London Calling (67 page)

The next month Saunders and his friends organized RAR and began publishing
Temporary Hoarding
, a cross between a sixties underground paper and a punk fanzine. They also began preparations for a huge rally. This saw
80,000 people march all the way from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park in London’s East End on 30 April 1978 for an open-air
concert featuring, among others, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, Steel Pulse and the Tom Robinson Band. The contrast between the reactionary
old hippy millionaire going on about ‘bastard wogs’ while ripping off their licks, and the energetic young punks onstage,
spreading a message of tolerance and goodwill, could not have been
greater. There had been a lot of unthinking racism and anti-semitism in punk, and RAR helped to focus people on real issues
and stop the movement from being taken over by the National Front, who saw disaffected youth as their natural recruiting ground.
Clapton never recognized he had done anything wrong; he continued to support Powell’s position and refused to apologize. Years
later, when he played with Dire Straits at a Nelson Mandela concert, the organizer, the anti-Apartheid activist Jerry Dammers
from the Specials, approached him and said: ‘You know this is your chance formally to apologize for what you said.’ Clapton
told
Uncut
magazine: ‘I thought “You must be fucking joking.” And I wouldn’t do it. I was so insulted.’
¹⁴

Though it is now considered to be the best film about British punk, Derek Jarman’s
Jubilee
was never intended to be a documentary film about the period but, better than any of the dedicated punk films, it captured
the punk sensibility of the time, albeit in a highly romanticized, art film format. Derek Jarman told Jon Savage:

Jubilee was originally a Super 8 film with Jordan, it wasn’t anything to do with punk in that sense. It was to do with Jordan
and whatever she wanted to make, but it grew in the course of early ’77, while we were writing it, and it was Jordan who brought
in the punk element, because we wanted musicians involved.
¹⁵

Derek Jarman had known Jordan since 1974, ever since he first saw her stepping off the Brighton Belle at Victoria station
dressed in white patent leather boots, a transparent plastic mini-skirt ‘revealing a hazy pudenda’, a Venus T-shirt, smudged
black eye shadow and a ‘flaming blonde beehive’. He rushed up and introduced himself, saying he would like to get to know
her.
¹⁶
He used her in the party scene of
Sebastiane
and also on Valentine’s Day, 1976, when he filmed her at a party at Andrew Logan’s loft where the newly formed Sex Pistols
were playing. When the evening seemed to be flagging, McLaren persuaded Jordan to get up onstage and strip, which she did
with Johnny Rotten’s half-hearted collusion. It still didn’t get them any press.

Jarman spent months making the rounds of the punk concerts and clubs, looking for likely actors for the film. Nell Campbell,
known as Little Nell, from the
Rocky Horror Show
played Crabs, described by Jarman as ‘sexy, nymphomaniac, plastic schmaltz, nubile’. The nineteen-year-old actress Toyah
Willcox, recently arrived from Birmingham and not yet a punk rock star, played Mad, ‘the flame–haired embodiment of craziness’.
Toyah: ‘When I got to his flat, Derek’s lover, a beautiful French boy called Yves, was wandering
around naked. Derek was completely sexually liberated. He asked me if I wanted tea… I asked, “What part do you want me to
play?” He said: “You’ll be Mad, the pyromaniac.”’ Wayne County was hired to play Lounge Lizard, ‘the world’s biggest star’,
having sold 50 million copies of his hit ‘Paranoia Paradise’ in Russia alone. The Slits became a street gang, a role they
took to with great enthusiasm. Gene October, from Chelsea, played Happy Days, and Hermine Demoriane, who had walked a tightrope
to present Derek with his Alternative Miss World crown, played Chaos, a mute, tightrope-walking, motorcycle mechanic au pair.
¹⁷
(She later released a 12” EP called
The World on My Plates
.)

