labels who regarded all-girls bands as novelties, she insisted that being girls had, on the whole, been a help, not a hindrance. She added (possibly as a wind-up, given the fractious tone between the band and Pearson) that exploiting their sexuality might bring them a wider audience still, which was fine with her. Ultimately, Ramona, the singer, decided that she personally was a feminist if feminism meant equal rights and abortion on demand, but when it came to the band, much as they couldn’t deny their gender, they were in it for the music alone.

Poseurs

So the Mo-dettes were not fond of the “women in rock” tag, but they weren’t an anti-feminist band as such: they simply wanted to be judged up top, not down below, as it were. Later that same year, guitarist Kate told Mike Laye in a Sounds interview that she believed such compartmentalising defeated the progress of women in society by making them into “…a women’s army”, separating them from the mass of humanity and further cementing the idea of women as Other – surely the opposite of the ideology’s tenets. Simply, the Mo-dettes didn’t believe they were automatically or anatomically entitled to respect simply because of a combination of gender and the ability to play. As Jane said, “We don’t demand respect, we’re going to earn it, mate… as musicians, as ourselves.”

The original line up was Ramona Carlier (vox), Jane Crockford (bass), Kate Korris (guitar) and June Miles-Kingston (drums). Jane was unhappily playing bass in a band called Bank of Dresden. The lone female of the group, she craved her own set-up. She met Ramona at a gig and impressed by her sixties kitchen-sink heroine appearance, asked her if she could sing. Ramona shrugged and said yeah, sure. (“That’s what you did”, Ramona later said of the era’s “Anyone can, man” ethos.)

Meanwhile, Kate and June met on the set of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle while working as production assistants and subsequently tried to make music with boys, an idea scrapped following not-wholly unexpected “You’re not a bad drummer/guitarist for a girl” quips. They saw countless potential bassists and singers, mainly male, all either “unreliable or afraid” according to Kate. Fortuitously, she then met Jane in the grim environs of the Lisson Grove dole queue. They ran their ideas by each other, and an outfit was born.

Ramona had been raised in Geneva, Switzerland and had studied ballet. From bourgeois beginnings, she gravitated toward the seedier side of life, producing a punk fanzine called Lolos De Lola, hanging out on the minuscule local scene and occasionally singing backing vocals for bands (but never for Kleenex, as is often said). But she saw little evidence of anger being turned into art, and yearning for the Real Thing, aged 21, emptied her savings account and flew to London. Looking like both a raven-haired Vogue-cover beauty and a cartoonish Betty Boop-alike with eyes you could swim with dolphins in, the alarmingly cheekboned Ramona sang with an accent as broad as the Champs Elysees (“Ah zee zoze gels go by tressed in dare zum-air closs!”) which left one critic with oeuf on his face after sneering at her “O level French” in an early review. Onstage, she’d favour synthetic-to-the-touch vintage A-line mod dresses, in spite of such attire possibly compounding confusion over their name.

Hittin' them notes: Ramona in 1980

Jane’s background was worthy of a Richard Allen novel. A native of west London, she was a restless adopted child who became a runaway and street kid, immersed in the capital’s subcultures and demimonde from the tender age of 13. Years of squats, violence and drugs could have led who knows where, but punk kicked the door wide for her, opportunity wise. Arming herself with a vintage Hofner violin bass, she proved to be a mistress of rich, dubby basslines that would make her the rock of the band. Her appearance took the biscuit: a Lahndan doll with a fetching and fierce vanilla-pale peroxide flat-top offsetting her razor-sharp cheekbones, a nice line in skinhead/rockabilly fusion style courtesy of Kensington Market and an astonishing pair of replacement eyebrows (she’d shaved hers off) which looked as though they’d been fashioned from hot tar and applied via cunning use of a Gloy-stick.

June don't play musical statues. The Modes in 1980

Kate, the guitarist, had moved from New York to London in 1974. She’d founded The Slits in the searing summer of ’76, played at their debut at Harlesden Coliseum with the Clash in March 1977 and for two subsequent gigs before taking her leave, claiming in 1979 that she felt “…the whole thing with The Slits was to get as famous as possible as fast as you could [but] I enjoyed it in a way.” Strong-featured, leggy and looking haughty as a heron, with a platinum skunk-stripe in her barnet, her minimal, glass-shower guitar sound complimented Jane’s heavy bass perfectly.

June was a drop-out art student and, as it turned out, a girl for whom rhythm came as naturally as breathing, having taught herself to drum on a ramshackle £40 kit she’d bought off the Pistols’ Paul Cook. A native of Essex and a musical family (her loftily quiffed brother Robert twanged for Tenpole Tudor), making her own sounds must have been a case of when, not if. She looked like a member of a girl gang: a surly mix of biker leathers (she did indeed ride) and slightly swollen-looking lips set in a mean pout. Looking as cool as a julep whether behind the kit or no, she favoured Spartan onstage outfits of shorts and singlet and kept her make-up in a toolbox. Her power-drumming was equal parts cataclysmic and clipped; it cut, said one elegant scribe “like a goods train passing through the room.”

Thus grouped, they set about making their impact on the world. Jane’s friend and mentor, the artist Neal Brown, was frontman of the Vincent Units and had a side project called The Tesco Bombers, with a rolling line-up. Jane had the idea that one such incarnation should be all-female, with Brown only participating if he’d drag up: The Tesco Bomberettes! In the end, they played it as the Mo-dettes, at Ladbroke Grove bootboy haunt, the Acklam Hall. A run of backroom gigs soon followed at The Chippenham, an insalubrious gin palace in Maida Hill. Word got out, and a combination of scene solidarity and credible connections soon led to support slots with Madness at the Electric Ballroom, the Clash at Notre Dame Hall and Siouxsie and the Banshees at Hammersmith Odeon. 

