//Annie Frost Nicholson with the Fandangoe Discoteca. Pic courtesy of anniefrostnicholson.com//

Next week sees the opening at London’s Canary Wharf of artist Annie Frost Nicholson’s Fandangoe Discoteca, the mini-disco installation where we can shake out our grief and help maintain daily mental health – the programme covers all intersections of grief from bereavement to climate angst to political rage to break-ups.

The design of the kiosk was inspired by De Stijl and Ettore Sottsass and holds up to eight dancers at a time.

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Tags: Amy Taylor, Annie Frost Nicholson, Black Star Liner, Bonzai, Canary Wharf, Dorothy, Fandagoe Discoteca, Guru, Harris Elliott Studio, Horace Andy, Inner City, Joe Smooth, Kid Loco, KLF, Lara Haworth, Le Tigre, Lil Yachty, Linnet Kamala, Mura Masa, Pet Shop Boyts, Raissa Pardini, Rebel MC, Rom Boyd, Stephe Hause, The Fall, The Fandangoe Kid, Timothy Wang, Viagra Boys, Wire

“Within the slippery divides between disciplines and media – fashion, art, music, interiors, commerce – one finds Malcolm McLaren, roaming and creating.”
Lou Stoppard in her essay in The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren

Disruption to the publication of a book is extremely small beer at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has set the world in disarray, so I’m sanguine about the postponement of several events and signings which were due to occur around the publication of my biography The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren.

//The back of the book jacket features this 1976 portrait by photographer Joe Stevens//

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Tags: CBS Theatrical Films, Fashion Beast, Joe Stevens, Lou Stoppard, Malcolm McLaren, Peter McLaren, Tracey Winwood

“It didn’t matter what side of the bed you were lying on, as long as you were lying on it. Everybody from (author/actress) Anne Lambton to (Sex Pistols guitarist) Kutie Jones to (socialite and writer) Anthony Haden-Guest – they were all flattered. Just goes to show how everyone loves to have their moment – good, bad or indifferent.”

Malcolm McLaren, The Look, 2006

It’s coming up to five years since I posted my marathon dissection – including extensively researched links to sources and references – of the divisive 1970s punk manifesto t-shirt design You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!

Here is a new version of that post, revised and updated with fresh links.

Enjoy!

Sixty years after Blast, the You’re Gonna Wake Up list t-shirt adopted a similarly truculent tone in an attempt to ring the alarms amid a culture rendered flaccid by the failure of the 60s dream.

You’re Gonna Wake Up – which went on sale in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974 – was conceived by fellow traveller and soon-to-be manager of The Clash Bernie Rhodes and realised with contributions from McLaren and their friend Gerry Goldstein.

Of course, it is best known for carrying the band name McLaren had recently granted to a bunch of teenagers hanging around the shop: “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS”.

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Tags: Alexander Cockburn, Alfred Bester, Anne Lambton, Anthony Haden-Guest, Bernard Wolfe, bernie Rhodes, COUM Transmission, David Cooper, David Holmes, Elton John, George Dangerfield, John Gunni Busck, John Lacey, Konstantin Paustovsky, Mal Huff, Marian and Doloures Price, Mel Ramos, Mervin Jones, New Statesman, pat Arrowsmith, Patrick heron, The Clash, Victor Lownes, You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You've Been Lying On!

Eyes For Blowing Up Bridges* is the title of the forthcoming exhibition about the creative interplay between a group of remarkable radical artists, poets, writers and activists who initiated, perpetrated and influenced a range of post-war alternatives.

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Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Asger Jorn, David Thorp, David Wise, Derek Harris, Guy Debord, Hervé Falcou, John Hansard Gallery, King Mob, Nostalgia Of Mud, Paul Burgess, Stuart Wise, William Burroughs

//Explanatory text panel which appeared on the inside cover of Icteric No. 2 with 2004 note, from King Mob: A Critical Hidden History//

//Extract of text on 1974 t-shirt by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein//

A few years ago I attempted a dissection of the intriguing elements of the culture-shock t-shirt You’re Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You’ve Been Lying On!, produced by Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm McLaren and Gerry Goldstein for sale in Sex at 430 King’s Road in the autumn of 1974.

In You’re Gonna Wake Up, the declamatory tone, aggressive punctuation, satirical bite and use of basic typographical emphases such as the repeated forward slash and random capitalised text combined to detonate a densely packed cultural device.

