Back to the future: 1979-1989
All 'society' essays

London calling : subculture in the early 1980s

Remembering the haircuts, fashions, music and social scene

Essay

When they first met in the Kings Road, Chelsea in 1983, Theresa Coburn was a fashion designer and Jonny Slut was keyboard player in the band Specimen. Here they reflect on early 1980s London and the influences that underpinned their creativity.

Theresa: 'Do you remember we sat outside the Chelsea Potter, spring 1983? I was designing and selling rubber vests and skirts to the shop Boy in the Kings Road and your flatmate Gayle who worked there had told me 'Jonny from the Specimen loves your stuff'. I remember getting your number from her and calling you from the payphone in the hall of my flat in Turnpike Lane. I had been excited to hear that you liked my work and wondered if you would be interested in me designing some exclusive stage wear for you.'

Jonny: 'I had also already modelled some of your stuff for the Boy catalogue — shot in a graveyard. There was also an image of me on the cover of 'Flexipop' wearing a rubber vest.'

Theresa: 'That cover shot was very dark and the vest was identifiable only by a large silver eyelet visible on the shoulder. It was enough though! Were you actually buying or borrowing the clothes?'

Jonny: 'I don't remember paying for anything from Boy when I was in Specimen! I lived with Gayle at the time, so I could get my hands on anything that took my fancy as it were. I was probably also a good advert — I was rake-thin with a foot high black Mohican and blonde shaved sides. (To achieve this distinctive look I'd backcomb the life out of my hair, then apply plenty of spray — Aqua Net from the US was the best — and then crimp the base to make it stand up and stand out.)'

Theresa: 'When I moved down to London in 1982, I remember getting the sides of my head shaved at Antenna in Kensington Church Street. I had read about Antenna in "The Face" and "i-D", so was desperate to get my hair done there. It cost £25 just to get the sides shaved, which was a fortune at the time and I couldn't afford to go back! Kensington and Chelsea were the go-to destinations. I remember the Great Gear Market in Kings Road. Khan and Bell had a stall in there. You could also buy leather fetish accessories, feather boas, the full range of Crazy Colour hair dyes … it was very eclectic. The Chelsea Drugstore (as referenced in "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones), Fiorucci, Johnsons … at least Westwood is still there.'

Jonny: 'I liked Kensington Market a lot. I always got chatting to the stallholders, there was a café and a record shop too and a cool hairdressers. I was very impressed by Degvilles Dispensary (run by Martin Degville later of Sigue, Sigue Sputnik) although his stuff was too pricey for me. When I was growing up in the Fens I didn't really have access to cool clothes and shops. I remember you could send away for mass produced 'punk' style clothes from adverts in the back of the inky music magazines like "Sounds", "NME", "Melody Maker" and "Disc". (Actually I seem to remember a particular advert that had pretty much all styles covered … mod, hippy, punk, beatnik etc!) I did send away for a few T-shirts which were brightly coloured leopard and zebra prints. I also got a nice Buzzcocks T-shirt with silver glitter lettering and a pair of PVC trousers that my mum promptly threw in the bin (I retrieved them of course!)'

Theresa: 'I had been making all my own clothes since I was about 14 and I had just moved to London after finishing my fashion degree in Newcastle. It seemed to me that everyone with creative ambition gravitated towards London and people just appeared to move without jobs or accommodation to go to. London seemed to represent the land of creative opportunity.'

Jonny: 'Well, it was where all the stuff that we'd seen in the magazines or heard on the TV and radio was happening.'

Theresa: 'Yes, I was getting all my inspiration from the "NME", "Sounds" and the newly launched "Face", "Blitz" and "i-D". There was also a magazine that ran briefly called "New Sounds, New Styles"'.

Jonny: 'Those magazines, as well as "Top of The Pops" on BBC One on a Thursday and the evening shows on Radio One — especially John Peel — were vital.'

Theresa: 'I got my first London flat through Capital Radio. They used to run an initiative called Capital Flatshare. People could ring up the station with details of spare rooms in their flats and these details were distributed via a hand written, photocopied sheet of A4. It was released at 11am on a Tuesday and you had to pick it up in person from their foyer in Warren Street. You would need to go to the nearest phone box with a ready supply of 10p coins and hope that someone was at home to answer when you called. It was the only way of contacting anyone by phone.'