June (left) and Jane on stage in Dallas, 1980

Their debut single ‘White Mice’ (B-side ‘Masochistic Opposite’) was released in late 1979 on their own Mode label and distributed by Rough Trade. A thing of jangly joy and beauty forever, John Peel succinctly described this perfectly crafted, catchy, post-punk pop-punk gem as sounding “… like the musical equivalent of the Battersea Power Station made out of eggboxes.” It was that charming and that unique – but far less fragile. Opening with a sharp reggae-like snare roll from June, the melody spirals away perfectly as Ramona’s Fronsh vocals lay waste to the egos of several Roxy Romeos with a bunch of come-hither-fuck-off lyrics (“Your arse is tight your moves are right, your eyes are big and blue, and if I was a homely girl I’d like to marry you. But I’m too naughty, bold and haughty, forward with it too, so come and visit, then I’d kiss it like other lovers do… don’t be stupid, don’t be limp. No girl likes to love a wimp.”) Clearly aware that all the best pop songs feature handclaps and “ooh-woahs”, they meld them with Kate’s ultra-minimal, choppy, abrasive melodies, June’s military-style fills and Jane’s yo-yo-staccato basslines. The single spent six weeks at number one in the then-new indie chart and it was often at the top of my stash whenever I used to flex my shonky DJ’ing prowess in exchange for a few light ales (typically, I found my original copy lurking between a Purple Hearts’ and a Specials’ single in the Two-Tone & Mod Revival section of the otherwise excellent Brighton emporium, Wax Factor, which for some reason I always want to call ‘Vinyl Sassoon’).

NYC 1981

In 1980 they were signed to Deram, an imprint of failing sixties’ stalwarts Decca. In June that year they released their second single, a cover of the Stones’ 1966 hit ‘Paint it Black’. Their take was stark, minimal and spiky, with just enough heft and sparseness to the rhythms to suggest a hint of dub (giving it, as Nicholas Rombes says in his Cultural Dictionary of Punk “its blackness”). It made Single of the Week in Sounds, the write-up revealing they were then John Lydon’s current favourites, rare praise from a man never known to have doffed his cap lightly. However, the single didn’t do what they expected commercially and nor did the subsequent release, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, a jagged and murky song that pumps along at a 4/4 beat while Ramona’s vocals soar and echo as she wails about drunken, inadequate men staggering around pitch-black parks after closing time looking for someone to right-hook with their sovereign. (The brassy bounce of the B-side, ‘Two Can Play’ seems to be about the constant struggle for autonomy in relationships.)

Loony Toons

Their album The Story So Far was recorded in Coventry in summer 1980 and released in autumn that year, with the girls’ likenesses rendered in candy-coloured Manga-style ‘toons on the cover. It received poor reviews largely centred on the production, described in one quarter as “weak and uninspired”. The band themselves conceded, with June, in bluff-stickswoman mode, describing it in the sleeve notes of the 2008 reissue as “shit” and Kate puzzling over what went wrong between the studio and the pressing plant. But this blight is easy to ignore simply because of the album’s sheer, ballooning fun. It featured ten originals plus a joyous and bouncy cover of Piaf’s ‘Milord’ and the aforementioned Stones cover. ‘Satisfy’ is a sunny, smutty slice of power-pop – a Girl’s Own ‘Orgasm Addict’ – which revels in harmony and owes some debt to Blondie. The cheery whirl of ‘Foolish Girl’ explains their aversion to the rigid and joyless feminist ideals of the day (“She was once a feminist, sharp and deadly was her kiss…”) with a spiralling outro bass line that suggests the Mo-dettes were well attuned to ‘old-fart’ notions of making people want to dance. While humour seemed to be their forte, it’s counterbalanced by the chilly dawn fade-in of ‘Bedtime Stories’ and the melancholy précis of Piaf’s life in ‘Sparrow’.

It may well be an imperfect album (the sped-up, charmless version of ‘White Mice’ (‘White Mouse Disco’) that they were forced to include didn’t help matters), but for those of us who were still unable to read our own names in 1980, it’s one of the few artefacts of their sound we have. They did record three Peel Sessions, one of which can be heard here and includes ‘Norman (He’s No Rebel)’, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, ‘Kray Twins’ and ‘Bitter Truth’. This session undoubtedly produced more cocksure recordings (and is truly representative of their sound, according to Jane and June) and there’s a clarity in the production that’s lacking on the album, but then, the producers and engineers at BBC Maida Vale were probably more used to dealing with bands not solely comprising hirsute men, unlike Roger Lomas at the Coventry studio who, according to June, seemed to think female musicians were mythical creatures and treated them accordingly. 

There’s also a live 7’ of ‘Kray Twins’ recorded at The Marquee in 1981. As it fades in, we hear Jane telling the restless audience in her broadest west-Londonese, “That one’s about amateur violence [‘Dark Park Creeping’] – now let’s have some professional violence”. The song, a downbeat blues narrative, is a snapshot of the rise and fall of the East End ne’er-do-wells and was written by Jane in early 1979 when she was still in Bank of Dresden. She said, “I was the only female in the band and they actually asked me not to write any songs, despite my enthusiasm. They only wanted a dumb blonde bass player.”  Their loss: the smart blonde added a loafing bass line and raspy half-spoken, half-scatted vocals, and with Ramona’s eerie backing wails, produced a song transcending both its era and any popular genre then or now.

June in 1980

No longer existing on snouts, wits and grubby pound notes, the Mo-dettes toured Europe and America twice. According to Ramona in Hot Love: Swiss Punk & New Wave 1976-1980, highlights of their travels included being run out of Orange County by local rednecks, wowing lesbian fans in the deep southern states, guzzling LSD-laced blue punch by the turquoise waters of the Tropicana’s pool in LA and endless nights at squat parties in Amsterdam. A contemporary American fanzine said that live, the Mo-dettes looked like they were “fighting with their instruments – and determined to win!” 

Kate in 1980

While in New York, they found time to sing backing vocals on John Cale’s ‘Fighter Pilot’ single from his album Honi Soit. But the fun couldn’t last forever and in mid-1981, their record company decided their coffers needed replenishing and put a gag order on the band’s individual sound, demanding a bit of sugar-coated candy pop to sweeten an increasingly bitter deal. Their next (and as it turned out, final) single was ‘Tonight’ released in July 1981. Much loathed by the band, the high-pitched girly harmonising and forgettable safe melody of the song is the antithesis of their earlier work: the difference between it and the mature froideur of ‘Sparrow’ and the angular nastiness of ‘Dark Park Creeping’ is the difference between chiffon velvet and the Rocky Mountains. The same might be said of the band’s appearance on the single’s cover – a far cry from the cool-as-fuck satin ‘n’ tat-clad dandettes of old, they lounge on a mountain of plush, got up in velour, puffballs, spangled woollens and half a ton of blusher each. Even Jane, as stylish as the decade was young, appears to have been forcibly permed. According to June, they considered the single and accompanying shoot nothing more than a joke. 

Kate clearly worn out by the glamour of it all . . .

