London Calling (59 page)

A spiral staircase led to the basement; a small dance floor surrounded by more low tables with red cloths and mirrors. And
controlled from a smoked-glass D J booth. Here Caroline, in her dyed cropped hair and proto-punk drainpipe pants and high
heels, played the latest Motown and soul as well as Doris Day and old favourites like ‘Love Hangover’ by Diana Ross. The customers
were middle-aged, middle-class lesbians: manly women in three-piece men’s suits, role playing fluffy Marilyn Monroes or gangster’s
molls, the whole gamut of personality games. One regular was Butch Joe, a black woman with a shaved polished head and no front
teeth who wore a beige-coloured man’s suit from Burtons. Her two favourite phrases were: ‘Strap a dick to me, dear’ and ‘I
want my tits off ’. Though catering mostly to lesbians, Louise was happy to allow the inchoate-punks to use the club. Peter
York described it as ‘a very nice little club, a little red box, where a floating population of freaks who aren’t gay but
would get beaten up for looking like that, the oddities, the contingent without a name, were really starting to collect in
a big way in 1975/6’.
³
Jordan, Sid Vicious, Viv Albertine, who joined the Slits in 1977, and the proto-punks from Bromley who became known as the
Bromley Contingent, including Siouxsie Sioux and Berlin, who was then only sixteen. There were young boys and girls in their
extreme makeup, their see-through tops, fishnets, high heels and brightly coloured hair, and they danced until the 3 a.m.
closing time, pausing from time to time to pose and pout in the mirrors and marvel at how fabulous they all looked. The dim
lighting helped.

They were all still teenagers. Something of the flavour of the place is given in Boy George’s description of meeting Siouxsie
Sioux in the ladies’ room at Louise’s in his introduction to Bertie Marshall’s
Berlin Bromley
: ‘She stood preening herself in the mirror wearing a swastika armband and very little else. She glared at me with contempt,
and almost knocked me flying as she stomped out…’
⁴
The Bromley Contingent were soon joined by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who usually stayed upstairs in the bar,
plotting with their friends. They brought in Johnny Rotten, the other Sex
Pistols and members of the Clash; so many punks in fact that the original lesbian clientele understandably began to complain.
They were right. Jordan, Siouxsie and the other originals took to only going on weekdays because the weekends became so crowded.
Louise’s closed soon after punk got fully underway, unable to handle the influx of hardcore punks and no longer attractive
to its original membership.
⁵

Linda Ashby, one of the regulars, whose girlfriend was Caroline the D J, befriended the punks and one night she took them
back to her place for drinks. She had a large two-bedroom flat at the back of the St James’s Residential Hotel on Park Place.
The entrance was through the hotel foyer, then across a courtyard and up three flights of stairs. She had decorated it in
the latest seventies style: a thick shag-pile carpet, smoked glass coffee table, thick damask curtains to keep out the light
and two large Heal’s settees where Linda and her friends sprawled to listen to
Judy Live at Carnegie Hall
on the state-of-the-art hi-fi and where many of the suburban punks would sleep rather than make the long journey home.

Linda, who was a prostitute, already knew Vivienne Westwood because a lot of the whores used to buy their bondage clothes
at SEX: they had rubber masks and leather skirts and tops with strategically placed zips that were unavailable elsewhere.
Linda and another prostitute worked at a dungeon in Earl’s Court. She would earn around £300 for a twelve-hour shift, enough
to provide for a luxurious lifestyle for herself and her girlfriend Caroline. She provided certain services to people, many
of them well known: the comedian Benny Hill liked to wear a rubber mask and be locked in a cupboard, others paid to be whipped.
Gradually Linda’s flat became the centre of activity for the early punks: Jordan moved in, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen lived
there for several months, Simon Barker became a paying lodger after Linda’s dungeon was busted and she couldn’t work for a
while. Johnny Rotten, Malcolm and Vivienne were there all the time. Linda’s was the punk equivalent of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s
Greenwich Village salon and in a matter of months her elegant walls were scrawled with punk graffiti as she took the whole
lifestyle on board.

