Jocks&Nerds Issue 16, Autumn 2015

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE

AUTUMN 2015 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 16

©

“People say I always play strong women; I don’t know any weak women.”

MAXINE PEAKE

£5.95

www.jocksandnerds.com

The original 1915 501® The Golden Handshake 100 years ago Cone Mills® in North Carolina made a historic deal to start producing Shrink-to-Fit denim for Levi Strauss & Co’s Lot 501® jeans. This is one of the first pairs they made. To honor them and the fine men that wore them, we’ve recreated this 1915 pair stitch for stitch, right down to the exposed rivets, suspender buttons and high waist fit. And we’ve done it all using lightweight Cone Mills® plain selvedge denim. levi.com/levisvintageclothing

The stitch for stitch reproduction MADE IN THE USA

Online store www.richardjames.co.uk Shop +44 (0)207 434 0605 Bespoke +44 (0)207 287 9645

BY APPOINTMENT TO H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES HATTERS

BY APPOINTMENT TO H.R.H. THE DUKE OF EDINBURGH HATTERS

F O U N D E D 1 6 7 6 . LOCK HATTER S.CO.U K

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE ©

VOLUME 1 ISSUE 16 Cover Maxine Peake photographed by David Goldman, styled by Rose Forde Hair and make-up by Victoria Bond at Caren using Bumble and Bumble and Burberry Beauty Suit by Hardy Amies menswear; shirt and tie by Aquascutum menswear; hat by Laulhère Retouching and colour management by Complete Colour Services completeltd.com Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com Assistant Editor Chris Tang tang@jocksandnerds.com Editorial Assistant Edward Moore edward@jocksandnerds.com Junior Designer Anna Holden anna@tack-press.com Financial Department Emma Gregory and Bryan Kemsley accounts@tack-press.com Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@tack-press.com Subscriptions subscriptions@jocksandnerds.com

Associate Editor Chris Sullivan chris@jocksandnerds.com New York Editor Janette Beckman janette@jocksandnerds.com Contributing Fashion Editors Marcus Love, Richard Simpson Staff Writers Paolo Hewitt, Chris May, Andy Thomas, Mark Webster Staff Photographer Ross Trevail ross@jocksandnerds.com Music Events Programmer Stuart Patterson stuart@jocksandnerds.com

Commercial Director Chris Jones chris@tack-press.com Commercial Manager Tack Studio Nina Akbari nina@tack-press.com Italian Advertising Representative Angelo Careddu Oberon Media, Viale Richard 1/b, Milan 20143 +39 (0)2874 543 acareddu@oberonmedia.com Swiss Advertising Representative Amelia Guercio Magazine International, Rue du Valée 3 Geneva 1211 +41 (0)78 723 72 53 aguercio@magazineinternational.ch

Subeditor Rosie Spencer Interns Hannah Beach Pablo Greppi Liam Hale Katerina Mazzucchelli Original Design Phil Buckingham

Contributors Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala, Filipa Alves, Mark Anthony Bradley, Darren Brode, Sophie Coletta, Joe Conzo, Kevin Davies, James Dimmock, Nicky Emmerson, Rose Forde, Teddy George-Poku, Orlando Gili, David Goldman, Gordon Goodwin, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Owen Harvey, Eric Hobbs, Martin Holtkamp, Elliot Kennedy, Phil Knott, Kumiko Kobayashi, Karen Mason, Masaki Miyairi, Benoit Peverelli, Laszlo Regos, Heather Saitz, Anna Sampson, Paolo Santambrogio, Jamel Shabazz, Gavin Watson, Simon Way Special Thanks Julie Arscott at Hideaway hideawaylive.co.uk, Champ Road magazine, Hannah Drozdowska at YMCA Ealing ymcawestlondon.org, Kaleigh Jones, Lauren Maiman and Mark Weber at Detroit Boat Races detroitboatraces.com, Jill Reading at the British Film Institute bfi.org.uk, Simon simon171.com Jocks&Nerds Magazine, Tack Press Limited, 283 Kingsland Road, London E2 8AS Telephone +44 (0)20 7739 8188 jocksandnerds.com facebook.com/jocksandnerds Twitter: @jocksandnerds Instagram: @jocksandnerdsmagazine Jocks&Nerds is published four times a year, printed by Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk To subscribe go to jocksandnerds.com/subscriptions All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in the magazine are that of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Jocks&Nerds is published by Tack Press Limited © 2015

justwilliam.com

essential accessories for men

p112

Contents p118

14–25 SEEN: Kaido Racing is

an underground Japanese custom car scene

104–111 STYLE: Ned Barton

Photographs James Dimmock Styling Mark Anthony Bradley

26–40 NEWS: Our edit of some

of this autumn’s highlights

112–117 MUSIC: John Lydon is still

agitated and agitating

42–50 PEOPLE: We celebrate the

pioneers, trailblazers and individuals

118–129 COVER STORY: Maxine

Peake is writing, directing and acting to forge her own path

52–56 DETAIL: James Sorrentino

Photographs Elliot Kennedy Styling Richard Simpson

130–137 STYLE: Tribe NYC

continues to fascinate filmmakers and storytellers

138–143 CINEMA: Pier Paolo Pasolini,

Italy’s foremost writer, poet and director, was murdered 40 years ago

64–68 GALLERY: Afropunk is a

subculture, festival, movement and so much more 74–77 MUSIC: St Germain, the

pioneering French house musician, is back with an African-influenced album 78–87 STYLE: When We Were Kings

Photographs Nicky Emmerson Styling Richard Simpson

98–103 CULTURE: Graphic Means

looks at how computers have changed our graphic world

178–181 BULLETIN: CP Company, 40

182–189 STYLE: Everything I Do Gonh

Be Funky Photographs Simon Way Styling Teddy George-Poku

is – so much more than great music; it is the breaking down of barriers

190–197 SPOTLIGHT: Detroit is on the up and rapidly becoming the most exciting city in the USA

150–157 STYLE: Joseph Dredge-

198–205 SPORT: Calisthenics is an

Fenwick Photographs David Goldman Styling Richard Simpson

ancient art that is being rediscovered 206–207 ICON: Armani Jacket is the

Miracles tells the incredible story of Nottingham Forest FC under the management of Brian Clough

tells the story of the ever-evolving hip-hop styles

a sport that requires both physical and mental agility

144–149 CULTURE: Disco was – and

158–161 CINEMA: I Believe In

88–95 CINEMA: Fresh Dressed

172–177 CULTURE: Chess Boxing is

years old, continues to pioneer technical clothing for heroes

Photographs Phil Knott Styling Mark Anthony Bradley

58–62 HISTORY: Guys and Dolls

164–171 PROFILE: Timothy Everest celebrates a quarter century as one of England’s top independent tailors

symbolic garment in the 40-year career of one of fashion’s true trailblazers

162–163 BULLETIN: K100 Karrimor

is a new outerwear brand

p130

p198

p64

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492Y2 POLY COVER COMPOSITE + HEAVY FLEECE HOODED JACKET IN POLY COVER COMPOSITE, A MATTE, COLOURLESS AND OPAQUE TWO-COMPONENT WATER AND WIND RESISTANT FILM. THE GARMENT DYEING TECHNIQUE COLOURS THE FILM WITHOUT AFFECTING ITS TRANSPARENCY. COMPLETELY HEAT SEALED SEAMS. POCKETS WITH WINDPROOF ENTRANCE. DRAWSTRING ON BOTTOM HEM. ZIP FASTENING. DETACHABLE LINING IN STRONG FLEECE USABLE ON ITS OWN. HOOD IN NYLON WITH FLOCK PRINT INSIDE. RAGLAN SLEEVE. ZIP FASTENED POCKETS. COTTON TELA POCKET INSIDE. COTTON TELA PLACKET MEANT TO HIDE THE LACING HOLES. ZIP AND VELCRO FASTENING.

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SEEN

Kaido Racing

Photographs Martin Holtkamp Production Kumiko Kobayashi Words Masaki Miyairi from Champ Road magazine Translator Emi Takahashi

Kaido racing (trail racing) was born out of the street car racing scenes of 1970s and 80s Japan.

Originally, production-line cars were modified with racing car specifications, and drivers gathered on public roads where they took part in illegal races such as the ‘zero yon’

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(quarter mile race) and ‘time-attack’, a type of drag race.

Many of these racers came out of the ‘bosozoku’ ( Japanese motorbike gangs), so in some ways these modified cars were a continuation of the style of these older gang members, known as ‘furyos’ (delinquents).

Over time the functional modifications gave way to more stylistic ones, with owners developing ever more extreme creations, notably oversized exhaust pipes – which are illegal on public roads in Japan – and extended front bumpers that can be stood, or danced, on.

SEEN | Kaido Racing

Shun Imaizumi, 21, construction worker, from Tochigi-ken How did you first get into Kaido Racing?

Through my father, Susumu Ueno.

What’s so special about Kaido Racing?

The individual car designs.

Describe Kaido Racing in three words.

No words needed.

Who’s your style icon?

My father.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Ariana Grande.

What’s your favourite movie?

The Fast and the Furious.

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SEEN | Kaido Racing

SEEN | Kaido Racing

Susumu Ueno, truck driver, from Tochigi-ken Describe your style.

Shakotan peta-peta.

Describe Kaido racing in three words.

Cool. Interesting. Exciting.

Who’s your style icon?

Kaido racer Mr Narui.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Eikichi Yazawa.

What’s your favourite movie?

Hey! Oirazu.

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Made in Red Wing, MN, USA.

MOC TOE Style no. 1907

WWW.REDWINGHERITAGE.EU

SEEN | Kaido Racing

Hiroki, 21, office worker, from Tochigi-ken Describe your style.

Furyo.

Describe Kaido racing in three words.

Always stands out.

Who are your style icons?

Kaido racers Mr Yutaka and Mr Narui.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Eikichi Yazawa.

What’s your favourite movie?

Shakotan Boogie.

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Some things change.

Others become legendary.

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SEEN | Kaido Racing

Katsumi Ueno, 26, truck driver, from Tochigi-ken Describe your style.

Shakotan.

Describe Kaido racing in three words.

Happy. Cool. Yabai.

Who’s your style icon?

Mr Narui.

What’s your favourite band?

Yokohama Ginbae.

What’s your favourite movie?

Maru So Kaizou Jidosha Kyoushujyo.

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Steve McQueen: the Man and Le Mans By the end of the 1960s, Steve McQueen was one of the world’s biggest acting stars, and setting up his own production company, Solar Productions, gave him the opportunity to make films that interested him.

A new documentary, Steve McQueen: the Man and Le Mans, explores the notion that McQueen’s 1971 racing film Le Mans, set around the famous 24-hour motor race, was an attempt to create a more personal, visceral film that captured the thrill and passion of driving competitively at high speed (McQueen competed professionally and represented the US in a few disciplines). The documentary – which includes interviews with key people from both his personal and professional life, as well a never-before heard voiceover from McQueen himself – presents a different side to the man most people remember only for his acting.

Elga Andersen, Steve McQueen and Lee Katzin on set of Le Mans, France, 1970 Photograph Nigel Snowdon © The Works UK Distribution

Steve McQueen: the Man and Le Mans is out in cinemas on 6 November theworksfilmgroup.com themanlemans.com Words Edward Moore

Levi’s and Cone Denim Centenary

North Carolina’s Cone Denim began supplying denim fabrics back in 1891, at a time when overalls and other denim garments were still strictly practical workwear. In 1915 the company started to supply denim from its mills to Levi’s, an ongoing partnership that celebrates its centenary this year. This season Levi’s Vintage Clothing has produced a range of garments based on pieces from the mill’s archive. levisvintageclothing.com conedenim.com Photograph Chris Tang Words Edward Moore

Atip Wananuruks, stylist, wears jacket and dungarees by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; trainers by Converse; hat, sunglasses and watch, model’s own. atipw.com

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NEWS

Patrick Cox, founder of Lathbridge, wears shoes by Lathbridge; jacket, trousers and shirt

by J Crew; sunglasses, watch and jewellery, model’s own.

Lathbridge

Shoe supremo Patrick Cox is back. Having closed down his eponymous label in 2008, this season sees him return with his new brand, Lathbridge (his middle name). He describes the brand, which includes footwear, bags and accessories, as “not about trends and not about labels. It is a brand that will reflect a certain Britishness and all the wonderful things that surround a man in life”. lathbridge.co.uk Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

NEWS Gravity Fatigue by Hussein Chalayan

“People always have to pigeonhole you, they can’t imagine that a person can have more than one career,” said Hussein Chalayan earlier this year, when news emerged about his forthcoming ballet Gravity Fatigue at Sadler’s Wells, made in collaboration with choreographer Damien Jalet. “I am an artist and a designer, if you want to categorise me, but ultimately I’m interested in ideas. What I really like about the dance world is that ideas do merge. Design, movement – it’s almost like art in action.”

Following Ballet Preljocaj and Jean Paul Gaultier’s Snow White, and an ongoing collaboration between Bodymap’s Stevie Stewart and Michael Clark, such crossovers are clearly fertile territory.

Gravity Fatigue is at Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1, 28-31 October sadlerswells.com chalayan.com damienjalet.com Words Andy Thomas Photograph courtesy of Hussein Chalayan

Working on costume designs for Gravity Fatigue

Moncler A

French outerwear brand Moncler has collaborated on a new capsule collection with Parisian designer Alexandre Mattiussi, creative director of Ami. Moncler A features reinterpretations of pieces such as the bomber jacket and Chesterfield coat that combine traditional English fabrics with technical materials. Regular design elements of the collection include an oversized fit and an enlarged Moncler logo. moncler.com Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

Nicholas Walter, brand consultant, wears all clothes and shoes by Moncler A. @nicholaswalter

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NEWS President’s x Hancock VA

Italian brand President’s draws from three generations of menswear design in Tuscany.

“The brand was registered by my grandfather in 1957,” says creative director Guido Biondi, “but it had never been used until I started to create my line of menswear, made entirely in Tuscany. The idea that my grandfather had was to create a line of men’s trousers for a higher segment. I followed his path but expanded the collection to a total look.”

Aside from creating seasonal men’s staples for the modern wardrobe, President’s loves to collaborate every season to create something new and unique to add to its collection. This season it has worked with rainwear brand Hancock, mixing classic English style with Italian engineering and detailing. presidents7bell.com hancockva.com Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

Joseph Russell, DJ, producer and promoter, wears coat by President’s x Hancock VA; jeans by Edwin Jeans; shirt

by Timothy Everest; shoes by Horatio from Present London facebook.com/earlysoundsrec

Mural XXL

Once the scourge of city mayors, the humble art of scrawling on a wall has grown into an international phenomenon, large buildings allowing for epic-scale works. These days city planners and corporations are more likely to seek out mural artists to tell stories than demonise them. Claudia Walde – a street muralist herself, known as MadC – has compiled some of the most dramatic modern murals from around the globe in a new book. Alongside stunning in situ photography, Mural XXL adds commentary from practitioners on their planning methods, challenges and inspirations.

Out on 14 September thamesandhudson.com Words Edward Moore

Mural by Seth, Paris, 2013 © Thomas Chretien

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move your lee Denim for extraordinary moves

WWW.UK.LEE.COM

NEWS Steve McCurry: India

Magnum photographer Steve McCurry is famous for his beautiful documentary photography taken around India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. His most recognised image, Afghan Girl, graced the cover of National Geographic in June 1985 and has been described as the magazine’s “most famous photograph”.

His worked is admired for the striking use of colour, something he has often achieved by using transparency film. So well regarded is his work in this medium that Kodak asked him to shoot their last ever roll.

This latest book brings together some of McCurry’s finest images of India. It features colour images of events such as the Ganesh festival on Chowpatty beach, the Kolkata railway station before dawn and the flower markets of Kashmir.

West Bengal, 1983 Photograph © Steve McCurry

Out in October phaidon.com Words Edward Moore

Daniel Carey, designer, wears all clothes by Brooks Brothers; hat, sunglasses and jewellery, model’s own. danielcareylondon.co.uk

Brooks Brothers Store

Brooks Brothers, perhaps the most ‘Ivy’ of all the American labels, is almost as old as the United States itself. With a landmark anniversary just a couple of years away, it seems fitting that the classic outfitters have given their flagship European store a makeover.

A refurbished Brooks Brothers store opens at 150 Regent Street, London W1, in September. brooksbrothers.com Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

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normanwalshuk.com

Image by David Goldman / / Shoe - PB Ultra Xtreme

Specifically developed by Norman Walsh in the 1970s for the sport of fell-running. The cuneiform wrap construction, ultra-lightweight, water-resistant materials and the Walsh registered pyramid sole deliver performance in the harshest of terrains.

NEWS Fantastic Man

Ten years ago, the choice of men’s fashion magazines seemed limited to either the lowest common denominator or the uber-cliquey, fashion insider glossy. Fantastic Man created something different, looking back to the refinement and gentlemanliness of a bygone-era, shining a light on key cultural men such as Bret Easton Ellis, Bryan Ferry and Ai Weiwei. A book marking this anniversary compiles some of the magazine’s most celebrated features.

Out on 26 October phaidon.com Words Edward Moore

Wolfgang Tillmans, 2010 Photograph Alasdair McLellan

La Paz x Kinfolk

Hailing from the Portuguese coast, La Paz (literally “peace”) create clothes that conjure up lazy days of surfing and even lazier nights drinking under the moonlight. And it is this spirit of sea, sun and friendship that has inspired them to team up with the guys at Kinfolk to reimagine their European Atlantic manner with a collection inspired by the 1980s cop drama series Miami Vice. lapaz.pt kinfolklife.com Photographs Filipa Alves Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

Jose Borges, Rafael Oliveira, Mário Maia and Hugo Dunkel wear all clothes by La Paz; all shoes, stylist’s own.

The Details: Iconic Men’s Accessories

Writer and fashion historian Josh Sims has been delivering a wealth of interesting books around the male wardrobe over the past decade or so. His latest, The Details: Iconic Men’s Accessories, focuses in on the smaller and often overlooked aspects of an outfit, considering everything from the roots of the baseball cap to the necessity of the money clip.

Out now, published by Laurence King laurenceking.com Words Edward Moore

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Man going to work, 1972 © Rex

MERZBSCHWANEN.COM

ORIGINAL LOOPWHEELER GERMANY

NEWS Drawing Blood by Graham Humphreys

British illustrator and graphic designer Graham Humphreys became the most renowned horror film illustrator of the 1980s. He has worked on the marketing campaigns for films such as The Evil Dead and A Nightmare On Elm Street. A book and exhibition, presented by London’s Proud Galleries, will showcase the range of Humphreys’ work.

Drawing Blood, with an accompanying book, opens at Proud Camden, The Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 from 29 October proud.co.uk grahamhumphreys.com Words Edward Moore

Castle of the Living Dead, 2011 © Graham Humphreys and Odeon Entertainment 2011

Huntsman Boot by Red Wing Shoes

To mark its 110th year of business, Red Wing Shoes has taken its Bird Shooter’s Boot – first made in 1936 and catalogued as number 668 – updated it and renamed it the Huntsman. It is an eight-inch laceup boot, made with black Klondike leather, gun metal eyelets and the same sole as the 668. redwingheritage.eu Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

Felix Friedmann, photographer, wears boots by Red Wing Shoes; jacket by Spiewak; jeans by Flying Horse Indigo Goods; sweater

by K100 Karrimor. felixfriedmann.com

CONTACT: STREETWEAR@DICKIES.COM PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES A. GRANT

SINCE 1922

NEWS Map: Exploring the World

While most of us now rely on the convenience of GPS devices to find our way around, physical maps still hold an allure of far-off places and adventure, as well as the ability to communicate far more than simple geographic topology. This new book from Phaidon compiles maps from the birth of cartography to digital versions of the 21st century. With 300 examples spanning 5,000 years, Map: Exploring the World looks at humankind’s documented history – highlighting its power struggles, desire for exploration and tendency for storytelling.

Out on 28 September phaidon.com Words Edward Moore

Jarl Allard for L’Uomo Vogue, 1996 Photograph © Bruce Weber

Philip Treacy: Hat Designer

“Every hat I have ever made has begun in my mind as a photograph,” Irish milliner Philip Treacy has said of his working process. Graduating from London’s Royal College of Art in 1990, Treacy’s career soared from the off through the support of the late stylist Isabella Blow, who wore one of his creations at her wedding and was rarely seen without some form of Treacy headgear. In this new book, Treacy shares some of his favourite designs of the past 25 years.

Out on 31 October rizzoliusa.com philiptreacy.co.uk Words Edward Moore

View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976,

by Saul Steinberg © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society, NY/DACS, London 2014

100 Years Of Tattoos

A US serviceman displays tattoos by Percy Waters, Detroit, 1921 © Amsterdam Tattoo Museum

Two generations ago, tattoos were truly fringe, the preserve of sailors, gangsters and circus performers. One generation ago, they tended to be a simple affair, often defining one’s class and status, while today someone is likely to get themselves inked with the aplomb of going to the hairdressers. 100 Years Of Tattoos, by David McComb, looks at the history of this increasingly popular art form, with more than 400 photographs, many published for the first time.

Out in September laurenceking.com Words Edward Moore

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NEWS

Mackintosh London Store

Karlmond Tang, writer, wears coat

by Mackintosh mrboy.co.uk

There can be no higher recognition than when a brand becomes synonymous with a common word. Mackintosh, the Scottish outerwear company, can lay claim to a legacy worthy of its functional designs. Donning a mac to combat the rainy British weather, or to do some sleuthing, is a practice as old as the brand itself. And closing in on its bicentennial, Mackintosh seems as much a part of the contemporary wardrobe as ever. In light of this, the company has chosen to move to larger premises in central London’s Mayfair, to better represent its range of clothing.

A new Mackintosh store opens at 19 Conduit Street, London W1 this autumn mackintosh.com Photographs Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore

Body Of Art

No subject has been more pored over than the human form. It is there in the earliest known works, idolised in classical and Renaissance art, contorted by Picasso and fetishised by Robert Mapplethorpe. It seems artists can’t get enough of the body, from the ancient Venus of Willendorf to contemporary works by Marina Abramovic and Bruce Nauman. Body Of Art traces this history of artistic representation, featuring works by more than 400 artists and spanning 26 millennia.

Out on 12 October phaidon.com Mirror Check performed by Joan Jonas, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, 1972 Photograph Roberta Neiman © Joan Jonas

Words Edward Moore

Music Complete by New Order

New Order (and its original guise as Joy Division) has been part of the UK’s musical landscape for almost 40 years. But when the apparent fall out between Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook signalled the band’s curtain call in 2009, most believed it was all over. Having been playing with a new line up for a few years now, the band is releasing its first new material in a decade, with contributions from the likes of Iggy Pop and Elly Jackson.

Music Complete by New Order is out on 25 September neworder.com mute.com New Order performs at Brixton Academy, 211 Stockwell Rd, London SW9, 16-17 November, with other dates throughout Europe o2academybrixton.co.uk Words Edward Moore

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Artwork Peter Saville

We’ve run this page because our website wouldn’t fit.

TotemCreative.com

Marc-Aurèle Vecchione

Marc-Aurèle Vecchione’s films often draw on his experiences as a youth in Paris. “When I was a teenager, in the early 1980s, there were two big crews of skins and they were Nazis,” he says. “All the young immigrants reacted to this and formed gangs to fight them. The generic term for them was antifa – it was a way to say, ‘I’m not a racist.’ Another was skinhead hunters.” His 2008 documentary Antifa looks back at this story.

“By 1987, I was a hip-hop kid and really into graffiti,” he says. His tag was ‘OREL’ and he was part of the AEC graffiti crew – later named Grim Team (GT). He became one of the most prolific subway taggers, known as “writers”, in France, until he took a break in 1994 to study architecture – realising his filmmaking call after graduating. His first project was 2004’s Writers: 20 Years Of Graffiti In Paris 1983-2003.

A year before the release, Vecchione remembers being tracked down by the Metropolitan Police after painting on the Underground in Farringdon, in the City of London, with a friend from London’s DDS crew. “They took my car and interrogated me, saying, ‘Because you morons went on top of Farringdon where there is the water reservoir, you created a terrorist threat. Last year [2002], two Algerian brothers came in a car with French plates and they tried to poison the water.’ They returned my car – the bomb squad had removed the boot and broken the windows – and told me to get back to France.”

Vecchione’s latest project, Rebel Photos, is a five-part documentary series on photographers of subcultures, released on 25 September. resistancefilms.com Photograph Gavin Watson Words Edward Moore

PEOPLE

James Wright

Starting his fashion journey as “pure casual” at school around 1983, James Wright was soon to supplement his uniform of Farah, Lacoste and Fila with “a second hand waistcoat I bought. I looked like Paddington Bear.

But it was on”.

What began with a market stall in Wright’s native Manchester eventually became Mint Vintage, a shop in east London’s Dalston with an online store. “I’ve never really been into brands to sell,” he says. “I’ve been into looks to sell, staying ahead of the fashion wave.” He sources old stock, workwear and military in bulk, as well as finding special one offs. He is also given to embellishing and altering ranges of items to “make them Mint”.

“People recycle a lot more quickly nowadays, but also workwear and military is constantly being redesigned,” says Wright. “You can find great stuff that’s perhaps only a couple of years old.”

France and Rotterdam are his favourite countries to source items in Europe, but he also spends time in New York and Toronto. “The rag yards are an amazing sight to see. In the US, only 20 per cent of donated clothing ends up in the goodwill charity stores. The rest is sold as bulk and arrives at these places for processing by the thousands of tonnes. They’ll have dozens of sifters working at conveyor belts to sort into bags and bales, and they’re stood shoulder to shoulder with professional Ebay buyers and pickers from all over the world. For a long-time secondhand dealer like me, it’s absolute gold.” mintvintage.co.uk Photograph Gordon Goodwin Words Mark Webster

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PEOPLE

Jack Broadbent

Hailing from the charming cathedral city of Lincoln, Jack Broadbent delivers a style of bluesinfused music that speaks of someone more worldly wise than you might think. A brief scan of the internet shows him playing on the streets of Amsterdam with his guitar positioned horizontally on his lap. “I feel that busking is very important to me as it keeps my music raw and real,” he says.

“I first started busking about four years ago when I was living in London. It kept me alive.”

He also cites his father, Micky Broadbent, as another important influence. “I feel very lucky to have been brought up by someone that understands music as much as he does,” he says. “He has an incredible sense of space, time, feel and groove; the kind of discipline that you rarely see in musicians… He says the only way to get better is to play with people that are better than you.

How right he is.”

Jack Broadbent’s latest album, Along the Trail Of Tears is out now jackbroadbent.co.uk Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Words Edward Moore

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DC X BEN DAVIS \ TREBOUX PHOTO

TRASE SEE ENTIRE BEN DAVIS COLLECTION AT DCSHOES.COM

THE

PEOPLE John Brett

Lemn Sissay

It would seem that the city of Manchester has been calling Lemn Sissay throughout his life. It was there that he “walked barefoot” from rural Lancashire as a teenager, having spent his formative years in foster care and children’s homes (a story he recounts in his awardwinning play Something Dark). And it is to there that he will return in October, to be installed as the new chancellor of the University of Manchester – having been nominated by the student union and voted in by staff and alumni. “To have the confidence of the entire university makes me so proud,” he says.

The university has been central to the career of this multitalented writer and performer, whose work has been widely published, as well as performed on stage, radio and TV. “I’ve been performing there in various capacities since I was 21,” says Sissay.

“And when I first moved to Manchester when I was a kid, where I lived I could spit out of the window and hit it. It is an important place. The biggest university in the country, and built on an ingrained sense of social responsibility.”

His role will be “symbolic and ceremonial”, he says. “And chairing the assembly twice a year. But I recently did a reading in the Library of Congress in Washington DC as the elected chancellor, so it now follows me wherever I go.”

Regardless of titles (he’s also an MBE), one thing remains sacrosanct for Sissay. “I consider myself a poet,” he says. “And as I’ve done it all my life, it comes as no surprise to me that poetry’s at the centre of popular culture. Word warriors are continually smashing down the walls. Poetry is in music. It’s in adverts. Every Valentine’s Day, we turn to poetry. And just take me, for instance.

You’ll hear my poem ‘Invisible Kisses’ at weddings. I’m the last track on Leftfield’s Leftism album. I’m in the City of London on a sculpture. And I’m on the GCSE syllabus. We’re there in the soup, but then again we can also revert back to the lonesome place of pen, paper and our heads.” lemnsissay.com Photograph Orlando Gili Words Mark Webster

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An Aladdin’s cave of original music and movie posters, collector John Brett’s Bamalama has been trading in Leather Lane, in east London’s Clerkenwell, since 2006. Choice top-end items on my visit included an autographed poster for the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope album, a 1969 Detroit concert poster designed by Gary Grimshaw, advertising a gig by the Psychedelic Stooges, MC5, Chuck Berry and Sun Ra, and an RCA Records poster for David Bowie’s Station To Station album. High-quality reproductions, some produced on Brett’s basement screenprinting set up, are cheaper. A beautifully screen-printed 1967 poster from Track Records promoting Jimi Hendrix, signed by its designer/ artist, Nigel Waymouth, is under £50.

Brett began his working life selling white goods in an electricity showroom. “The Long Good Friday had just come out,” he says, “and my claim to fame is selling a refrigerator to Bob Hoskins.” A 1988 pilgrimage to Detroit for an Iggy Pop gig, when he discovered a poster art shop in nearby Ann Arbor, set Brett on his current path.

John Brett is curating a Detroit posters and memorabilia exhibition at the 44th Mega Record & CD Fair, Utrecht, Holland, 21-22 November bamalamaposters.co.uk Photograph Ross Trevail Words Chris May

The Biomega

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PEOPLE

Louis Berry

When his city was crowned European Capital of Culture in 2008, Liverpool singer-songwriter Louis Berry wasn’t on board. “Most of the people in Liverpool would agree, it’s a city centre thing and we’re from the council estates. It’s not the capital of culture there, its not the capital of anything.”