Two months later, in August 1981, Melissa Ritter joined on rhythm guitar, Decca having demanded the Mo-dettes add more flesh to their agile sound. The group’s dynamic was now askew, and the first cracks appeared. In a Sounds cover story back on 28 June 1980, Ramona and Kate had both expressed reservations about their signing to a major, a situation June and Jane, conversely, couldn’t have seemed happier about. Ramona had said she didn’t like knowing exactly how the following two years of her life were going to pan out. So it was perhaps no surprise that she was the first to decamp, in the winter of 1982, citing Deram’s wilful neglect of them as her reason and leaving June to sing from behind her toms until one Sue Slack took over vocal duties. Kate was next to go, her initial worries about being manipulated by the strings of a major (also aired in the aforementioned interview) seemingly confirmed. With only half the original line-up now at the helm, the good ship Mode ran aground in late '82.

A grass-roots revolution of the like we surely won’t see again had offered these girls (and many more) previously undreamt of opportunities – for making a living out of gut creativity, travelling the world and treating others to the fruits of said ideas. The Mo-dettes were, by their own account, out for a lark and would give it up when the fun ceased – but to live the lark required a certain amount of capital and their signing with a major seemed less a career move than a chance to extend the fun. They cared about the music though, and wanted to be heard: they didn’t, as Kate said to ZigZag magazine in 1979, want to be a cult, and so they set about moving into the slipstream of the mainstream. Despite this, their lack of careerism was ultimately borne out by the fact that they stuck to their agreement to chuck it all in when it stopped being a hoot.

Sun und fun

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons behind their obscurity. It was the right time and they had a real cool one - but their ardour for hedonism burned brighter than their ambition, unlike many of their contemporaries, such as the Slits. Another reason for the Mo-dettes’ continuing obscurity may be the ongoing erroneous belief in their relation to modernists. For unlike Two-Tone’s still much-loved exuberant brand of ska, new mod’s practitioners (Merton Parkas, Lambrettas), with their reputation for po-faced fastidiousness, have not been looked upon with any such favour (Paul Weller excepted) and are rarely played by all but their sharply-clad devotees. Of course, being remembered may well be enough for the former Mo-dettes. After all, by 1983, they’d already done what they’d set out to do, have proof of the accomplishment and may feel no need to revisit the graffiti-covered, booze-filled, fag-fugged rooms of their past.

The group’s ultimate contribution to the world is a singular sound: they simply don’t sound like anyone else. Dark and abrasive edges somehow sit happily alongside their bold and rough ‘n’ cheery punky melodies. That they’re only ever compared (lazily) to their stateside contemporaries The Go-Gos, whose twisted take on Californian surf-pop had as many dark and abrasive edges as a multi-coloured beachball, is basic proof for my money that they were a rare bunch. And the intervening decades have been kind: their songs could be placed in almost any year since the ones they were recorded. And while it’s less important, the same is true of their appearance: their young selves could take to a stage in the gentrified badlands of Dalston tonight and no one would peg them as time travellers from the early years of Thatcher’s reign of terror. They never looked ‘seventies’ or indeed, ‘eighties’ in any way (save for the slapstick shoot for ‘Tonight’).

Faggin' around in London tahn: 1979

Though their legacy can undoubtedly be heard in the pure indie fuzz-pop of C86 groups like The Shop Assistants and The Darling Buds, it’s difficult – not least because of their obscurity - to make a case for the Mo-dettes as influential. If they were, there’d be far more good bands on the underground circuit today than there are. But if their legacy seems to have reached an impasse in the mid-to-late eighties, it may be all the better for preserving their uniqueness.

Of her band’s place quiet but sure place in the pop-cult pantheon, Jane : “Along with The Slits, to have been a genuine part of London culture – of British culture – whether it’s high or low, is mind-blowing.”

Leee Black Childers: Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks

"Tits have played a big part in history" - Leee Black Childers

In 2012, Leee Black Childers came to London to launch his book Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rock Stars and Punks (ah - My People!) He came armed with anecdotes and proved to be a fountain of Old Southern Charm. Below was a piece I wrote at the time for the London Festival Fringe. It was an honour to meet him.

Leee Black Childers 1972

When Leee Black Childers first arrived in New York in the late 1960s, fresh from the simmering backwaters of Kentucky, a cocky request for a cigarette found him looking skywards: towering above him was a stack-heeled Amazonian disporting false eyelashes like tarantula legs, hair an aureole of static-charged frizz. She was primed with panstick and sleek with speed: his first NYC drag queen. 

Jackie Curtis 1971

Leee’s entry into the demimonde of the rotting core of the Big Apple led to his becoming the in-house snapper at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and later vice president of David Bowie’s Mainman company and manager of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers (who he brought to the UK to join the Sex Pistols on the 1977 Anarchy Tour). 

But in the end, he was always spiritually solid with the anonymous outlaws scratching a living in the anomalous, urban dead zones of London and New York.

In that respect, the tile of the exhibition & book is somewhat misleading. While Childers has taken the titular misfits as his subjects for over 40 years, the photos on display here are largely comprised of the Warhol superstars, the key proto-punks (Iggy and the Stooges, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls) plus Bowie, Debbie Harry and the London scene of ’77.

Iggy 1973

Modest to the point of reticence about his many achievements, Leee’s photos betray a stunning use of murky light, composition and, of course, styling – none of which was born of anything as quotidian as by-rote training: these were collaborations born of sulpahte, sass and whatever satin and tat was to hand.  The photos of the Factory drag queens stand out – particularly a 1970 shot of Jackie Curtis, a plush hussy half lit by a seedy neon dancehall sign, cigarette in hand, hair the colour of dried blood, eyelids weighted with glitter, her gossamer-thin mini-dress dress clinging to her padded contours.

Jayne County 1974

The proud and pugnacious Jayne County snarls at the camera, mimicking the heads of two tiger rugs that flank her – she looks like their human equivalent, equally fierce but with more Max Factor than fur. Patti Smith looks equal parts frail and hard, her obsidian eyes ablaze in that solemn pale cameo of a face, and Cherry Vanilla is depicted simultaneously enjoying cock and crack in an eye-watering fashion.

Debbie Harry 1977

Bowie appears here on his 1974 Russian tour in all his haughty, androgyne glory. Childers had also been tour manager for Iggy and the Stooges in 1972 and the images of the 23-year-old Iggy perfectly stress his diamond-hard, glistening body aglow with sweat and sexual energy, while the Stooges look like the most terrifying gang on earth. 

They had competition in Bowery boys The Heartbreakers though, and the pictures of them in London display a menacing vision of sexuality – Johnny Thunders couldn’t have looked as though he gave a damn even if he’d tried. 