Jonny: 'I also remember having to write notes for friends who didn't have a phone in the flat and popping them through their letterboxes to arrange meeting points for the evening.'

Theresa: 'Everyone invariably carried small, pocket telephone address books around with them, usually with multiple scribbled out addresses and numbers for individuals — people seemed to be moving flats all the time.'

Jonny: 'Yes, I think I moved on a fairly regular basis, every six months or so, in with friends who had a place — either a rented flat or a squat. My first London address was in Great Portland Street. I had come down to visit a friend, ostensibly to attend a Bauhaus gig but I knew I wouldn't be returning home. She had a small room and I used to sleep on the floor on a couple of blankets with a coat on top of me in front of a dodgy gas fire. But hey — it was slap bang in the middle of London! The first few days I remember us just walking around Soho at night soaking up the atmosphere. It must have been let as a B&B property, as every other week an Orthodox Jewish gentleman would drop us off a pint of milk, packet of cream crackers and jar of jam when he collected the rent!'

Theresa: 'I moved to London with a view to 'designing for pop stars' although this wasn't always a convincing line with potential flatmates from Capital Flatshare, who used to all line up on a sofa — in a scene reminiscent of "Shallow Grave" — and interrogate potential tenants about employment status.'

Jonny: 'I always lived with friends and never strangers, so didn't have to be interrogated. I lived in a few squats — living in a squat you get a great sense of community spirit. There were so many empty council properties in central London at the time that someone would just have to gain access and change the locks. The electricity was usually already on, and you just phoned the company, said you lived at the property and got billed. There were squatters' rights and if the council wanted you to leave they had to serve notice and give you a notice period.'

'I was also aware from reading in the music / style press of the famous Warren Street squat where Boy George, Marilyn, Princess Julia, Stephen Linard and Christine Binnie had all lived, so the idea of squatting had a certain glamour attached.

'The first squatting community I became part of was in a series of council blocks in Somers Town, by Euston Station. Getting a squat was a word-of-mouth thing. There were a number of art students, fashion shop workers from the Kings Road, musicians, designers, a very creative bunch living there. The late comedian Jeremy Hardy lived in the block opposite, and I shared a place with Amanda Cazalet, a shop worker who was later spotted and became a top model. Madonna even turned up one night and was trying to get a couple of my friends to go down to "Top of the Pops" for her first-ever appearance. I was in the Specimen at this time and "Blitz" magazine came and did a feature on my "Batsquat" as they dubbed it.'

Theresa: 'After establishing somewhere to live — I paid £20 a month for a shared flat in Stockwell — I started selling my rubber clothes to Boy in Feb 1983. The garments were a development of the rubberwear I had based my graduate collection on. Rubber was — still is to a certain extent — perceived as a rather subversive fabric. With my designs I wanted to take rubber out of the seedier sex shops and make clothes that were more fashionably relevant. I wanted the fabric to be perceived differently whilst still retaining an "edge". Even the extreme stuff that I was designing for you as stagewear was not about sex and fetish.'

Jonny: 'To be honest sex was way down the list of what was important to me at the time. I also didn't want to be pigeonholed into the label "gay", which to me implied the leather scene around Earls Court and Bronski Beat. I think a lot of the more interesting "gay" artists of the time — Boy George, Marc Almond, Pete Burns — rebelled against that too.'

Theresa: 'I have never wanted to be perceived as a rubberwear / fetishwear designer per se and the Atomage/John Sutcliffe aesthetic was not the direction I wanted to follow. My ideas around fashion design were about disruption and rubber was simply a fabric that I was interested in working with at the time. It was post punk, when PVC had been widely used and to me it seemed like a natural progression and something that hadn't been fully explored outside of sex shops and fetish clubs.

'I was also more interested in music than fashion and specifically the stagewear that musicians wore. In that respect I saw music and fashion as inextricably linked and always wanted to design stagewear. Growing up watching "Top of the Pops" every week was as much about seeing what the bands were wearing and parental outrage was inevitably always based around someone's image. Particularly harrowing if they "couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl".