Having just released his first EP ‘Rebel’, the musician is clear on representing his roots. “Songs like ‘Rebel’ are about where I grew up – a lot of crimes and a lot of friends in jail. I almost ended up there myself a couple of times. I put it out to let people know, if they do something wrong, they shouldn’t be treated like animals for it. It’s about raising awareness; I used to do that and now I’m here.”

Louis Berry’s ‘Rebel’ EP is out now. He will perform at the Liverpool International Music Festival, as part of his UK tour, on 30 August louisberryofficial.com limfestival.com Photograph Anna Sampson Words Edward Moore

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PEOPLE Ben Medansky

Born in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the sunbaked Sonoran Desert, Ben Medansky first forged his interest in moulding shapes with Silly Putty. In high school he studied ceramics and chose his path. “I knew then that this was something I wanted to spend my life learning about,” recalls Medansky.

He left his desert hometown in 2006 to enrol at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago – the city where his parents grew up. “I felt at home,” he says, “and was instantly inspired by the diverse architectural structures.”

While living away from Scottsdale, Medansky still draws inspiration from the city – infusing it into his work.

“The clay body that I use references the desert sand and earthy palette.”

In 2012, he set up Ben Medansky Ceramics in Los Angeles and has been exploring what seems to be a boundless continuation of ideas. “The style of my current body of work references industrial aesthetics and modern architectural forms. Some pieces explore variations in radial symmetry and utilise a limited colour palette. Other pieces incorporate humorous and sexually ambiguous undertones, like my Morning Wood mugs with their erect handles.” benmedansky.com Photograph Eric Hobbs Words Edward Moore

Andy Van Dinh

Canadian artist Andy Van Dinh originally studied biology at university, believing he wasn’t good enough for art school. Eventually he had the courage to switch, and, after completing an art BA in his hometown of Calgary, he is now studying for an MA in painting at New York’s Hunter College.

Although he quit biology, Van Dinh maintains an anatomical perspective through his artistic work. “I am referencing vintage anatomical drawings to exaggerate ideas of analysing, dissecting… I am very interested in how we perceive the self, as an accumulation of time, memory and place. Memory and the self is often considered an internal function but it is also a bodily experience.”

Van Dinh’s work has recently been recognised

by Nike, and for the Air Max 95’s 20th anniversary he was asked to reinterpret designer Sergio Lozano’s original drawing of the trainer.

“I wanted to show how complex the design of the shoe is, like how there are traces of the ribs in every layer. I wanted people to imagine it as a collage of layered anatomical parts.” andyvandinh.com Photograph Heather Saitz courtesy of Nike Words Edward Moore

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WeActivist JASON LEE SHOT BY BOON PHOTOGRAPHY in STOCKHOLM

wesc.com / @wesc1999 / facebook.com/superlativeconspiracy

DETAIL

Jacket by Sand Copenhagen; sweater

by Our Legacy; pocket square

by Scotch&Soda.

James Sorrentino Photographs Elliot Kennedy Styling Richard Simpson Grooming Adam Garland using Balmain

Jacket by Canali; trousers by Berluti; shirt by Tiger of Sweden; shoes by Bass; tie, pocket square and belt by Paul Smith.

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Jacket, shirt, tie and pocket square

by Timothy Everest; trousers by Calvin Klein Platinum; shoes by Bass; socks by Richard James.

Jacket by Richard James; trousers by Lacoste; shirt by Agnès B; shoes by Bass; tie and pocket square by Timothy Everest.

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DETAIL | James Sorrentino

Jacket by Calvin Klein Platinum; jeans by Lee; top by John Smedley.

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DETAIL | James Sorrentino Jacket, trousers, shirt and tie by Polo Ralph Lauren; shoes by Bass; socks by Duchamp.

HISTORY

Guys and Dolls Danny Strong. Frank Loesser. Alfred Damon Runyon. Obadiah Masterson.

Words Mark Webster

In David Wild’s book Seinfeld: The Totally Unauthorized Tribute, the author describes season four’s ‘The Outing’ – originally screened in February 1993 – as a “near perfect episode”. It’s the Larry Charles-penned story of how a female student reporter ‘confuses’ Jerry Seinfeld and his friend George Costanza’s relationship (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”, as the now legendary punchline goes), and the lengths they go to to dispel, then reaffirm, the misconception, depending on where you are in the helter skelter plot.

At one point Costanza is delighted, and Seinfeld worried, because he has bought two theatre tickets for Seinfeld’s birthday – to “Guys and Dolls! I’m gonna go with you!” The implication here, of course, is that the Broadway musical was somewhat underlining the comedy of errors that was already in place. Costanza’s stance is, nonetheless, unwavering – it’s Guys and Dolls!

Guys and Dolls made its stage debut in Philadelphia in 1950 and was an immediate award-winning smash, going on to win six Tony Awards in the same year that The King and I made its debut.

One critic described it as having “dealt with the rolling of the dice and the beating of the heart”. Three years later, two of the original Broadway stars – Vivian Blaine and Stubby Kaye – made their way to England for the London run at the Coliseum, with Sid James drafted in to play one of the two major leads, Nathan Detroit. It sold out for an entire year, during which time (and previously while on Broadway) Kaye, playing Nicely-Nicely Johnson, was contracted not to let his weight drop 58

below 18 stone. This he managed on a diet of ice cream and pasta. He had to sail to London to be in the show because he couldn’t fit in a plane at that time.

Since then it has been revived several times, with Laurence Olivier so smitten with it he bought the rights for London’s National Theatre in 1970, so that he could bring Nathan Detroit to the South Bank. By the time the now famous production was staged there, Olivier was too ill to take part, and too upset to even watch it. Now it is due to be staged in London again, previewing in December, and running from January to March 2016, this time at the West End’s Savoy Theatre.

However, in spite of all its strengths as a stage show, it is the people behind its creation – and those involved in the subsequent film, which premiered at New York’s Capitol Theatre in November 1955 – that really hit the spot. Boasting larger-than-life characters and colourful plotlines, the stories of these people are thoroughly in keeping with this most audacious, vigorous and fun piece of entertainment.

The array of guys and dolls that populate the musical’s own Broadway setting and occasionally beyond were born two decades before their stage and film incarnations, in prohibition America, conjured in the mind of Alfred Damon Runyon. Runyon was born in Kansas in the 1880s, in the town of Manhattan, appropriately enough. Diminutive of stature and somewhat anonymous in personality, there was nevertheless clearly something about Runyon. He made his first big

move to get out of small town USA by joining the Spanish-American war when still effectively a boy. On his return his skills as a journalist were acknowledged when he became a sports writer for the New York JournalAmerican, then war correspondent between 1914 and 1918 for William Randolph Hearst’s publications.

All of which became fuel for the short stories that would ensure Runyon’s name was mentioned in the same breath as that other great teller of American tales, Mark Twain. His early stories focused on his experience of Middle America and war. But it was his time spent in and around sport – in particular, the clandestine world of betting – and living in the Big Apple that caused his syndicated tales to capture the American public’s imagination. This is when he really struck oil, and burst into life as a unique voice in literature.

In 1946 Runyon wrote a column called ‘The Insidious I’, in which he said, “My autobiography, or life story, is one thing you can bet I’ll never write.

If I told the truth a lot of persons, including myself, might go to jail.”

He then added that an “even more potent reason” was that “there is no sure money in that tripe”. Runyon’s writing was never about himself. It was about everything else – the twilight world through which he moved, and where his natural anonymity had become his weapon. His stories are always told in the first person by someone Runyon describes as “a guy who is just around”.

And what he is around is a neon-lit metropolis full of shady citizens that go by such names as Angie the Ox, Society >

Men charged with committing a million dollars’ worth of bank robberies, New York, 1931

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The day low-alcohol beer was legalised following Prohibition, Broadway, New York, 1933

Max, Big Jule, Harry the Horse, Benny Southstreet, Regret – all of whom, and more, were first gathered together in a 1932 collection of his short stories entitled Guys and Dolls.

In an introduction to a later collection of Runyon’s short stories, On Broadway, the distinguished English writer and humorist EC Bentley sums it up when he tells us that what we “will probably love without reserve is the endless comedy that Damon Runyon extracts from these citizens’ dangerous and disreputable way of life, and the wonderful style in which he gives it expression”. Two prime examples of this are the stories ‘Blood Pressure’ and ‘The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown’. In the former, a most unlikely dice game takes place, run by one Nathan Detroit. Runyon’s narrator tells us: “A Nathan Detroit crap game is apt to be anywhere. About all Nathan Detroit has to do with the game is to find a spot, furnish the dice, and take his percentage, which is by no means bad.” In the latter, the professional gambler who finds himself besotted with a rather inappropriate doll is known as Sky, of whom the narrator tells us “his right name is Obadiah Masterson, and he is originally out of a little town in Southern Colorado where he learns to shoot craps, and where his old man is a very well known citizen, and something of a sport himself, in fact”.

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It’s from these two tales that the book of the musical, and ultimately the film, would be extrapolated, once the dust had begun to settle after the second world war. And there certainly wasn’t any shortage of characters, plotlines and unique, vibrant language to play with. All that was needed now were some tunes to match. For this, the stage show’s producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin turned to a regular collaborator for their lyrics and melodies, Frank Loesser.

Loesser was born in New York in 1910, and by the time the Depression had hit 20 years later, he was already breathing the same air as Runyon’s characters, singing in the clubs and writing songs for vaudeville. The fact that he would start his working day with a martini further established him as a man who could easily have leapt from the page. He even managed to die with a cigarette in his hand, attached to an iron lung.

During his time serving in the second world war, Loesser had a hit with a song whose title indicated he might just be the man to echo Runyon’s raucous use of prose.

‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ brought him to the attention of the Theatre District, while other cheeky numbers such as ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ and ‘I’d Like To Get You On a Slow Boat To China’ went on to establish him as legit,

as well as preparing him perfectly for the demands of becoming the ‘musical Runyon’.

So a bunch of already much-loved characters and a perfect Runyon hybrid story now had songs such as ‘Luck Be a Lady’, ‘If I Were a Bell’, ‘Pet Me Poppa’, ‘Sue Me’ and ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’ for company. All of that, plus those sold-out theatres worldwide, meant that Hollywood was right on the case. It wasn’t long before Samuel Goldwyn snapped up the film rights for $1m. With a $4m production fee then agreed, Joseph L Mankiewicz (a man who knew how to get Oscarnominated performances from his actors, which he managed 12 times) was the choice for screenwriter and director. Gene Kelly and Grace Kelly were the clean-cut superstars first mooted to play two of the love interests.

Later Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis all came and went as prospective ‘guys’.

But Mankiewicz had only one man in mind to play the handsome lead, Sky Masterson – Marlon Brando, the actor he had chosen in 1953 to be his Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. In a telegram to the actor, he wrote: “Very much want to have you play Masterson. In its own way, as I would write it for you, offers challenges almost equal to Mark Antony.” Brando – the Stanislavski method-acting poster boy who was just into his 30s, but already had a series of brooding, big-screen lead roles under his belt – was at first very nervous at the prospect. But Mankiewicz wouldn’t let him off the hook. “You have never done a musical, neither have I. We never did Shakespeare, either,” he told him, and Brando was in. Of course, Brando would have to learn to sing and dance, but he was by no means non-musical. By all accounts he already had a passion for African-Cuban music and had reportedly sat in with both Tito Puente’s and Cal Tjader’s bands.

But before he could even contemplate any of that, there was the matter of dropping the three stone he’d put on playing Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée (in which he played opposite Jean Simmons, who was hired to play opposite him again as Sister Sarah in Guys and Dolls).

There was also another major obstacle to overcome, in the somewhat diminutive shape of Frank Sinatra, who

HISTORY | Guys and Dolls

Court hearing for John Dillinger, charged with killing a police officer during a bank robbery, Indiana, 1934

was to play Nathan Detroit. Six-footplus Hollywood beefcake Robert Mitchum once said of the skinny, crooning king of the bobby soxers, “The only man I’d be afraid to fight is Frank Sinatra. I might knock him down, but he’d keep getting up until one of us was dead.”

Sinatra was 10 years older than Brando, which meant he was approaching middle age at what was the dawn of the rock’n’roll era. As if to hammer that point home, new kid on the block Elvis Presley loved Brando. Nevertheless, even though Ol’ Blue Eyes wasn’t (currently) in vogue as a singer, he was at this point a prolific, successful film actor; having only recently, and some may say infamously, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Private Maggio in From Here To Eternity.

Nevertheless, as his daughter Nancy mentioned in the autumn of 1954 in her later published diaries, “though he was on a roll as an actor, dad didn’t get the part he wanted most – Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. He lost it to

Marlon Brando.” On the Waterfront’s director Elia Kazan had also wanted Sinatra for the role. Set in and filmed across the Hudson from Manhattan in the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, Kazan said, “Frank had grown up

‘IF I TOLD THE TRUTH A LOT OF PERSONS, INCLUDING MYSELF, MIGHT GO TO JAIL’ [there], and spoke perfect Hobokenese.

He’d be simple to work with.” But producer Sam Spiegel wanted Brando.

Eight Oscars later (including those for producer, director and Brando as lead

actor), such thoughts were probably forgotten, though not necessarily

by Sinatra, who awarded Brando with another accolade for his performance – the nickname ‘Mumbles’.

By the time the film of Guys and Dolls was released a year or so later, Sinatra’s daughter was once again putting pen to paper in her diary, and nothing much had changed. “This is one of the finest scores ever written,” she wrote. “Dad went into the project feeling the picture would have been a lot stronger if he, not Brando, had played Sky Masterson.”

Perhaps unaware of the bitterness that Sinatra harboured towards him, Brando seemingly went into the production with wide-eyed innocence. But he was quickly to discover where he stood with the leader of the Rat Pack. On their first meeting, he apparently asked of his co-star, “I’ve never done anything like this before, [could we] run the dialogue together?” Sinatra’s unequivocal response was, “Don’t give me any of that Actors Studio shit.” > 61

HISTORY | Guys and Dolls

Al Capone on trial for tax evasion, Chicago, 1931

This point was endorsed by Vivian Blaine, who transferred from stage to screen to play Detroit’s love interest Miss Adelaide. She said after the film was made that “although we had respect for Marlon Brando, I was more in awe of Sinatra. Frank and I got known as the One Take Kids. He always did a scene fast. Brando... once took 135 takes. Nobody could believe it.”

Later in life, Sinatra seemed to have mellowed when he said of Brando, “I think he is a dedicated actor,” but he was only damning him with faint praise, which was made clear when he added, “But in the musical numbers, Brando suddenly realised he was working with a dedicated singer.” But Brando, having worked on the songs directly with composer Loesser, was no less critical, pointing out he himself thought he sounded “like a yak in heat”.

Cut, however, to $15m at the box office later, and it would seem that the audience didn’t mind too much how he sang. Or that Sinatra was staring across at Brando throughout the film thinking, that should have been me.

Brando was such a hit he found himself being mobbed and nearly garrotted with his own tie at the film’s premier. It was a personal appearance that made him weary of public adoration and the nature of being a star for the rest of his life. Although on that night, 62

the white Thunderbird convertible the producers had bribed him with to show up may have provided some solace. Brando managed to get a little gentle revenge on his old sparring partner later in life, however, when he quipped, “When Sinatra goes to heaven, the first thing he’ll do will be to find God and yell at him for making him bald.”

‘ALTHOUGH WE HAD RESPECT FOR MARLON BRANDO, I WAS MORE IN AWE OF SINATRA’ As the film’s 60th anniversary approaches, a remake is apparently starting to make its way through the Hollywood works. Two years ago, 20th Century Fox reached an agreement with Frank Loesser’s widow and the green

Norma Brighton, Murton Millen and Irving Millen, charged with bank robbery and murder, New York, 1934

light was given. At the time of writing, Danny Strong – writer on the The Hunger Games film series and celebrated TV drama Empire – is pencilled for the screenplay, while Channing Tatum and his friend Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the latter directed the former in his film Don Jon) are current favourites to be the new Sky and Nathan.

Other actors have also thrown their fedoras into the ring for potential productions of Guys and Dolls down the years, including two men with the appropriate vocal chops, Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman. In 2010, Guy Ritchie had a stab at getting a new version off the ground. Brilliant character actor John C Reilly – who can also more than carry a tune, and has had two singles released on Jack White’s Third Man Records – was attached to that project, and his words at the time perhaps sum up perfectly the enduring appeal of these characters, their story and the great tunes they get to sing. Reilly informed the rest of his profession, “I will scratch the eyes out of anyone who tries to get between me and Nathan Detroit, I swear to God. That movie’s like the Holy Grail.”

Chichester Festival Theatre presents Guys and Dolls at the Savoy Theatre, London WC2 from 10 December savoytheatre.org

GALLERY

Afropunk Photographs Phil Knott

Afropunk founders Matthew Morgan and James Spooner first came together back in 2002, when they began work on a feature film documenting the African American punk scene. The resulting film, AfroPunk (2003), was the catalyst for what is now a global movement.

Morgan, who works in the music industry, had noticed this underground scene of musicians and fans. The film centres around four of these fans and contains interviews with bands including Fishbone, Bad Brains and TV On the Radio.

From those four afropunk fans, Morgan and Spooner have today brought together thousands of people who share their beliefs. Like many subcultures, the scene challenges many 64

commonly held stereotypes. It also highlights personal issues such as alienation, identity and freedom and reaches into more over-arching topics such as civil rights, politics and power.

Members of the afropunk scene are driven by a desire to be heard and challenge the conservative status quo in the US. Understanding that personal appearance can be a great agitator, the movement attracts a diverse range of people who create strong individual identities. Apparel can be provocative, seductive, alluring, reassuring, political, confusing, defiant and many things besides. And in the afropunk scene, often all at the same time.

Afropunk is very much a movement for people wanting to express themselves and have a voice, whether

it be through individual sloganeering across their clothes or simply being part of a unified crowd.

The first Afropunk festival took place in 2005 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, and today encapsulates three cities, with Atlanta and Paris added to the festival schedule.

Alongside the festivals, the afropunk community now has an online magazine and merchandising, including a collaboration with French-Malian label Xuly Bët.

D’Angelo, Tyler, the Creator and Public Enemy headline the Afropunk Fest Atlanta 2015, taking place in Atlanta’s Central Park on 3 and 4 October afropunkfest.com afropunk.com

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GALLERY | Afropunk

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GALLERY | Afropunk

68

Ian Donald is a freedive instructor, author and coach based in Cornwall, southwest England. He can hold his breath for more than seven minutes. He has developed a range of training programmes for professional athletes, surfers and triathletes, as well as Royal Marine commandos. His courses include marine foraging and spear fishing, and he also teaches people how to hold their breath properly, with the average person managing up to three minutes after one day’s instruction.

Tudor Pelagos Photographs Alastair Scarlett Safety Diver Sam Barnes Freediver Ian Donald freediveuk.com

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The first specialist Tudor watches designed to work in extreme conditions were created in 1952. They were immediately adopted by the armed forces, attracted by their hardiness and technical specifications. The Royal Navy opted for the Tudor Oyster Prince, while the US and French navies preferred the Tudor Submariner, the original Tudor divers’ watch. Dubbed the “snowflake”, a special hour hand and dial version was commissioned by the French navy to be more visible underwater. This detail has been carried through to Tudor’s contemporary divers’ watch – the Pelagos.

Every detail of the Pelagos has been created with a professional diver’s needs

in mind. Rather than casing the watch in conventional steel, the Pelagos uses titanium, an especially light yet strong metal discovered in Cornwall in 1791. Aside from its weight advantage, titanium is highly resistant to corrosion from sea water. Renowned for its dark, matt tone, the titanium case magnifies the richness of the colours used on the Pelagos watch and enhances the overall design. It also means the watch is less reflective, a useful trait when underwater, where low visibility makes unnecessary distractions dangerous.

A key feature of the Pelagos watch is its blue luminous elements. Blue is the last colour in the visible spectrum detectable by the naked eye before total darkness and is still visible at a depth of 40 metres. Charged by the sun’s rays, these blue elements remain luminous longer than any other colour.

As divers go deeper, water pressure causes compression that affects the thickness of a diver’s wetsuit. With a normal watch bracelet, this compression causes a watch to become loose. The Pelagos, however, incorporates a unique bracelet that expands and contracts over the diver’s wetsuit, meaning that the watch always remains comfortable.

Tudor has placed its own in-house manufactured movement into the Pelagos, giving a level of accuracy that far exceeds the highest industry standards, vital in the time-sensitive situations that free divers encounter every time they submerge.

The Pelagos proves that Tudor’s divers’ watches are a military perennial, with many forces around the world still insisting on using this perfectly considered timepiece. tudorwatch.com

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MUSIC

St Germain Mali. Real World. Culoe De Song. F Comm. Blue Note.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Kevin Davies

Since its beginnings in Chicago in the mid-1980s, house music has been closely entwined with jazz. In his heavily improvised sets at the Music Box, a favourite curveball of Blue Note fan Ron Hardy was ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ by Benny Goodman. Similarly, Warehouse DJ Frankie Knuckles’ pioneering jazz house track from 1991, ‘The Whistle Song’, was a continuation of a love that began with his sister’s collection of jazz LPs in the late 1960s. It’s a bond that has continued through dance music of the past two decades – from Detroit producer Moodymann’s Black Mahogani II to Masters at Work’s reworking of Nina Simone’s ‘See-Line Woman’.

And it’s been at the root of the music of French producer Ludovic Navarre, better known as St Germain, since his Boulevard LP of 1995. Fifteen years since his subsequent jazz-infused house LP Tourist and the Marlena Shaw sampling single ‘Rose Rouge’ sent his music global, he is back with a new LP. Recorded at his Magic House Studio in Chatou, just outside Paris, Real Blues finds the producer exploring another of his great passions, African music.

Born in 1971, Navarre grew up in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Germainen-Laye. “When I was younger I was 74

big into sport, although I did listen to music,” he tells me. “But then I had to stop sport because of an accident.

I was immobilised for two years and so started to get into computers and learning all about them. That was initially just to pass the time. This really was the beginning of computers so there was a lot to learn.”

With Navarre’s ears tuned to the electronic sounds coming from Chicago and Detroit, music production would soon become part of that experimentation. “That’s how it all started, with me trying to make techno and house with programmes like Cubase,” he says. So what were the first house records he heard as a teenager in the northern Paris suburbs? “I remember hearing ‘Trapped’ by Colonel Abrams in 1985 and just being blown away, and then things like Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk. But there was none of this stuff being played on the radio in France at the time – so you had to really look hard to find it. I also had a friend who was into this music and we used to search all the record shops to find it. It really was a matter of digging deep for this music. Nobody in France was listening to house music at that time. There were no clubs playing

house or techno so you had to find your own thing. That was what France was like in the late 1980s. The first places that played house in Paris were the gay clubs. And there was this gay club we went to under Olympia and that was amazing, a really incredible place.”

Navarre’s two years of convalescence were well spent. Camped in his home studio in the early 1990s, he had started to play around with samples and loops, mixing house, techno, dub and hip-hop with jazz and blues. Releases followed under a range of different aliases to match the diversity of the sounds – from the raw techno of Sub System to the deep house of Nuages. With his ‘Disco Inferno’ EP released under the name Ln’S, Navarre anticipated the filtered French disco sound of the likes of Daft Punk. Bringing his musical loves together, his ‘Mezzotinto’ EP introduced the name St Germain to ears overseas thanks to its release on Laurent Garnier’s F Communications label. His vocal sampling, like that of Lightnin’ Hopkins on ‘The Black Man’ and ‘Alabama Blues’ (from his ‘Motherland’ EP later reworked by Todd Edwards) would anticipate the blues-immersed house of producers such as Moodymann. “Because I don’t >

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MUSIC | St Germain

Cast of St Germain’s face painted with the colours of the French flag, by street artist Gregos.

Several of the masks were created with different flag colours and displayed across Paris Photograph Benoit Peverelli

speak English well, with the voices that I sample I don’t completely understand the words,” says Navarre. “I’m sampling the words not because of what they mean but the emotion they have, and how they touch me when I hear them.”

A year later Navarre returned on the Paris label for the first St Germain LP. A milestone in jazz house, Boulevard was recorded with a group of Paris-based musicians conducted and produced by Navarre. “I had started getting into jazz when I was about 17, but never really thought about making that kind of music,” he says. “One of the main reasons was that in France it was quite difficult to get musicians to play with electronic music. Traditional musicians were very wary of going into electronic music back then. They were very concerned in a way about these machines they didn’t really know or understand.” How long did it take for them to be converted? “Once they were in the studio those guys were pretty quick. It took them about a year to completely get into it and to understand what the work was,” he says. “I had to convince them that it wasn’t the machines making the music, they were just part of the process. But in the end they were very open to it. It took me 76

a while to find these musicians but I was very lucky to do so because in the end they were great.”

Boulevard would go on to sell more than 700,000 copies. “I really never thought it was going to be a success,” says Navarre. “Before Boulevard I had

‘AFTER SIX MONTHS I WIPED EVERYTHING AND STARTED AGAIN WITH THE ROOTS GUYS’ done lots of different things – from house to techno. But then around 1992 I really wanted a new style, mixing blues and jazz with house. Then when I finally started making Boulevard I didn’t really think it was going to

work. At the time people were listening to harder and harder and faster and faster and I was doing slower and slower and calmer and calmer. I was doing completely the opposite of what the general movement was. Actually by the time of Boulevard I thought I was going to have to stop doing music and go back to computer programming or something. And then it happened.

It became big in England first, which was amazing for me.”

Despite this mainstream consumption, the LP still sounds relevant today, unlike many of the pale imitations that followed. During this period Navarre became known as one of the originators of the ‘French touch’, the country’s new electronic movement.

It would place him alongside the likes of Daft Punk, Philippe Zdar and Étienne de Crécy, but it was a term he never really felt comfortable with.

Soon French dance music had gone from an underground movement to a sound recognised globally, thanks to LPs such as Daft Punk’s Homework.

But Navarre distanced himself with an even deeper, more organic sound for his second LP, Tourist. He was assisted by players from France, Africa and Brazil, including Pascal Ohsé on trumpet, Edouard Labor on saxophone, Alexandre Destrez on keyboards and Edmondo Carneiro on percussion.

Tourist was something of a dream come true for the jazz-loving producer, as the 2000 LP was released on Blue Note.

“The boss from EMI asked me what label I wanted the LP to come out on,” he recalls. “And so I said Blue Note, but I never thought it would happen.”

It would prove an even bigger global success than Boulevard, selling nearly three million copies. “Again I was really surprised when that happened,” he says.

The LP would provide a template for many other producers. “I was really happy when this music went on to influence other people’s work,” he says.

“In fact that makes me happier than selling lots of copies. Creating my own St Germain sound that people would associate with me was very important.”

Providing some of the organic textures to the LP was percussionist Idrissa Diop. A master of the talking drum, Diop had also appeared on Boulevard – a sign of Navarre’s long-standing interest in African music.

“I have always listened to African music even as a young guy,” says

St Germain (right) with Gregos and one of his sculptural works, used on the cover of St Germain’s new album, Real Blues Photograph Benoit Peveelli

Navarre. “Records on labels like Real World, they were very important to me.

I guess, like Peter Gabriel [Real World founder], I am just interested in sounds from other places. And it wasn’t just one part of Africa. When I started to think about this project I guess I was thinking of afrobeat, but it had already been done. So I wasn’t so excited by that. Then I began to listen to more highlife from the 1970s and onto the music of Ghana – I thought, this is just fantastic. So in the beginning I was trying to mix Ghanaian music with electronic music, but using the more traditional jazz musicians I was already working with. But it really was impossible – they just couldn’t do it.

And so I started to look for Ghanaian musicians in the neighbourhood but couldn’t find any.”

Determined to follow this new direction, Navarre looked to other parts of Africa for inspiration. “I was still listening to lots of different African music and ended up really getting into all the Mali stuff,” he says. “And these Malian musicians were much easier to

find in the neighbourhood. I went to an area called Montreuil, where there is a big Malian population, and found them there through one of the musicians on Tourist.” But still it wasn’t easy to find the right musicians who understood the sound he was after. “To begin with the first musicians I played with were playing too European and I really wanted the roots,” he says. “So after six months I wiped everything and started again with the roots guys. I really wanted the more traditional sounds.”

The results of this have now come to fruition on Real Blues, an LP that sees Navarre digging deeper into the roots of the music he has always loved – be it jazz or blues. Featuring Malian musicians on the kora, balafon, n’goni and vocals, mixed with electric guitars, pianos and his trademark loops and samples, the LP finds Navarre giving the same respectful update of African blues as he did with jazz before.

“Although we have different instruments, the methods of working between me and the musicians is the same as on my other albums,” he says.

“I don’t want to exaggerate, but it’s taken four or five years to make this record. I kept starting then wiping it out because I didn’t like the sound.”

His exploration into African music and electronics has also been inspired by the dance music from another part of the continent. “For the past seven years I have been listening to lots of Afrohouse from South Africa,” he says. “I discovered this music and just thought it was fabulous – those producers like Culoe De Song are just amazing. I love the sound – when you hear it you know straight away it’s from South Africa just from the sonority. You only need to hear a few seconds and you know instantly where it’s from. And that in some way has created an inspiration for this album. If I can create a sound like this, that people recognise as mine with my new music, then I will be happy.”

St Germain’s new album Real Blues is out on 9 October His European tour starts in Belgrade on 2 November parlophone.co.uk 77

STYLE

When We Were Kings Photographs Nicky Emmerson Styling Richard Simpson Photographic Assistant Roland Gopal Boxers James Costanzo, Lamin Conteh, Duran Dennis, Shomarri Diaz, Marconi Griffith, Kristian Hirscher and Andrew McKoy Location Islington Boxing Club, 20 Hazellville Road, London N19 islingtonboxingclub.org

Shomarri Diaz, 22, law graduate and filmmaker, wears jacket by McQ

by Alexander McQueen; tracksuit bottoms by Liam Hodges; sweater

by Lou Dalton; trainers

by Swear.