The other London pictures depict some curiously cosy scenes: NME journalist Caroline Coon had half the punks in town round for Christmas dinner in 1977, and it’s charmingly jarring to see Slits guitarist Viv Albertine and Sid Vicious (with an acoustic!) lounging amid the throws and spider plants of Coon’s living room like a pair of urchins who’ve broken into some bourgeois hippy's home and are taking a moment before going in search of the jewellery and silver. A platinumed Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren overlook the brood. 

Cherry Vanilla pipes up, 1976

There’s a grand portrait of chalk-faced Siouxsie, too hardened with hauteur and high dudgeon to care that someone’s waving a lens in her direction and her polar opposite, Debbie Harry, displaying the smiling, cocky, come-hither charm of the savviest starlet in town.

Jackie Curtis 1970

Bowie on the Trans-Siberian Express 1973

Diabolical Angel: Johnny Thunders in London 1977

Hard Day's Night: sleepy rent boys, late 1970s

These kind of outlaws are harder to find in London or NYC today as the cancerous bloom of gentrification slowly seeps into every street and neighbourhood. But they’ll always be with us, skirting the Quicksand of the Everyday, outsmarting the Life More Ordinary – and Leee Black Childers’ subjects built much of that rocky road on which they wilfully walk.

Leee Black Childers. Born: Louisville, Kentucky 1945. Died: Los Angeles, California 2014.

This piece was originally published by London Festival Fringe in December 2012

She Walked Alone: Female Rebels, Loners, Anti-Heroines and Outsiders in Film

With his broad-shoulders half lit by seedy neon and his facial crags fleetingly illuminated by a shuddering Zippo flame, The Male Loner is over-represented in film. Male collectivity was relatively rare in cinema until all those bromance and buddy flicks came along to bore us the collective shit out of us. There always were exceptions of course – the films of Peckinpah, John Cassavetes’ 1970 film Husbands, queer cinema like Boys in the Band and certain war films and westerns. But even the latter two tended to focus on a renegade soldier, general or nameless vigilante rather than battalion banter or saloon solidarity: the great rebel male goes it alone. 

But with female characters, collectivity has been huge, whether in solidarity (Busby Berkley musicals, How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Group, Nine to Five, Thelma and Louise, Steel Magnolias, Bridesmaids etc) or bitchery (The Women, Stage Door, Mean Girls). The message has mainly been that men are self-reliant and women co-dependent. But for every male outsider, whether it’s Mitchum, Garfield, Brando, Dean, McQueen, Newman, DeNiro or Gosling, there’s always been a straight-talking sister, rebel girl, lone lady, morose misfit and no-bull broad. Some are cultural icons, some cult curios – and none of them need you or anyone else.

Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer in Frances (1982)

Ready for combat: Lange as Farmer

Of course, we’re dealing with the real life of an actual flesh-and-blood outsider heroine here, as interpreted by Lange in an intuitive, violent and sensitive performance. But this film, for all its flaws, liberties and inaccuracies is how most people came to ‘know’ the tragic story of the ‘Bad Girl of Seattle’ (this, or a later acquaintance with Nirvana’s In Utero and this song). But was Frances Farmer (1913-1970) bad? Or mad? Clearly neither, but rather a gobby anomaly; a punk on remand at Paramount, a leftist adrift in La-La Land, a foul-mouthed feminist who neither knew nor needed that title. Few outsider heroines lived the nightmare like Farmer, a misfit in every sphere: a socialist, atheist, intellectual teenage girl in the 1930s, a Hollywood star who couldn’t stick gossamer glamour, publicity or film-making, an off-Broadway actress used by producers to get backing for their plays, an alcoholic on the run from the law and ultimately, a none-more-sane inmate of a Dickensian asylum, locked for a half-decade in a primitive ward for the incurably insane. 

Frances Farmer in 1940

Lange takes Farmer from stubborn schoolgirl to reluctant goddess to liquored-up firebrand to a hollow-eyed, fragile matron clad in black as if in mourning for her ruined life. But she also demonstrates that at every age, Farmer was a woman who clung with white-knuckled fervour to her sense of self. When she fights with her vile gorgon of a mother, with the police, paparazzi, psychiatrists or orderlies, I think of the real-life 1943 newspaper reports from when Farmer was arrested in downtown Los Angeles for violating her parole: “By all accounts, Miss Farmer did not surrender peacefully.” 

Farmer after her arrest in 1943

She survived her horrific years of unjust incarceration, but returned to the bottle, which aided the creep of cancer which did for her at the shockingly premature age of 56. Even if she did end up burned out on the bonfire of idealism, Farmer had stuck to her guns even when they were turned to her temples (as Roger Ebert said of Frances: “It shows it’s possible for everything to go wrong [in a life]”) – and she’s still cited today as a heroine to thousands who’ve stuck to theirs in extreme adversity.

“Miss Farmer did not surrender peacefully . . .”

Solitary: Lange as Farmer

Sigourney Weaver as Lt Ellen Ripley in the Alien Trilogy (1979, 1986 and 1992)

'nuff said

One of the greatest female characters in 120 years of cinema, in any discussion about Ripley the Renegade it’s inevitable that some purse-lipped sad-sack will point out that the role was originally written as a man. So? And William of Orange was Dutch and spaghetti comes from China. The fact is, the former Susan Weaver is Ripley.

It would belabour a point to say too much about Ripley - reams have been written on her unblinking militaristic gumption, seal-sleek skin aglow with combat toil and the flames reflected in her incredulous eyes. Ripley’s not fearless – but she is astonishingly brave. She’s as human as her nemesis is, um, alien.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated that at the climax of the first film of the trilogy, when tremulous with terror and her nerves ripped raw, she steadies herself by humming the dulcet notes of a nursery rhyme while clambering into her space suit in order to not alert the stowaway alien, who is snoozing ’neath the pipes and no doubt dribbling acid.

She’s seen as the benevolent force in this haunted-mansion-in-outer-space trilogy and is undoubtedly the one we root for. Yet in her own fashion, she’s as much a lone killer and harbringer of destruction, carnage and death as is the Alien Queen. And she battles alone: her allies are always dispensable and it’s always just her and the descendants of her original enemy, ultimately.

Thirty-five years on, and there have never been any serious contenders for her crown (though in Aliens, Jeanette Goldstein’s ripped marine, Vazquez, briefly made Ripley look like a Big Girl’s Blouse): no one else is fit to wear her cracked-yet-impenetrable armour.