The young Adam Ant played Kid. He described the meeting in his autobiography. Earlier that afternoon Adam had lain face down
on the floor of Jordan’s bedroom while she slashed a hole in back of his black T-shirt, pulled the fabric apart and carved
the word ‘FUCK’ into his back with a razorblade. He jumped up afterwards, but had to sit down again, feeling faint. Adam Ant:
‘Jordan washed the blood away and put an old T-shirt on to my first bit of body decoration to soak up the blood. Then she
put the kettle on.’
¹⁸
After a nice cup of tea, he slung his leather jacket over his shoulder and went for a walk down the King’s Road, hoping to
impress the punks. He had only gone a few hundred yards when someone ran up to him. Adam: ‘He said he was a director and would
I like to be in his film entitled Jubilee, all the while beaming a cheeky smile at me.’ Jarman was delighted to hear that
he knew Jordan and was in a band but had not realized that the ‘Fuck’ on Adam’s back was written in blood until Jordan told
him later; he thought it was eye liner.
¹⁹

Though punk intruded on
Jubilee
, the film dealt with the decline of Britain in more universal terms. The framing device has Dr John Dee, Queen Elizabeth
I’s court astrologer, showing his queen a vision of her kingdom 400 years in the future; a parallel jubilee to that of Queen
Elizabeth II. The old queen is horrified: the country is bordering on fascism, gangs of feral youths fight it out with neo-Nazi
police, murderous gangs of girl punks cause mayhem, the streets are desolate, boarded up, the rich live behind barbed wire
cordons. One of the high points comes when Jordan, dressed as a half-naked Britannia, carrying her trident and wearing her
helmet, goose-steps across the stage to a performance of ‘Rule Britannia’ by Suzy Pinns. It’s as if the statue on top of Tate
Britain had come to life. Jarman described his dystopia in
Dancing Ledge
: ‘In Jubilee all the positives are negated, turned on their heads. Its dream imagery drifts uncomfortably on the edge of
reality, balanced like Hermine on the tightrope. Its amazons make men uncomfortable, ridicule their male pursuits. Its men
are all victims.’
²⁰
The derelict
warehouses and wharfs around Jarman’s studio in Butler’s Wharf and Shad Thames were perfect locations for this desperate,
depressing view of Britain in decline. The film was shot entirely on location and in Jarman’s studio over a six-week period.
Sometimes there would be a delay in shooting while the producers, Howard Malin and James Whaley, ran around London looking
for more money but they scraped by. The film cost £200,000 in all, a tiny sum.

Jarman took his mother to the premiere, where the audience response was tumultuous. At the end, as the credits rolled, people
were shouting, arguing and fainting as he wheeled his mother up the aisle in her wheelchair. She looked around and told him:
‘This is a very accurate film.’
²¹
Much of Fleet Street liked the film and
Variety
described it as ‘one of the most original, bold and exciting films to come out of Britain this decade’. Predictably, the
‘punk experts’ on the weekly music papers damned it. They did not know Jarman’s work and were unfamiliar with his type of
individual artistic expression. They were expecting something like a documentary or a punk musical; there is music, but it
is only a small part of it. Vivienne Westwood called it as ‘the most boring and therefore disgusting film’
²²
she had ever seen and produced a souvenir T-shirt, silk-screened with her long rant against the film, which she ended by
saying: ‘I ain’t insecure enough nor enough of a voyeur to get off watching a gay boy jerk off through the titillation of
his masochistic tremblings. You pointed your nose in the right direction then you wanked.’ Malcolm and Vivienne saw the film
as being in competition with their own, ill-conceived,
The Great Rock
’
n
’
roll Swindle
(which has not stood the test of time). All the other punk films faded away with time, but
Jubilee
remains remarkably prescient.

As far as Derek was concerned, everyone was corruptible, particularly the punks. As he said in his memoirs: ‘Afterwards, the
film turned prophetic. Dr. Dee’s vision came true – the streets burned in Brixton and Toxteth, Adam [ Ant ] was on
Top of the Pops
and signed up with Margaret Thatcher to sing at the Falklands Ball. They all sign up one way or another.’
²³
Though it, unsurprisingly, contained echoes of Ken Russell and Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Jubilee
was a perfect auteur film: the cast and crew were all Jarman’s friends and many of the roles were written specially for them;
the locations were the streets and warehouses where he had lived for the previous decade. The film changed and grew from day
to day, with an infinitely flexible script determined by the previous day’s shooting and sometimes by money. He wrote: ‘With
Jubilee the progressive merging of film and my reality was complete.’
²⁴

Jubilee
is remarkable as a visual record of the face of London in 1977, and also as a fashion document. Punk was above all a fashion
statement. ‘You
are what you wear.’ It was about to enter its mannerist phase complete with pirates, pierrots and pashas. King’s Road shops
no longer sold clothes; they sold costumes. Never had the dressing-up box been so thoroughly raided. The young generation
of punks like Boy George and Steve Strange now took punk fashion to an extreme.