Andrew McKoy, 19, student and waiter, wears jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren; tracksuit bottoms

by Jimmy Sweatpants x A Number of Names; top

by Human Made.

Shomarri wears jacket by Canali; tracksuit bottoms

by Liam Hodges.

STYLE | When We Were Kings

James Costanzo, 26, personal trainer and student, wears jacket

by Polo Ralph Lauren; tracksuit bottoms by McQ by Alexander McQueen; sweater by Stone Island; trainers by Converse.

81

Marconi Griffith, 44, barber and boxing tutor, wears jacket by McQ by Alexander McQueen; tracksuit bottoms by Philipp Plein; T-shirt by Boulezar.

82

STYLE | When We Were Kings

Kristian Hirscher, 30, ex-Royal Marine and charity programme associate, wears jacket

by Levi’s Made&Crafted; tracksuit bottoms by Boulezar; sweater by Esk; trainers by Y-3.

83

Andrew wears sweater by Polo Ralph Lauren; tracksuit bottoms by McQ by Alexander McQueen; trainers by Y-3.

84

STYLE | When We Were Kings

Duran Dennis, 28, advertising manager, wears jacket

by Vivienne Westwood Man.

Lamin Conteh, 23, gym instructor, wears sweater by Calvin Klein Collection; tracksuit bottoms

by Vivienne Westwood Man.

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STYLE | When We Were Kings

Duran wears coat by Mackintosh; tracksuit bottoms by Polo Ralph Lauren; sweater by Neil Barrett; trainers by Y-3; glasses by Ray-Ban; bag by Ralph Lauren, stylist’s own.

CINEMA

Fresh Dressed BJ Boots. X-Plicit Language. Jean Jackets. Thirstin Howl III. Lo-Lifes.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Janette Beckman Archive Photographs Janette Beckman, Joe Conzo and Jamel Shabazz

“They shared a revolutionary aesthetic. They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul,” wrote Jeff Chang in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a History Of the Hip-hop Generation. “Unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful, protected and enclosed by almost monastic rites, codes and orders.”

It was this aesthetic that Jamel Shabazz captured so well in his seminal photographs from the streets of 1980s New York. “All too often my work is misinterpreted, they look at it and they just see urban culture and hip-hop in the African American community.

But it’s more broad than that,” he said recently. “It’s a universal body of work about compassion, empathy, bringing out the beauty within people and the love that bridges the gaps between us.”

Along with fellow NYC photographers Henry Chalfant, Joe Conzo, Martha Cooper and Janette Beckman, Shabazz provided an invaluable record of the early days of hip-hop style. But his work went much further, by telling the personal stories within the cultural movement. “His photography didn’t just capture the wares, but the minds that were fly enough to compose such magnificent outfits,” wrote Sacha Jenkins, editorial director at Mass Appeal magazine and former music editor at Vibe. “Here, we see that it’s not the clothes that make the man, that it’s the people who bring value and life to the garments.” And now a documentary film directed by Jenkins, Fresh Dressed, is set to become the most important study of hip-hop style since Shabazz’s 2001 book Back In the Days.

Growing up in Queens in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jenkins saw the 88

rise of early hip-hop fashion first-hand.

And through his career in publishing in the 1990s, he also saw the commodification of that culture. So his story traces a line from the DIY styles of gangs from the south Bronx in the early 1970s to the multi-million-dollar business empire of Rocawear, and from the Harlem boutique of Dapper Dan in the 1980s to department stores across the world. But as Jenkins explained prior to the film’s premier at the Sundance Film Festival, Fresh Dressed goes even deeper, in providing a narrative that “begins with slavery and ends with what is being rocked today – and what the social implications attached to it are.” With rapper Nas acting as one of the producers, the documentary features interviews with high profile figures such as Pharrell Williams and P Diddy alongside big fashion names such as Damon Dash and André Leon Talley. These connections, combined with its release on CNN Films (in association with Mass Appeal), will help Fresh Dressed reach out well beyond its underground roots. We caught up with Jenkins a few weeks before the film’s screening at the London Film Festival in October.

I understand you lived in Astoria, Queens, from 1977. Where had you moved from and what age were you?

I was seven years old and had lived in Maryland before that. So moving from semi-suburbia to across the streets from the projects in Queens was a very radical environment change for me.

When I started going outside and making new friends I noticed there was all this stuff happening that was foreign to me. Graffiti was obviously a big

thing and everyone had magic markers and stuff. There was music everywhere and DJs were playing in the park.

I didn’t know at the time but that was hip-hop being born.

You mentioned graffiti and I know you went on to write the fanzine Graphic Scenes & X-Plicit Language. How were you drawn into that world?

Where I grew up everyone had a graffiti alias and it was very popular in the neighbourhood where I lived. I had been initiated into it as early as 1979, but I was only a little kid, although like everyone I did have a tag. But it wasn’t until the mid-1980s and going to train yards and that with other kids that I got really serious. I met Havoc from Mobb Deep writing graffiti on the outside of a subway train back in 1986.

What was the first stylistic thing you really became aware of?

Sneakers were always really important.

As a kid I remember the importance of having the right pair. Back then we would all play sport so we would go to the shops for our American Football gear and we’d see sneakers.

So you would see the Puma Basket shoe and those were the first ones I wanted.

That was largely because all the kids around me who were athletes had them.

So long before I was thinking about the hip-hop connection there was this sport connection. Then from the Basket shoes you would move on to the Puma Suede and on to the Adidas Superstar shell toe – that was always something we reached for. So yes, as young kids we all understood that shoes were cool. As 10 year olds we weren’t thinking about fashion per se, but sport shoes were >

Sacha Jenkins, director of Fresh Dressed

The Ching-a-Ling Nomads, New York, 1980 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz Queens, New York, 1984 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz

definitely a great entry point into the hip-hop fashion consciousness.

What was the first hip-hop fashion you really noticed?

In the very early 1980s when breakdancing and all that became really popular, there was this aesthetic with the jean jacket that had the acrylic paintings on the back. So for me that was a natural sort of connection to the graffiti with all the same colours, and with painting, drawing and lettering. That look really epitomised for me what the whole hip-hop sensibility was centred around, and that was creativity – the fact that you have a pre-existing jacket and you are adding your own thing to it to make it your own. Also the fact that it’s not mainstream and not what everyone else is doing. There were a handful of us doing this and when you recognised the other people doing it you felt like part of a sub-set or community. So it was important to be separate from the adults and the establishment.

As you show in the film, that DIY thing was very important, going right 90

back to the gangs in the early 1970s with the customised biker jackets.

Going back to when I got to Queens in 1977, the gang situation was starting to cool down a little, but the energy and competitive spirit was still there.

As was the biker aesthetic and that was carried over to these painted jean jackets. Before that you would have the lettering of the gangs sewn on like with the Hells Angels, but now the artwork was being painted onto the jackets. So you can see that the gang aesthetic was very much still there. It then went on to lettering the name of your crew on the front of your sweatshirt. These are two examples of how it transitioned from gang culture to what became hip-hop.

Was there one particular item of clothing you really wanted when you started getting into the hip-hop style?

Again for me it was the shoes. I really loved Adidas’ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar basketball shoe. That is still my favourite shoe of all time – with the high top, white leather, blue stripes and suede on the tip of the shoe. It is just an awesome shoe and it was a very big deal when I got mine. It was funny back then though – my mum, who was

a Haitian immigrant, always wanted me to look nice. So she would take me to the department store and buy me three expensive pairs of corduroy pants. That was her way of using fashion as a way to separate me from everyone else and to tell the world, “He is not from the ghetto.” After a while I had to explain to her that I needed to be part of what was going on. Finally I convinced her and the money that she used to spend on these pants went a long way when it came to buying sneakers.

How did having the right shoes make you feel as a young kid?

I’ll never forget the first time I went shopping for clothes and came back home with all these bags. I did up my sneakers with fat laces and went down to where all the kids were and I felt like I was part of something. I was recognised and people thought my shoes were cool – they wanted to talk about it. Remembering those feelings back then really inspired me to make this film. How you dress is obviously such an important part of hip-hop, and young people in the inner cities still get the same feeling from it as I did back then. But more than that is how the

CINEMA | Fresh Dressed

The Cold Crush Brothers performing at Outer Skates, New Jersey, 1981 Photograph Joe Conzo

hip-hop aesthetic has gone on to influence young kids around the world.

What were the names of the shops where you got your clothes?

There was a place called Sneaker World on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, that I believe is still there. It’s funny because there was this other place near the Queensbridge housing projects where Nas is from called BJ Boots.

And when me and Nas first connected and I told him about that he was like, “Wow, you were there at BJ Boots at the same time as me.” There was this other place near there called QPs. That was what people in California would call a Swap Meet [where people buy, sell and trade goods]. That was where you would get your sheepskin coat, your belt buckle with your name on it, your sweatshirt with the iron-on letters, as well as your sneakers. Anyone who was around at that time – if you mention those shops they’ll bug out.

Unfortunately a lot of those shops have gone and they represent a time that has long gone as well.

Would these have been stores owned by the Jewish merchants?

I’m sure a large percentage of those merchants were Jewish but it wasn’t the same thing as the Bronx or Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. If you look at the film, we are with Jamel Shabazz on the corner of Orchard Street and we just randomly run into these two Jewish guys. Jamel was like, “Hang on, I know these guys.” It turns out they used to be merchants on the Lower East Side when all the shops

B Boys Shaheem, Grandmixer DST and the Godfather KC, London, 1982 Photograph Janette Beckman

used to be Jewish. And that strip of shops was very important. Because of gentrification most of those merchants have gone, but the savvy ones are still there and are now working in real estate. And that’s what these two guys were doing now.

‘SPORT SHOES WERE A GREAT ENTRY POINT INTO HIP-HOP FASHION’ Looking back at one iconic item from that period, the sheepskin jacket – how would that have become a hiphop piece?

It probably started on Orchard Street because the area was known for leather and fur and expensive items like that.

Again back then people weren’t making clothing specifically for us, so the whole idea was how can I one-up the next man. What can I wear that nobody else has that I can turn into my own thing and own that. And sheepskin coats are very cool looking, they come in lots of different colours, from brown to green to purple, you name it. And hip-hop loves colours – so you put colours on a really cool warm coat with a premium price on it then kids in the inner cities are going to want it. Especially when

it was known what the price tag was.

Because it also represented a level of status and a level of gangster if you will.

If you could a) afford that coat and b) walk the street without fear of getting it stolen, that always said something – that you had a level of status and you were not to be fucked with.

You mentioned Jamel Shabazz – when did you become aware of his photography?

I’ve been seeing his work around for over 20 years and of course his books have become iconic. Those pictures have shown up in so many different magazines including those I worked on, so he has always been important to me.

And why was he so important?

He was taking professional photos of people that others weren’t taking professional photos of. Nobody outside of the culture appreciated either the importance of the clothes or the language in the way these folk dressed.

And that language was very important.

It said where they were from, it said what their interests were, and Jamel understood very early on that it wasn’t just about, “Hey, we look cool.” It was about culture, it was about communication, it was about pride, and it was about self-esteem. And as an insider rather than an outsider, he was able to get these candid photographs because people trusted him. He was a brother that people knew and he would get people to relax and just let him shoot them. We are very lucky that he did that on such a grand scale because so much could have been > 91

The East Flatbush Crew, East Flatbush, New York, 1981 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz

lost. But it wasn’t even a conscious thing, it was just an extension of who he was and what he was interested in and wanted to preserve.

Apart from Jamel, which other photographers have influenced you?

I have been publishing and writing about hip-hop since 1992. And this all relied heavily on photography – from Jamel to people like Janette Beckman and Joe Conzo. And that is why I have so much rich photography in the film because I tapped into the best of the best. As I said to the audience at the screening in New York, looking out at everyone who contributed to the film – it really was us that made the film not just me. There were so many different voices that made this film what it is.

As well as photography, films such as 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s were obviously very important in recording the early gang styles. Was that a big influence?

Oh 100 per cent – also have you seen this film Rubble Kings? What my film spends a few minutes on with the murder of Cornell Benjamin (the “peace ambassador” from the Ghetto Brothers), the gang truce and how that changed the climate, well Rubble Kings 92

really focuses in on that. I recommend anyone who is interested in this story of hip-hop to see that. It borrows heavily from 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s and also Flyin’ Cut Sleeves. And so do I in my film, as well as Style Wars.

Henry Chalfant, who was behind both Style Wars and Flyin’ Cut Sleeves, has been a friend and mentor to me for many years. I was actually a production assistant in my youth on Flyin’ Cut Sleeves. So for me all this stuff is just a community thing. I’ve been in that community as a participant and as a documentarian and continue to build those relationships. And that has put me in the position to create the film that I have made.

What were the most important things you wanted to get across in making this film?

Firstly to really show how fashion is such an important part of hip-hop’s identity and people of colour’s identity in America. But I also wanted to take fashion as a springboard to talk about bigger issues. In the film we have gang members from the South Bronx in the early 1970s talking about being warriors against the violence and racism of the police. This was 1971, and then

you flash forward to that same neighbourhood now and there is still all this madness and chaos. I interview this old gang member from the South Bronx called Lorraine and she says that police brutality is worse than ever. She also says, “If I’m going to send my kid to school in a $600 jacket, I’m going to send him in a bulletproof vest.”

So the internal violence is still going on. Also, as I started making the film other things began to become more important. For example, the role of Latinos in hip-hop fashion – from gangs in the South Bronx to Thirstin Howl III from Lo-Lifes [the Brooklyn gang formed in the late 1980s who wore only Ralph Lauren clothing head to toe], or Willie Esco from the Esco brand. And then also how attitudes to homosexuality have changed in hiphop and how that has affected what people are able to wear. But at the end of the day I wanted to show that hiphop was a reflection of and a reaction to the environment it was made in – whether that was gangs in the South Bronx or Jay Z and Kanye rubbing shoulders with multi-millionaires.

You mentioned the different looks in each borough earlier. Could you talk a bit about that?

First of all, young people didn’t really travel that far back then. Unless you were on an athletics team or you were a graffiti writer, you never really left your neighbourhood. So if you did go to other areas or to Manhattan, which was something of a neutral area, you could tell which areas kids were coming from just by the way they were dressed. Back then coming off the back of the gang thing there was still this sense of uniformity. There was more of an individual style because they weren’t actually presenting specific gangs. But you could still tell where they were from in terms of their vocabulary [in clothing] and the style they were referencing in their fashion.

For example, because Nike only put a certain colourway into Brooklyn or you could only get a particular Clarks shoe there, it made it easier to distinguish people if you were paying attention. I mean the Brooklyn aesthetic to someone from Queens just looked weird because they were dressing with all the Jamaican influences that were all around them. So they wore Clarks shoes and they wore Kangol

CINEMA | Fresh Dressed

UTFO, New York, 1986 Photograph Janette Beckman

Hip-hop jam at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club, New York, 1981 Photograph Joe Conzo

hats, things that were very particular to Brooklyn.

At clubs such as the Roxy and Funhouse, were there very distinct looks from each borough?

Yes, if you went to those clubs you could see who was from where. But the kids who were venturing out to those Manhattan clubs, if they stayed with it they ended up getting influenced by kids from other areas. So if the kids came in with a heavy vocabulary from Queens or Brooklyn and got more plugged in to that downtown scene, their vocabulary would expand as they mixed with other people.

Another figure to feature in the film is Dapper Dan. Why was he was so important?

To me he is the epitome of what hiphop is and that is sampling. He wanted to sell all these luxury brands in his shop in Harlem and he was refused. He wasn’t deemed a worthy merchant. So he said, “I know folks in my community

The Cold Crush Brothers, 1982 Photograph Joe Conzo

will like this stuff and I know how to make them like it even more – I’m going to make it sing the way they want it to sing.” And so he did that – he used his creativity to create a new language and dialect with these brands. Some

In the film Willy Esco says that luxury urban fashion began with Dapper Dan. Would you agree with that?

Yes I think by Dapper Dan doing what he did he definitely educated people on these brands. When you get Eric B&Rakim wearing this stuff on album covers, your average 14-yearold kid in the inner city had no idea who Louis Vuitton was. But you see it on the back of these artists and you get curious. Through what Dapper Dan did and the media coverage that followed, he turned on a whole generation of young people into these brands.

‘IT WAS ABOUT CULTURE, IT WAS ABOUT PRIDE, AND IT You were working in the magazines WAS ABOUT by the time the first hip-hop brands as Karl Kani started to get really SELF-ESTEEM’ such big. When did you first realise hippeople would call that bootleg but either way it’s language, slang. It’s people of colour saying, “This is not my original language, but if I have to speak it how can I do that on my own terms?”

And that’s what he did with clothing.

hop fashion was going to be such big business?

I remember there suddenly being this big rush in hip-hop clothing lines.

And as you say, I saw it first-hand because I was doing the magazines and I used to have to sell ads. So I would > 93

Russell Simmons outside his store in Soho, New York, 2000 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz

A man wearing a Karl Kani top, Chinatown, New York, 1997 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz

look in other magazines like The Source and see every month these new clothing lines popping out of nowhere, many of them connected to a rapper. Then when I got to Vibe magazine, folks in the ad department were flying all over the world with these brands. It felt more vibrant than the actual music industry itself and that is why everyone wanted to hop in. And now 99 per cent of those brands have gone.

One of those brands to pave the way was Cross Colours, which you would see on the backs of everyone from Salt-N-Pepa to Will Smith. Why did the brand become so important?

It arrived at a time when there was a heightened interest in identity and a connection between Africa and hiphop. Although Cross Colours will tell you they were marketing to a wide range of people, ultimately their mantra really spoke to folks of colour looking for their identity. And their Africanlike colours and designs merging with people connecting with their lineage just made a lot of sense at the time.

Why did a lot of those brands fold?

Was it saturation of the market?

94

Yes, you had really good brands like Karl Kani and Cross Colours who had kicked open the door for these other brands. And now they had less floor space. Instead of people thinking, wow these brands are great and they come

‘WHAT CAN I WEAR THAT NOBODY ELSE HAS THAT I CAN TURN INTO MY OWN THING’ from where we come from, they just move on to the next new thing. And that’s partly to do with us being led to believe our culture is disposable.

So with that mentality they just move on rather than supporting these brands.

Then you had everyone trying to cash in so the quality starts to diminish.

But thankfully Cross Colours has now re-launched and Karl Kani is still selling well in places like Korea and all over the world.

What would you say is the current aesthetic in hip-hop?

Obviously with the internet and people travelling more, the world has got so much smaller. As I said before, when I was growing up you could look at someone on the train and tell where they were from. Now you can’t do that, but I do think it’s going back to that original hip-hop aesthetic, which was not wanting to look like anyone else. Now it’s not about having the Jay Z Rocawear uniform, it’s about mixing and matching. The way people dress now is a lot broader. I might see a black kid on the street with a Black Flag band T-shirt and spiked belt and he could be into hardcore music. I just think certain taboos have gone. And also hip-hop has become the new rock’n’roll.

So with all this cross pollination, the way younger people are dressing now is just limitless.

Fresh Dressed is out now freshdressedmovie.com

CINEMA | Fresh Dressed

Sparky D, Roxanne Shanté, Millie Jackson, Sweet Tee, MC Lyte, Peaches, Yvette Money, Synquis and Ms Melodie, New York, 1988 Photograph Janette Beckman

Queens, New York, 1992 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz

A Tribe Called Quest, New York, 1990 Photograph Janette Beckman

Lower East Side, New York, 1999 Photograph © Jamel Shabazz

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Thidaa, potter, wears The Birdy watch by Shinola blueguy.co.uk Photograph Kevin Davies

Peter Bellerby, globe maker, wears The Rambler watch by Shinola bellerbyandco.com Photograph Kevin Davies

ADVERTORIAL

Jess Fügler, bicycle bell maker, wears leather-covered bike chain by Shinola x Map of Days. Runwell bicycle by Shinola jessfugler.com Photograph Marcus Agerman Ross

Shinola Community of Craft Project Beginning this April with bespoke apron maker Nigel Ruwende, Jocks&Nerds and Shinola have been working together on promoting craftsmanship in the UK. The Community of Craft project showcases craftsmen and women who create unique and individually crafted products tailored for each client.

Initially profiled on the Jocks&Nerds website, each designer has been invited to set up a temporary store-cum-workshop within Shinola’s London shop, where they have been able to showcase their skills and interact with the public.

The diverse range of skills that the project has focused on so far has included handmade, bespoke globes from Peter Bellerby of Bellerby&Co and bespoke cups from potter Thidaa, of Blue Guy Pottery, alongside Ruwende’s aprons. Jess Fügler, who designs and handcrafts brass bicycle bells unique in both look and sound, will be in the store from 25 to 27 September.

The final project in the series will see designers Attua Aparicio and Oscar Wanless of Silo Studio creating one-off bowls, made by rapidly spinning various coloured non-toxic resins in a specially

designed machine based on Isaac Newton’s bucket experiment.

Bicycle bell maker Jess Fügler will be making and selling her unique bells at Shinola, 13 Newburgh St, London W1 from 25 to 27 September jessfugler.com At the end of November, Silo Studio will create one-off bowls at the new Shinola store, 28 Foubert’s Place, London W1 silostudio.net For more information on pop-up dates visit jocksandnerds.com/shinola shinola.com

CULTURE

Graphic Means Rocking Russian. AW Wainwright. Linotype. Johannes Gutenberg. Airfix.

Words Andy Thomas Photographs Orlando Gili

“The transition from analogue to digital technology and the advent of the personal computer are innovations whose effect will be as profound as Gutenberg’s movable type,” wrote Jon Wozencroft in the second volume of The Graphic Language Of Neville Brody.

Twenty years on from that statement, two new projects are examining graphic design and typography before and after the advent of the Mac computer. Briar Levit’s documentary film Graphic Means, currently in production, looks at graphic design in the pre-computer age, while Full Circle is a retrospective book on the work of graphic designer Ian ‘Swifty’ Swift, who has been at the forefront of font design in the Mac age.

With his team of designers (including a young Swifty) in the early 1990s, Neville Brody – who pioneered the revolutionary aesthetic of The Face magazine in the 1980s – was one of the first in the UK to advance the new age in digital design. Similarly, Malcolm Garrett – creator of the Buzzcocks’ ‘Orgasm Addict’ record sleeve, among many other influential designs – became a forerunner of interactive design with his AMX multimedia agency. Through these designers, what was once revolutionary would become the norm for publishing and advertising.

I caught up with Levit, Swift, Brody and Garrett to discuss these seminal moments in the history of graphic design.

Briar Levit, a graphic designer and teacher based in Portland, Oregon, studied at London’s Central Saint Martins in the early 2000s. She got her first break in publishing as art director at Bitch magazine, “a feminist pop culture magazine,” she tells me on a recent trip to London. It was through pop culture that she first became interested in design. “I used

to love Roger Dean’s work for Yes and so music was my first entry point. And then exhibition design with Appelbaum Associates, who did the Holocaust museum [Washington, DC].”

While at Saint Martins Levit was introduced to the work of British guidebook author and illustrator AW Wainwright. “His walking books became a big influence on me,” she says. “He hand-drew and hand-lettered everything. There was so much care and detail. So a real mix of function and aesthetics. And the guy wasn’t a graphic designer – he was an accountant who loved walking.”

That love drew Levit into book publishing, where she got her first taste of old school graphic design. “I’d be in the studios and I’d see all these old production tools and really didn’t know what they were,” she says. “There would be things like rubber cement and certain measuring tools for type.

And I was fascinated.”

She began searching out old design books. “I would pore over the manuals, admiring the tools and trying to imagine myself executing the projects demonstrated – from calculating the number of words that would fit in a brochure design to preparing layout mechanicals to go to print,” she wrote in her Kickstarter campaign for Graphic Means. The film is a tribute to the people who worked in the industry in the pre-computer age, and the machines, tools and processes that brought the type to life.

Within the film Levit explores an invention that would be almost as revolutionary as Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press of 1450. Invented

by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884, Linotype allowed for an entire line of type to be created at once, instead of someone piecing words together

letter by letter. Levit was influenced

by Doug Wilson’s film Linotype, which looks at the processes and machinery as well as shining a light on the people behind the type, such as the late Carl Schlesinger, a former typesetter at The New York Times. “The people in the film are amazing, just so charming,” says Levit. “And that’s the main thing I want to get across in my film. So while the methods are really interesting, I also want to show the relationships and the culture behind the industry.”

By the 1970s, phototypesetting or ‘cold type’ systems had started to replace traditional ‘hot type’ Linotype casting machines. It would see the loss of the artisans and beautiful old machines, but the industry and practice behind phototype would be just as interesting. In Graphic Means we meet Patty Gable, an old school typesetter who explains the painstaking process and the hierarchy in the type shops.

“It was also the politics I was interested in, going back to the feminist stuff,” Levit says. “Phototypesetting was the first time women got their foot in the door in production terms. In the Linotype years it all had been very closed shop with all the unions. But still things were far from equal – Patty says she got half the pay as the union guys.”

While the film’s main focus is the 1950s to the 1980s, it also covers the transition to the Mac. “You could make a whole film about that transition,” she says. “It democratised design in a huge way for better or worse.” Despite her interest in the old methods, she doesn’t want to over-romanticise the past.

“I have nothing against new technology.

This film is not about wanting to return to old techniques. It’s about honouring and respecting it because it’s a part of our history and discipline. We should be proud of it.” >

Briar Levit

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Ian Swift

In the early 1990s, Ian Swift’s Macaided design of Straight No Chaser became as central to the magazine’s aesthetic as Neville Brody’s had at The Face. But his passion was fostered long before the arrival of tools such as Fontographer and Photoshop.

“Our influences as kids were the Airfix packets, PG Tips cards, Thunderbirds,” he tells me in his west London studio.

“And all this stuff that I consumed as a kid I still reference.”

Born in 1965 in a village between Liverpool and Manchester, Swift first became aware of graphic design through his teenage passions. “I loved the skateboarding graphics and flicking through those magazines like Skateboard and Skateboard Scene,” he says. “Even now I think those old logos like Kryptonics, Gullwing and Alva are fantastic. Those were the first things I looked at and thought, this looks cool.”

On leaving school at 16, Swift took an art school foundation course before following in the path of the first graphic designer he looked up to. “I went to Manchester Polytechnic because of Malcolm Garrett,” he says. “His design of ‘Orgasm Addict’ just blew me away. It was one of those sleeves that just made you go, ‘Wow, what is that? Where has that come from?’ And then from about the second year of my course I knew that was what I wanted to do – design record sleeves. I came to the conclusion that it was the only 100

way as a graphic designer to develop your own style, as opposed to sitting in some design studio being told what to do. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Garrett, Peter Saville and of course Neville Brody.”

It was this other post-punk design legend that would be Swift’s next big influence. “At the time The Face was massive and Brody’s design was just mind blowing,” he says. “I’d really study and copy every typeface and try and find out what those typefaces were.”

This was in the days before the Mac. “Essentially you would have a pad of blue graph paper and you would get out your Rotring pen and compass and just draw it. And that was how Brody was producing The Face at that time.”

Swift was introduced to Brody when he was invited to lecture at Manchester.

Arriving at The Face in 1986, he was there at the tail end of Brody’s innovations in the pre-Mac era.

“Neville sat down and showed me all the dimensions and proportions.

That was great training,” says Swift.

“Learning by hand just gives you a great sense of proportion, and I’m so glad that I trained in the old ways,” he says. “To sit down and draw just teaches you so much about the dynamics and personality of a typeface. And also how you can inject your own personality into it. It was also that thing of well, if I can’t find a typeface that will suit my needs, I’m just going to draw one.”

Swift had first been introduced to the Macintosh computer while at Manchester Polytechnic, but it was only when he joined Brody’s studio that he realised the potential. “To begin with I think we were all a bit frustrated because it came out all bitmapped. But then programmes like Freehand and Fontographer came in and we started to get in tune with what could be done on one of these little things. Freehand was the revolution for me because it became so much easier to construct those geometric style typefaces. And then QuarkXPress comes along, so you could now design pages as well as type.”

It was at Straight No Chaser, alongside editor Paul Bradshaw, that his creativity was really let loose. “It took a while to create my own visual identity as I got to grips with what the magazine was really about,” he says. “By then I had also discovered Reid Miles and Blue Note, so I started chopping up fonts like he used to. And then looking at the history of jazz record covers.

I would be at clubs like Dingwalls and go though Gilles Peterson’s record box.

I then had to try and remember the images. That’s when my design sensibilities started to fit in with the music because I started to improvise.”

Much of Swift’s visual identity came from his distinctive fonts. “For me it was always about creating something funky,” he says. “I was really into those 1970s typefaces of Herb Lubalin and then also Saul Bass, so kind of funky, playful and a bit weird.” The arrival of each issue found Swift creating new fonts, such as Coltrane, and layouts that became the visual signature of the magazine. “I remember thinking, what can I do that looked different to what Neville was doing,” he says. “It was that combination of Reid Miles and Saul Bass but with the stuff that I had learned from Neville and Malcolm.

So all this stuff that was in my head just came out.”

Another big influence was the graphic artist Ian Wright. “I learned a lot from him. He worked at the studio up at Neville’s. He was always spraying and cutting stuff up and he had the photocopiers and could be feeding tissue paper and stuff through them.

Just doing stuff with the technology we had at that time. Through him I learned how to free up somehow.”