Jane Fonda as Gloria Beatty in They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1969)

Never no Glory

Sic transit Gloria mundi. Fonda’s palpably bitter and sneering nihilist is the black heart of this adaptation of Horace McCoy’s 1935 existential pulp novel about the futility and grasping desperation of life. Gloria is one of many Depression-era desperadoes seeking hope in eternally sun-dappled California. But circumstance, the indifference of Hollywood and a belly rumbling like a boxcar force her to join a dance marathon at the Santa Monica Pier ballroom in 1932.

Gloria is what Pollyanna the Glad Girl might have turned out like had she been slung into reform school aged 11. She’s so bruised by life and crackling with misanthropy that she cannot and will not trust another human being. She’s an avowed loner. She’s not without mordant wit (“Maybe the whole damn world’s just like Central Casting. They got it all rigged ‘fore you ever show up.”) and almost smiles once, while relating to her dance partner a story about a sick dog she once cared for. But then misery steals across her taut features again as she recalls the hound’s painful fate. “Doesn’t matter,” she snaps. “Forget it.”

Danse Macabre

By the last quarter of the film, Gloria is pantingly fierce: her once smart, tight Marcel Wave - a symbol of putting her best foot forward - has exploded into loose, crazed curls; her sleep-deprived eyes are angry and as red as a sunset; her limbs look painfully lean; she looks like she smells of stale sweat and Lucky Strikes, has rank breath and teeth fizzing with sugary corrosion. She’s close to breaking but still takes no shit from anyone, least of all men.

She does give up - but arranges her own fate. And it’s equal parts cowardly and brave, like most humans when faced with their mortality. Gloria’s not too sensitive for this world – she’s too wise for it. She’s seen it writhing bloodily with its skin ripped off and, in disgust, decides to leave it to the foolish hopers.

Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933)

Hard-knock life for Lil'

A girl’s gotta live somehow. This Pre-Code Depression-era gritfest is a Stanwyck classic. Lily is a barmaid in her snake of a father’s speakeasy in the soot-sodden steel mill hell of Pittsburgh: a city where the streetlamps are lit at noon and hope is drowned in hooch. OK, so she shapes up as a gold-digger, but the only other life she’s fit for is the horrid one she’s trying to escape.

*Almost* a reason to put up with Pittsburgh

Her end goal isn’t really glittering mink and an Art Deco Park Avenue duplex (though she gets these): it’s security, independence, autonomy. With her background, the best she can hope for if she follows the path of decency is one where she’ll be wasting her looks and wits in the boss’s outer office, chained to the stenograph. Girls like Lily, then as now, will grab at the first chance to be delivered from a lifetime of drudgery. Can you say you wouldn’t do the same?

Lily’s dad offers his daughter to a corrupt local politician in return for protection. She pours scalding coffee in his lap and says with emasculating sarcasm: “Oh I’m sorry. My hand shakes so when I’m near you!” Poppa’s still later explodes in his face and after his funeral, Lily visits her crusty old mentor, who’s mad about Nietzsche but also full of Puritan Homilies as dictated by Will Hays. He declares she must go forth into the world and USE MEN – but with purity! With decency! Lily lights her cigarette, looks up at him half in disbelief half in pity, and says: “I got four bucks, where am I supposed to go, Paris?”

Chico and Lily: sisters under the skin

That city comes later. Now though, she and her fellow barmaid Chico hitch a boxcar to NYC where Lily works and sleeps her way to the top of a Wall Street bank. Soon, she’s incredibly gowned in Lucien Lelong, dripping cabochon diamonds, her once soft, wholesome ash-blonde hair now undulating in sculpted, metallic waves. She’s not hard-but-gooey-inside, like an over-chilled soft centre - she’s hard, hard, hard all the way through, like school. You look for flashes of conscience in vain for most of the film (not unusual in pre-code). She moves from the boss to the boss’s son. She packs away half a million dollars in jewels alone. One man loses his job, wife and family over her, but she moves on with nary a backward glance. 

Getting what you want . . .

One night he turns up at her apartment begging for her love. She slams the door on him and tells her current beau it was a telegram boy. But we root for Lily still. She’s a woman alone thinking of her future – a thing she once didn’t have. She’s fiercely loyal to Chico (when one lover says “Can’t you get rid of that fantastic black maid?” Lily snaps “Chico stays!”) and later describes herself as having lost her kindness through bitter circumstance and a need to survive, and if you didn’t already understand her motives, you do then: dealt a bad hand, she reshuffled the deck.

Lily and Chico - make mine mink!

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White in Carrie (1976)

The teenage years: a veil of blood and tears

I first saw Carrie when I was 12 and I was upset and scared in equal measure. Upset because I too was as popular as the pox and had to admit to myself that I identified with her (it’d be a few more years before I’d be able to take the wind from my detractors’ sails by discovering I was actually proud to be the things they ribbed me for) and scared because it suggested that perhaps, there were no happy endings for misfits. I didn’t help that I read the Stephen King novel shortly after; Carrie’s backstory broke my heart. King described the abuse and suffering heaped on this innocent soul - from her grisly birth to her miserable demise - with an extraordinary compassion (it’s a book that can make you a better person, undoubtedly). 

Spacek, who occasionally blots her copy book with luvvyish bull about her profession, hit the nail on the head when she created a creature of enormous sympathy in this freckled, folorn, doormat-in-a-world-of-platform-heels. Unaccountably and very sadly, Carrie’s actually a sweet girl, when you’d imagine her to be bitter as all get-out. Furthermore, though Carrie is friendless, hurt, alone and regularly beaten by her religious nut mother, she’s not quite beat. She still tries, still hopes. She even tells her mother (played by defused former 1950s sex bomb Piper Laurie in a performance that seems designed for drag queen imitations) that she wants to “try and become a whole person before it’s too late.” For this touching hope she gets a cup of coffee chucked in her face. But she’s quietly rebellious – she tries to be that person.

" 'You're beautiful' said Tommy. She was."

And when she finally gets what seems like her chance and is crowned Prom Queen, her vile classmates drench her soft amber tresses and ivory satin gown in thick, unctuous, pig plasma, skin and entrails. (In my alternate version, Carrie then licks her lips, goes “Mmmm!”, then performs a full striptease, throwing her clot-covered clobber at her enemies, piece by piece, before the carnage commences). She claws at the air, looking like a horrific fire-and-brimstone drawing from an illustrated version of the Old Testament. Then the hurt turns to rage. All those years of never giving as good as she got have backed up and their force when released is a veritable banquet of revenge. I smile when I see her teachers and peers die screaming in flames, frying like meat or being mangled in car crashes. Not that I’d wish this on anyone in real life, but Carrie stands as a warning to all you bullies out there. We stride out into the world with a little bit of hope, then you try and kick, beat and wrangle it out of us for having had the audacity to be born different. It might look like you’re succeeding, too. But one day, one day . . .