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Tags: Antonin Artaud, Arthur Cravan, Bernard Buffet, Blue Blouse, Boris Arvatov, Buckminster Fuller, David Wise, Erik Satie, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Francis Picabia, Franz Jung, Georges Méliès, Giorgio de Chirico, Icteric, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, Johannes Baader, John Cage, John Myers, Jonathan Swift, Kazimir Malevich, Leon Trotsky, Louis Aragan, Marcel DUchamp, Maurice Martin du Gard, Nick Brandt, Raymond Roussel, Richard von Foregger, Ron Hunt, Stuart Wise, Tristan Tzara, Vache, Viktor Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Woyrow, You're Gonna Wake Up One Morning And Know What Side Of The Bed You've Been Lying On!

Great news that the British Library has digitised the archive of one of the most important magazines of modern times: Spare Rib.

If you don’t know it or haven’t seen the publication, you are in for a treat. As the British Library’s politics and public life curator Polly Russell says, Spare Rib was “funny, irreverent, intelligent and passionate… a product of its time which is also somehow timeless”.

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Tags: British Library, Charlotte Raven, Club International, Debra Ferraday, Feminist Times, Friends, Jisc, Marsha Rowe, Polly Russell, Rosie Boycott, Spare Rib, Women's Liberation Movement

//From Radical People, Vol 1, No 2//

Great to see heroine Caroline Coon among the subjects/contributors to the second issue of Radical People, Reba Maybury’s celebration of quinquagenarian-plus non-conformists.

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Tags: Anna Braun, Barbra Streisand, Caroline Coon, Humboldt University, Muzeum Sztuki, Otis Redding, Pauline Boty, Radical People, Reba Maybury

//Pussy Riot on the set of the promo video for I Can’t Breathe. Photo: Denis Sinyakov//

I received a message from Richard Hell: “Check out this wildness.”

So I did.

It’s I Can’t Breathe, Pussy Riot’s first English-language release, about the furore surrounding the death last year of Eric Garner.  Hell recites Garner’s final words on the track.

“It felt weird to speak the words of a black man killed by the police, when I’m this privileged white guy,” Hell told Pitchfork. “At the same time, I believe in Pussy Riot. I have faith in them. I think they’re for real.”

Read all about the recording of I Can’t Breathe here.

Tags: Andrew Wyatt, Eric Garner, I Can't Breathe, Jack Wood, Nick Zinner, Pitchfork, Pussy Riot, Richard hell, Scofferlane, Shahzad Ismaily, The Ceramic Dog

Sixty years after Blast, the You’re Gonna Wake Up t-shirt adopted the same truculent tone and diffuse dialectic to ring the alarms amid a culture rendered flaccid by the failure of the 60s dream.

You’re Gonna Wake Up – which went on sale in SEX in the late autumn of 1974 – was conceived by Bernie Rhodes and realised with contributions from friends Malcolm McLaren (who wrote the slogan) and Gerry Goldstein.

Of course, it is best known for carrying the following band name: “Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS”.

I investigated its history in THE LOOK and also here. By publishing the list with links today I aim to dive deeper to demonstrate the tract’s range beyond popular culture.

Hence the references to artists David Holmes, Mel Ramos and Patrick Heron (and his campaign against The Tate), the literature of Alfred Bester, David Cooper, George Dangerfield, Konstantin Paustovsky and Bernard Wolfe, the work of  radical journalists Alexander Cockburn and Mervin Jones and the campaigning of political activists Pat Arrowsmith and Marian and Doloures Price.

Such content dates the compilation to October 1974: The Guardian published Heron’s 14,000-word Tate critique over consecutive days between the 12th and 14th of that month; the shirt itself mentions a piece by Jones in the New Statesman on October 4 and also an Elton John interview in the NME on September 25 (in fact the issue was dated September 28).

Alongside the call-girl phone number taken from local newsagents there are such quizzical references as that for former Playboy Club UK head Victor Lownes: “To be avoided first thing in the morning”.

Is this because one of the contributors had encountered him leaving his club Stocks, just a few hundred yards from SEX along the King’s Road?

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Tags: Alexander Cockburn, Alfred Bester, Bernard Wolfe, bernie Rhodes, David Cooper, Elton John, George Dangerfield, Gerry Goldstein, Konstantin Paustovsky, Kutie Jones & his SEX PISTOLS, Malcolm McLaren, Mel Ramos, Mervin Jones, Monty Modlyn, October 1974, pat Arrowsmith, Patrick heron, SEX