Through his designs for Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label he wanted

CULTURE | Graphic Means to create a look every bit as distinctive as Reid Miles at Blue Note. “The Young Disciples’ ‘Apparently Nothin’ was great because they actually came to me and said they wanted something in the style of the Joe Henderson LP cover [Mode for Joe],” he says. “Hip-hop was massive at that time and sampling was all part of that. It was about taking something and reappropriating it into something new. So that was my attitude with the graphics.” He would go on to create a similarly distinctive graphic identity for Joe Davis’s Far Out Recordings, designing more than 80 sleeves for the label.

By the early 1990s, Swift had left Brody’s studio to share offices with Straight No Chaser in east London’s Hoxton Square. “That was where I met everyone, with people like James Lavelle coming in,” he says. Swift’s designs helped make Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax one of the most collectable labels of the 1990s. “He’d seen my work for Talkin’ Loud and he knew I was the logo king,” says Swift. Through his flyers for a host of club sessions, Swift’s graphics reached an even bigger audience, and his look became ubiquitous on the acid jazz scene.

Although Swift was at the forefront of font design in the Mac age, he felt far removed from the industry. “My problem with that whole world was it was all quite geeky,” he says. “So lots of nerdy font dudes. My attitude was, I’ll design a font for my own use and when I can be bothered to finish it I’ll sell it for £10. And they were selling their fonts for £40. And look at it now, you can go on the internet and get free fonts until you are blue in the face. So it’s like music piracy – you can’t keep a tab on it. I haven’t checked, but you can probably design a font on an iPad now.”

Brought up in the north London suburb of Southgate, Neville Brody studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art in 1975. His love of painting was matched by a dislike of the world that surrounded it. “It was marketdriven rather than culturally driven,” he tells me. “Also if you went into fine art you weren’t reaching a very wide audience. I thought it was much more important to grasp the tools of mass distribution and see if you could work in a subversive way with those. So I shifted from the elite world of fine art to the popular world of graphic design.”

Neville Brody

In the autumn of 1976, Brody started a BA course in graphics at the London College of Printing (LCP).

“The Sex Pistols had started earlier that year and the whole music and social culture at the time was so exciting. That idea that anything is possible,” he says.

With a strong interest in modernism, he also saw connections between the

‘LEARNING BY HAND GIVES YOU A GREAT SENSE OF PROPORTION’ arrival of punk and Dadaism. “It was about tearing up the plans and starting again,” he states. “Just because society was saying, ‘It’s this way,’ it didn’t mean that was the only way it could be.”

It wasn’t just the music of punk that was challenging the old ideas. “You had the punk fanzines of course, like Sniffin’ Glue, but there were also a lot of situationist fanzines floating around

in the mid-1970s, for example Jamie Reid had done one,” he says. “Situationism was all about undermining the regime and routine of daily life, thereby undermining control. And I was very interested in that and breaking patterns in society.”

It wasn’t surprising that the cut-up technique of William Burroughs struck a chord with Brody. “He was a big inspiration, as were people like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. People who would challenge the status quo,” he says. “But yes, Burroughs’ ideas about splicing different things together to evolve a new meaning, that you could never have consciously sat down and created. That process was hugely influential to me. And it’s really underpinned all my work since then.”

Brody’s first job within the culture he was immersed in was at Alex McDowell’s [graphic studio] Rocking Russian. “He was doing all the ‘Destroy’ and ‘Fuck Art Let’s Dance’ T-shirts for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood,” Brody says. “But he also did a magazine with Terry Jones [founder of i-D magazine] called Grabuge. My thesis at college was on radical magazines and that was my intro to Rocking Russian. I had gone there > 101

to interview Al and he saw my work.

I started there the day after my show came down at LCP.” After a short spell at Stiff Records, Brody’s real break came with the postpunk industrial label Fetish Records, set up by Rod Pearce in 1978. “I came into punk about halfway through but then got pulled into all the industrial music,” he says. “My introduction to Rod was serendipity. I was living in a squat in Covent Garden and on the floor below was Tom Heslop [from British band 23 Skidoo] and he introduced me to Rod.” Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire and 23 Skidoo were just three of the post-punk acts whose identity Brody helped create.

“At the time I was obsessed with making communication non-mechanical, and bringing it back to very primordial human instinct, so primitive or born of imperfection,” he says. His almost ritualistic aesthetic was most obvious on his logo and sleeve design for 23 Skidoo’s ‘Seven Songs’ EP and The Gospel Comes To New Guinea LP. “I had rejected a lot of the mechanical processes of graphic design and was obsessed with hand-making everything.

So those sleeves were very handcrafted,” he says.

Brody’s most influential work was as art director for The Face, where his designs were as revolutionary to publishing as those of the constructivists who inspired him. “I looked at the constructivists as real pioneers,” he says. “I wasn’t interested in copying their stuff but I was influenced by the way they were thinking.” Rejecting editorial conventions, Brody used visual devices such as placing blocks of text horizontally or vertically, and wrapping text around the page in a constant flow of experimentation. It was all designed to make the reader an active participant rather than a passive consumer.

“Everything we did with The Face was a question. We looked at communication as a dialogue not a monologue,” he says. The design would be hugely influential, but many designers missed the whole point.

“People viewed the layout of The Face as a style of design, but it was much more than that,” he says. “It was an extension of Dadaism, constructivism and punk, so it was about questioning everything. Other people took the surface stylistic qualities and applied them and didn’t understand how we had got there.”

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Between 1987 and 1990 Brody was art director at Arena. His use of neutral fonts such as Helvetica, and lots of empty space, created a neutral visual language. “The pressure at The Face to do something new every week in itself became a pattern and so it was self-defeating,” he says. “So when I did Arena I wanted to do completely the opposite. I wanted to make it normcore, as we would call it now.”

With the arrival of the Mac, Brody’s studio became a hotbed of innovation.

To meet the demand in this new age of typography he formed the digital font foundry Fontshop and the magazine Fuse, which included a disk loaded with experimental typefaces.

“The Mac had created a huge amount of possibility because it made graphic design both populist and democratic,” he says. “Anyone could now learn how to use Fontographer and produce their

‘MY JOB WAS TO EVOKE A SENSE OF WHAT THIS BAND WAS ABOUT’ own typefaces. It was a very exciting time. Like recording music on home computers, people were now designing fonts in their bedrooms. The digital thing in that sense really was like Gutenberg creating printing for mass distribution.”

So how does Brody, now a professor at London’s Royal College of Art, think media today has grasped the creative possibilities of new technology?

“Digital media has become so corporatised and commercialised,” he says. “Twenty years ago there was so much more exciting, innovative and interactive stuff going on with people like Tomato and Antirom. There will be a time when people rediscover those new frontiers.”

Born in the small town of Northwich outside Manchester in 1956, Malcolm Garrett traces his love of design back to his old Styrograph and Lego set. “I was conscious even

as a seven-year-old that I was going to follow some sort of path in the visual arts,” he tells me in a pub near his south London office. “For me that was being an architect, until I realised I had a real interest in words and typography. And what I came to know as graphic design was actually the bits of music culture that I really liked. So the record sleeves, the magazines, the posters, and the visual components of a musical and cultural lifestyle.”

There was one band that seemed to capture all the elements he liked.

“Around about 1972, when I was 16, I became a big fan of Hawkwind,” he says. “They were doing really interesting things with their visual presentation. Their album sleeves were fold-out extravaganzas, with lots of printed components. And I somehow worked out it was all done by a guy called Barney Bubbles. At the time I didn’t have an analytical appreciation [of his work], it was instinctive. I just knew it worked.”

In 1974, Garrett went to the University of Reading to study typography. “I spent a lot of time in the library and started to look at what typography actually was and found this great book Pioneers of Modern Typography [by Herbert Spencer], a fantastic book and a great introduction to everything from futurism right up to the Bauhaus. That’s where I did my groundwork on constructivism and Dada.” It was an interest he shared with his old school friend Peter Saville, who he joined at Manchester Polytechnic the year after. They arrived at a pivotal time. “Punk entered the picture for both me and Peter very early on,” he says.

“I had this idea of starting a new Dada movement and was interested in art as a statement of disintent. And then lo and behold we looked around and there were the Sex Pistols playing the Free Trade Hall in mid-1976.

And the Dada movement that I wanted to create was happening. Dada wanted to destroy art in order to create new art in the same way as the Sex Pistols.”

After an introduction to Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks by his friend Linda Sterling (later known as Linder), Garrett found a new platform for his Dadaist ideas. The sleeve for their single ‘Orgasm Addict’ was as striking as it was provocative. It featured Sterling’s collage of a naked female with the head replaced by an iron,

CULTURE | Graphic Means reportedly cut out of an Argos catalogue. Garrett’s choice of a gaudy yellow background and asymmetrical arrangement of type helped make it the perfect postmodern punk sleeve.

“Suddenly my life had a real sense of purpose and everything gelled,” he says. “Punk had a real connection to me right now on the streets of Manchester. It was something I felt very much a part of. At the same time, his Buzzcocks logo was the first of many such visual identities he would help create for bands. “As part of your training you created logos – I had actually created a logo at school as part of my A-level, with the same diagonal stripes as on the first album.”

Like Barney Bubbles, Garrett became known for his use of contrasting colour. “My favourite colours were fluorescent orange and metallic silver,” he says. “And that came from an appreciation of constructivism and the graphics of a mechanical world.” I put it to him that one of the LPs that best captured his aesthetic was the Buzzcocks’ A Different Kind Of Tension. “That was an exercise in illustrating tension,” he says. “Do these colours go together – yellow, fluorescent orange, purple? What kind of tension are they suggesting? And then the array of geometric shapes was looking at another visual tension.”

In the early 1980s, at the Assorted Images design company Garrett set up with Kasper de Graaf, he created the visual identity of Simple Minds. The band’s singer Jim Kerr recalled first seeing Garrett’s design for the cover of their New Gold Dream LP. “He was tripping on the music and lyrics, and the idea of faith, of mysticism and spirituality.” Garrett created similarly distinct graphic identities for Duran Duran and Culture Club.

“I worked really closely with all these bands to create a visual language that suited each of them,” he says. “That’s what I really liked. I don’t feel like I was an image-maker, I was a graphic designer and my job was to try and communicate and evoke a sense of what this band was about. So it was going back to Hawkwind and the idea of representing a lifestyle.”

Assorted Images were one of the first UK studios alongside Neville Brody’s to see the future through new technology. “The Mac brought a new set of components. It wasn’t

Malcolm Garrett

just a drawing tool, it was a writing tool, it was a compositional tool, and it was a publishing tool,” says Garrett.

“There had been a point in 1983 where we were using three distinct computer systems – for drawing, typesetting and page planning as it was called. And I used to dream of there being one machine where you could do all this stuff together. So when we got the first Macintosh we realised the potential so we started to push the company to do new things. But the graphic design industry as a whole was very, very dismissive of Macintosh and digital to start with.”

It was around this time he set up the AMX multimedia company with Alasdair Scott, going on to become one of the pioneers of multimedia design. “The Mac brought in publishing in a virtual space, it was interactive media, it was dynamic media, it was global media, and a whole lot of other spatial and interactive components,”

says Garrett. “And instinctively I knew that was where it was going when I saw my first Macintosh.” And whether as creative director at Images&Co or co-curator of the Design Manchester festival, he continues to explore the future of graphic design. “It’s like what I was saying in the 1990s – watch this space. I didn’t know then exactly where that would be, but I did know that it would be beyond our expectations.

And that’s what’s happened.”

The film Graphic Means is in production graphicmeans.com The book Swifty: Full Circle is out in late October gammaproforma.com The book Legacy: the Story Of the Face is out in early 2016 thamesandhudson.com Design Manchester 15, co-curated by Malcolm Garrett, opens at selected venues across Manchester from 14 October designmcr.com 103

Suit and shirt by Caruso; trainers

by Shoes Like Pottery; hat by Worth&Worth; sunglasses by Dita; tie-clip, stylist’s own. Bag

by White Chalk NYC.

STYLE

Jacket by John Varvatos; trousers

by E Tautz; shirt

by Caruso.

Ned Barton

Photographs James Dimmock Styling Mark Anthony Bradley Grooming Thomas Dunkinz at Bridge Artists Photographic Assistant Dustin Stefansic Post-production D’Arcy Hyde Casting Cast Partner castpartner.com Ned Barton, 25, is a music producer and actor from the South Downs, West Sussex. He is currently living in New York and has worked on two music releases under the alias Bluto. @nedthenoodle

STYLE | Ned Barton

Jacket and tank top by E Tautz; trousers by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; shirt by Caruso; belt by John Varvatos; trainers by Shoes Like Pottery.

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Coat by Caruso; trousers by Margaret Howell; jacket by White Chalk NYC; shirt by Prada; hat by Worth&Worth.

STYLE | Ned Barton

Jacket and trousers

by Lanvin; boots by John Varvatos; hat by Worth&Worth; scarf and pin, stylist’s own; bag by White Chalk NYC.

Jacket and trousers by E Tautz; shirt by Caruso; tie-clip and belt, stylist’s own; gloves by John Varvatos.

110

STYLE | Ned Barton

Coat by Yohji Yamamoto; jacket and tie by Prada; shirt from Rokit; hat by Worth&Worth; sunglasses by Dita; tie-clip and pocket square, stylist’s own.

MUSIC

John Lydon Artificial Intelligence. Teddy Boys. Arsenal. Issey Miyake.

Words Chris May Portrait Tim Hans

In his 2014 autobiography Anger Is An Energy: My Life Uncensored, John Lydon tells how, at the height of the Sex Pistols’ notoriety, the group was having difficulty obtaining work permits for a proposed 1978 American tour. The sticking point was a conviction for amphetamine sulphate possession that Lydon had picked up in early 1977. The problem was resolved when the US Embassy in London got hold of the idea that Lydon was actually a right-thinking pillar of society.

In the book, Lydon relates how he was at a club along with the escort girls he was sharing a flat with in St James’s. Generously self-medicated, he was stretched out on the stairs when someone tried to rob the cash register.

Running up the stairs from the basement bar with the loot, the robber tripped over Lydon’s foot, fell backwards and knocked himself out. Fleet Street got wind of the story and, unexpectedly, Lydon found himself being portrayed in the press as a model citizen. “I was the hero of the hour,” writes Lydon. “Ouch!”

But the official dealing with Lydon at the US embassy read the story, told Lydon he’d “done things for society” and granted him the visa. The tour happened in January 1978, though 112

the Pistols – racked by bassist Sid Vicious’s heroin-addled implosion and Lydon’s dysfunctional relationship with manager Malcolm McLaren – broke up after the final date.

Lydon moved to America “lock, stock and barrel” in 1990, and in 2013 acquired a US passport (a process that was much dogged by the then 34-yearold speed conviction). He lives in a modest home by the beach in Malibu.

Since relocating, his band Public Image Limited (PiL) continued with the success they had enjoyed since forming in 1978. There was a hiatus beginning in 1993, when Lydon was writing his first autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, before he regrouped with Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook in 1996 for the Pistols’ Filthy Lucre tour. In 2009, PiL reformed. The band – Lydon, guitarist Lu Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith, who both joined in 1986, and bassist Scott Firth – have since recorded two albums, 2012’s This Is Pil and What the World Needs Now…, out now. They are currently on a 13-date UK tour, followed by mainland European and North American dates.

Despite the nihilist-barbarian image fostered by the mainstream media that has followed Lydon around since the

Pistols – softened recently by attempts to turn him into a “national treasure” (an accolade he vigorously rejects) – Lydon’s core values are traditional ones.

Loyalty figures large among them. He met his wife Nora Forster at McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Kings Road boutique Sex in 1975. They’re still very happily together. “Once I make [a] commitment, it’s forever,” Lydon wrote in Anger Is An Energy. He met his future manager, John ‘Rambo’ Stevens, even earlier. Stevens was a school friend of Lydon’s younger brother Jimmy, and all three were passionate Arsenal supporters. He has many acquaintances but not a lot of close friends, and they too are long-term. “My friends are for life,” says Lydon. America is fortunate that Lydon decided to relocate there.

Our loss is their gain.

I wouldn’t call myself even an acquaintance of Lydon’s, but in 1985 I was the British publicist on the ‘World Destruction’ single he made with Afrika Bambaataa and Time Zone.

Dealing with Lydon was a pleasure then, as was talking to him again 30 years later. As ever, he’s refreshingly self-deprecating, says exactly what he thinks and to hell with the consequences, and laughs a lot. He doesn’t have a trace of an American >

PiL’s original line up – Jah Wobble, Jim Walker, John Lydon and Keith Levene – with Lydon’s brother Martin at their parents’ home, Finsbury Park, London, 1978

accent and sounds like he never left Finsbury Park. He is also well informed about, and engaged with, what’s going on in the UK. After a brief period of reminiscing – during which Lydon, speaking on the phone from Malibu, graciously suggested that the relative failure of ‘World Destruction’ in the UK (it only made the Top 50 and we all thought it should have done better) was down to problems at the Celluloid label’s New York HQ rather than the work of the London office – I asked him how he’d dealt with the subsequent years of ageing.

Being older than you, I’m allowed to ask this. Three decades on from ‘World Destruction’, how are you finding getting older?

It’s nothing like as bad as I thought it would be when I hit 21. I remember going home and crying. I refused to answer the phone and I closed the curtains. I thought it was the end of my life. And actually, it was the beginning of my life and I’ve never looked back.

I’ve never wallowed in that sentiment of stupidity for which the wonderful Mr Pete Townshend coined the phrase “hope I die before I get old”. No fucking way! I’m around for as long as possible. I’m looking forward to being 100. One of the great thrills about being in California, which has always appealed to me, is that the people here don’t accept age like they do in Britain.

They bungee jump at 85 here. The mentality is, get the hell out of the 114

house and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Eveything stops at a certain age? Fuck that. I wonder who sold us that idea. And I’m actually in better physical shape now, too. The Californian climate really suits me. It’s basically the same all year round. All my bronchial problems and allergies are clearing up. I can actually sing now!

‘I’M AROUND FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO BEING 100’ Your sartorial style looks to be in rude health, too, as strong as it was with the Pistols.

The Pistols had loads of style. Style is very important for someone with a working class background. Because you don’t want to look like you just fell out of a dustbin, you want to present yourself fairly decently. You want to let the young girls know that you wash your willy, and even clean your clothes. Sometimes you don’t get the opportunity, but it’s amazing what a row of safety pins can do.

I’ve never followed any fashions or dictates. I’ve admired the uniforms

of certain movements, though with me it’s always been mix and match.

With the Pistols, Vivienne Westwood was really pissed off about that. One of the biggest problems when punk was taking off was the Daily Mirror and newspapers like that, they meant it fondly I suppose, but they’d present clichéd representations of what the punk uniform was. And then there’d be all these horse’s arses out there imitating it, the studded leather jacket look, and it was really, really boring.

So I took a nod and wink from my dad, who was a very snappy dresser in his youth, a bit of a teddy boy. When the punks were feuding with the teds, I went out dressed as a teddy boy and made the case clear: we’re all in this together – if it wasn’t for the teds, punks wouldn’t be here. The teds started the whole style thing for working class youth.

Do you still approach style instinctively?

It’s still what catches my eye. At the moment it’s Japanese designers. They thrill me. It’s an odd way of thrilling me because I’m larger than most Japanese fellas, so it’s a bit of a tight squeeze. I love Issey Miyake because he makes clothes like it’s one size fits all. There’s plenty of wrinkles and they expand. But next week it might be something completely different.

Fashion is something different altogether. I’ve never followed fashion.

Style is a much, much better way of approaching it. Style is not something that’s dictated to you.

It’s always struck me as very odd that gay men tell women what to wear.

That’s not style, that’s fashion. Style is that oddball collection that reflects your personal beliefs.

My biggest problem in life is a strange one but here it is – I’ve always liked that suave Mediterranean gigolo look. And I’m the worst body shape in the world for it. Extra tight round the buttocks? Hopeless. I suppose that reflects back on the mod years. I used to like the way mods were so sharp, clean cut. Which I suppose Tommy Hilfiger is now kind of representing. But for my body, that’s a bit of a catastrophe.

Would you call yourself analogue or digital?

Analogue. Because I can get more information, more quality, that way.

MUSIC | John Lydon Especially with sound. The downgrading of quality with this MP3 bollocks, it’s like a really bad postcard version of a brilliant oil painting. Modern technology, at least soundwise, is two steps backwards and downgrading the whole way. People are getting ripped off with digital formats.

So vinyl for me, thank you. Every chance I get to hook up with some sort of vinyl promotion campaign, I’m in.

I was forced into making CDs, and I collect them too, but I’m always aware that the pressing plants are not giving you the most full, correct information possible. So when we release CDs, I always make sure we’re giving the best content quality the technology is capable of. It’s expensive, but there you go.

What’s your take on artificial intelligence? Stephen Hawking said recently that it is an aspect of digital technology that actually threatens the future of humanity.

I recommend it highly to politicians, particularly the intelligence part. I have no fears about improving ourselves. But I think AI presents a very interesting future, because who knows which way it will go. Ultimately, like all of these things that promise a great and bright future, AI will probably be the dumbing down of us all. Because they’ll find a way of producing these processes cheaper, and there’ll be a lack of quality in your artificial intelligence.

Like so much else it may end up as a vanity act. For instance, it’s very hard to watch the news in America because the faces are not moving. Frozen with Botox. Death masks. It’s quite frightening. The newscasters make it look like the robots are already here.

In America, that sort of dumb, oversanitised look usually spells reactionary.

I see Ukip are actually trying to ape it, without the cosmetic surgery. Trying to look ‘respectable’ I suppose.

What do you make of Ukip? The Little Englander mentality seems to be getting worse all the time.

It’s odd, isn’t it, that the people who support this Ukip prejudice, who want to close the border and seal the country off, are the same lot that love to go to Spain for their holidays? They don’t mind going over there and nicking everything they’ve got, but they don’t want to share anything from the

John Lydon, 1978 Photograph Dennis Morris

English point of view. Having people from other cultures in the country does wonders. Otherwise everyone would end up fucking inbreds. Or dead, because there wouldn’t be enough nurses and doctors. It’s a lousy, stupid, ignorant way of viewing the world.

For my mind, as soon I could travel, I did. I started at a very early age – my dad being a bit of a gypo, so we were always on the move – and I found that to be the healthiest mentality.

I was never going to lock myself up in a British council flat and claim that’s my castle, because it isn’t. Keep moving or else the dust collects.

It used to amaze me, when I started with the Pistols, the hatred that northerners would have for us, because we were allegedly cockney bastards.

For fuck’s sake, aren’t we all in this together? Apparently not. And taking that to another extreme, I ain’t no cockney, I weren’t born within the sound of Bow bells. But an awful lot of people who wear turbans are. They’re the real cockneys now. Things change all the time. And the population of London is all immigrants basically

from the last 100 years. Irish, Jews, Jamaicans, Greeks, Turks, the list is endless and why not? I grew up in a very mixed neighbourhood and I think it was ultimately to my benefit.

The variety of music and fresh ideas from different places, it was like a swap meet. Trade things off with each other and you end up wanting the best of each bit rather than sticking with the worst.

I can’t see any better alternative for Britain than staying in the EU, not at the moment. And to my mind, as many of your neighbours as you can help out, and they’ll help you out, the better.

Think globally. Think of each other as one big family, rather than that bitter, twisted English mentality of resenting the next village down the road. We can’t keep throwing rocks at each other and wonder why nothing comes together.

What about nationalism generally?

I want one world, really, and ultimately the elimination of private, localised governments, because it just leads to bitter hatreds and selfish interests.

I find any sort of nationalism very > 115

Heathrow Airport, London, 1976 Photograph Ray Stevenson

At home, London, 1979 Photograph Janette Beckman

unhealthy, even to the point – I’m sorry my Millwall friends – that I can’t enjoy an England game any more. I’m not interested in it because the world’s much more mixed up than the narrow separateness it promotes. And the idea of national pride, I always find that a bit worrying, it just seems to create national division… divisions, diversions, derisions. I remember the newspaper posters after the 1966 World Cup, and even now I still don’t get it. I just love Arsenal. Fuck the rest of it.

The loudest voices against immigration are often the loudest voices demanding British military intervention elsewhere in the world.

Yesterday, the foreign secretary started floating the idea of extending British bombing from Iraq into Syria.

What the fuck are these clowns not learning? The Nazis certainly didn’t break the British spirit in the second world war by bombing. I can’t see Isis being crushed by this endless bombing from above either. It solves nothing. If you ever want to build walls, build walls around those kinds of places instead, alright? They’re all determined to kill each other.

So wait till they’ve finished, and then come bearing gifts. You could throw cheese sandwiches over the wall every now and again so they can see what they’re missing.

There’s this endless vendetta thing coming from that part of the world.

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It’s not just an Arab problem, it’s the Balkans too, they’re all riddled with it. In LA we have the same situation with the Crips and the Bloods. None of them can remember what actually led to the gang war, and that was from long before the drug dealing started. Even today, if you’re wearing red you’ve got to watch out for those wearing blue, and vice versa. It’s deeply fucking childish. But most human beings never learn to leave the playground.

worth anything at all, then he should be able to stand up to reasonable debate. Because he gave us minds to think with. Hello god lovers, bear this in mind. And if we choose not to think, then we are despising god’s gift. All religions are oppressive, manmade creations basically.

They’re interesting for all that, it’s storytelling of a kind. But really it’s about control and things put together by sheep shaggers and cow herders, with a penchant for goats and no indoor plumbing. So, not too wise really.

‘THIS MP3 And religion permeates US politics too…

BOLLOCKS Certainly. Take the police shootings black men. It’s been going – IT’S LIKE A ofon unarmed for a long time, the victimisation a very important part of the REALLY BAD ofpopulation, and often the victimisers those who are most self-righteously POSTCARD OF are religious. It’s now being noticed, let’s it that way, so that’s hopeful, maybe.

A BRILLIANT put But to my mind, I think Obama’s left OIL PAINTING’ it all too late. And it’s resulted in all Extreme religion is like extreme politics. Neither allows itself to be questioned. I’ve always despised any authoritarian controls on my freedom of thought. Anything that presents itself to you and tells you that you have no right to question it, that you must just accept it, is unacceptable, in huge capital letters. If your god is

this [Confederate] flag hatred stuff that’s going on, and looking for reasons to blame, which are quick and convenient, rather than dealing with the real issues. Racism has become an integral part of the police force.

It’s institutionalised. And you can’t be blaming anyone but those who run those institutions.

I am an Obama supporter though, always have been. His election was

MUSIC | John Lydon

Sex Pistols rehearsing, London, 1977 Photograph Janette Beckman

amazing, an incredible day emotionally.

I did what I always do with elections, I stayed up for two days watching TV so as not to skip a beat of it. And right from the start, half the country hated him simply because he was black, and they were going to obstruct him all the way. And we’ve still got a Republican Party propagating outright lies. The latest, most fabulous outrager is Donald Trump. Yet again, people aren’t remembering. He first did this years back [saying Obama was not born in the US], and now he’s giving us part two. Everybody seems to have forgotten he was coming out with the same ignorance and hatred when Obama first ran. It’s extraordinary how shortterm some people’s memories are.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the gap between the rich and the poor keeps getting wider. Do you think we’ll ever get rid of the class system?

Well, I’ve done my bit. But it’s not a gap really, it’s a grand canyon. A lot of it is a mentality issue. You can’t wallow in stupidity, which is unfortunately where working class people victimise themselves. They deliberately stay

stupid and see education as the enemy.

It’s not, it’s your friend. Don’t resent school. You can resent the way they’re trying to teach you, but educate yourself then. You can’t go into the world unarmed. It’s the same with not bothering to vote. If you disenfranchise yourself, you can’t point fingers later on down the line. Less than a 100 years ago we didn’t all have the right to vote.

It’s everybody’s right now. Why would you want to concede it?

The working class aren’t the only ones with a problem. The middle class, who believes the privilege of their education has made them superior to their fellow human beings, that’s a great, great problem. It’s one I still face every time I go to England. They’re looking down their nose through the class system. Nightclubs, places like the Groucho, they don’t want me in there.

The last time I was there I was thrown out. I was having a bit of a laugh with some of the Madness boys, and I was the one that had to leave. It’s fucking ridiculous. In England, you can trace someone’s entire family history by the way they talk. The only variants in that are blokes like Jamie Oliver going

“oi-oi” on us, which adds to the problem actually. There’s an awful lot of them about. Idiots.

At least there isn’t a class system in the US. What there is is money.

That’s the tell all of it. Money is the difference here. There’s those that have it and those that don’t. It seems to all be about acquiring the dollar, the sacred dollar. And churches here are very money led, it’s all about that collection box. A lot of the rappers have got caught up in that, and it’s a shame now that they all wear golf outfits.

They’ve given up the tracksuit thing.

They’re assuming the money mantle.

To me, that’s even worse. You don’t need to go that way.

Our allotted half hour is up.

May all your enemies be behind you.

May they scatter, shatter, splatter.

What the World Needs Now… is out now. PiL will perform at selected venues around the UK and Europe from 18 September cargorecordsdirect.co.uk pilofficial.com

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COVER STORY

Maxine Peake

Betty Tebbs. Eccentronic Research Council. Beryl Burton. Carol Morley.

Photographs David Goldman Styling Rose Forde Words Sophie Coletta Styling Assistant Laurie Lederman Hair and Make-up Victoria Bond at Caren using Bumble and Bumble and Burberry Beauty

“Maxine’s normally cute face devoid of make-up was like a bombastic anaemic lozenge on two liquorice sticks.” Maxine Peake is reciting a review of her performance in How To Hold Your Breath at London’s Royal Court Theatre earlier this year. It’s a drizzly July afternoon and we’re holed up in an office at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. “With a 1980s undercut, she is middle-aged, on her last sexual rounds, and dressed like she’d just walked out of a Slovakian funeral parlour,” Peake continues, pausing to take a sip of tea before addressing the vitriol she’s just delivered from memory. “Oh, I see. So this is how it works now. If the reviewer doesn’t find you attractive, then the play is no good. Right, I understand,” she says, elongating every syllable of the last sentence. “I’ve never been bothered about my looks; I never thought my looks had got much to do with my acting. I’ve never been the ingénue, I’ve always been a character actress.