Carrie: wet nightmares

I had my own Carrie moment not long after I first saw it. A porcine-faced school bully with a curiously wheezy, high-pitched voice (which made him sound like Phil Mitchell being shagged with an outsize strap-on) poured a can of Coke over my head at the bus stop in middle of town. Some kids laughed, some adults tutted, but no one reproached him (guess he were just dousing me in sugary slurp, not dumping a sow’s innards on me). After giving him a hurt sideways glance as beads of brown liquid dripped from my eyelashes, I opted for what I thought were a cool, slightly swaggering Outsider’s Retreat (I’d also recently discovered the films of Steve McQueen & Paul Newman), though I could almost feel my soul shrivelling with humiliation. The bully, I’ve since heard, made a memorable appearance on a cable TV show called I’m So Fat I Can’t Find My Penis.

Gena Rowlands as Gloria Swenson in Gloria (1980)

Oh yeeeeeeah.

G.L.O.R.I.A! Anyone who knows me well knows that if this list had order, Gloria would take Gold. As directed by husband John Cassavates, Rowlands’s fast-talking, tough-walking, Virginia-Slim chuffing ex-moll, former jailboid and unwitting mater dolorosa has heart, soul and sass. She flexes her Joisey roots in her gravelly tones and big, honeyed hairdo. She looks like a Gentile Lauren Bacall, or what Anne Sothern might have ended up like had she not gotten into the movies.

Gloria: twice as fierce

Gloria’s neighbour keeps books for the mob, but has been embezzling funds. They’re onto him, and he knows it’s curtains for him and his family. So he sends Phil (John Adames) his youngest, round to Gloria’s apartment down the hall. The gunshots ring out and Gloria and her solemn little soldier are soon on the run.

Reluctant as hell, she hastily packs her kimono and pistol and ushers herself and the kid down the back stairs through an atmosphere of fear thick as smoke. You know she’s never again going see all the things that have made her new life worth living – “My apoartment, my clothes, my shoes, my friends . . . some”. But she does the right thing and the two of them blaze a taut, fraught and deadly trail across Brooklyn, the Bronx and New Jersey pursued by the Gloria’s old mob cronies through bars, flop houses, stations, subways and crack dens.

Lioness of the Bronx

Gloria’s not maternal (“I was always a broad – never could stand the smell of milk”) but what else is she doing but defending Phil’s life to the death? It’s a tedious trope for tough-as-titanium female characters to be revealed at some point as ‘vulnerable’, but Gloria never is (and who’d believe it anyway?) What she is though, is compassionate. Mobster’s Mistress turned Mother Courage.

Gloria’s not totally phlegmatic, and she clearly often feels the total danger of her situation. But when she does, she stares it dead.in.the.face. (The first time I saw this film on the big screen a few years ago, the scene in which Gloria overturns an entire car full of macho hoods with just a couple of shots from her gun had people punching the air and going “WOOO-HOOO!”) She shimmies up and down crumbling stairwells and fire escapes, the heartbreakingly sweet and wise orphaned Phil hiding in the folds of her skirt; she holds up an entire apartment full of molls, whores and a well-armed greaseball; she escapes from the enemy (again) on a crowded subway car, giving her the best line in the film as she backs away from the train across the platform, her teeth gritted, her eyes furious, gun held aloft: “Sissies! So you let a woman beat ya, ha? Yer PUNKS!”

She does all of this in high-heels and with no help from a soul. Even her natural allies – bartenders, hookers and waitresses, all fail her. Time and again, she proves the fallacy of her own weary maxim that you can’t beat the system. (When Phil asks her what ‘the system is’, she’s tells him she’s no idea. “How d’ya know you can’t beat it then?” he says.)

I won’t spoil the ending of this film. (Though you may have already seen it in Luc Besson’s Leon which had Jean Reno effectively in the Gloria role and Natalie Portman in Phil’s.) Gloria itself was remade in 1999 with Sharon Stone in the title role. Though Stone need not be in any way ashamed of her performance, the film, like 99 per cent of remakes, was in no way necessary. After Rowlands’ Gloria, any imitation could only ever be as pale as a Xerox of a Xerox.

Gloria: smoke and mirrors

Thora Birch as Enid in Ghost World (2000)

"Enid the Iconoclast!"

Enid the Iconoclast sounds like a superheroine by way of a no-nonsense Northern dinner lady (and they’re an imperious breed, let me tell you) but that’s what she is – or wants to be (an iconoclast that is). The gap between what we are and what we hope to become seems as narrow when you’re a teen as it does when you’re gallon drunk at a much more advanced age. But you wouldn’t know it with Enid. She isn’t the first bored, truculent and directionless teen who, finding her turn-of-the-century world and peers lacking, seeks solace and identity in the sounds and looks of ’77.

In her unlovely and lonely corner of an outer LA suburb, choked with neon and smog, multiplexes and parking lots, her inability to relate to anyone of her generation leads her to hook up with Steve Buscemi’s sad-eyed blues-loving fellow loner, thereby inadvertently wrecking her own hopes of escape and his career in the process. 

"Lemme sketch a portrait of my hate"

She has the typical superiority complex of the alienated alterna-teen (“I’m so sick of these obnoxious, pseudo-Bohemian losers” she chuffs of her peers) and a fearless, spicy nastiness of wit (“He’d better be careful or he might catch AIDS when he date rapes her.”)





Failed by her crypto-Republican best mate Rebecca (a pre-peroxide Scarlett Johansson), confused by her feelings for Seymour and believing she’s going to lose her kind, gentle father (Bob Balaban) to his second wife, she finds solace in the memories of childhood as prompted by a twee little 7-inch record. She’s only 18 and already looking back rather than forward. But after getting caught up in a philistine scandal that costs her the one chance of escape she had, she takes her destiny in hand and bravely honours her dreams of leaving – alone.

When I first saw Ghost World I thought they were trying to show us how punk Enid was by dint of her red-flag-to-the-mean-girls name alone – I mean: Enid! But in America, Enid (and Thora) aren’t old ladies’ names as they are here on Airstrip One where “Enid, played by Thora . . .” reads like a credit from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. On the other hand “Rebecca, played by Scarlett . . .” puts us firmly in Red Shoe Dairies territory. Hmmm.