Jonny: 'We are talking earlier here, about the glam rock era of the early '70s. I was 10 years old and my hero was Steve Priest from The Sweet. He'd be acting in that really over the top camp/feminine manner plastered in heavy make up, long hair, pouting at the camera and wearing the most flamboyant outfits. The whole performance was hysterical and hilarious. Recently reading the broadcaster Danny Baker's autobiography ("Going to sea in a sieve") it struck me just how "cool" being "gay'" (or being perceived to be) was in the early '70s. He'd (Danny Baker) got a job at 14 at the coolest record shop in Soho, owned by a gay couple and it seemed to be the epicentre of everything hot and happening at the time. It certainly shed some light on the whole camping it up on Top of the Pops thing to me. I always felt desperately sorry for Rob Davies from Mud as he was so obviously assigned to be the "camp" one!'

Theresa: 'There were some elements of Glam Rock that were quite theatrical and "pantomine". I was more interested in the images and music of David Bowie and also Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno of Roxy Music. I loved the androgyny and otherness within Bowie's whole persona and image, whereas with Roxy Music it was more about the garments and the fabrics. I never felt they (Roxy) were making a statement about sexual ambiguity, but I really liked the idea of using traditional womenswear fabrics for menswear and Ferry's sequined and zebra skin jackets and Eno's peacock feathers stuck with me, and ideas expressed by both Bowie and Roxy Music (and their designers) had a big influence.

'This blurring of genders and conformity I was seeing on the music scene appealed to me. I suppose this is where I saw the potential for the most creativity or confrontation. There was always the element of wanting to "shock someone" (broadly meaning the general, conservative public) and this carried on from Glam to Punk and influenced my image and my work. There seemed to be a great preoccupation with "shocking people". We were challenging tradition and pushing boundaries but that was not our vocabulary or terminology and we weren't analysing what drove our creativity.'

Jonny: 'Later we had the whole New Romantic Scene of the late '70s / early '80s that I think was the most interesting and radical offshoot to come out of punk, dressing defiantly up, rather than down, with echoes of the Glam Rock scene from years earlier. I think it was about wanting to be noticed than "to shock" per se, flaunting your invented self rather than knowing your place in an otherwise drab world.

'I got asked to join the Specimen within the first month of being in London. I think Jon Klein the guitarist had spotted me the first night I went to the Batcave, and Ollie Wisdom the lead singer, approached me not long after, on my second or third visit. I think I was wearing something in lurex that I had liberated from my Mum's wardrobe and probably a pair of black PVC trousers. The invitation to join the band was solely based on my image.'

Theresa: 'We eventually met through the Boy rather than the Batcave connection. Do you remember Boy had a reputation for being quite intimidating at the time?'

Jonny: 'I remember once coming on a shopping trip to London when I was still at school and heading to the Kings Road. In the window of Boy, there was a pair of dayglo green and black striped drainpipe trousers that I really wanted but I was too scared to go in, as there was a tall guy inside with a red plastic bag sellotaped around his face and head! It was a strong look …'

Theresa: 'Yes, it was also always so dark in there, all painted black. I remember once hovering by the door as this large stocky punk, dressed from head to foot in black, emerged threateningly from the shadows!

'I used to illustrate someone who looked like you when I was designing, long before we were even aware of each other — a kind of subconscious muse perhaps. Your image was perfect for the statement that I was trying to make through the clothes.

'When we met at the Chelsea Potter, you said you were interested in looking like a cat onstage. The work that subsequently emerged went beyond gender. What I enjoyed so much about our collaboration was that you were so open to ideas that I had total creative freedom as a designer. Our work has always pushed boundaries but retrospectively I think we were exploring gender in a way that wasn't a "conscious" decision at the time. Exploring gender neutrality and the potential for i.e. feminising menswear has been a popular debate within contemporary fashion in recent times. Were you aware that this is what we were subconsciously doing back in the '80s?'

Jonny: 'Subconsciously maybe, but consciously no. I mean it was the era of the "gender bender" as the press called it. Associated with club culture, Boy George, Marilyn, Steve Strange and the "Blitz" crowd.

'Looking "other" just felt like my version of normal, I think. I really didn't see any sartorial boundaries. I was in a band and this, against the backdrop of the London club scene, was quite a natural way of living for me.