That’s how I’ve always seen myself.”

Over the years Peake’s roles have oscillated between vivid, but never demeaning, versions of femininity and androgyny; performances that cling to you long after they’ve been delivered. The evening before our meeting, I watch from the dress circle of the Royal Exchange as she performs her eight-minute opening monologue in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, Joycean sentences tumbling out of her mouth with mesmerising fervour.

It’s impossible to look away.

Peake’s work seems to come from a place of genuine passion rather than a desire for praise or profit. She tells me an anecdote about turning down a “mainstream, high profile BBC1 franchise telly thing” to do a short film with Carol Morley, making the decision after returning home drunk one night and watching Morley’s autobiographical 118

documentary The Alcohol Years, and thinking it was brilliant.

This sense of passion is not restricted to the stage and screen.

Peake has recorded three concept albums with Sheffield’s Eccentronic Research Council, delivering bitingly satirical spoken-word narratives over their unhinged analogue electronics.

In the wake of this year’s general election, the trio released a track called ‘Loathsome Dave’, in which she refers to David Cameron as a “blue-tied toff dinky winky Dick Turpin”.

Outside of her work, and to a large extent within it, Peake is an increasingly rare figure amongst her cultural contemporaries. Her political candour was instilled in her from an early age (she attended a miners’ protest at the age of 10) but, she says, is often mistaken for an attempt to augment her own profile.

“If your career was on the wane, the last thing you’d want to do to is come out as a card-carrying socialist,” she says, laughing. “That’s not going to do you any favours.” When she was younger she would often tell journalists about her time as a member of the Young Communist League, only to be met with, “Oh, that’s fascinating.

Anyway, how did you lose the weight?”

Peake grew up in the once industrial town of Westhoughton, a five-mile drive down the A58 from Bolton. At 13 she became a member of a theatre group in Bolton, and later attended the youth group at Manchester’s Royal Exchange. When her older sister joined the local police force, the sergeant who came to visit the family home found Peake wearing an African awareness pendant, a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament badge, and an anarchist symbol drawn on her trainers. She cites her grandad, who joined the Communist Party after returning horrified from Palestine in the 1940s,

as a major influence on her political beliefs. “I worshipped them,” she says of her grandparents. “My grandad only died a couple of years ago and part of me misses him like hell, but I also think it would have finished him off where we are at the moment. He always used to say to me, ‘I was born in the biggest depression, Maxine, and I’ll die in the biggest depression.’”

Peake moved to London aged 21 to enrol at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) after being awarded the Patricia Rothermere Scholarship, and stayed on in the city after graduating. She grew to love it, but always felt like something of an outsider. “There is a huge snobbery down in London,” she says of her years in the capital. “When I was there I felt slightly looked down upon because I was from the north.

“I remember doing a fashion shoot, when we were doing Shameless,” she recalls. “It was the second series, and I think it was The Times that were doing this fashion shoot. They all came up to Wardley Industrial Estate in Salford where we film, which is quite grim, and they brought the most horrific clothes I’ve ever seen in my life.

And this woman tried to put me in this sequinned grandad cap with a crop top, with these leggings and these platform spiky trainer shoes. I put it on and I nearly cried. I said, ‘I really can’t wear this,’ and as I walked off she was like, ‘Oh these northerners, they’ve got no idea about fashion.’ I nearly hit the roof. I was just like, ‘How dare you.’

And then they did the photoshoot and played Oasis all the way through it and I was literally hyperventilating.

I’ve never been so patronised. It was that element of, ‘Oh you’re from the north so you all like Oasis, and you’ve got no idea about fashion or culture.’”

After 13 years in London, Peake moved back up north six years ago, and >

Coat by Nicole Farhi menswear; trousers by Uniqlo menswear; sweater by John Smedley menswear; boots by Guidi; socks, stylist’s own.

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Blazer and trousers by Yohji Yamamoto menswear; denim jacket by Lee menswear; belt by Paul Smith.

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COVER STORY | Maxine Peake now lives on a “very ordinary road” in Salford. “I was trying to buy a flat in London and it was just madness, sort of gazumping and bidding wars,” she says. “You’d walk into a flat and go, ‘It’s alright, once I’ve swept the hypodermic needles away from the front door it’ll be a nice place to live.’ And I woke up one morning and went, ‘I’m going home, because I can have a house.’

I moved back and I absolutely love it.”

“The thing about moving back,” Peake continues, “was it gave me more time. I just found London consumed me. In some respects getting things made is a lot easier here too. People are very open. It just felt easier to get to people. In London I wouldn’t know where to start. I felt more intimidated.

You think, oh everybody wants to write, everybody wants to do something.

“One of the main things is not to get myself bogged down, so that work becomes about financial necessity,” Peake adds. “It sounds slightly arrogant, but I’ve just been lucky that I’ve been able to do that. I can do theatre for a year and that’s fine. It’s about the work, it’s never been about the money.”

While presenting a BBC2 Artsnight programme earlier this year, Peake, between driving around in a Ford Transit, chatting to Sleaford Mods and visiting 97-year-old friend and activist Betty Tebbs, highlighted the fact that currently less than a quarter of theatre and television directors are female. “In film it’s even more shocking.

I don’t think it’s actually improved in the last 20 years,” she tells me. “The women I work with seem braver. I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am and had to prove so much, now I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m just gonna do what I enjoy. I don’t quite know how I’ve got here, so you just go, ‘You know what, I’m just gonna have a go, I’m just gonna do what I want while I can.’”

Peake has collaborated with a lot of female creatives – including theatre director Sarah Frankcom, who she’s worked with six times in the last 10 years, and filmmaker Carol Morley, who recently compared their working relationship to that of Derek Jarman and Tilda Swinton – but it’s not necessarily a conscious move. “I’ve never set out – and yes I am a feminist – but I’ve never set out going, ‘This is my manifesto and I will only do feminist roles,’” says Peake. “It just happens that it’s gone this way.

I haven’t deliberately gone, ‘I’m only working with you because you’re a woman.’ I’m just more interested in those collaborations.”

Three years ago, weary of the lack of interesting female roles on offer, Peake began writing them herself, penning two female-led BBC Radio 4 dramas, Queens Of the Coal Age and Beryl: a Love Story On Two Wheels. The former told the story of Anne Scargill and three other miners’ wives who, armed only with chewing gum and bottles of water, occupied Parkside colliery in 1993 for five days in an attempt to prevent its closure, while the latter depicted the achievements of cyclist Beryl Burton, and was later adapted for stage.

“If they were men, they’d have been big dramas or made into big films,” Peake says. “There’s so many amazing women out there and so many amazing stories that don’t get told. I’ve just got this fascination with getting more women’s stories out there.

‘IT’S ABOUT THE WORK, IT’S NEVER BEEN ABOUT THE MONEY’ “I do think there’s a real problem with female parts, and it’s not just the amount of female parts, it’s the female parts that there are. I read things and go, ‘I don’t want to play that, I don’t want to play another put-upon wife or mother.’ You do get parts and go, ‘Really? Who are these women?’ People say to me, ‘Oh, you always play strong women,’ and I say, ‘I don’t know any other women. I don’t know any weak women.’ Women get themselves into situations that might weaken them, but they’re not weak. A lot of the time I read them and go, ‘I can’t relate to that,’ they’re just badly written.”

While the lack of interesting female parts remains a pertinent issue, for Peake there are more pressing and less-considered casting prejudices that also need addressing. “I know we bang on about women’s roles in this country, and older women’s roles, but I still think for black and Asian actors there

isn’t enough work,” she says. “What Sarah Frankcom has done here at the Exchange is fantastic, with the casting.

She gets the best person for the job. But I still think there’s a bit of a problem.

“A lot of young black actors are going over to the States, because they’re not getting enough roles here. I spoke to Sophie Okonedo, who I think is one of our best British actresses, and her agent said to her, ‘You might have to go over there if you really want the career you should be having.’ In every walk of life in this country, we’ve slipped back decades. We’re not moving forward and representing. When will we represent Britain as Britain is?

“Some people have weird ideas about casting. It’s not as bad now, but I used to get it being northern. I used to get, ‘The thing is Maxine, she has been to university, so do you think you could lose the accent?’” Her eyes widen.

“You can’t say that.”

The representation of the north too, Peake says, is often misguided.

“Where’s the humour? I love a bit of bleak, I’ve spent my career doing bleak, but the humour is always fed through, however bad things get.” Her role as Veronica Fisher in Paul Abbott’s critically acclaimed drama Shameless springs to mind, a show that brought wit and verve to the ‘feckless’ fringes of society. “A few people said maybe Shameless started the rot with things like Benefits Street,” says Peake, referring to the controversial Channel 4 documentary series that aired last year.

“I always thought it was a celebration.

Everyone talks about the working class, but it’s not even the working class any more. People have dropped off the scale, now you’ve got the underclass, you’ve got people who can’t even get a job. Shameless was bringing drama to a social group that hadn’t had a voice before. It was still about that old working class sense of community, whether they were a load of rum buggers or not. They still looked after each other.” Peake pauses for thought.

“I would never do anything that I thought was patronising or derisive, or damaging to the working classes.”

It’s interesting how, 11 years since it first aired, Shameless doesn’t really seem to have aged at all. Substitute its backdrop of New Labour’s ‘social exclusion agenda’ with current Tory austerity, and the social concerns it highlighted are more relevant now than > 121

COVER STORY | Maxine Peake

Coat by Nudie Jeans menswear; trousers and jacket by By Walid menswear; boots by Guidi.

COVER STORY | Maxine Peake

Shirt by Aquascutum menswear; trousers by Margaret Howell menswear; hat by Laulhère.

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Suit by Hardy Amies menswear; shirt and tie by Aquascutum menswear; hat by Laulhère.

ever before. “I’m petrified if I’m honest,” says Peake of the present political landscape. “After the election, that feeling of grief, I’ve never felt anything like it. I was having lunch with my boyfriend the next day and I was trying to talk to him and I just kept welling up. It was disappointment and heartbreak and disbelief. I thought, I’ve been so naive haven’t I? I sort of forget sometimes that there’s this swathe of middle England Daily Mail readers that you think are a minority because of the people we mix with, and the business we’re in. It’s quite frightening.”

Peake recently joined the Labour Party as a supporter, and says she intends to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the leadership election. Two days before our interview, Tony Blair makes a bracing attack on Corbyn’s bid, calling it “reactionary”, and further stating that in supporting him, Labour have “rediscovered losing” by lurching too far to the left.

“I wish he’d wind his neck in,” says Peake, rolling her eyes. “I remember when Blair got in, I was at drama school and I was in the foyer and everyone was leaping up and down.

I snuck out to the phone box and rang my grandad and he said, ‘Bloody hell,’ and I said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘It’s going to be no different Maxine, he’s no different.’ And I went back in and everyone said, ‘Oh you and your grandad, you’re so pessimistic.’ Later they came to me saying, ‘How did you know?’ When you’ve been through what my grandad’s been through you become very astute to politics. And now we’re in this, and I find it really depressing.

But I always think, it’s never over is it?

People have been in worse situations like this in history.”

Our conversation drifts back in time, to the political unrest and cultural hedonism of the late 1980s, when Peake was a teenager. “I was 14 when it was all kicking off,” she says. “I hate that term ‘the Madchester scene’, but it was.

You were there in Afflecks Palace, going to gigs, I remember bunking off the youth theatre to go and see the Charlatans play at the Crown and Cushion in Bolton. I thought, well, this is the revolution isn’t it? It did feel that things will never go back that way, we wouldn’t go back to the 1980s, we’d move forward. It was the Second Summer of Love, and you think it’s really going to change things, but 126

actually I suppose it was that we all went out at the weekend and took loads of ecstasy. The discussions didn’t really go further than that.

“However horrific the 1980s were, and whatever an evil witch Thatcher was, all that came out of that period culturally and musically was really exciting. Then you go to this period, and there doesn’t seem to be the same sort of force there was in the 1980s.

I’m probably going to say something contentious right now, but I meet a lot of young people who I feel are conservative with a small c. I feel a little bit like, wow. And I don’t mean everyone, and I do also meet some amazing young activists. Maybe it’s the business I’m in. It’s become such

‘IF THE BBC GOES, THEN HOW AM I GOING TO EARN A LIVING? I’D HAVE TO GO CAP IN HAND TO THE ENEMY’ a different business. It’s all about the work ethic, it’s all about America.

Capitalism has affected everything.

It’s bled into the arts and the music industry – into the mainstream.

America, through the internet, feels a lot closer, and people don’t want to upset anybody in case that jeopardises their chances over there.

You don’t want to say you’re political.”

I wonder if Peake feels like she has an obligation to have a political voice in the absence of others. “Yeah, but there’s also a responsibility to go, ‘I am an actor, I’m not a politician,” she counters.

“I do get inundated with requests. Can you come and speak at this meeting?

Can you come to this rally? Can you come to this? Part of me goes, ‘I’d love to,’ and part of me goes, ‘Actually, do

you know what, I am an actor.’ These are my politics and I wear them on my sleeve, but at the end of the day it’s not my job, and I’m not qualified.

“What’s sad now is that people are looking to those from other walks of life to give them that voice because they’re not getting that from politicians,” Peake continues. “People are desperately going, ‘You’ve got a view on this that we agree with, please will you come?’”

In March this year, Peake made an appearance at the protests against legal aid cuts, joining thousands of protesters outside Parliament in a nationwide walkout. Does she feel that protest is still a valid form of political statement?

“I think at the moment one of the only options is to get out there, to get out on the streets, but it does feel like it’s getting completely ignored,” she says.

“You only have to look at the news reports and when they’re saying how many people are there – it’s like, stick another nought on that.

“It’s frightening the propaganda that goes on in the media. It’s quite interesting that now the Tory party are trying to get rid of the BBC. You read the Mail and see that it’s always accusing the BBC of being very leftwing, which I find hilarious because that’s not the case at all. The BBC does need to have a good look at itself.”

Peake is quick to add that she would be “devastated” by the BBC’s hypothetical demise. “I don’t quite know what I’d do with my television.

I think it would go in the skip. I don’t want a media that’s run by Rupert Murdoch. If the BBC goes, then how am I going to earn a living? I’d have to go cap in hand to the enemy.”

It’s quite difficult to imagine Peake going “cap in hand” to anyone. Over the course of the two hours we spend together, she is brilliantly fiery and opinionated, but also thoughtful and considered. In an age of excess and overshare, there’s still often a reticence to publicly critique aspects of our own society, and it’s invigorating to meet someone so openly embracing the antithesis of that. “A lot of people say to me, ‘You’re jeopardising work,’” she says. “If that would be the case, that would be the case. Would I want to do that work? It’s fine having a nice glittering career, but then lying on your deathbed going, ‘Well, I didn’t really say anything.’ I couldn’t live with myself.”

COVER STORY | Maxine Peake

Coat and knitted vest

by Topman menswear; trousers by Tiger of Sweden menswear; belt by Paul Smith.

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Suit by Richard James menswear; sweater by APC menswear; hat by Laulhère.

COVER STORY | Maxine Peake

Jacket by Canali menswear; top by Topman menswear; hat by Laulhère.

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Michael ‘Manolo Mike’ Collins, 23, dancer, wears jacket by Kinfolk; trousers by White Chalk NYC; trainers by Nike; hat by Kangol; jewellery, stylist’s own. Elijah ‘Kid Love’ Pryor, 24, MC, wears jacket by Y-3; trousers and shirt by WeSC; trainers by Pony; glasses, model’s own. Aleya ‘Indigo Monet’ Swopes, 21, dancer and artist, wears top by Adidas; trousers, trainers, hat and jewellery, model’s own. Kareem ‘Steel’ Welch, 19, actor, comedian and fitness expert, wears top by Adidas; tracksuit bottoms by Polo Sport Ralph Lauren; hat by Kangol; trainers by Pony.

Manoah ‘Prynce Divoe’ Raphael, 22, MC, wears top by Baartmans&Siegel; trousers by Tiger of Sweden; top by Farah; trainers by Pony; hat

by Kangol; sunglasses, model’s own. Paulasia ‘Paulie’ Coston, 21, designer, wears top by Adidas; trousers, trainers, glasses and jewellery, model’s own. James ‘Sensei Chill’ Gripper, 21, model, MC and artist, wears top and trainers by Adidas; trousers by Baartmans&Siegel; hat

by Kangol; glasses and chain, stylist’s own. Rhetlaw ‘Def Soul’ Brandon, 26, rapper, producer and artist, wears top by Polo Sport Ralph Lauren; trousers by WeSC; trainers by Converse; shirt by Farah; hat by Bailey; glasses, model’s own.

STYLE

Elijah wears shirt by Tiger of Sweden; trousers by Farah; trainers by Pony; sunglasses and jewellery, stylist’s own.

Michael wears jacket by Kinfolk; trousers by Topman; shirt by Farah; trainers by Adidas; hat by Bailey; glasses, jewellery and belt, stylist’s own.

Tribe NYC

Photographs Phil Knott Styling Mark Anthony Bradley Grooming Missy Scarborough Tribe NYC is a collective of young individuals who embrace the history and style of hip-hop culture. Each member has a specific area of expertise, such as rapping, acting, modelling, styling and designing. facebook.com/tribenyc

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James wears cardigan by John Smedley; jeans by YMC; top by Fred Perry; trainers by Pony; hat by White Chalk NYC; glasses and jewellery, stylist’s own.

STYLE | Tribe NYC

Paulaisia wears jacket by Tiger of Sweden menswearv; vest, T-shirt and jeans, model’s own. Aleya wears jacket by Y-3 menswear.

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Rhetlaw wears cardigan by John Smedley; trousers by Topman; top by Farah. Denzel wears yellow shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; trousers by White Chalk NYC; white shirt by WeSC; hat by Bailey; sunglasses and jewellery, model’s own.

STYLE | Tribe NYC

Denzel wears jacket and trousers by YMC; shirt by WeSC; hat by Kangol; jewellery, model’s own.

Manoah wears jacket by Adidas; trousers by Tiger of Sweden; shirt by Kinfolk; hat by Kangol.

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STYLE | Tribe NYC

Michael wears jacket by Original Penguin; trousers by Maison Kitsuné; shirt by Topman; trainers

by Pony; glasses and jewellery, stylist’s own. Manoah wears coat and shirt by White Chalk NYC; trousers and top by Baartmans and Siegel; trainers by Pony; hat by Bailey. James wears jacket, trousers and vest by White Chalk NYC; shirt by Original Penguin; trainers by Adidas; hat by Kangol; glasses and pocket square, stylist’s own. Elijah wears jacket and shirt by White Chalk NYC; trousers by Ben Sherman; trainers by Pony; crown, model’s own; pocket square, stylist’s own.

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Michael wears jacket and trousers

by YMC; shirt by WeSC; trainers by Pony; hat by Kangol; jewellery, stylist’s own. Manoah wears jacket by Adidas; trousers by Tiger of Sweden; trainers

by Pony; hat by Kangol.

CINEMA

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Willem Dafoe. Charlie Chaplin. The Canterbury Tales. Giuseppe Pelosi. Lotta Continua. Fellini.

Words Chris May Archive images courtesy of the British Film Institute, bfi.org.uk

Forty years on, mystery still shrouds the murder of filmmaker, poet, novelist, journalist, painter and political activist Pier Paolo Pasolini on the beach in Ostia, a seaside satellite of Rome.

Some say Pasolini was assassinated by members of Movimento Sociale Italiano, the then-powerful Italian fascist party. Some blame the CIA, while others point to organised crime.

The facts, as far as they are known, suggest a more prosaic but no less tragic event, a homophobic hate crime...

Shortly after 10pm on Saturday 1 November 1975, in central Rome, Pasolini left the restaurant where he’d been dining with his one-time lover, the actor Ninetto Davoli, along with Davoli’s wife and the couple’s eldest son. He got into his Alfa Romeo GT and drove to a bar where rent boys hung out waiting for clients. Pasolini picked up one of the hustlers, 17-year-old Giuseppe ‘Pino’ Pelosi, and the pair drove to another restaurant, where Pasolini bought Pelosi a meal. They then drove to Ostia, parked the car on the front, and strolled onto the beach.

As portrayed in Abel Ferrara’s film Pasolini – in which Willem Dafoe takes the title role, and which focuses on the last 24 hours of Pasolini’s life – when Pasolini and Pelosi get down to business, three young men walk out of the darkness and accost them. The trio attack Pasolini, beat him senseless and leave him lying face down in the sand. Pelosi runs to the Alfa, starts it up and, in his panic to escape the scene, drives at speed over Pasolini’s inert body.

At around 1.30am on 2 November, less than a mile away, Pelosi was stopped by the police for driving 138

on the wrong side of the road. In December, he was charged with murder, car theft and committing obscene acts in public. In April 1976, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to just under 10 years in jail.

He was released on parole in 1983.

Pelosi has been in and out of jail ever since, most recently for a drug dealing offence. He has sold his story at least five times, re-spinning it every time, and is, at best, an unreliable witness.

He currently works as a street cleaner on an ex-prisoner employment scheme in Rome.

Pasolini was 53 years old when he died, feted internationally for his movies and domestically for his writing, at the height of his powers. A postneorealist in the Italian cinematic tradition pioneered by directors such as Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe De Santis in the 1940s, in late 1975 Pasolini was riding high on his latest release, Salò, O le 120 Giornate Di Sodoma (Salò, Or the 120 Days Of Sodom), with another film in development.

Whatever the objective details of his last few hours, Pasolini’s death was violent and premature. Speaking on the phone from Rome, where he has relocated after spending most of his life in the US, Abel Ferrara says: “The CIA blah blah blah, organised crime blah blah blah. Any of those things could have happened. The period was violent.

Hey, they snatched the president of the country and kept him in an apartment in the middle of Rome for a month, then took him out and smoked the guy in the middle of the street. If that can happen to the president it can happen to anybody.

“But none of the people around Pasolini were surprised at what happened. I know, I talked to them.

Around 10pm, every night, he’d stop whatever he was doing, go out and do his thing. He was a tough guy.

He might have been gay but he was tough. He was an alpha film director.

He’s not going to think there’s going to be a situation that he can’t handle.

But those kids he mixed with were some nasty fucking dudes, man, and I think the situation just blew up on him.

“We researched it a lot. We must have spoken to around 80 of his friends and family. We interviewed Pelosi.

But you can’t film research. Like with Welcome To New York [Ferrara’s 2014 film about the Dominique StraussKahn affair]. We researched the hell out of it and then threw most of it out. We’re not police officers and we’re not making a documentary – I’m trying to find an ending for the film. In the end, who knows if Pelosi was even there? He was a street thug and he keeps changing his story. I’m not going to know for sure what happened with Strauss-Kahn in that hotel room a few years ago, let alone what happened to Pasolini on that beach 40 years ago.”

“In Italy, Pasolini’s assassination was a little bit like JFK’s assassination,” says Willem Dafoe, also speaking from Rome. “There’s still a lot of questions, there’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of conspiracy theories. Those things are important but they’re not what we wanted the film to be about. What we wanted was to inhabit the last 24 hours of Pier Paolo’s life. We didn’t want to recreate events, rather to come up against them. >

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Abel Ferrara, director of forthcoming biopic Pasolini, at his home in Rome Photograph Paolo Santambrogio

Willem Dafoe as the lead in Ferrara’s Pasolini Š Capricci-Urania Pictures-Tarantula

140

CINEMA | Pier Paolo Pasolini “But there were certain things in the historical record that rang true.

It was obvious, even with a botched and convoluted judicial inquiry, that Pelosi didn’t act alone. Clearly these guys come along and whether they’re friends of Pelosi’s, or whether they’re just people who happened to be walking in the neighbourhood and see two men together – whether it’s a hate killing, whether it’s a robbery, all those things are a little generalised in the action.

We didn’t want to dictate to the audience, we wanted to catch a certain kind of atmosphere. It’s dark, it’s a little unclear, it happens very fast, it’s brutal.

Theories aside, the tragedy is that Pasolini is dead, he died violently and he died before his time.”

Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna, and was brought up in Friuli, in the far north east of Italy. His early years were marred by the never-ending rows between his mother, a school teacher, and his alcoholic father, a lieutenant in the army – who in 1926 had become famous for saving Benito Mussolini from an assassin’s bomb – as well as by the death of Pasolini’s brother, who was killed in internecine fighting between partisans resisting the rump of Nazi occupation in 1945.

In 1947, Pasolini joined the Communist Party, but was expelled in 1949 for alleged homosexual “offences”.

He identified as a communist throughout his life, despite his many disagreements with the party. In the early 1970s, he aligned himself with Italy’s left-libertarian ‘autonomous’ movement, notably the Lotta Continua party, with which he also had disputes, over abortion rights and gay liberation.

Always his own man, never afraid to express unfashionable opinions, Pasolini was a free spirit in the doctrinaire world of Italian leftwing politics.

In 1950, Pasolini moved to Rome with his mother, with whom he continued to share a home throughout his life. He had published his first volume of poetry in 1942 and made his reputation initially as a writer, sparking the first of many national controversies with the 1955 novel Ragazzi Di Vita and another with its follow up, 1959’s Una Vita Violenta. Both books were sympathetic fictionalisations of Rome’s criminal demi-monde and were written in working-class dialect. Two more volumes of poetry, 1957’s Le Ceneri Di Gramsci and 1961’s La

Pasolini’s The Decameron, 1971

Religione Del Mio Tempo, cemented his literary reputation.

In 1956, Federico Fellini, impressed

by Pasolini’s talent for writing in the Roman vernacular, hired him to contribute to the script for Le Notti Di Cabiria. More screenwriting commissions followed, and in 1961

‘THE CINEMA IS AN EXPLOSION OF MY LOVE FOR REALITY’ Pasolini made his directorial debut with Accattone, a critical and financial success set in the milieu depicted in Ragazzi Di Vita and Una Vita Violenta.

In an interview he gave in Sweden shortly before his death, Pasolini was asked if he had received any apprenticeship in filmmaking other than the experience of screenwriting.

“I had no training,” said Pasolini.

“I trained by watching films, starting with two great and precise passions, Charlie Chaplin and Kenji Mizoguchi.

They are the two poles within which everything happens in my films… a mix of the comic and the sublime, [though] we have to be careful not to attribute too ordinary a meaning to the term ‘comic’… When I shot Accattone, it was the first time I laid my hands on a movie camera. I hadn’t even ever taken a photograph. To this day, I cannot take good pictures.”

Asked in the same interview what triggered him to start directing movies rather than continuing to channel his creative energy into writing, Pasolini said: “Let’s take into consideration the extreme case of an avant-garde film, an ‘illegible’ one as [French critic] Philippe Sollers would say, and a literary text of the same kind. Between the two of them the film is definitely more legible. There is a higher grade of simplicity and readability, which is inherent to the cinematographic technique itself… When I make a film, there’s no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality. > 141

Pasolini’s Salò, Or the 120 days Of Sodom, 1975

Pasolini’s Arabian Nights, 1974

“It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae.

In truth, my only hero is reality…

If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression – to express reality through reality.”

In the opening scene of Ferrara’s film, Dafoe’s Pasolini quotes one of Pasolini’s aphorisms: “To scandalise is a right, to be scandalised a pleasure.”

His filmmaking began with prosecutions for blasphemy – for Accattone and 1962’s Mamma Roma, and for his contribution to the 1963 portmanteau movie RoGoPaG, for which he was given a suspended jail sentence – and ended with Salò, about which more in a moment, with international outrage and scandal.

Most of his 12 feature films provoked ideological conflict with either the political right or left, or the religious establishment; sometimes with all three groups simultaneously.

Occasionally, Pasolini’s work was free of controversy. 1964’s Il Vangelo 142

Secondo Matteo was a straightforward retelling of the Gospel of St Matthew and was well received by the church, despite the deliberate omission of the word “saint” from its title on original release. “If you know me for an unbeliever,” Pasolini said, “then you know me better than I know myself.

I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for belief… I am not interested in deconsecrating. This is a fashion I hate. It is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible.

I want to re-mythicise them.” Pasolini was more anti-clerical than he was antireligion. “The Church,” he wrote later, “is the merciless heart of the State.”

After four more, critically acclaimed late-1960s releases – Edipo Re, Teorema, Porcile and Medea – Pasolini’s mainstream breakthrough came with a trio of sex-laced films based on classical literature: 1971’s Il Decameron, 1972’s I Racconti Di Canterbury (based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) and 1974’s Il Fiore Delle Mille e Una Notte (Arabian Nights). The series, known as the ‘Trilogy of Life’, took Pasolini beyond art-house audiences towards

more popular, international acclaim, and spawned a sub-genre of historically costumed erotic romps.

If Il Decameron, I Racconti Di Canterbury and Il Fiore Delle Mille e Una Notte were enjoyed partly for their explorations of bawdy, lifeenhancing sexuality, Salò portrays the dark side of the human psyche.

Based on the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 Journées De Sodome Ou l’Ecole Du Libertinage, the film is a graphic and deeply disturbing tale of murder, torture, rape and other sexual humiliations, committed over a period of months on 18 abducted teenagers by a quartet of wealthy fascist libertines in a castle hideout shortly after the fall of Mussolini. After premiering at the Paris Film Festival, Salò was banned in Italy for a year and its producer, Alberto Grimaldi, was prosecuted for “corruption of minors”. It remains banned in several countries and was only granted uncut release in the UK in 2000. Viewing the film still requires a strong stomach.