Enid's World

Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in Der Blaue Engel (1930)

File under 'legend'

The silk-stocking-and-suspender clad thighs of the heartless Lola-Lola are ultimate emblems of the Weimar Republic’s twilight years. Dietrich’s final film as a mere mortal (as opposed to living legend) and her first film with Josef von Sternberg cast the Teutonic goddess as a gleeful, natural saucestrel and anti-heroine. Her merciless destruction of the middle-class, hypocritical, lascivious and ultimately pathetic Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) is steady yet casual, malicious yet uncalculated. She’s not after wealth or position. She marries Rath as an act of mockery; he has little money and she knows that. The subsequent events suggest she’s avenging her sex and class with her treatment of Rath.

Professor Beware

Strutting around on the splintery stage of a smoky cabaret club in high-heels, frilly knickers and a top hat, Lola has probably earned more free beer than cash in her working life. Having no privileges, she’s created her own. She’s languid as a cat, and a symbol of what the bourgeoisie fears the most: a sexual, sensual destructoress who does not give a damn for you and your notions of what is Right and Proper and does not crave your approval or way of life.

You just know she’s made for lust more than love, and when she claims the opposite in that famous song, reclining on that beer keg and flashing more close-to-the-border-flesh than Hollywood would ever allow, those who aren’t spellbound are as dead as Prof Rath.

Pam Grier as Jackie Brown in Jackie Brown (1997)

Brown: in the Driver's Seat

Tarantino’s tale of a lone, middle-aged air hostess on the bottom rung of her profession was something of a departure for him. So much so that some audiences baulked and walked due to the lack of choreographed ultra-violence. But he seemed to realise that while sticking with a tried-and-tested formula might bring simpler, straightforward success, it would also lead to a far less interesting body of work. This is my personal Tarantino favourite. It proved he could deliver trenchant, rounded characters just as well as he could bruised fists, smoking guns and gushing blood – and that he was, in fact, a great director of women.

Brown’s sensational and casually-worn sexiness seems to have got her little materially, but it’s fed her self-assurance (or vice versa) and given her the confidence to carry off her illicit yet unglamorous sideline - until now.




Still, it’s a lonely life she leads and the pathos of her plight is highlighted when we see her return to her touchingly modest apartment, grim in its sparse neatness. It’s there that she and Robert Forster’s craggy-faced ageing fox talk about the passing of their respective years, dreams and hopes, of disappointments and arse-saggery. Brown doesn’t know what her future is going to hold but she knows what she wants and likes – we can see that in the swooning pleasure she takes in the sweetest soul music and her sensual enjoyment of a slowly smoked cigarette. She’s the brains behind the film’s central scam and fearless about executing it. She could lose her job, freedom or life in the process, but she’s willing to take that tightrope over the quicksand of the everyday. She’s cool as a julep whether being interrogated, held at gunpoint, stewing in the pen or grabbing her rightful share of a fortune in a nail-biting heist.

Jackie on the lam

Even the one time she loses her cool she reverts to Coffy, doing the motherfucking-finger-wagging-shoulder-shake and taking no prisoners. In the end, she heads off into the sunset after stirring feelings in Max he clearly thought he’d forgotten. She doesn’t beg him to join her – that’s not her style. The kiss she gives him says enough. Her expression in the unbroken and lengthy final shot as she drives away, silently mouthing the words to Across 110^th Street as it plays on her radio, is inscrutable.

Madonna as Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Susan’s a drifter, a rock ‘n’ roll hobo, a Greenwich Village gunslinger. She’s a playful, insouciant punk who smiles more than she sneers. Knows exactly what she wants and takes it. In other words, Madonna playing a version of herself at the time (hopefully, there’s no sequel in the offing – a yoga-mad Susan looking like a walnut-filled condom would ruin the illusion beyond repair). Susan has effortlessly turned her life into a vision of free-spirited paradise as coveted by Rosanna Arquette’s Roberta who has ended up married alive in the bourgeois graveyard of New Jersey’s moneyed suburbs.

Desert Island Shot

Susan blazes a casually chaotic trail across NYC, relying on few and pursued by many – some with murderous intent. Like a man, she takes her pleasures and vices more seriously than any of her emotions and is so funny and sexy and she’d probably snub Madonna as too humourless and ambitious to be interesting. Memorably yet stupidly described in one review as a ‘self-sufficient slut’ (which I think was intended to be a compliment), Susan actually seems to reserve her heart (but not her body) for only one man - Robert Joy’s runtish Jimmy.

'tude to spare - any takers?

Big-haired, bountiful of breast and never-knowingly overdressed, every time she appears on screen, klieg lights seem to come on and the poverty of the Soft Life roars at you. We’re all Roberta when we watch DSS – misfits craving the slapstick sin of lawless Big City Life as made so damn desirable by Susan. Only when you follow in her footsteps to a city of warehouse apartments, dive bars and pulsing netherworld clubs where everyone’s dressed like Someone Your Mother Warned You About will you feel this free.

Karen Black as Rayette DiPesto in Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Trying to make a case for Rayette as any kind of feminist heroine would be like trying to Instagram an avalanche. However, Black’s trashily endearing turn here is justly revered – and it’s she who is the film’s ultimate outsider, not Jack Nicholson’s class-tourist, Bobby.
  

As Bobby’s girl, sweet Rayette has ambitions to move up in the world – something Bobby either can’t or can’t be bothered to understand, having left behind his family of classical music geniuses for a life as a drifting roustabout.

As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds, though they try with all their hearts.

Bobby treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s already swollen heart burst.

Bobby & Ray in one of those moments that Make Up For It All

She’s warm, real, romantic, fun and loyal. She can be shit-sharp as a gangster, too: when Helena Kallianiotes's verbally aggressive hippy responds to Rayette’s openness and working-class charm by snapping “Hey – don’t call me honey, mac.” Rayette’s eyes flame and she spits: “Don’t call ME mac - HONEY!” Nor is she above a bout of red-blooded bitchery, sweetly saying to her classy yet cold love rival Catherine (Susan Anspach) “That’s a lovely head of hair you’ve got  -*beat*-  natural?” She is a vulnerable soul, it's true, but outsiders are not amorphous in every trait – they can be tender or tough.

Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Would he be really better off with his mother's eyes?