The new generation was totally, unquestionably, more open and optimistic… Club life had never existed like this before: more
kinds of drugs were consumed in London than ever before; more people gathered on a Saturday, outside mainstream pop culture,
than ever before.

MALCOLM MCLAREN

It was a huge movement. By the autumn of 1978 punk had worn itself out and the London club scene had become stagnant. Flatmates
Steve Strange and Rusty Egan decided to remedy this by opening a new club of their own. They even had the location lined up.
Steve Strange, who had been a regular at Louise’s, and was briefly involved in the Moors Murderers punk band, had become the
doorman at Billy’s, a gay club at 69 Dean Street. When Louise’s closed, the club’s D J Caroline had also moved to Billy’s.
They noticed that the club was virtually empty on Tuesday nights and two weeks later, after some enthusiastic discussions,
Steve and Rusty approached the owner and told him they could fill the club on Tuesdays with their friends. They would take
the entrance money and he would get an enormously increased bar take. He had nothing to lose. Billy’s was the latest incarnation
of David Tennant’s old Gargoyle club, and was still entered by the rickety lift on Meard Street just around the corner. Calling
it Billy’s – a Club for Heroes, they printed up flyers which read: ‘Fame Fame Jump Aboard the Night / Fame, Fame, Fame. What’s
Your Name?’ and quickly packed the place. Tuesday nights quickly became known as Bowie Night, and the crowd it attracted were
those punks who had started off as Bowie fans and still retained that love of reinventing themselves with their costumes.
News of the club spread by word of mouth as the music press was not interested – there were no live bands; despite this, the
line soon stretched around the block and people had to be turned away.

Many of these people had been very young when punk first began and now came into their own. Boy George was only fifteen when
the Sex Pistols formed and could not afford Vivienne Westwood’s clothes; now he had developed
his own unique look, making his spectacular entrance in a kimono, face paint and one of his extraordinary headdresses. Black
bin-liners, safety pins and zips now gave way to some of the most innovative clothing ever seen on the streets of London,
creative combinations of Bowie’s various personae combined with what Peter York has called the ‘Ruritanian toy soldier’ look,
¹
with little peaked caps and sashes, the huge baggy Turkish pants, pill-box hats with veil, lots and lots of makeup: Stephen
Linard wore a tartan battle-dress suitable for Culloden, Boy George’s boyfriend Marilyn arrived dressed as Rita Hayworth,
and David Claridge and Daniel James arrived one night as characters from
Thunderbirds
. Every Tuesday night Theresa Thurmer, a secretary at the
Daily Express
by day, transformed herself into Pinkie Tessa and arrived in a pink Little Bo Peep outfit complete with golden tresses. The
fashion department of St Martin’s School of Art used it as their R&D department. Steve Strange described the scene in
Blitzed!
:

People stood in the Soho rain in gold braid and pill box hats, waiting to get in. Cossacks and queens mingled happily and
narcissism ran riot… all these people were dressed like royalty, while in reality they were just ex-punks running up the clothes
on their mum’s sewing machines at home in the suburbs or living in the nearby squats in Warren Street.
²

The club ran from 10 p.m. until 3.30am with Rusty Egan at the turntables. He did not play much in the way of punk records;
the Bowie Night audience was fed up with punk and looking for something new. As well as the many ages of Bowie, he played
‘Warm Leatherette’ by the Normal (Daniel Miller, founder of Mute Records), whose lyrics referenced J. G. Ballard’s
Crash
; Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’; the theme from
Stingray
; Barry McGuire’s 1965 ‘Eve of Destruction’; ‘In the Year 2525’ by Zager & Evans from 1969; and minimalist electronic German
rock albums, particularly Kraftwerk’s
Autobahn
(1974),
Radio-Activity
(1975) and
Trans-Europe Express
(1977). These were combined with Berlin cabaret from Marlene Dietrich, which gave a decadent thirties feel to the club. Steve
Strange, dressed in a German army greatcoat and leather jodhpurs, maintained a strict door policy while making sure that people
who did get in would be comfortable in each other’s company. Robert Elms wrote: ‘Billy’s wasn’t a place for those who dressed
up for the occasion but for those who dressed up as a way of life. A small incestuous group numbering no more than a couple
of hundred kids in search of a life of style.’ After three months the club had outgrown the premises and it was time to move.
The owner did not want to lose this winning formula and became so threatening that Rusty Egan went into hiding. They moved
anyway, and on
Tuesday, 6 February 1979, Bowie Night opened at the Blitz wine bar in Covent Garden.
³