'The creation of the one-off, bespoke garments was important as they obviously augmented the Jonny Slut image and persona, in that it definitely made me stand out and it showed that I was serious about being in a band and making an impact. Getting dressed for a show definitely feels very empowering. It gets you in the zone of being something other. It's like armour really. I can remember the first show I ever did was at Heaven in London in 1982. I was obviously a bit nervous but once onstage I did feel the power of the unsmiling, slightly disinterested vibe I was giving off. I went with it and it definitely worked.'

Theresa: 'I remember Noddy Holder from Slade saying once, that before gigs the rest of the band were always curious to see what Dave Hill was going to be coming out of the dressing room wearing. Was this the same for you?'

Jonny: 'Ha ha! I remember that you had made me that "tail" for the first Batcave UK Tour. I hadn't said anything about it (to the band) and in the dressing room on the first gig of the tour, Ollie Wisdom the lead singer was banging on about how he had got this fantastic addition to his leotard costume.

'He delved into his bag and produced a thin, flaccid, foot long, red velvet devil tail which he proceeded to pin to the back of his leotard. "Let's see your outfit now, Slut!"

'Reluctantly I unfurled the 5ft long creation from its box. A "tail" like a fat, black latex boa constrictor, covered in hundreds of studs and so heavy that it had to be worn attached to a rubber and chain "harness". I put it on in stunned silenced.

'I think, however, that that incident may have encouraged the rest of the band to up their game a little.'

Theresa: 'Jon Barraclough did some great photos of the tail and the spiders web. They have become iconic subcultural images and have been reproduced widely. Your look made you a "Goth Icon" and you can still see references to our work now, in the recent Comme des Garçons Mens A/W 19 collection and also with the DJ Parma Ham, who actively acknowledges your '80s image as an inspiration. It's fair to say that what we were doing was unique at the time and is culturally and politically relevant now.'

Jonny: 'Parma Ham told me recently that the look had been a way into a non-binary identity for them, as it was a way of getting into wearing make up and dressing in a more extreme way. Looking back it was a really powerful, genderless image, coupled with the "power" of being part of a scene and in a band. I'm happy and proud of that aspect of the work.'

See also:

Further reading

  • '80s Fashion: From club to catwalk' by Sonnet Stanfill (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013) [National Library shelfmark: PB6.213.975/4].
  • 'As Seen in BLITZ: Fashioning '80s Style', by Iain R Webb (Woodbridge: ACC Editions, 2013) [Shelfmark: HB6.213.8.67].
  • 'Blitzed!: The autobiography of Steve Strange', by Steve Strange (London: Orion, 2002) [Shelfmark: H3.203.2297].
  • 'Going to sea in a sieve: The autobiography' by Danny Baker (London: Phoenix, 2013) [Shelfmark: PB5.214.1263/3].
  • 'Gothic Dark Glamour' by Valerie Steele (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008) [Shelfmark: HB5.208.11.222].
  • 'Gothic Rock', by Mick Mercer (Birmingham Pegasus, 1991) [Shelfmark: HP4.92.843].
  • 'In the Eighties: Portraits from another time', by Derek Ridgers (Great Britain: Carpet Bombing Culture, 2017) [Shelfmark: HB7.217.12.1].
  • 'No Future: Punk, politics and British youth culture, 1976–1984', by Matthew Worley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) [Shelfmark: PB8.217.491/2].
  • 'Pop Styles', by Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter (London: Vermilion, 1984) [Shelfmark: HP4.84.1731].
  • 'Take It Like a Man: The autobiography of Boy George', by Boy George and Spencer Bright (London: Pan, 1995) [Shelfmark: HP1.96.1164].
  • 'The Dark Carnival: Portraits from the endless night', by Derek Ridgers (Darlington: Carpet Bombing Culture, 2015) [Shelfmark: HB6.216.1.26].
  • 'The Fashion Year Volume 2', by Emily White (London: Zomba, 1984) [Shelfmark: HP4.85.151].
  • 'The Story of The Face: The magazine that changed culture', by Paul Gorman (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017) [Shelfmark: PB7.218.91/1.

 

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