In this the Rolls Royce of horror films, Rosemary is manifestly not a hard-drinking, tough-talking dame. She’s not scraping by on her wits and wiles. Society at large approves of her; to all outward appearances, she and Guy (John Cassavetes) are part of the Establishment. She’s so bourgeois she even gets in a butler and bartender when she throws a party. But was there ever a woman more alone in her singular terror?

After Old Nick has gotten into her knickers and her strangulating foetus drains her of colour and comfort, each and every potential ally is despatched, disabled or safely out in the Midwest. She is alone. She becomes paranoid. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get her. When the coven decide it’s safe for her to venture out into the burning concrete jungle of high summertime New York  and put a halt her suffering, Farrow’s beleaguered gamin gets wise. Her stuttering, palpable jitters in that phone booth scene as she frantically tries to reach her doctor are visceral – you can almost feel the pure fear oozing from her pores and seeping all over her body like icy water (“Witches, witches all of them witches . . .” she giggles to herself maniacally).

And like in every smudgy coloured nightmare you’ve ever had, every situation she now finds herself in seems to have four brick walls and no door. But ‘poor’ Rosemary? Never! As the net closes in on her and the hour of birth draws near, she goes down fighting, screaming, distracting, running, door-locking and tranquiliser-dodging. She is dogged, now beyond fear.

"You look like a piece of chalk, Ro"

At the end, as she enters a room full of gleeful sherry-sipping Satanists, carving-knife in hand, to stake her rightful claim on her newborn son, she’s throwing down the gauntlet. Maternal feelings overcome ones of revulsion because Rosemary knows however bad his dad might be, he’s also as good as her at her best, too, isn’t he? (Isn't he?)

Carol White as Joy in Poor Cow (1967)

"A lady? Perhaps, I may be . . ."

White embodied the lot of the proletarian princesses of Swinging London. Predictably, she was thus saddled with epithets like “The Battersea Bardot” - hijacked by Oi band Cock Sparrer for their tribute to White - and “The Working-Class Julie Christie”, as if she was worthy only through comparison (imagine anyone calling Julie Christie “The Middle-Class Carol White”). For while the well-heeled SW3 sorority - Christie, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, all so sunny and insouciant where White was forlorn and resigned - were free to indulge in Pilled-up sex as their Baby Boomer birthright and suffer little or no consequence or judgement, White’s girls only had to take the most tentative walk on the wild side before finding themselves up the duff, up the aisle or up shit creek PDQ. Joy will never cross the river to Chelsea – she’ll always be too busy putting her little cherub to sleep with the aid of milk and alcohol or washing the Battersea soot from her yellow hair with Lux flakes.

Joy & Son: room and bored

Joy is simple, straightforward and lonely, a bit of a drifter. Her husband is doing 12 years in Wandsworth and alone with her baby son, she hooks up with Terence Stamp’s ebony-haired, tender-but-bad boy. He’s in the same business as her jailbird spouse, and it’s a lifestyle she casually accepts – the stolen jewels he brings to a bleary-eyed Joy after a night-time robbery delight her in the most casual manner. Such are the material blessings that light up her existence. No matter how many shifts she spends getting varicose veins behind the local bar or how many shivery hours she spends ‘modelling’ in front of a sweaty lecher’s film-free camera, she’d only ever have the shillings for paste imitations.

A smashing bird under sooty skies

Now and then, she’s radiant with hope. Yet the forlorn look in her eyes – even when she’s smiling – always hints at some inevitably bleak and hopeless destiny. She always seems soft, whereas girls like Joy are often bruised early by experience, and it shows in their flinty faces. But Joy’s a romantic soul, too suffused with dreams of something better so that she floats above the rocks. She delights in sexual pleasure and is frank about it, telling her equally hard-up, more practical mate Beryl that “I couldn’t go professional – I enjoy it too much.”

Battersea Bardot

Her beauty is a casually worn one, forever on the verge of being slatternly: chignon always falling apart, badly-bleached hair in need of a root-job, mascara collecting sootily in the corners of her eyes. These looks are Joy’s only passport to a better life, and you just know they’re going to expire. It’s a fleeting, early-blooming beauty, one that will run to colourless, fat cheeks on a steady diet of white bread, too-sweet tea, gin & orange squash and John Player’s Specials. When Joy says to herself “Whoever heard of girls like me making it?” the pathos in her voice is heartrending – for this is barely an act; the thought has probably passed through her mind daily since she first realised she’d be looking out over weed-choked bombsites all her young life.

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniel in Klute (1971)

Fonda as Bree: a vision of urban alienation in shiny boots of leather

Klute is a favourite film of mine, the unjustly and bafflingly least known of Alan J. Pakula’s early 1970s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’. I love Klute as much for the stomach-tensing murk and menace of the setting and mood as for Fonda’s portrayal of this none-more-conflicted and unflashy prostitute being stalked by a psychotic ex-john.

A loner in the head-down urban jungle of noirish early seventies NYC, Bree is one of its many working girls – but none can match her for oddness. She’s not eccentric, just strange - and anomalous in every sphere of her life. You can tell by her accent, the books she reads, her methods of relaxation (a joint, a kaftan and a gospel standard) that she’s of middle-class extraction, probably a college graduate and that her family, if she has any, know nothing of her current life or the peril she’s in. 

She’s more solitary than social: we only seeing her letting loose when she goes on a three-day drug binge to forget the horror of her situation, dancing to high-octane psych-soul with Candy Darling. Even her threads set her apart from her fellow hookers (“Yeah. She used to dress the way you do” smirks Shirely Stoler’s madam as she looks over Bree’s East Village roll-neck and mod mop).

Humiliated at model castings (“She’s got funny hands”) and acting auditions (“Interesting accent – we’ll let you know”), the uncomfortable irony is that’s she only in control when she’s turning tricks: “For an hour, I’m the best fuck in the world”. No wonder she’s so neurotic and throws away half her earnings on shrink sessions.

"I guess this will amuse you . . . I'm - I'm afraid of the dark."

When she meets Donald Sutherland’s gauche, lonely private investigator, John Klute, she first snubs him as a “Goddamn hypocrite square”, then takes his virginity. In return, he gradually gives her love and understanding. And against her will she finds herself responding. They are both outcasts on opposite sides of the law, but equally, neither have a place in ‘respectable’ society. Still, there’s no danger of Klute threatening Bree’s independence; her succinct take on the normal life that marriage represents are an outsider classic: “Setting up home? Darning socks? I’d go mad.”

Klute and Bree: the start of something