The portrayal of sex, in all its guises, was a thread running through Pasolini’s work, as was his championing of Italy’s

CINEMA | Pier Paolo Pasolini

Salò, Or the 120 days Of Sodom

urban and, especially, rural poor. But the topic that most frequently engaged him was the rise of consumerism – for which he said the sexual violence in Salò was a metaphor – and its role in imposing a bland, one size fits all, cultural hegemony on Italy. Pasolini borrowed a phrase from Marx to describe consumerism as “a genocide of living cultures”, and singled out television as its biggest and most malign weapon.

In a 1975 interview with the Milanbased daily newspaper Corriere Della Sera, to which he contributed regular columns, Pasolini wrote: “The power of consumer goods has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature… I consider consumerism a worse fascism than that of the classical one, because clerical-fascism did not transform Italians. It did not get into them. It was totalitarian but not totalising. I’ll give you an example. Fascism has tried for 20 years to eliminate [regional] dialects and it didn’t succeed. Consumerism, which, on the contrary, pretends to be safeguarding dialects, is destroying them.

“Salò shows the sinister connection between consumerism and Nazism.

Consumerism manipulates and violates bodies neither more nor less than Nazism. Being based on De Sade, this film revolves around the representation of sex. But [unlike in Il Decameron, I Racconti Di Canterbury and Il Fiore] in this new film, sex is nothing but an allegory of the commodification

‘TO SCANDALISE IS A RIGHT, TO BE SCANDALISED A PLEASURE’ of bodies at the hands of power. I think that consumerism manipulates and violates bodies as much as Nazism did… The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer’s life.”

In his attacks on consumerism and the cultural hegemony that accompanies it, Pasolini was well ahead of the curve.

It is one of the reasons why his work resonates so loudly 40 years after his death. And while it is perilous to attribute opinions to people who are no longer with us, it is hard to imagine that Pasolini would have been anything but horrified by the globalising effect of digital media, a far more powerful force than terrestrial television ever was in Pasolini’s lifetime.

With Pasolini, however, such assumptions are fragile. “He was such an original thinker that I don’t think we can say how he would deal with [digital technology],” says Dafoe.

“He was always surprising us. With his imagination, maybe he’d be running an IT company. If he was living in this world where all that stuff has come to pass, maybe he would have a fresh new take that would turn it into a good thing. Who knows? Pasolini keeps us guessing.”

Pasolini opens at London’s ICA and in selected cinemas from 11 September ica.org.uk The blu-ray box set Pasolini: Six Films, 1968-1975 is out on 19 October bfi.org.uk 143

CULTURE

Disco Better Days. GG Barnum.

Words Andy Thomas Portrait Janette Beckman Photographs © Bill Bernstein/Reel Art Press

“These shots capture the very essence of what going out was, is, and should be all about. They showed the true democracy of the dance floor where anyone could be a star, as long as they had the right attitude and flair,” writes James Hillard, of London DJ collective Horse Meat Disco, in the foreword to Disco: the Bill Bernstein Photographs.

In 1979, The Village Voice sent Bill Bernstein to cover an awards dinner for Lillian Carter, mother of US president Jimmy Carter. The venue was Studio 54, and as the presentation finished the real party started. Bernstein was mesmerised as the famously decadent and flamboyant crowd arrived. “Over the next five or six hours my world was metamorphosised [sic],” writes Bernstein in the introduction to Disco.

“Had I been suddenly transported back to a pre-war Berlin cabaret? Who were these people of the night and what was their other, real life like?”

The 12 rolls of film Bernstein shot that night began a journey into the many corners of New York nightlife.

But it wasn’t the excesses of the famous at Studio 54 that most interested him.

“It had never been my interest to shoot celebrities at these clubs and there are very few in this book,” he writes. “My attention was caught by the unknown guy in the corner, probably a waiter or messenger, in the black leather T-shirt and silver cap, posing for hours upon hours, talking to no one.” While he is best known for his photographs of the glitz and glamour at Studio 54, his most enlightening disco shots were taken at clubs such as Paradise Garage and Better Days. It was here in the 144

predominantly gay, black and Hispanic clubs that disco’s most radical advancements were made. “The disco was a place of great acceptance and diversity,” writes Bernstein. “Only years later, when we look back and study this era, do we see that many of the advances in social liberation got a great push in this period.”

“As I go through these images years later I find photographs I barely remember taking jumping out at me,” he writes. “Roseland, where people went to show off their serious new clothes and dance moves.

GG Barnum, which had the Latin transvestites and trapeze artists above the dance floor.”

It wasn’t just Manhattan that Bernstein took his camera to. His photographs of Brooklyn’s Empire Roller Rink and 2001 Odyssey (where Saturday Night Fever was filmed) are reminders of the different faces of disco in the outer boroughs. They are also some of the only pictures of the lesserknown spots that played an important part in the history of disco.

Over recent years, books such as Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day and Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around have documented this uniquely creative time in New York. But this is the first time we have really had a fitting visual tribute since Bernstein’s disco pictures were published in the 1980 book Night Dancin’. While there have been subsequent books from other photographers, such as Disco Years by Ron Galella, none have captured New York disco in all its glorious diversity quite like Bernstein.

How did your interest in photography come about?

When I was a kid, watching my father develop film in the basement darkroom.

He was a really good amateur photographer. And I used to agitate the chemicals for him when he was processing his negatives. I was very interested in watching the images coming up on the enlarger.

So it was the whole magic of it?

Exactly. My dad had also been into it since he was a child because his mother bought him a darkroom back in the 1920s. So he turned me onto it and it was always something I would do on the side while I studied graphic design.

I did that for a couple of years thinking I was going to be a graphic designer.

But I knew I didn’t want an office job.

Did your background in graphic design help when you got serious about photography?

I always had some sort of an attraction to composition, lighting etc. And I think it’s all part of the same thing in many ways. So it was an easy switch from graphic design to photography.

How did you start working for The Village Voice?

I had started shooting some pictures on the side for them and then I got offered an internship for a few months.

I did that and then became a regular contributor. That was in the mid-1970s.

How did the Studio 54 assignment come about?

They sent me there to photograph >

Bill Bernstein, photographer and author of Disco

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“The Empire Roller Skating Rink in Crown Heights, Brooklyn opened in 1941 and finally closed its doors in 2007. It converted into a roller disco in the 70s and then the roller rink organ was replaced with a sound system and DJ booth. Empire was usually packed with an AfricanAmerican crowd but top skaters of all races and creeds also came. It was a great place to shoot with good vibes all around.”

Empire Roller Disco #1, 1979

Lillian Carter receiving an award for some humanitarian work she had done.

I think Studio 54 used to look for those kind of events before they opened up the club to make extra income.

Had you planned to stay behind after the event to shoot those first pictures?

No I didn’t plan that at all. I had intended to cover the event and then go home. I was curious about Studio 54 but I wasn’t thinking of shooting in there. But then when I saw the regulars starting to come in I decided I wanted to stay. So I quickly shot all my film and then went to a couple of other photographers and bought some [Kodak] Tri-X film. And I just stayed there and took all these shots, because honestly I didn’t know if I would get back in there again. I thought, this has got to be my night to get some shots.

How many good shots did you get on that first night?

A lot. Maybe it was just a good night but it was really rocking. It was all so new to me and I felt like I had found a diamond mine of imagery. I really wondered who all these people were.

What were your favourite shots from those first rolls of film?

There’s one shot in the book of a transgender woman sitting on a chair on the dance floor. There are people dancing all around her and she’s looking 146

at the camera posing. There’s also a shot I took at the top of the stairs going up to the balcony level. There were two African American guys and a woman.

One guy’s dressed like he is in the military and the other looks like a dandy, and the woman looks like a Hollywood starlet from the 1940s.

I saw them standing there in this threesome and I wondered what they were conspiring. It was just fascinating.

‘IT WAS ALL SO NEW TO ME AND I FELT LIKE I HAD FOUND A DIAMOND MINE’ Was it usually these stories you were imagining that drew you to the people you shot?

That was a big question I had during the whole shooting. Who are these people who would stay up until 7am?

A lot of them would come in at 2am, so I used to presume they were waiters or waitresses who could then sleep the

rest of the day. They would come out at night and take on this whole other persona. And this is what I became interested in. The book doesn’t actually have many celebrities in it because that was really what all the other photographers were doing. I thought there was this whole other story – these regular people and their lives. To me that was far more interesting.

What were the main challenges of shooting in the clubs?

Good question. I was shooting with Tri-X film and a Vivitar 273 flash. By today’s standards it was primitive. You didn’t have the option of bouncing the flash into the ceiling because there was no ceiling to aim at. So you had to use a direct flash, which is problematic a lot of the time. The flash will read the light and it will adjust to the amount of light.

For example, if there is some big subject in front of you that is very bright, the flash will shut down. Therefore the guy in the white shirt or woman in the white dress will come out fine, but everything else will be dark. So there were a lot of challenges. But I just tried to shoot a lot. And I also learned after a while and it got easier.

Another challenge I guess was getting people to trust you to take their picture when they were up to all sorts.

How were you received?

There was a general sort of acceptance

CULTURE | Disco of photographers walking around at most of those clubs. I actually found that people liked it and I wasn’t given a hard time at all. They were there to be seen as well as to have a good time.

So the photographer kind of became part of the scene. I definitely never felt like I was intruding.

After Studio 54 you started to shoot at lots of other clubs. That’s one of the most striking things about the book – the variety of places you went to.

The important thing for me was to cover the whole gamut. The point I like to make is that there were a huge variety of discos in New York City at that time. And it was important to me to show the whole breadth and extent of it. So I tried to cover them all.

“Marc Benecke called the shots outside Studio 54, along with Steve Rubell.

This was the scene most nights as people waited for hours to be chosen to enter the grand party.

Sometimes pulling up in a Bentley or Cadillac helped, but not always. Nobody was interested in getting into Shufflebottoms next door.”

One of those clubs that hasn’t been documented so much is Better Days, where Tee Scott used to spin. What was it like?

It was young, black, mostly gay and inexpensive. But it was a great club and had an amazing sound system and DJs. Was it more difficult to shoot there being a white photographer?

No, not at all, they were really welcoming. I also went to Empire Roller Disco. It is basically walking distance from where I live in Brooklyn and is now a really nice area. But back then it was really rough. It was pretty much all black and I walked in there with my white shiny face and people were very happy to see me. That was a great place with a really nice vibe.

Was there a particular DJ you really got into?

It was the whole thing that interested me, but I do know that Larry Levan was very highly regarded at that time.

So I went back to the Paradise Garage a bunch of times. Sometimes I would just watch the crowd and listen to Larry play, just to take it all in. But generally I was watching more than listening.

Did you plan or was it instinctive?

Oh totally instinctive. I was always drawn by the imagery – and what it was I couldn’t really put my finger on until much later on. I would just show up at these places and keep my eyes open for things that I found interesting or unusual. At a very instinctive level, I would just shoot what attracted my eye.

Studio 54 and Cadillac, 1979

Did you start going to these places as a clubber?

No, it was always as a photographer.

This was my subject and my thesis and I felt like it was my job to capture the whole variety and the freedom of personal expression.

It was interesting that you shot at GG Barnum. Was that the most extreme place you went to?

GG Barnum was perhaps the most extreme just because of the number of transgender people and transvestites.

This was a new world for me. And I ended up getting to know a few of these transgender women and I found them to be very open. It was absolutely life changing for me. These were such places of self-expression and nobody was judging at all.

So how do you feel now the legacy of disco is finally being recognised?

And how proud are you to be part of that?

I feel great about it. These negatives were sitting in a box in my studio for years and years and my wife used

to say I should do something with them. And I’d say, “Why?” because in America, to a large extent, disco is still looked on as a joke – an era where everyone was on cocaine with celebrities getting trashed. But when I started to put these images together, and then doing further research, it reminded me that it was much more than that. The glitzy stuff was just the surface of it. If you dug beyond that there was an amazing sociological and cultural thing going on that nobody really looked at back then.

How did the new book come about after all these years?

Back in the late 1970s I started to work with a writer and we looked for a publisher. And we did eventually find one for the book. It was called Night Dancin’ but it didn’t work out the way we had hoped. However, it did lead us to a guy in London named David Hill who knew the book. He called me up in New York and asked if I wanted to publish a coffee table book. So I’m very happy about this coming out now. > 147

“2001 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn was famous for being the location for the movie Saturday Night Fever, and featured the classic illuminated disco dance floor. It was pretty much a local and bridge and tunnel crowd and advertised the movie connection with a couple of posters in the lobby. The owner of the place complained to me that after several years he was still waiting to get paid his location fee.”

2001 Dancefloor, 1979

How did you decide which pictures to use from your vast archive?

There were a handful of pictures from that original book, but we’ve picked out a lot more that have never been seen before. I was kind of shocked when I looked back because I don’t remember taking a lot of these pictures.

Not because I was drinking or taking drugs, just because there was so much material. I’m quite often surprised when I see some of the pictures.

Could you talk about some of your other work as a photographer?

I was always interested in popular culture and documenting the times, but actually I have spent most of my life as a portrait photographer. I would say my heart lies in documenting popular culture. That would include being Paul McCartney’s tour photographer. My original draw was to street photography – my heroes were Henri CartierBresson and William Klein. They are documenters of the moment, as I am with these photos.

When did you change to digital and do you miss anything about film?

I changed in 2002. I had been working with Paul McCartney since 1989. It was very difficult to shoot film on the road.

Stuff had to be processed and contact sheets had to be made, and of course 148

you were in a different city every night.

The logistics made it very difficult.

When I was asked to go on the road in 2002 I jumped on digital as it made my life so much easier. I actually ended up liking digital much more than film.

‘WHO WERE THESE PEOPLE OF THE NIGHT AND WHAT WAS THEIR OTHER, REAL LIFE LIKE?’ Is there one thing you want people to take away from this book?

Right now in America there is a sea change in terms of lesbian, gay and transgender. We have the Supreme Court ruling on equal marriage and the military accepting transgender people. So there is a complete change in outlook. This period that my book covers gives a glimpse of what we

are about to see in the United States today. And that is absolute freedom of expression and acceptance. These clubs showed that everyone can have fun together – it didn’t matter if you were gay or transgender or whatever, you were all part of the community.

It was possible to have a place with no judgement and you could be who you wanted to be. And then in the early 1980s, Aids was declared the gay cancer by the medical profession. People thought if they talked to a gay person they could catch it. At the same time you’d just had the Disco Demolition at Comiskey Park in Chicago, when they blew up all the disco records. And then Ronald Reagan was elected president – so really the door was slammed shut to what was going on that I was shooting. It’s taken another 35 years for things to start opening up. So I do look at this book as a sneak peek of freedom of expression that is now starting to happen in the world today.

Disco: the Bill Bernstein Photographs is out in October reelartpress.com ‘Disco: the Bill Bernstein Exhibition’ opens at Serena Morton Gallery, 343 Ladbroke Grove, London W10 on 3 December serenamorton.com

CULTURE | Disco

“Le Clique was a roaming disco that popped up in different locations throughout Manhattan. Its creators, Marlene Backer and Stewart Feinstein, conjured outrageous parties with acrobats, actors, dancers, special effects and staging.�

Le Clique #1, 1979

Sweater by Canali; trousers by Mohsin; shoes by Bass; hat by Lock&Co; socks, stylist’s own.

STYLE

Suit by Richard James; shirt by Agnès B; hat by Lock&Co; tie and pocket square, stylist’s own.

Joseph Dredge-Fenwick Photographs David Goldman Styling Richard Simpson

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STYLE | Joseph Dredge-Fenwick

Top by Wolsey; trousers by E Tautz; hat by Lock&Co; shoes and braces, stylist’s own.

Shirt by Gieves&Hawkes; trousers by Vivienne Westwood Man; hat by Lock&Co; belt by Paul Smith; necktie, stylist’s own.

STYLE | Joseph Dredge-Fenwick

Shirt, stylist’s own; trousers by Paul Smith.

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Coat by Paul Smith London; trousers by Casely-Hayford; shirt by Tiger of Sweden; shoes, stylist’s own; hat by Lock&Co; tie, stylist’s own.

155

Sweater, trousers and belt

by Caruso; hat by Lock&Co; scarf, stylist’s own.

STYLE | Joseph Dredge-Fenwick

Suit and shirt by Caruso; hat by Lock&Co.

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CINEMA

I Believe In Miracles Jonny Owen. Brian Clough. Garry Birtles. Jackson Sisters. José Mourinho. The Damned United.

Words Mark Webster Photographs Courtesy of the Nottingham Post nottinghampost.com

“Brian Clough was the nearest thing we ever got to Muhammad Ali,” Jonny Owen tells me. “He was political, a lifelong socialist, he was antiestablishment – he was up on a fucking charge at the FA almost every week – he was hugely charismatic and, like Ali, dominant in his sport, without peer. Nobody could get near him.”

Owen is talking to me about his latest film project, I Believe In Miracles.

We’re in the heart of Soho, in central London, which is still very much the place that keeps the British film industry pumping. His film started life in development for television, but re-emerged as a cinema release, scheduled to hit the big screens this autumn. It is a film that couldn’t be further away from, yet paradoxically closer to, his previous project, Svengali – the comic take on the music business he wrote, directed and starred in.

Further away, because I Believe In Miracles is a sport documentary film; closer to, because as in Svengali, the characters involved are very much ‘Jonny Owen people’ – or as he says, “The great cliché is write what you know... and it’s so true.” And, as with Svengali, it’s got a stellar soundtrack.

Since the release of Svengali, Owen has set up home in Nottingham with his partner Vicky McClure (who also played his love interest in the film), where the local girl became very proactive in her support of a new television station for the area, Notts TV. Owen had been working on developing a couple of scripts and admits, “After Svengali, I probably would have done another comedy, perhaps a drama, but when Craig Chettle [head of Notts TV and local production company 158

Antenna] talked to me about the milestone anniversary of Nottingham Forest winning the European Cup twice that was approaching, and asked would I be interested in doing something on that for the channel launch, I immediately went, ‘Woah, I’ll have a little go at that.’

“And when I started, I found that I had an even richer story than I’d expected. We knew the legend, but I found a much grander man in Brian Clough, and a more inspiring bunch of characters than even I could have imagined. They make you fall in love with them, that team. They’re bastards.

You sit with these men now in their sixties, and then see them in the film as elite athletes. There’s something really poignant about that. They’re one of the great iconic teams in domestic football history, and they didn’t disappoint.”

There is a statue of Brian Clough in Nottingham, and it stands not outside Forest’s stadium, but big and proud in the city centre. He was actually a Yorkshireman, whose playing career as a prolific goalscorer ended early aged 29 because of injury. He cut his teeth on club management in the mid-1960s at Hartlepool, before he and his assistant Peter Taylor were tempted to take up the cause of the then second division club Derby County. Within three years they were League Champions and went on to reach the European Cup semi-finals. After a fall out with the Derby chairman, both men took up a similar challenge at Brighton and Hove Albion, before ‘Ol’ Big Head’ (as he would even refer to himself ) was on the move again, as Leeds United now wanted some of that Clough magic. That somewhat protracted

chapter of his life is vividly recounted in the book and film, The Damned United.

Luckily for the reaffirming of the legend, it was Derby County’s deadly East Midlands rivals Nottingham Forest who next wanted to take a chance on this most mercurial of football managers. And as Owen goes on to point out, “When he arrived it was another mid-table second division team. But this was a perfect storm. The club was run by a committee, which he could dominate. And his old partner Taylor, who’d stayed at Brighton, almost took them up, but not quite. Otherwise he’d have stayed there. So he joined up again with Clough.”

What’s more, it seemed the whole city – at least the red half of it – was ready to take a chance on Clough.

It is also the home of the oldest professional football club in the world, Notts County, but Forest had long been the noisy neighbour right across from Notts’ home on the Trent. Forest hadn’t known any real success since the late 1950s. Around that time, a young local fan called Garry Birtles was going to his first games. “I went with my dad and stood in the Trent End,” says Birtles. “My earliest memory is seeing Manchester United’s championshipwinning team – Best, Charlton, Law. The lot. Forest beat them 4-1.”

In his teens, Birtles went on to begin a professional football career, but it hadn’t worked out. He went back to his hometown to play non-League football and work as a carpet fitter, but was given a second chance in the professional game when the winger was signed by Clough in 1976 for £2,000 to play for Forest. By the time he left for Manchester United in 1980, he had >

Nottingham Forest goalkeeper Peter Shilton kisses the European Cup after a 1-0 victory against Malmรถ FF, Sweden, at the Olympiastadion, Munich, 1979

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Nottingham Forest vs FC Köln in the second leg of the semi final at the Muengersdorfer Stadium, Cologne, 1979. Forest won 4-3 on aggregate

become a prolific centre forward with, among other things, two European Cup winners’ medals from 1979 and 1980 in his trophy cabinet.

Birtles recalls, “I was gobsmacked from one day to the next. You couldn’t wait to get to training because you didn’t know what was going to happen.

A run along the Trent and a bollocking.

Or a cup of coffee and ‘I don’t want to see you until Thursday’.

“And you have to remember, I thought my chance had gone. Then all of a sudden to be brought in at the age of 20... I was out with my pals one night in the city centre at Le Palais de Dance with its revolving dance floor, and there was a petition that had been going around Nottingham to bring Clough in as manager. It was pages and pages. It was trailing along that dance floor. And as a Forest fan, I signed it.

Two years later, I was playing for him.”

Birtles’ personal journey is just one of the fairytale elements that are so 160

crucial to any great sports story. And with Forest, there were more than you could wave a magic wand at. Yet there is also a more pragmatic take – but no less remarkable for it – that emerged as Owen was working on the film. “If José Mourinho – who is a big Clough fan, there’s a quote from him at the end of the film – was to repeat those achievements now, in the timeframe that Clough achieved them, the team he’d have to do it with now is Huddersfield Town. But here’s the nub. Here’s the catch. He’d have to do it with five of the players that are already there now, in the team.”

Owen’s concept was to tell the tale of Clough’s arrival at Forest and take it to their first European cup win in 1979. The original TV version, called The Boys of ’79, was the fanfare for the arrival of Notts TV on air around 18 months ago. He then sent a copy of it to the man with whom he had collaborated on the production of

Svengali, Henry Normal, who is one half of the celebrated TV company Baby Cow Productions.

“I had that relationship with Henry,” continues Owen, “and what’s more, he’s a Nottingham lad. So I sent it to him. And I remember I was at Barons Court tube station and he rang me and I’ll never forget what he said: ‘This could be genius, and I’m going to give you the money to make it genius.’

I couldn’t have asked for a better home for it. He said to me once, if The Damned United was the story of John the Baptist, this is the story of Jesus.”

So Owen was given licence to upgrade his story into one of even greater biblical proportions. It was probably fitting that as he settled back into an edit suite in Nottingham to turn a TV show into a big screen film, he had what he refers to as “an epiphany”.

“I was watching some 1970s footage, and you can say it’s a bit wanky, but I had an artistic spark. It was Forest

CINEMA | I Believe in Miracles

Nottingham Forest assistant manager Peter Taylor and manager Brian Clough salute fans after winning the European Cup, 1979 Forest fans at the European Cup final, 1979

playing Liverpool in the FA Cup and it was full of bright colours and shimmering kits, and I put the Jackson Sisters’ tune ‘I Believe In Miracles’ to it, and I said to my editor, ‘Fuck, that works!’

“We’d found something in that moment. And we kept it. And I’ve said since, I don’t know why it is [Forest’s Scottish winger] John Robertson’s arse moves so well to funk and soul, but it does. But there’s a joy in that music, and there’s something in that team. It’s always said that music is truth. There’s a purity to it. This music is contemporary to these years, and it sits well with them. It’s aesthetically beautiful.”

The use of music in that way is also what helps turn the documentary, something that has fundamentally been built for the small screen, into an increasingly popular feature-length genre. The line is now somewhat blurred by the fact that documentary films can debut across many formats, but one thing is clear – sports topics are proving a particularly rich vein to tap into. A game changer in this respect was the Muhammad Ali film that Owen cites, When We Were Kings, which won an Oscar in 1996 – a category where previously feature-length sport documentaries had made little or no impact. More recently, in 2010, Senna was at once a Bafta and Sundance Film Festival sensation. Around the same time, the US sport channel ESPN commemorated its 30th anniversary with a high-class series of films under

the banner “30 for 30”. In the UK, our newest sport channel has established BT Sport Films to produce its own feature-length documentaries.

For Owen, a man whose career has seen him take in many areas of the entertainment business, it was a relatively seamless move to switch from TV to film with the project. “The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree and it didn’t for me with this film,” he says.

‘THEY MAKE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH THEM, THAT TEAM. THEY’RE BASTARDS’ “It will have great music; it will have strong references to popular culture.

And it will feature real people. Basically it will have the same DNA as Svengali.”

In the end, it is the time he has spent with these “real people” – the 15 men that went on to win the European Cup – that he has perhaps found the most rewarding.

“I stayed away from voice over,” says Owen. “I wanted it to be the players’ voices. Brian Clough’s son Nigel told

me the people who knew his father best were the people who were around him every day. And they were at the football club. So through them I was able to create something genuinely filmic out of their interviews that didn’t need the familiar TV techniques. I was able to weave a story out of the men that lived it. And these were men from an era when their wages dictated that they had to live among us. They weren’t segregated by their housing, their training, their socialising. These men went to the local pub where the fans went, because they lived there.

“So although they’ve dined out on their old war stories for years, they haven’t been asked to sit down and really reflect on it, in some cases for ages, or in others, not at all. It’s an incredibly unique insight into the times, and into Clough, and what he was to these men.

“And when I’m with them, and they’re together again, there’s an energy, an electricity. They own, between them, an experience that would be difficult to better or duplicate.

It is extraordinary to watch. And even if one is currently the Republic of Ireland manager [Martin O’Neill] and another a painter and decorator [Colin Barrett], in this film, those men are equals again.”

I Believe In Miracles, a documentary about Nottingham Forest FC’s European Cup success, is out in selected UK cinemas in October

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BULLETIN

K100 Karrimor Photograph Lee Vincent Grubb Styling Karen Mason Words Edward Moore Ramblers Chad Budhdeo and Scott Cook

K100 Karrimor is a new outerwear brand that draws on the heritage of the classic British outdoor clothing and equipment company Karrimor.

“We started K100 Karrimor in response to the feeling that in the UK we were losing the brands we once coveted for weekend and camping trips,” explains creative consultant Stephen Atkinson.

Inspired by the 1990s post-rave trend – when outdoor brands such as Karrimor, Berghaus and Patagonia were adopted, as much for comfort and practicality as style – Atkinson and his team wanted to create something that infused the technical knowhow of the original brand with the look and feel of a fashion item.

“The name [K100] is taken from a fabric created by Karrimor called KS100e, which was the first flexible and waterproof nylon used for outerwear and rucksacks,” says Atkinson.

Karrimor has its origins in the industrial town of Waterfoot in Lancashire. During the second world war, Charles Parsons, who owned the local bicycle shop, got round the issue of not been able to get hold of saddle bags by making his own for his customers. And this successful enterprise led to the birth of Karrimor Weathertite Products shortly after the end of the war. When Parsons’ son Mike, who enjoyed outdoor pursuits, joined the company in the 1960s,

Karrimor expanded its output to include rucksacks and other outdoor equipment. The company grew to become one of the largest outdoor brands in the world.

K100 Karrimor’s debut collection is described by Atkinson as “a range that will look great in the city but will also function back out in the wilds, where the brand began”. There is also a 12-piece, premium capsule collection created by Newcastle-based designer Nigel Cabourn. k100karrimor.com

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PROFILE

Timothy Everest

Tommy Nutter. Malcolm Levene. New Romantics. Superman. Screaming Lord Sutch.

Words Chris May Photographs Marcus Agerman Ross Styling Richard Simpson Location Timothy Everest Atelier, 32 Elder Street, London E1

Stepping into Timothy Everest’s atelier in Elder Street, in east London’s Spitalfields, is like going back in time.

Not to a distant galaxy long, long ago, but far enough back to be momentarily dislocating. The house was built in 1724 and Everest has lovingly and luminously restored it. Though not to its original state. You can’t restore an early Georgian house to its original state if you incorporate electric lights, state-of-the-art indoor plumbing and radiators, even the reclaimed mid-20thcentury ones that replaced the dodgy gas-fired models when Everest moved his business into the house in 1996.

Instead, from top to bottom – there are three floors and a basement, altogether accommodating around 10 cutters and sewers – the paint job, furniture and fittings fuse elements of Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian and other British styles up to around the 1950s. The overall effect is a continuum of British tradition rather than Georgian authenticity. Factor in a few computers and an espresso machine and you have something that is essentially timeless.

The house is a perfect metaphor for Everest’s tailoring, which takes the best 164

of the Savile Row tradition and gives it a modern twist. “I see us as quintessentially British, in that we’re attuned to tradition,” says Everest.

“But at the same time there’s a willingness to play with that tradition.”

Everest learned his craft, and evolved his style, in the 1980s, combining card-carrying membership of the new romantics with working for two of the legends of modern British menswear – tailor Tommy Nutter and retailer Malcolm Levene. Everest set up on his own in 1989. In the mid-1990s, he was a leader of the new bespoke movement, which became a core element of cool Britannia and which went overground when Vanity Fair published its “Cool Britannia” edition in 1997. He is also at the forefront of bespoke casual and active wear tailoring. “We are tailors who design,” says Everest. “Not designers who discovered tailoring.”

It’s an aesthetic that has made Everest’s work a success in Britain and abroad. In 2010, he was awarded an MBE for services to the British fashion industry, in particular for his achievements in the export market. As

a salesman for Britain, he has a winning eye for detail and has learnt which buttons to press. “I had to go and see a client in Qatar a year or so ago,” he says. “It was 90 degrees. Sweltering.

But I turned up in a three-piece tweed suit with a matching set of blue GlobeTrotter luggage. I was dropped off outside the palace and the client was watching through the window.