Number 430 King’s Road, after the bend in the King’s Road, is an inconsequential-looking building, hardly the sort of place
you’d expect to find described as the ‘motor of U K teen experience’ (by Jon Savage). And yet for forty years, and through
numerous name changes and owners, it was the centre of ever-changing London street fashion. Before that it had been a greengrocer’s,
and for more than thirty years it was a pawnbroker’s. In the fifties it was Ida
Docker’s café, then it became a yacht agency and a motor scooter dealership catering to the local mods. It was given its new
direction in 1966 by Bill Fuller and Carol Derry, who ran it as an unnamed clothes shop. In 1967 it became Hung on You, Michael
Rainey’s swinging London clothes boutique which moved there from Chelsea Green, much closer to the centre of action. Here
you could buy boots made from carpets, fabulous velvet jackets and shirts with huge droopy lapels. Inspired by the Chinese
Cultural Revolution, Rainey launched a collection of high-collared drab green Chinese-style jackets and covered the wall of
his shop with a huge enlargement of a photograph of Mao Tse-tung’s famous 16 July 1966 swim in the Yangtze. But in 1967 Michael
and Jane Ormsby-Gore left London, heading west along a ley line in a gypsy caravan to Wales with a group of Holy Grail-seeking
friends, a journey which took them four years and inevitably meant that Michael was not often in the shop, to the detriment
of sales.

In 1969 number 430 was taken over by Tommy Roberts and Trevor Myles, who took it resolutely downmarket. They called it Mister
Freedom, after William Klein’s 1968 film, and ushered in seventies bad taste with giant star-spangled kipper ties, leopard-skin
prints and garish colour combinations. Just inside the door stood a huge stuffed gorilla, its fur dyed bright blue. It was
not subtle but it suited the times.

A year later Tommy moved on, leaving Trevor to rename the shop Paradise Garage and build a green-painted corrugated iron South
Sea island façade complete with a rusting fifties petrol pump and the shop’s name spelled out in bamboo. Sometimes he parked
his sixties Ford Mustang painted in tiger-striped livery outside. He filled the bamboo-lined shop with $5,000 worth of used
jeans, Osh Kosh dungarees, embroidered bowling shirts, hand-painted Hawaiian shirts, baseball jackets and other Americana
bought cheaply in New York. After a year he got bored, sprayed the walls black and installed a jukebox and a dance floor.
One day, Malcolm McLaren was parading down the King’s Road in a lamé suit copied from an Elvis Presley album sleeve, in his
words ‘a shining beacon in silver and blue’, when Trevor Myles accosted him and asked what he was doing. ‘I’ve got
stuff
! Stuff to sell,’ he told him. Myles gestured towards the shop across the street and McLaren rushed in: ‘There in the middle
of the room was a gleaming jukebox and a mirror ball, a skirt and pair of old jeans tacked up on the wall. It reminded me
of old dance halls with flickers of light all over the room.’ The jukebox was playing fifties rock ’n’ roll.

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood rented the back room to sell fifties records and memorabilia and did it up like a Teddy
boy’s bedroom
with patterned wallpaper, posters for the films
Rock Around the Clock
and
The Damned
, jars of Brylcreem, framed photographs of Billy Fury and Screamin’ Lord Sutch, a Dancette record player, copies of
Photoplay
, 16
Magazine
,
Spic
and
Mad
; an idealized fifties that they barely knew. They called it In the Back of the Paradise Garage. Vivienne began making Teddy
boy clothes and in 1971 they took over the whole shop, changing the name to Let It Rock and began selling drainpipe trousers,
bootlace ties, blue suede shoes and fluorescent day-glo socks. Malcolm had relatives in the rag trade and had box jackets
made up in blue-and-white flecked material like those worn by Elvis in the fifties. Teddy boys flocked to the shop. At first
the black walls and jukebox remained but then pictures of James Dean and early Elvis began to appear on the walls. McLaren
dressed in full fig retro-Teddy boy splendour: drape jacket, velvet cuffs, skinny tie and waistcoat. It was a look he liked
because it allowed him to ‘be a peacock, standing out in the crowd’ and yet it identified him as a ‘part of the dispossessed’.
⁶

Vivienne quickly made the style her own: they found a way to attach glitter to T-shirts to spell out the names of Eddie, Chuck
Berry and Elvis. She attached strategically placed zips across the breasts and carefully sewed fifties pin-up photographs
into small panels. They boiled chicken bones and Vivienne used them to carefully spell out the word ‘ROCK’, attaching them
to the cloth with small chains. Cigarette holes were burned in T-shirts, then turned back and sewn. Each piece was a work
of art.

Malcolm and Vivienne’s interest moved in the direction of rockers so in 1973 the shop front was transformed yet again, this
time into Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die with a shop sign designed like the colours on the back of a Hell’s Angel’s jacket
with a skull and crossbones in the middle. They now specialized in Hells Angels and biker fashions with an even greater emphasis
on studs, zips and leathers. They made the costumes for Ken Russell’s
Mahler
, including the famous short leather skirt with a swastika made from brass studs covering the arse.

