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 Nashvilleand 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)
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 21st 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.)
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.”
"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
Skinheads have long been misunderstood. This subculture’s perceived
links to far-right politics have somewhat soured their contribution to subcultural
style. To make claims for it is to hit a cultural nerve and be laid open to
accusations of filtering out noxious ideologies to concentrate on aesthetics
alone.
However, things are rarely as black and white as they seem,
if you’ll pardon the expression, and while there were undoubtedly factions of
racist and violent Skins or 'boneheads' – those who were afraid of everything and worked
overtime pretending they were afraid of nothing – there were legions of other
Skins whose way of life was a celebration not of whiteness, but of roots: they
were working-class with class.
Dress to the left c.1972
The original sixties Skins morphed out of the Mod scene. For
Mods whose means were as slender as their silhouettes, petrol-blue Italian mohair
suits were out - but Sta-prest, button-down Brutus shirts and steel-capped
leather boots (shiny enough for a modette to stare into and make up her Ace Face)
were in. The template for this approximated look was the dockyard worker’s
uniform: with a few tweaks and some painstaking attention to detail, it was sharp,
clean and tough enough to be seen in during an amphetamine-fuelled evening of
skanking to blue beat, ska and soul in the racially mixed and harmonious
dancehalls of south-west London.
Suedeheads c.1971
By and by, like ice floes in the spring, these
Mods (‘Hard Mods’) split from their peacock-like brethren (‘Smooth Mods’). By
now, the latter wore their aspiration tonsorially by adopting hairstyles that
spoke of leisured grooming while the former went to the other extreme with a
clipped head that spoke of practicality, manual work and self-assurance. This
style, the original Skinhead crop, was inspired by the young West Indian men
they danced beside. These Rude Boys kept their wiry, unruly & coarse locks
under strict control by keeping one step ahead of the razor. From this cut
Skinheads would receive their new name come the fag-end of that most
mythologized decade.
Best foot forward, c.1971
In 1969, many male Skins had partings shaved into their
crops, running from crown to forehead, though this was mostly hidden beneath a
pork-pie trilby, worn on the back, not the top of the head. Over the check
shirt (Brutus, Ben Sherman or Jaytex) an original Skin would wear a Wrangler or
Levi’s denim or corduroy jacket, or perhaps an RAF great coat or donkey jacket.
Anything, infact, as long as it wasn’t fashion, that most bourgeois of
concerns; this was about style. However, all coats and jackets faded in the
grand shadow of the sheepskin coat, the Skin Symbol par excellence.
'ard Modettes c.1968
The distaff members of the Skin and Suedehead cult distained
the buttock-hugging acrylic strides favoured by their mainstream sisters of the
’69-72 period (though the Skinbird’s affection for the mini-and-fishnets combo came
later), but their faces owed much to the Modette style: lips painted cardiac-arrest pale, Cleopatra
eyes, and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Their hairstyle was also modernist at
this point – a tufty, micro-fringed crop with feathered sides. Beneath their
flat-fronted slacks or bell-bottoms, they’d more than likely be wearing monkey
boots or clumpy flare-heeled brogues. Their brothers and boyfriends would be
shod in a bewildering array of reflective leather: loafers, Italian brogues,
leather-uppers, 8-eyelet DMs, or Norwegians.
Jackie-friendly suedehead couple c.1973
Come the very early seventies, Skinheads began to evolve
into Suedeheads - some of who took their terrace stomp all the way to Top of the
Pops in the form of Glam (Slade, after all, started out as faithful
Suedeheads).
Nobody's Fools: Slade in 1969
With a softer, smoother surface up top, the silhouette broadened
at the shoulders with the arrival of the Crombie (more often than not a
Chesterfield masquerading as Crombie, but let’s not split stubble) in all its
midnight black or natty navy sleekness. A pocket square was often pinned in the
breast with a diamond-studded pin. Amazingly, a brolly and bowler was sometimes
added to this get-up, thereby creating a bizarre caricature of a City Slicker.
Skins and Suedeheads were increasingly less easy to spot in the
mid-seventies period, largely because their style had evolved so far from its
origins that they were virtually unrecognisable, walking the mean streets of
the East End in knitwear, polo-necks, cords and, surreally, long fringes.
But
in the wake of the punk explosion, a new generation of Skins emerged alongsidethe countless other youth cults of the 1979-83 period, and this was when racial
politics really entered the equation along with the emergence of Two Tone. The
East End of London was the principal territory of the new Skin, but in the New
Towns - those concrete citadels of the Home Counties - Skinhead was huge.
Sorts
Skins now wrapped up against the chill wind of Thatcherism in
Harrington jackets (burgundy or black cutting the sharpest dash), accompanied
by orange-tab Levis with three-inch turn ups, all the better to expose the inky-black DMs rising up their calves. Added to this were form-fitting Fred
Perry shirts, V-neck sweaters and whip-slender braces. Hair ranged from the
near-bald ‘shadow’ of the number one crop to smoothies and suedes. Skinhead
girls (or ‘Skinbirds’) now sported the classic feather (or ‘Chelsea’) cut –
short on the crown, with fringes at the sides and front; the crown might even
be shaved, with feathery bangs flopping over the forehead. Many Skinbirds had a
tendency to bleach their remaining follicles to within an inch of their lives -
and they never let their roots grow out. Ever. Denim minis were worn with itchy
black fishnet tights and spotless cherry red DMs (or white socks with shoes). Snug
Fred Perry t-shirts and Ben Sherman check shirts were often a real boon for
those Skinbirds blessed in the mammary department.
Skinbirds, Brighton 1980
Overall, the look became more extreme (tattoos were
widespread), but it was no less sharp, although suits were never seen on Skin
revivalists. But the rot had set in, and Skinheads began to splinter spectacularly: into Trojans (originals), Neo-Nazis, SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial
Prejudice), casuals and ‘plastic’ Skins (i.e. High Street pretenders), Two-Tone and Oi! fans and later, gay fetishists. For a subculture that had originally stressed roots,
pride and respect, the fact that some Skins could now be seen Mod-bashing on Margate seafront
or in Bethnal Green underpasses showed how withered those roots had become.
Neo
Like all the subcultures of the post-punk era, true Skins
still exist, albeit in diminished numbers. Many 21st-century Skins are often a
combination of the best elements of the subculture; their politics, if they
have any, do not interfere with their love of ska, Fred Perry or feather cuts. But
then as now, there are those who sully the name: a head case is a hard case to
crack.