He knew immediately, that must be Tim the tailor from London.”

In addition to the bespoke tailoring with which he launched the brand, Everest now offers made-to-measure and ready-to-wear garments. Alongside the Elder Street atelier, he has a spacious design studio round the corner in Corbet Place, and a central London store off New Bond Street in Bruton Place. This autumn, he will open a new east London outlet in a three-level space in Redchurch Street, Shoreditch, focusing on ready-to-wear and madeto-measure.

A keen cyclist, in 2009 Everest designed the first modern-era tailored cycling suit in collaboration with cyclewear brand Rapha, and in 2011 launched a clothing collection with >

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saddle-makers Brooks England. He designed the England football team’s off-field uniforms for the 2008 European Championships and the 2010 World Cup. His bespoke clients include David Beckham, Jarvis Cocker, Jay Z, Mick Jagger, Pierce Brosnan and Jeremy Irons. He has created costumes for a string of movies including, recently, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Skyfall.

Another recent client is Henry Cavill, who plays Superman in the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice.

The day I visited, a door on the first floor was propped up against a wall.

Apparently Cavill, who seems to have been well cast, had unintentionally pulled the door off its hinges when opening it.

It’s all a long way from west Wales, where Everest was born in 1961. He says he remembers first being interested in clothes as a young teenager in Canterbury, where his parents had relocated. “There was a trouser-maker who came down to the market from London,” he says. “He’d take your measurements, and a week later he’d be back with your trousers. Northern soul style was the thing. Then punk came along. We didn’t know about gels and things so we’d use sugar and water to make our hair stick up.”

When Everest was 16, his parents moved back to Wales. “I had one A-level, in art, and two very bad CSEs and that was it,” he says. “I started working in a furniture shop. Then an uncle said, they’re looking for a boy at Hepworth’s [the high street tailoring-chain] in Milford Haven.

I started there in 1978. I thought it was boring, working with all these old men and selling suits. It was a cross between a Carry On film and Are You Being Served? My immediate boss was very, very shortsighted. My first week, he tried to give the receipt to the mannequin rather than the customer. But it paid better than selling furniture.

“Then I started going clubbing in Tenby. I met kids who’d come down on holiday with their parents, and got on with them and started going clubbing in their towns. Like the Rum Runner in Birmingham. We used to read The Face and, in late 1979 or early 1980, I learned about the Blitz club in Covent Garden. On a Saturday we’d rent a car, like a Ford Escort, that I thought was really cool, finish work 166

William Baxter, trouser-maker, wears jacket, scarf and socks

by Timothy Everest Readyto-Wear; jeans by Timothy Everest Bespoke; shoes

by Dr Martens.

around five or six, and drive down here.

We’d go to my sister’s and get dressed up and go out about midnight. I wore the slap and all that. A bit later there was Club for Heroes in Baker Street and then the Camden Palace nights.

We’d be up all night and end up having a late pub lunch somewhere and start back late Sunday. Back to Hepworth’s on Monday morning.

“I was quite shy, so getting dressed up was helpful. You couldn’t buy those sorts of clothes – not in Wales, you had to go to places like the Great Gear Market on the Kings Road – so you had to improvise and customise things yourself. We’d buy secondhand clothing and create our own look. For me, the lasting influence of the new romantics is the idea of wanting to dress for yourself. Being individual. You’d make your own style. Every night you’d

go out looking different. Different hairstyle, different clothes. You’d very rarely go out looking the same twice.

What’s changed is that you can dress how you want now and no one will look at you and say you’re crazy. The only way to be modern is to be yourself.”

By 1982, Everest wanted to be working in London. An opportunity presented itself when he answered a situations vacant ad in the Evening Standard. The ad was placed by Tommy Nutter, who, having been forced out of his own firm at 35a Savile Row six years earlier, was about to set up shop again at number 19. Everest thought tailoring was pretty uncool – “I wanted to work in fashion, not tailoring” – but he applied for the position, thinking it would be a route into a “proper job”. He hadn’t even heard of Nutter.

PROFILE | Timothy Everest

Fred Nieddu, cutter, wears shirt by Timothy Everest Bespoke.

Also born in Wales, Nutter grew up in north London’s Edgware, where his father owned a working men’s café.

In 1961, aged 18, he began work at Donaldson, Williamson & Ward, traditional Savile Row tailors with premises in Burlington Arcade. In 1968, he set up his own business, Nutter’s of Savile Row, backed by entertainer Cilla Black and Peter Brown, of the Beatles’ Apple Corps.

Combining traditional Savile Row production values with a new-dandy sensibility, Nutter fast became the tailor of choice for Britain’s rock aristocracy and other luminaries of swinging London. Clients included the Beatles (Nutter dressed John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr for the cover of Abbey Road), Mick Jagger, Elton John, Bianca Jagger and Twiggy.

He partied like it was going out of style and his clothes and clientele shook up Savile Row. According to a typical story, one morning in 1969, Lennon and Yoko Ono stood naked in the shop’s front window waiting for Nutter to arrive, as the cutters and sales staff over the road at Huntsman stared, in shock, over their modesty curtain.

In 1972, American Menswear had described Nutter’s style as “tradition spiced with daring” – a description

that could be applied to Everest today.

“One Sunday in 1982 when I was down in London,” says Everest, “I picked up a copy of Friday’s Evening Standard and there was this ad from a tailor called Tommy Nutter headlined “Boy Wanted”. I realised later how he must have pissed himself laughing about that. Anyway, I rang up and got an interview with his PA, Catherine,

‘IT WAS QATAR, 90 DEGREES, AND I TURNED UP IN A THREE-PIECE TWEED SUIT’ who’s now my wife. And I met Tommy.

He seemed quite old, though he was only in his late thirties. I thought he was cool. He said, ‘Do you know about me?’ I didn’t, but I said, ‘Yes, of course, I know lots about you.’ He said, ‘No you don’t, Catherine get my portfolio.’ And he showed me the Abbey Road sleeve

and photos of Elton John. He said, ‘I got booted out of my old firm and so I’m starting again and I’m looking for a new team of people.’ He was non-committal about the job though.

“So I went back to Wales and Hepworth’s. But I pestered Tommy.

I’d go to the telephone box every day, put in my tuppence or whatever it was and ask to speak to Mr Nutter. ‘No, he’s too busy.’ ‘No, he’s in Brighton.’

‘He couldn’t possibly talk to you.’ But eventually we did talk and he gave me a three-month trial. I started downstairs with the cutters, then went upstairs with the sales guys.”

Everest fell effortlessly into the louche milieu at Nutter’s. “It was absolutely nuts,” he says. “John Galliano was on placement from Central Saint Martins and I started hanging out with those guys. We used to go for girls’ nights out and I’d be the only straight one. I went out one night with John and Tommy and I wore a red shift dress. Sometimes we’d make ourselves up so Tommy wouldn’t recognise us. Go home after work and change and walk into a bar and start chatting to him. For a moment he wouldn’t recognise you, because you’d gone so mad with your hair. Tommy used to say, ‘It’s a shame > 167

PROFILE | Timothy Everest

Lloyd Forrester, head cutter, wears waistcoat, trousers and shirt by Timothy Everest Ready-to-Wear; shoes by Bass.

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you’re not gay Tim, your career would go so much faster.’

“It was awful the way he’d got booted out of his own business. He told me the worst time was when there was an Andy Warhol exhibition at the Tate and they wouldn’t let him in. He said, ‘But I really do know Andy Warhol.’

Still security wouldn’t let him in. He said to me, ‘I just walked and walked and ended up by the Albert Bridge and I thought, that’s it, I’m going to kill myself.’ So he threw himself off the Albert Bridge and broke his arm. ‘That’s how bad it was,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t even kill myself, I couldn’t even get that right, doll.’ Working for Tommy was brilliant. I worked to party, but he opened my eyes to tailoring and I learnt so much.”

But after four and a half riotous years with Nutter, Everest began to feel the need for a change. “By now, thanks to Tommy, I deeply respected the best of the Savile Row tradition. But I was disenchanted with some of its business practices and all these people who weren’t investing in the business and were moaning about how good the Italians were and never saying how good we were. And I was fascinated, too, by the designer brands such as Giorgio Armani and Hugo Boss that were making an impact. I’d also become very grand. I needed a reality check.

At Tommy’s, we were running around with the great and the good. Joan Collins. Freddie Mercury. It was bonkers. I remember being offered a job at Ralph Lauren and I said, ‘Good god, no, I couldn’t work in the shop, I know Mr Lauren!’ Somebody offered me £500 to jump into Elton John’s swimming pool and I said, ‘But I’d ruin my moiré waistcoat.’ Eventually, I thought, Tim, you need to get a grip.

So I went off to Malcolm Levene.”

Levene owned a small but innovative menswear shop in central London’s Chiltern Street, Marylebone. He sold many of the designer brands that were recalibrating the way British men thought about clothing. Levene’s was just over a mile away from Savile Row, but was light years away in attitude.

It offered the change Everest was looking for.

“Malcolm convinced me to start there before I’d actually seen the shop,” says Everest. “When I arrived, I found it was tiny and a real mess. There were pennies in the corner they’d thrown

Gary Bott, brand director, wears all clothes by Timothy Everest Ready- to-Wear.

there because of some superstition about bad luck. And there was

‘WE ARE TAILORS WHO DESIGN, NOT DESIGNERS WHO DISCOVERED TAILORING’ Malcolm’s mum, Sadie, standing by the till, virtually holding the till in her

arms. I’d booked a holiday for shortly after I started. I was in Spain, and I said to my stepfather, ‘It’s terrible.’ And he said, ‘You’ve made your bed, you’d better lie in it. You either don’t go back or you try and make a difference.’

I went back and I was there two and a half years. I learnt so much. With Tommy I’d partied a lot – we’d struggle for a few hours in the morning, then go out for a good lunch, then out again in the evening. At Malcolm’s, I started to take work more seriously.

“It was the growth of the power suit.

We were working with Hugo Boss, we were the only people they would stock with their own label. And Malcolm would go to Italy and buy all these other brands. We created our own look.

We were kind of doing what Trunk [coincidentally also in Chiltern Street] > 169

are doing now. We did it by buying the best of the menswear collections. We’d drive everyone mad. They’d say, ‘Are you going to buy the whole collection?’

And we’d say, ‘No, we only want the shirts or whatever.’ They’d say, ‘You can’t do that, you have to buy the collection.’ But we’d give them a big order for the shirts and they’d go, ‘OK, you can have them.’ Malcolm was gay but he’d decided he was going to get married, he got back in the closet. So it was all very complicated and he was quite prickly but we got on very well.

I started bringing in some waistcoats from the tailors, and we began doing a little made-to-order. Quite quickly, I realised the customers wanted to buy from Malcolm Levene so I said we should develop the brand. We did phenomenally well.”

In Everest’s first year, Levene’s doubled its turnover. “Eventually I put together a whole collection for him,” says Everest, “but he didn’t want to sell it. He’d gone broke once, he was about 40, and he didn’t want to risk his money again. We had a massive row and I said, ‘What do you want to do about it then?’

And he said, ‘Well, it’s my name over the door.’ So I said, ‘Shall I go then?’

And he said, ‘Yes, you’d better go.’ So I went home to Catherine and told her what I’d done, and she said, ‘We’re overdrawn at the bank, you’re driving a Mercedes coupé and you’ve been going to all these expensive Michelinstarred restaurants, what are you going to do?’ I’d been living the 1980s dream, earning a lot of money but spending even more.

“So we opened a bottle of champagne and thought about it. And I rang up a few of the stylists I knew, who would come in for stuff, and I ended up working with this dreadful woman, Flossie. She was a nightmare, a serial shagger with everybody. But that got me into styling commercials for Ridley Scott Associates, which was fantastic. I did Citroën cars and a beer ad with Screaming Lord Sutch. And MTV was growing, so I was styling people like George Michael and Wet Wet Wet. “But it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I started thinking, Savile Row really isn’t that bad. It was still long-winded, boring, expensive, elitest, not very cool. But I began to think we could take the best of it and move it forward.”

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Everest opened his first atelier in Princelet Street, Spitalfields, in 1989, before moving to Elder Street in 1996.

If Chiltern Street had been light years from Savile Row, Spitalfields was in another cosmos. It was rough, dilapidated and edgy. Everest had discovered it at warehouse parties during the 1988 summer of love and was drawn to its still-thriving schmutter trade. It was also conveniently cheap.

“I wanted people to take British clothing seriously again,” says Everest.

“We’d lost that. But the first challenge was getting people to come here. That was hard. There was no reason to come here. It was a really rough area and nobody knew about it. The first time most people came to the shop, they thought they must have been given the wrong address in the wrong part of town. I remember when Tony Parsons arrived to interview me he looked quite

‘I WAS OFFERED £500 TO JUMP INTO ELTON JOHN’S POOL. I SAID, BUT I’D RUIN MY MOIRÉ WAISTCOAT’ indignant about being here, though the interview actually went really well.

“One day a friend said, ‘You need to do PR.’ I said, ‘I can’t afford to.’

He said, ‘You can’t afford not to, if you don’t no one’s going to find you.’ Then I ran into this girl, Alison Hargreaves, who was starting up her PR agency.

I showed her round the house. She didn’t say much and I thought, damn, she doesn’t get it. But when we’d finished the tour she said, ‘It’s really cool, I love it and I love what you’re doing.’ She said, ‘Can you recommend anyone else who’s tailoring but not on Savile Row?’ Between us, we came up with the idea of the new bespoke movement. It was me, Ozwald Boateng and Richard James. The media picked up on it big time. It was a really hot and

sexy moment. We presented tailoring in a different way. We were trying to go after that person who’d been schooled on designer brands, not Savile Row, and encourage them to think that tailoring was actually pretty cool.

“I was inspired by that more 1960s, slightly dandy look. It’s all being parodied now but in the early 1990s it was quite a fresh approach. The 1960s were an amazing time for all things British. Football, movies, clothes, rock’n’roll. The Bond movies were important references. Bond was quintessentially British, but a bit irreverent in how he did things. I like that thing about the British being able to be quite proper without being stuffy.

And he had the latest gadgets and he wore a cool suit. Then you go to the The Italian Job, and you’ve got Michael Caine, and Noel Coward in prison, and Camp Freddy, and Doug Hayward’s tailoring. I was probably closer to Doug’s tailoring than I was to Tommy’s in a sense. Because he was everyman’s tailor. And he did The Thomas Crown Affair, too, another big influence on me.”

Everest’s new space in Redchurch Street will be a sort of entry-level establishment for the brand. “The idea is to deconstruct tailoring and deconstruct Georgian,” says Everest.

“The houses that we’ve been in so far, we’ve made them our own but they’ve already had format. In Redchurch Street though, it’s a light industrial space on three levels. It would be silly to try to recreate a Georgian house there. We’re using a lot of Japanese fabrics and at the back we’ve got a Japanese screen thing going on. There’s a kind of Japanese-Georgian vibe.

“We’ll open up the brand there.

The key idea is to be premium at all prices. Even if a thing’s only £35, it’s got to be really good. We’ve got to punch above our weight because a lot of people come to this area at weekends just to graze, not necessarily to buy something. It’s a day out. Whether it’s from Tokyo or Tunbridge Wells. They come to look around and have a nice lunch. But if they stumble into our shop, they might be tempted to buy.”

Timothy Everest’s first ready-to-wear collection is out now. A new Timothy Everest store opens at 37 Redchurch Street, London E2 later this year timothyeverest.co.uk

PROFILE | Timothy Everest

Annika Caswell, coat-maker, wears suit by Timothy Everest Bespoke womenswear; shirt and tie by Timothy Everest Ready-to-Wear womenswear.

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CULTURE

Chess Boxing Photographs Simon Way Words Mark Webster

In his pursuit of “the great British public doing weird and wonderful things”, photographer Simon Way has recently submerged himself to capture images of bog-snorkelling in Wales, as well as covering “a chicken beauty contest”. It is all part of Way’s “ongoing, bigger project” that will ultimately result in a book; the latest element of which covers the relatively youthful sport of chess boxing.

Chess boxing is around 10 years old as a recognised sport. There are various opinions as to how the two disciplines became formally combined, but the idea came to prominence after French comic book artist Enki Bilal developed it in one of his storylines. The result is an international circuit with a variety of weight champions and many successful events that attract a passionate following.

In a bout, both the alternating boxing and chess rounds last three minutes

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and a contest can be won via either element. The competitors wear ear defenders during the chess element to block out the crowd and help focus their concentration.

“I spotted an advert for an event at the Scala, King’s Cross,” says Way, “and I approached the organisers about it. They were really helpful. They said I could go wherever I wanted, do whatever I wanted. The sense was, no one really comes and shoots it.”

Way’s first impression was of “an electric atmosphere and a full house”.

“It’s well staged, too,” he says. “There’s a camera that comes in to shoot the chess element. It works really well as a spectator sport.” He also got the sense that the competitors themselves “were really close, because they’ve all committed to the sport.

There’s a real camaraderie”.

To capture the action, Way used “a big studio light on a stick”, working

within the natural lighting environment of the venue. “That was the only nod towards staging a shot,” he says. “And no retouching.” He feels that London’s Scala venue lent itself perfectly to the project, being “just a bit rough around the edges. There’s a tatty old red paint that shoots beautifully”.

On one level it was simply “a good night out”. “I’d go back with my friends,” says Way. But it is also a genuine sport. “There are a lot of tactics,” he says. “Lots of forward thinking – and of course, that applies to both the chess and the boxing.

There are big guys who box and who have taken up chess. And skinny fellas who are getting into the boxing. It’s the real deal.”

The next London Chess Boxing event is at York Hall, Bethnal Green, London E2 on 28 November londonchessboxing.com

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CULTURE | Chess Boxing

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CULTURE | Chess Boxing

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BULLETIN

CP Company Words Chris May Photographs Owen Harvey

Massimo Osti’s Goggle jacket has been a centrepiece of the late designer’s CP Company collections since 1988, when he introduced it for drivers in Italy’s classic and vintage car endurance race Mille Miglia – a 1,000mile round trip from Brescia in the north, down to Rome and back again.

Osti’s core belief that form follows function permeated the garment.

In addition to its wind and waterproof qualities, he built a pair of goggles into the hood, and another lens into the sleeve to let the driver see his watch while keeping both hands on the wheel.

A customised system of pockets allowed the wearer to carry, and easily access, practical necessities such as a flask of coffee, food and maps. Like all of Osti’s garments, the Goggle jacket was beautiful, but the beauty grew out of the rigorous foregrounding of function.

This winter, to celebrate CP Company’s 40th anniversary, the brand is releasing a new edition of the Goggle jacket, which will be available in its Marshall Street store in London’s Soho towards the end of September.

CP has its origins in Chester Perry, a logo Osti first used in 1970. In 1978, following threats of legal action from British brands Chester Barrie and Fred Perry, Osti changed the name to CP Company. It predated Osti’s other leading brands Boneville (launched in 1981) and Stone Island (launched in 1982). Osti, who died in 2005, designed his last CP collection in 1994. Since 2010, CP Company has been owned by stylist and entrepreneur Enzo Fusco’s company, FGF Industry.

From the start, Osti used CP Company as a laboratory for the experiments in garment construction and fabrics that drove his work.

An early breakthrough was complete garment dyeing, which created a uniquely harmonious, tone-on-tone effect impossible to replicate through the pre-dyeing of component parts before assembly. In the 1980s, experiments with brushed wool 178

and rubberised flax made for dramatic improvements in functionality and finish. Osti also had an obsessive eye for details such as buttons, linings and zips, with many of his innovations derived from military garments.

A committed anti-militarist, he nonetheless appreciated the technical achievements of military clothing.

In the monumental 2012 monograph Ideas From Massimo Osti – a 412-page study of Osti’s research notes, drawings and garments – Carlo Grazia, Osti’s longtime right-hand man, recalled the impact the launch of CP had on menswear in Italy, Germany and then elsewhere in Europe.

“CP changed the way of dressing,” said Grazia. “It gave men that loose self-confidence they’d never had before.

We noticed there was a big difference between those who wore CP and the others, who all seemed a little ‘packaged’. Obviously at the time there were still environments in which more formal attire was obligatory, such as offices and banks. But beginning with students all the way up to 60-year-old professors, there were no limits to the age of CP’s customers. The only group we were never able to penetrate was that of the very young, who preferred Stone Island because it had an immediate effect on their imagination.

They bought it out of instinct… the CP product was more sophisticated; it attracted a more reflective and also more culturally developed customer.”

In 1987, Osti launched CP’s first collection of formal clothing, designed for wear in those places where suits remained the required attire. The line changed the look and feel of the classic men’s suit largely through Osti’s discovery of a new brushing technique for wool.

The cloth was ‘worked over’, brushed in such a way as to make it look slightly used, and its soft, velvety feel made it a pleasure to wear. Like everything Osti designed, his suits were unlike anything else on the market.

Inevitably, the features distinguishing CP Company from other Osti brands have, from time to time, been blurred.

But the designers who have succeeded Osti have mostly managed to keep them distinct. Paul Harvey, a Brit who has lived and worked in Italy since 1979, has been CP’s co-designer with Alessandro Pungetti since 2012, despite, or perhaps because of, working as Stone Island’s designer from 1995 to 2007.

“Stone Island was an amazing company, but 12 years in one place was really heavy,” says Harvey of his move to CP Company. “I left because I was totally burnt out. I was too close to the product, I couldn’t see it any more. For a while, I thought I’d do something else, but all my experience is in the fashion business. So in 2009 I started up Ten C with Alessandro.

And that led on almost directly to CP Company. We did a licensing deal for Ten C with Enzo Fusco, and it was agreed that Alessandro and I would design for CP Company.

Alessandro had done CP for nine ears and I was free.”

One of Harvey and Pungetti’s key concerns is to retain CP’s heritage without ossifying the brand in the process. “You have to be very careful,” says Harvey. “Generally, we try not to take pieces from the archive and redo them. We actually stay a bit away from the archive most of the time. It’s too easy to just redo things, but it’s not actual. It has to be what’s happening now. Otherwise you turn the brand into a museum piece. So you have a box to move in and you add the new things.

You have to stay in that box, that’s the playing field. But it’s essential not to become fossilised, retro. I’m totally against that. Clothing has to be modern. It has to be actual.”

CP Company, 34 Marshall St, London W1 020 7494 1983 cpcompany.co.uk

Leslie Winston Blake, 34, civil engineer from Glasgow, wears Harrington jacket from 2011 @leslieblake Describe your style.

Modern Ivy. What’s so special about CP Company?

They are genuinely forward thinking; their attention to technical details combined with an overall aesthetic makes the brand unique. The fabrics protect against the natural elements and the garments are engineered to respond ergonomically and adapt to changes within the environment.

No one else has even come close to achieving this.

Describe CP Company in three words.

Innovative. Timeless. Functional.

Who are your style icons?

Style Council-era Paul Weller and pre-Bitches Brew Miles Davis.

Who’s your favourite band?

The Blue Nile. And Goldie.

What’s your favourite movie?

Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind.

BULLETIN | CP Company

Richard Simpson, stylist and art director from Glasgow, wears Goggle jacket from 2014 richard-simpson.com Describe your style.

Modernist – with an appropriation of styles.

What’s so special about CP Company?

The reinterpretation of military designs and detailing, applied to new technical fabrics. They created stylish and unique outerwear that was integral to the style of young modernists in rainy Glasgow on the football terraces and the northern soul scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Describe CP Company in three words.

Looking good. Always.

Who’s your style icon?

Paul Simonon.

Who’s your favourite band?

The Fall.

What’s your favourite movie?

The Night Of the Hunter.

Tom Stubbs, 45, stylist and fashion writer from Bristol, wears parka from 2008 thomasstubbs.com

Toby McLellan, 33, jewellery designer, wears nylon down jacket from 2015 tobymclellan.com

Describe your style.

Relentless.

Describe you style.

Ready for the road. And ready to rave.

No change needed.

What’s so special about CP Company?

Their fabrications are completely unique and they put their own handwriting in every aspect of every garment from the stitching to the fastenings. The ongoing concept of honed actionwear with a style derived from genuine practical apparel stands them apart.

What’s so special about CP Company?

They smash it with hi-tech fabric and high-end style – functional on a fashionable flex. The fact that everyone from hedge fund managers to hooligans buy into it makes it special.

Describe CP Company in three words.

Authentic. Action. Chic.

Who are your style icons?

David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth; Roxy Music-era Bryan Ferry; young, aggro New York Doll, David Johansen; Chas from Performance.

Who’s your favourite musician?

Bowie.

What’s your favourite movie?

Performance.

Describe CP Company in three words.

Compulsory. Captivating. Pockets.

Who’s your style icon?

It’s an obvious one, but Steve McQueen.

An all rounder – the rides he drove, the ‘kettles’ he rocked, the garms he dropped.

And what a looker.

Who’s your favourite musician?

There are too many for a favourite, but if I could only listen to one artist it would be Bounty Killer.

What’s your favourite movie?

For the desperation, determination and perseverance, and of course the friendship, Papillon.

Dana Wladèk, 26, teacher, from Russia, wears C.P. Company goggle jacket, 2012. @mille_miglia Describe your style.

Smart casual with a feminine twist.

I always wear sneakers.

What’s so special about CP Company?

Any of their products can make an outfit special.

Describe CP Company in three words.

History. Heritage. Unique.

Who’s your style icon?

I’m inspired by the interesting people I meet all over the world.

Who’s your favourite band?

Red Hot Chili Peppers.

What’s your favourite movie?

The Pursuit of Happyness.

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Moses, drummer, wears jacket by Casely-Hayford; trousers by Oliver Spencer; shirt by Tiger of Sweden; sunglasses by Cutler&Gross.

STYLE

Joseph, bassist, wears coat and trousers by Oliver Spencer; shirt by Ermenegildo Zegna; hat and tie by Paul Smith.

Sam, pianist, wears jacket by E Tautz; trousers by Matthew Miller; shirt by Sunspel; tie by Prada.

Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky Photographs Simon Way Styling Teddy George-Poku Styling Assistant Khary Bennett Musicians Moses Boyd mosesboyd.bandcamp.com, Joseph Chiari freddieandthefreeloaders.com, Sam Leak samleak.com and Michael Underwood michaelunderwoodmusic.com Location Hideaway, 2 Empire Mews, Streatham, London, SW1 hideawaylive.co.uk

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Joseph wears jacket by Timothy Everest; trousers by Wooyoungmi; hat

by Paul Smith; jewellery by Bunney.

STYLE | Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky

Sam wears jacket by Lou Dalton; trousers by Casely-Hayford; top by Levi’s California; badges by Bunney. Michael wears coat by Hancock VA; trousers

by Gieves&Hawkes; top by Thom Sweeney; belt by Caruso.

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STYLE | Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky

Jay, trumpeter, wears jacket and pocket square by Richard James; trousers by Oliver Spencer; sweater by E Tautz; shirt by Richard Anderson; tie by Paul Smith.

Joseph wears coat and top by Gieves&Hawkes; trousers by Oliver Spencer; hat by Paul Smith; jewellery by Bunney.

Michael, saxophonist and singer, wears suit by Acne; sweater by Thom Sweeney; pocket square

by Neil Barrett.

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Moses wears jacket by Oliver Spencer; trousers by Lanvin; shirt by Edwin Jeans; trainers by Converse; hat and belt by Paul Smith.

STYLE | Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky

Sam wears jacket by E Tautz; shirt by Sunspel; tie by Prada.

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SPOTLIGHT

Sabrina Nelson, artist and teacher, sabrinanelson.carbonmade.com and Yolanda Nichelle, jewellery designer, thedjewelry.com at the Music Hall rooftop party, Madison Street Photograph Janette Beckman

Detroit

Words Mark Webster Photographs Janette Beckman, Darren Brode and Laszlo Regos

As you collect your luggage from the carousel inside Detroit airport, you are reminded immediately that you have arrived at ‘Motor City’ – the metropolis that around a century ago burgeoned dramatically, later acquiring its familiar nickname. A mural featuring the de facto father of the motor car, Henry Ford, surrounded by some of the great names and images of the industry, leaves you in no doubt that the city was born to rule the road. But the sepia colours also serve to remind you that those unprecedented glories are part of Detroit’s past. Of course, the motor 190

industry is still a massive part of what this city is about – the cathedral to the industry that is the new General Motors HQ, standing on the Detroit riverbank with a fine view across to neighbouring Canada, pays grandiose testimony to that. But just two years ago the city became America’s biggest ever victim of bankruptcy, at a time when it was home to thousands of abandoned buildings as well as a population that had nearly halved since its boom time at the start of the 1950s.

Yet in spite of all of this, on my recent trip there I discovered a city that

was already sprouting its green shoots of recovery. It was not necessarily being driven by the machines with which it had become synonymous, but instead by the citizens the Motor City has built; people who are putting their skills and creativity into a regeneration that, as Detroit’s champion boat racer Mark Weber told me down by the river, has put his hometown back “ahead of the curve”.

“When we stepped off the elevator the first time here, there wasn’t even a wall. There was nothing,” says Jacques Panis, a native of the city and president >

Saxappeal, from the band Collective Peace saxappealmusic.com Photograph Janette Beckman

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Amp Fiddler, musician ampfiddler.com Photograph Janette Beckman

of Shinola, which began assembling watches “just three years and some change ago”. He is talking to me from the floor that the company adopted inside the Argonaut Building in downtown Detroit, which begun life as a General Motors research laboratory. From the outside, its somewhat stark appearance echoes many of the giant, rather anonymous buildings around it – brick boxes that were also once part of the nuts and bolts of the motor industry. Now there is a whole new production line keeping locals working, and the goods disappearing out the back door.