In 1974 they decided to concentrate entirely on the zips and leathers and turned the shop over to fetish and bondage wear.
‘Rubberwear for the office’, as Malcolm called it. McLaren’s interest in bondage gear continued throughout the period and
he wears an inflatable rubber mask in the opening sequences of the 1980 film
The Great Rock
’
n
’
roll Swindle
. They spelled out the shop’s name, SEX, across the shop front in huge human-size soft pink latex letters like a Claes Oldenburg
alphabet. The window was blacked out; a certain insouciance was required to enter. Once inside, the shopper was confronted
by the shop’s manager, Jordan, who sat at the far end dressed in
fishnet stockings, impossibly high black stilettos and a black PVC leotard. Her blonde hair was piled high in a beehive and
she had thick black eye makeup. Berlin Bromley described her as looking like ‘a cross between a shark and a pickaxe’.
⁷
Sometimes wearing only tights and a rubber vest, it took tremendous courage for Jordan to dress that way, taking a commuter
train in the morning. She did not go unnoticed. Sid Vicious also worked there in the early days, goofy-looking with his overbite,
helpful and unassuming, dressed in Hawaiian shirts and fifties peg trousers; two shops behind in his attire but a welcome
contrast to Jordan’s full-on aggressive attitude.

Vivienne was the designer and Malcolm had the family connections to get the stuff run off; his stepfather owned the large
clothing factory Eve Edwards Limited. Malcolm was the Londoner; he grew up in Hendon and was sent to the private Avigdor Hirsch
Torah Temimah Primary School in Stoke Newington (his family were Sephardic Jews on his mother’s side). From there he went
to Orange Hill grammar school in Burnt Oak, where he showed enough ability in art to be enrolled, much against his parents’
wishes, in St Martin’s School of Art on Charing Cross Road; the first of many art schools he was to attend over the next six
years. Malcolm’s father left home when he was only eighteen months old and he and his elder brother were largely brought up
by their grandmother while their mother spent her time in the South of France and Paris with friends such as the millionaire
Charles Clore. Perhaps not surprisingly neither of the boys did well at school.

Malcolm and Vivienne were an unusual couple. Vivienne was born Vivienne Swire and came from the village of Tintwistle near
Glossop, Derbyshire. She moved with her parents to Harrow when she was seventeen and there attended Harrow School of Art.
She married Derek Westwood in 1962, and they had a son, Ben. After college she made and sold her jewellery on Portobello Road,
saving enough money to train as a teacher. She taught at a primary school in North London and also at a Sunday school; she
was a regular churchgoer. When her marriage failed, she and Ben separated from Westwood and in 1965 she moved into her brother’s
flat, where Malcolm McLaren was also living. After three weeks, they began sleeping together. McLaren was twenty-one years
old and she was the first woman he ever made love to. He told Jon Savage: ‘I’d come from a closeted environment, so completely
cut off from the world, I had never grown up.’ His powerful matriarchal Jewish grandmother had made sure that he never had
a girlfriend. Caroline Coon believes that his repressed attitude towards sex had quite a profound effect on the punk scene,
where mentors were few and far between. Vivienne was six years older than him and considerably
more mature. McLaren: ‘From then on, I kept going back to live with my grandmother, and going back to live with Vivienne,
backwards and forwards for three or four years, until I lived with Vivienne and left art school, and started in fashion.’
⁸
She got pregnant, and in 1967 they had a son, Joseph. They were together for fifteen years. She stopped teaching when Let
It Rock opened in 1971.

Vivienne, when she made an appearance in the shop, was stunning. Gene Krell, who ran Granny Takes a Trip a few doors further
west, described her: ‘Vivienne was walking down the street in leather mini skirts wound round with chains and padlocks, T-shirts
with holes, ripped fishnets and stilettos, or rubber negligees and rubber stockings: nobody had seen anything like it – she
stopped the traffic.’
⁹
She was the punk fashion prototype; everything stemmed from her designs and fashion sense. Punk was really what happened
when you combined Vivienne Westwood with a series of pub bands descended from the Who, Small Faces, Bowie, Mott the Hoople,
Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Several commentators have suggested that punk was just skiffle with electric instruments: Wreckless
Eric told Max Décharné: ‘It was really skiffle – part two.’
¹⁰
There is some truth in the idea. It has also been said they were hippies with short hair and there’s even more truth in that;
Joe Strummer even cast the I-Ching to decide whether or not he should join the Clash.