Shinola is already a crucial part of the Detroit story. It is intent on spreading the word on what it is doing not only across the United States, but also around the world. And what’s 192

more, it is doing it on its own terms – to the point where people are encouraged to contact the company and go along to observe the watches being made – from the delicate assembly of the parts to the immaculate preparation of the straps. “We’re part of a beautiful ecosystem of highly motivated, smart people,” says Panis.

“We’re about 300 here. But we started with nine. And they’re incredible. We trained them in a whole new trade, and that was to make watches at the level of quality we expected. Seven of them are still here as team leaders.

“But we’re just a small part of what’s happening here in the city. You can see it daily around you. The increase in traffic. The increase of people on the street. New restaurants, the new M-1 rail that’s being put in. You’re just

seeing good happen. People talk about bringing Detroit back. This is just going to be a new version of Detroit.”

This can be more candidly witnessed at the Shinola store, the perfect catalyst for the aforementioned ‘green shoots’ that are cropping up.

Detroit is a city that builds cars, and is built for cars. There are no great swathes of shops, bars, galleries, restaurants and all of the other cultural punctuation points you’d imagine that would make up the jigsaw of an area or district. Instead, they tend to pop up in pockets, so that where Shinola’s shop is on West Canfield St there is now also a classy barber, a chic little restaurant, the Motor City Brewing Works and a little clutch of newly refurbished apartments and lofts tucked in behind some most welcome greenery.

What’s more, musician and record producer Jack White has taken on a space alongside Shinola so that he can open a Third Man Records shop at the end of the year in his hometown.

“It is such exciting news that he is doing that,” says Daniel Caudill, creative director for Shinola. “And I know he’s excited himself to be doing it, and in particular here. Just there at the bottom of the street is known as the Cass Corridor, which is legendary for live music. He used to play all around that area.”

Caudill moved here from LA when the company started, having worked with a variety of brands in styling and product development. In the store we are surrounded by the fruits of his labour – not only the infamous watches, but also a whole raft of goods, from wallets and dog collars to pencils and bikes, which, in what is clearly the Shinola way, can be seen being assembled at the back of the store.

“Whatever it is we decide to make, though,” says Caudill, “we want it to mean something, to be of a certain quality, to stand for something. We don’t just want to produce a few T-shirts with our name across them.

There’s thought and skill gone into what we do. Take those, the old school basketballs with the lace – we can’t keep them in the store. We do different colours, and people come back in and they want them because they look good, they feel good.”

Shinola is proudly embracing what Panis calls “a larger movement in the world where the consumer today wants

SPOTLIGHT | Detroit something with more meaning behind it”. It is, as Caudill points out, exactly how he thinks and behaves as a consumer, particularly in his adopted city, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s an amazing thing when you can see the people who are making that thing, and experience it in that wholesome way. That transition has happened in food, drink, in so many other areas of design. It’s honest, authentic. And if it’s not, people will sniff you out. And we’re part of all that.”

In 1957, when two former boxers and sons of the city, songwriter Berry Gordy and singer Jackie Wilson, combined their talents to create the hit ‘Reet Petite’, it became the catalyst for a whole new Detroit production line that was soon ready to take on the world – Motown Records. From that resounding start, music remained an integral part of Detroit’s personality – including the proto-punk of MC5 and Iggy Pop and the Stooges, the spaced out dance of George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic collectives, Eminem’s snarling ‘Eight Mile’ hiphop and the techno house wizardry of, among others, the Belleville Three, aka Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson.

On my trip there, the focal point on a balmy Sunday evening was a tiny triangle of open space in Midtown created by the conflagration of Centre Street, Randolph Street and East Grand River Avenue. On one corner, on the roof of the concert venue Music Hall, I saw DJ Jon Q lead the way on the decks, while local artist Sabrina Nelson explained to me how “the soul of this city, these kinda people, won’t allow it to die. And they also love their sneakers!” Back on Randolph Street, I also went along to the handsome cigar and cocktail bar La Casa de la Habana – which recently doubled as a location for the video to the song ‘Soul Bounce’

by Collective Peace featuring Amp Fiddler. And it is there to which bandleader Saxappeal and Amp returned to explain to me the enduring qualities of Detroit as a town. Or, as Saxappeal puts it in an analogy that I’m sure would appeal to ex-pugilist Berry Gordy, “our backs have been against the wall so many times, all we know how to do is fight. Someone once said Detroit is a city of sore losers.

We just won’t give an inch.”

John Varvatos, fashion designer, in his Detroit store johnvarvatos.com Photograph Laszlo Regos

And that spirit is something both men – Saxappeal just starting out with his own ensemble, Amp Fiddler a veteran of disco band Enchantment, P-Funk gods Parliament, Detroit’s Was (Not Was) and many a subsequent project – feel has always manifested itself in the city’s music. “It’s a blue

‘SOMEONE ONCE SAID DETROIT IS A CITY OF SORE LOSERS; WE JUST WON’T GIVE AN INCH’ collar feeling,” picks up Amp. “I watched my dad work in a factory.

All my neighbours worked building cars. But just about every one of their children were in a garage jamming with somebody. You don’t have so much of

that industry now. But the flame and the fire is still there. And of course I grew up watching the Motown Revue.

It’s been in my head since I started knowing music. It’s been an influence, whether you wanted it to be or not.”

“And as a kid, I wanted to be part of that legacy,” continues Saxappeal.

“Now I get to live the dream, it’s surreal. And that also means working with Amp. I’d like to have been a fly on the wall at some of his sessions.

He’s done what I want to do, but on a global level. And he’s from here.”

This collaboration of ideas and generations has resulted in a wealth of music from the two men, but they happily acknowledge they are simply part of another Detroit element that is blossoming again. “Music is kind of the nucleus of the city right now,” Saxappeal says. “At some time it was cars, at other times sports, but right now music is the centre of our culture.

It’s in the water.”

“There’s a production line of new artists, new labels,” Amp adds. “What I like is that it’s so innovative. We’re trendsetters. Our work has always been something fresh and therefore gives you a real feeling of the city.” > 193

SPOTLIGHT | Detroit

Sermon DJs Ryan Dahl and Danny Leone, and DJ Peter Croce of Rocksteady Disco, Temple Bar Photograph Janette Beckman

And that feeling is spreading into the club scene, too, where a perfectly basic, four-square-walls bar at the city end of Cass Avenue on Temple Street – where not much else appears to be going on around it – houses a fortnightly vinyl-only club session called Sermon that, with its policy of mixing contemporary house with groundbreaking disco, perfectly encapsulates the sense of classic/ modern that seems to be pervading the city. The Temple Bar is dark, low-ceilinged, old fashioned (much of it is exactly as it was around 50 years ago) and absolutely primed to party – the owner George Boukas having stamped his personality on it when he took it over in the 1980s. Not that he was any stranger to the place – his father owned it from the 1920s through to the 1960s.

You can take the boy out of the bar…

The Sermon club night is hosted

by Peter Croce and Ryan Dahl with regular guest Danny Leone, who describes their nights as “comfortably underground”. “We dig for sounds and don’t just settle for what’s hot,” he says.

“Which is why places like this exist.

There are big nightclubs in the city, but this is where you get away from cheesy bar people.”

The three men are by no means veterans of the club scene, but they certainly bring a sensibility to their music that would sit well with any of their peers – with a distinctly Detroit take. Dahl, for example, recalls “the first techno DJ I saw was when I was at 194

high school, and it was Juan Atkins.

But he didn’t play techno, he played hip-shaking music”. While Croce says, “I grew up in a suburb of Detroit that had no nightlife at all. I went to a college that had no house or techno scene. So we just started collecting for fun. And when you live in Michigan you better find some shit to do in the winter.”

‘MOTOWN IS PART OF THE HISTORY OF THIS CITY, AND TECHNO IS TOO’ With this passion for vinyl continuing into their club work – “If I’m paying $13 for a record, it’s going to be a damn good one,” says Dahl – what also goes with them into the DJ booth and, thus, out onto the dance floor is a sense of where they are coming from. “There’s a reason I have Mary Jane Girls and Edwin Starr records in my crate,” says Croce. “To me, the DJs I don’t want to see are the ones who don’t understand the history of Detroit music. And I can tell the ones who do, and the ones who don’t.”

“Motown is part of the history of the city,” agrees Leone. “And techno is part of it too. So whatever we’re playing as DJs now, we know we’re carrying the baton.”

“The music scene was amazing.

It was raw and edgy,” says John Varvatos, another Detroit native.

“It was rock’n’roll. One of my passions is music and it was exciting to go to concerts and see musicians like the Stooges, Ted Nugent, MC5, Grand Funk Railroad and Bob Seger.”

Varvatos fully embraced what his city had to offer, but in his case steered all that creative passion into men’s fashion – initially working for Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and then with his own collection in 2000. And just like the music that is clearly in his blood, so the clothes he now designs are pure rock’n’roll.

Varvatos recently put his name above the door of a handsomely ornate late 19th-century store on Woodward Avenue that once housed the Schwankovsky Temple of Music, on a street that once bustled with shops, including the second biggest department store in the world after Macy’s in New York.

The man responsible for trying to breathe life back into this forgotten part of downtown, enormously influential local businessman and philanthropist Dan Gilbert, described Varvatos as the “first destination leader to plant a flag” in the Detroit Free Press newspaper. Of the evangelical Gilbert, Varvatos describes him as crucial among the “many people who want to get behind the city and support its rejuvenation”. Of course he is now part of that process itself – and very much with the Varvatos stamp on it. Across two floors, not only is there a wealth of his trademark snake-hipped, sleek ensembles but also a vinyl department, guitars and amps on sale, and a rock’n’roll photo gallery. There is even a small stage area for live shows.

“For me, this is much more than a business opportunity,” says Varvatos.

“It’s also about changing the complexion of a great city and creating a different kind of legacy. Detroit is well past its tipping point and I’m thrilled to be playing a role in the city’s ongoing transformation.” He recalls the moment that made him realise how important it was for him to become part of the solution. “I remember in

November 2014 I made a trip to Detroit for Thanksgiving, and had dinner one night at Wright & Company, which was created by two brilliant guys from the city. The dinner was a revelation. And confirmation that I’d made the right business decision.

It was packed with young people, and they weren’t passing through on their way to a baseball game. They were there to hang out and socialise. It was happening.”

Of course, as with all great cities, the people who help make it such a place aren’t necessarily born and bred there. Indeed it is often those who have had the chance to look from the outside in who can really see the strengths, the weaknesses and the potential.

Over in one of the oldest, most traditional parts of Detroit that experience has manifested itself in just a few short years. The Eastern Market is an expansive area on the edge of the city that serves as the hub for all manners of farming produce – with everything from animals being brought to slaughter to a regular flower market.

It services wholesalers and single shoppers, with regular craft fairs on site, as well as being an area where Lions fans park and gather when their National Football League team play home games. At night, its rows of darkened warehouses in what are only gently lit streets can appear quite forbidding. But it is still worth the trip to the border at Chrysler Drive, where on Riopelle Street two great Detroit traditions are being reimagined, by two young men who spent their formative years with the smell of sea salt in the air, on the coast in Maine.

“We arrived as a family about five years ago and moved straight into here, on Eastern Market,” says the eldest of the two Johnson brothers, 22-year-old Marlowe – the man behind Detroit City Distillery bar and restaurant, which he opened directly opposite the family home. “The property prices were just starting to go up and people were starting to give a shit about Detroit. We happened to arrive right at the forefront of it.”

Marlowe Johnson trained as a bartender in the city, and it wasn’t long before he saw that there was an opportunity to be part of the new Detroit by quite literally tapping into the old one. Nearly a century ago, because of its proximity to the

Leander Johnson, letterpress printer and bookbinder, from Salt & Cedar saltandcedar.com and Marlowe Johnson, senior bartender and ginsmith, from Detroit City Distillery detroitcitydistillery.com with their father Leon Johnson Photograph Janette Beckman

Canadian border, Detroit became the first port of call for ‘businessmen’ looking to exploit the national state of prohibition that had been brought into law. Aside from running booze in from the neighbours, stills were also built to supplement the imported product. Now, his legal still creates subtle varieties of gin, vodka and whisky inside the breeze-blocked walls of a former slaughterhouse – with one side of it dominated by a magnificent brownwood bar “from 1928, that we found in an old abandoned storefront”. “It dictated our space,” says Johnson. “And you’ll see that our bottles fit perfectly into it.

Because they’re classic ‘hard flats’, they can stand up to anything. You could throw them in a bag and they’d survive a border crossing. Another sign we’re doing things right.”

Aside from sourcing the decor from the remnants of the city, Johnson and his team are also very particular about where their ingredients come from – “the grain, less than a 100 miles away.

And we can just go out the door for the flavours” – while he is also proud that his distiller, old school pal and Detroit native JP Jerome, can claim as hands-on a connection with their new enterprise as you could wish for. “Jerome’s grandfather Yogi worked next door, as a slaughterhouse man. We have a photo of him up there behind the bar holding a rifle, with half of one of his fingers missing. He’s the patron saint of our bar. He grew up here during prohibition. He was so pleased with what we were doing.”

Younger brother Leander Johnson is also introducing his skills into the > 195

SPOTLIGHT | Detroit Hydroplaner Jimmy Shane at the APBA Gold Cup trophy, Detroit River 2014 Photograph Darren Brode, courtesy of Detroit Riverfront Events, Inc

community, across the street from his brother’s bar at Salt & Cedar, where he is pursuing a family trade of letterpress printing and bookbinding that is feeding perfectly into the needs of the small, boutique start-up businesses that are beginning to emerge, as well as “the cheese merchants and wine merchants that have been in this market for over a 100 years”. “In fact,” he says, “they’re the ones who said they wanted a letterpress in this neighbourhood.”

“We got a lot of our equipment and furniture from old local print shops,” he continues. “It has deep roots here.

It was a trade that was taught at the technical colleges. Now we have special events and classes ourselves, and there’s a whole new crowd that wants to learn and join in.”

Both Marlowe Johnson and his sibling have clearly found the pulse of their adopted city, and are now very much part of its changing dynamic.

And, as Leander adds, “It’s astonishing how fast it’s happening. And in such concentrated areas. What I think is so impressive is that the true soul of Detroit is surviving in this neighbourhood, downtown, midtown, Corktown... it is happening. And it’s beautiful.”

I’m back down by the river and Mark Weber is showing me the course where he once raced hydroplane powerboats, alongside the Roostertail banqueting hall. Inside the hall are 196

photographic reminders of a glorious 1960s past. There’s a poster for Motown Mondays concerts and black and white shots of Berry Gordy, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson in tuxedos, enjoying the entertainment.

In August this year, the entertainment was on the enormous strait of water before me (The French colonists’ reference to ‘the strait’ between Lake Huron and Lake Erie

‘THE SOUL OF THIS CITY, THESE KINDA PEOPLE, WON’T LET IT DIE’ is where the city derived its name), when the Spirit of Detroit Hydrofest welcomed racing back to the river. Its absence had been a symptom of the city’s decline, but the desire to put it back on the powerboat racing map goes back to how important Detroit had been to the sport’s birth and development. “They came from New York in the 1900s – a bunch of wealthy people – and they had race boats,” says

Weber, who recently made it into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame as a multi-championship-winning boat racer. “They migrated towards Detroit because we had the horse power. We were building engines for the first world war, and there was that guy Henry Ford. In 1916 they ran the first Gold Cup race here, and by the 1930s this was the place for racing to be.

It stayed here, because of the automotive industry.”

Born and raised in Detroit, Weber went to his first race when he was just six weeks old. It’s a sport written into the DNA of his family, with dad and father-in-law as former team owners, while his brothers, niece and nephew are racers too. He was clearly the right man to approach when the car industry, in this case in the shape of UAW-GM Center for Human Resources, approached him about reinstating racing. He was as up for it as they were. “They didn’t want it to leave Detroit because this is a resilient town,” he says. “I told them I didn’t want it to be a one-year wonder – I wanted to rebuild the event, and they agreed.

“So we’re going to keep the tradition alive. And I don’t know if it’s the competitor in me, or the Detroit attitude, but we clearly have a mindset here that we refuse to lose. We refuse to walk away. There’s no city in America with more resolve. You just watch this town in 10 years. We’re on a roll.”

Daniel Caudill, creative director of Shinola, inside the Shinola store, Detroit shinola.com Photograph Janette Beckman

SPORT

Calisthenics Spartan Army. Convict Conditioning. Shaolin Monks.

Words Chris May Photographs Simon Way Styling Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala Styling Assistant Nicolas Payne-Baader Hair and Make-up Susana Mota at Khelis using Tom Ford Athletes Jay Anthony, Rebecca Bartels, Amir Qorbanzaeeh and Miguel Ulloa

If you’ve taken a walk in your neighbourhood park recently, you may have noticed a cluster of 8ft-high, metal pull-up bars which weren’t there last time you visited. Over the past few years, local councils have erected almost 200 of these bar-parks in public spaces, many of them in London. More are being installed. They are partly in response to, and partly designed to encourage, the revival of calisthenics, a physical training discipline that uses your own bodyweight, and little or no equipment, to build strength and endurance. For centuries the cornerstone of physical training, calisthenics was sidelined in the late 20th century by members-only gyms and the seductive semiology of hightech resistance machines.

Calisthenics is an authentic analogue-age hold out. The word itself is a combination of two Greek words, kálos (beauty) and sthénos (strength).

Its many varieties and combinations of pull-ups, push-ups, squats, jumps, lunges, holds and bar-dips are extraordinarily effective, and there are other pluses. You don’t need to join a gym – you can practise calisthenics anywhere you like; at home, in the park, in the garden. And because you are using only your own bodyweight, it’s harder to injure yourself than it is when using barbells or resistance machines.

Further, because your bodyweight increases as your muscles build up, there is an inbuilt, natural progression to the exercises.

Calisthenics’ back-to-basics approach, however, makes it unusually challenging. Many people find modern gym apparatus to be a useful psychological prop, particularly when 198

they start training. But with calisthenics, there’s nowhere to hide.

It’s all down to you and your motivation.

Neill Timms, who runs the calisthenics training company Incite Fitness in south-east London, says the recession that followed the 2008 world financial crisis was the spark that started the revival. “Because of the economic downturn,” he says, “people who might otherwise have joined a gym decided they couldn’t afford to and began looking for an alternative.” Timms also cites the drive for better public health and fitness, which has led borough councils to build more bar-parks – low cost, free-at-the-point-of-demand resources for local people.

“Youtube has had a massive impact, too,” says Timms. “Lots of people start after seeing videos. Back when I began, if you were in the park doing calisthenics, people would ask what it was you were doing. They didn’t know anything about it. But now, as soon as someone sees me, they’re saying, ‘Oh, do you know so-and-so?’ They’ve seen a clip on Youtube.”

Timms started Incite Fitness in 2009 as a Youtube channel showing how-to videos, later adding one-on-one and workshop classes. In 2013, he set up Incite Fitness: Outdoor Gym Equipment, selling and installing barpark kit part time. Business is good and, since February this year, Timms has been doing it full time. “The long-term aim is to sell to councils, and we’ve got some proposals being considered,” he says. “But at the moment it’s gyms and schools and private builds, people who want a set of bars in the back garden.

I also sell the equipment for people to

put up themselves. That’s very popular.”

Calisthenics’ grass-roots revival is being reflected in elite sports. Team GB-affiliated bodies that have calisthenics strands in their training programmes include British Ski and Snowboard, British Sailing and British Ice Hockey. Others, including, surprisingly, GB Boxing, say they don’t use calisthenics – but any sportsperson or sports training programme using even basic push-ups, pull-ups and sit-ups, is employing some degree of calisthenics, whether they call it that or not.

Calisthenics isn’t an Olympic sport itself yet, but there are a raft of flourishing national and international competitions. Among the most prominent are the World Championships organised by the World Street Workout and Calisthenics Federation (WSWCF). Street workout is a spin-off from calisthenics, and adds athletics to the training programme.

The WSWCF is based in Latvia – calisthenics is big in the Baltic states, Russia and east Europe, where hightech gyms have yet to make a gamechanging impact and where old-school strength and endurance training never went away.

Another place where calisthenics never went away is the US prison system. In his book Convict Conditioning, Paul Wade, who spent most of the 1980s and 1990s banged up in San Quentin State Prison and Angola Penitentiary in the US, says: “During the 18th and 19th centuries, the guys who got incarcerated and knew how to do true bodyweight training based on strength – the gymnasts, acrobats, circus performers and >

Miguel wears jacket by Maison KitsunĂŠ; trousers by YMC; trainers by Y-3. Amir wears jacket by Moncler; trousers

by Berluti; trainers by Y-3; bracelet, model’s own.

Amir wears jacket by Givenchy from Mr Porter; tracksuit bottoms by Adidas; T-shirt by Orlebar Brown; trainers by Y-3. Miguel wears jacket by Calvin Klein Jeans; trousers by Andrea Pompilio; trainers by John Lobb.

SPORT | Calisthenics

Jay wears gilet and trousers by Moncler; gloves by Cos.

strongmen – passed their knowledge on to other inmates. This knowledge – old school calisthenics – was gold in prisons, where no exercise equipment at all was to be found, with the exception of the bars overhead and the floor below. And being physically strong as well as agile was essential – those days were tough. The handful of guys who trained for strength in their cells did so literally to stay alive.

“The traditions that were killed off in gymnasiums up and down the country [have] stayed alive in prisons, because they weren’t choked to death by technology and the money associated with novelty gimmicks...

For more years than I care to count, [calisthenics training] kept me physically tougher and head-andshoulders stronger than the vast majority of the psychos, veteranos and other vicious nutjobs with whom I’ve been forced to rub shoulders.”

Nobody knows when bodyweight exercises first became systemised into a training discipline. The earliest evidence comes from the Greek

‘THE SPARTAN ARMY PERFORMED IDENTICAL ROUTINES, EXCEPT THEY WERE NAKED’ historian Herodotus. In his nearcontemporary account of the battle between the Spartans and the Persians

at Thermopylae in 480 BC, Herodotus recorded that a Persian scout watched the Spartan army performing group training routines that sound identical to modern calisthenics (except that the Spartans did them naked). Around 500 years later, the Roman historian Livy’s account of gladiator training described similar routines. China’s Shaolin monks have used a form of calisthenics since around 500 AD. Until the 1950s, calisthenics was the foundation of strength and endurance training in martial arts schools and military academies all over the world.

Strong man Charles Atlas, whose mailorder courses dominated the American bodybuilding market from the 1920s until the 1960s, borrowed some of the principles of calisthenics for his “dynamic tension” programme.

But in the 1970s, gym-based training using weights and resistance machines began to replace calisthenics. > 201

SPORT | Calisthenics

Jay wears jumpsuit and trainers

by Y-3. Miguel wears top by Balenciaga from Mr Porter; tracksuit bottoms and trainers by Adidas; bracelet by Miansai.

Jay wears sweater by Canali; tracksuit bottoms and trainers by Y-3.

Jay wears jacket by DSquared2; tracksuit bottoms and trainers by Y-3. Amir wears T-shirt by Balenciaga from Mr Porter; tracksuit bottoms by Calvin Klein Jeans; trainers by Adidas; bracelet, model’s own. Rebecca wears sweater by Moncler womenswear; tracksuit bottoms by Y-3 womenswear; trainers by Nike; bracelet, model’s own. Miguel wears jacket by Saint Laurent from Mr Porter; tracksuit bottoms by Valentino from Mr Porter; T-shirt by Y-3; trainers by John Lobb.

Amir wears jacket by Moncler; trousers by Berluti; trainers by Y-3; bracelet, model’s own.

203

SPORT | Calisthenics

Amir wears T-shirt by Balenciaga from Mr Porter; tracksuit bottoms

by Calvin Klein Jeans; trainers by Adidas; bracelet, model’s own.

Jay wears jacket by DSquared2; tracksuit bottoms and trainers by Y-3.

Simon Way’s photographs are of Miguel Ulloa, Jay Anthony, Amir Qorbanzaeeh and Rebecca Bartels from Crazy 4 Calisthenics (C4C), which holds classes at the YMCA in west London’s Ealing and at CrossFit SY1 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. C4C is representative of several dozen grassroots calisthenics groups around the country whose primary activity is organising classes, often in public parks. Ulloa and Anthony, who both came to callisthenics from gym-based weight training, set up C4C in early 2014. Qorbanzaeeh is a C4C coach and Bartels a student.

Ulloa began doing calisthenics seven years ago, following a motorcycle accident in which he broke a wrist, the back of a hand and some fingers.

“The doctor said I wouldn’t be able to continue lifting heavy weights,” he says. “While I was recovering, I was on Youtube and found calisthenics clips and I’ve never looked back.

“As a teacher, I enjoy it because it’s so creative. The routines are limitless.

You can have 10 simple pull-ups and have a hold at the bottom or a hold at the top or a hold in the middle. You can play around with it. There are so many 204

moves, so many different push-ups and pull-ups. The main focus is your core, your abs upwards, but there are exercises for all parts of the body. Your routine can be as rounded as you want to make it and it can only be as boring

‘PEOPLE THINK GYM EQUIPMENT IS SOME KIND OF MAGIC. YOU DON’T NEED ANY OF IT’ as the teacher. Whatever sport you go into you’ll benefit from some calisthenics training.”

Anthony began doing calisthenics around the same time as Ulloa. Until then also a dedicated weightlifter,

he decided one day that he’d rather be at home with his partner and children than doing weights in a gym. “People have been tricked into believing you need lots of equipment to keep fit,” he says. “They think the kit is some kind of magic. Every minute somebody is bringing out a new item which is supposed to make you get fit quicker or better. You don’t need any of it. Once you’ve learnt the exercises, you can do them practically anywhere.”

As the calisthenics revival continues to grow, the only thing that might prevent it from becoming a mainstream training discipline is, perversely, its affordability and freedom from technology. The profit-making opportunities offered by gym chains barely exist in calisthenics. Meanwhile, says Qorbanzaeeh, “You can go the gym and lift weights and get a physique that looks good in the mirror, on the outside. But if you want to build your body from the inside, calisthenics are grade one.” incitefitness.co.uk wswcf.org crazy4calisthenics@hotmail.com

Amir wears vest by Z Zegna; trousers by Moncler; trainers, model’s own; gloves by Cos; bracelet, model’s own.

ICON

Armani Jacket

Words Chris May Photograph Elliot Kennedy Styling Richard Simpson Hair Adam Garland using Balmain Make-up Dominic Paul using Charlotte Tilbury Businesswoman Karina Orlova

In an emblematic scene from Paul Schrader’s 1980 movie American Gigolo, Richard Gere, playing male escort Julian, is seen getting ready for a date.

As Smokey Robinson & the Miracles rock out ‘The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage’, he takes four impeccable jackets from his wardrobe and lays them side by side on his bed. How good Julian looks with his clothes on, we are given to understand, is as important as how well he performs with them off. The jackets were all designed

by Giorgio Armani, as were the suits, shirts and ties that Julian wears. But Armani’s signature garment was, and remains, the jacket.

Armani’s game changer was to remove the substrata of linings and pads from jacket construction, giving the garment a looser feel and appearance.

By also using more forgiving fabrics, he introduced a unique blend of formality and informality, elegance and comfort.

I asked Giorgio Armani if he could remember the lightbulb moment when he thought of decluttering jacketmaking. “I started by observing the world around me,” he told me. “I saw men wearing stiff jackets, which looked a bit like armour that concealed the body and made it hard to move. I was looking for the exact opposite; flowing lines that felt comfortable and allowed for free and easy movement. So it was that, in the mid-1970s, I created the 206

first unstructured jackets, without any linings or pads.

“I soon realised that women, with their increasingly busy working life, needed clothes that felt as comfortable as men’s. They needed something that gave them dignity, an attitude that helped them cope with their professional life without giving up looking like a woman. I tried to give them a stronger image; hence the creation of women’s power suits.”

After American Gigolo, Armani’s jackets were next seen to winning effect in the mid-1980s TV series Miami Vice, in which Don Johnson’s undercover cop Sonny Crockett habitually wore an Armani jacket, linen trousers, slip-on loafers over sockless feet, and a T-shirt.

Together, Armani and Johnson made being a cop look cool.

“I’ve always thought of the T-shirt as the alpha and omega of the fashion alphabet,” said Armani of Crockett’s white tee. “I love the T-shirt as an anti-status symbol, putting rich and poor on the same level in a sheath of white cotton that cancels the distinctions of caste.”

Armani was born in 1934 to lowermiddle class parents in the provincial town of Piacenza. After completing national service in the mid-1950s, he worked as a window dresser in the department store La Rinascente.

Appropriately for such a three-

dimensional designer, his first involvement in the clothing business was learning how best to make a garment hang on a mannequin, rather than gauging how good it looked in a two-dimensional sketch. He was hired by Nino Cerruti in 1961, going freelance in 1970.

This year marks 40 years since the founding of Armani’s company, which he set up in Milan at the urging of his partner Sergio Galeotti (who died in 1985). It was floated with £6,000, scraped together in part by the sale of Armani’s Volkswagen Beetle.

By 1986, the company had an annual turnover approaching £70m. Today it’s in the billions. Remarkably, it is Armani himself, not a bank or an anonymous group of investors, who owns it all.

“I never have fun,” Armani told Vanity Fair in 2004. “When I look at old photos, I’m never smiling, I look sour. I’ve always just worked.”

It is said, sometimes as a criticism, sometimes as a recommendation, that it’s impossible to tell whether an Armani garment was made decades ago or recently. As anyone who has owned and loved one knows, an Armani jacket never goes out of style. It simply gets exhausted through overuse. armani.com

Suit, shoes and bag

by Emporio Armani.

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www.carhartt-wip.com Photography by Joshua Gordon, artwork by Tim Head

STYLE HISTORY CULTURE

AUTUMN 2015 VOLUME 1 ISSUE 16

©

“People say I always play strong women; I don’t know any weak women.”

MAXINE PEAKE

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