69 Exhibition Road: Twelve True-Life Tales from the Fag End of Punk, Porn & Performance

By Dorothy Max Prior

A vibrant, wry, and engaging account of life as an adventurous, queer young person in late 1970s London discovering themselves as an artist, and an individual.

While working as a photographer’s model, gallery usher, and exotic dancer, Dorothy “Max” Prior witnessed the births of Adam and the Ants, The Monochrome Set, The Sex Pistols, and Throbbing Gristle, as well as drumming in her own cult band Rema Rema and recording with Industrial Records.  
 
Her exuberant commentaries, each presented as a stand-alone episode, illustrate the multilayered nature of the London music, art, and fashion worlds of the late 1970s, and the overlap between the early punk scene with the city’s rapidly evolving club and queer cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strange Attractor Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913689643

Book preview

69 EXHIBITION ROAD

69 Exhibition Road by Dorothy Max Prior

First published by Strange Attractor Press 2022

Text © Dorothy Max Prior 2022

Typeset in Avant Garde, Helvetica Neue and Plantin

Design and layout by Maïa Gaffney-Hyde

Dorothy Max Prior has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form on by means without the written permission of the publishers. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781913689636

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Strange Attractor Press

BM SAP, London,

WC1N 3XX, UK

www.strangeattractor.co.uk

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And London, England.

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69 EXHIBITION ROAD

Twelve True-Life Tales

From the Fag End of Punk,

Porn & Performance

Dorothy Max Prior

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Contents

Then

69 Exhibition Road

Picture This

I Got You In My Camera

Everyone Is A Prostitute

Ladies Night

QT Jones And His Sex Pistols

La La La La Lola

Flesh, Trash, Heat

Ant Music For Sex People

Fond Affections

I Confess

Weekend Swingers

And Then

Whatever Happened To…

Discography Filmography Bibliography

Afterword

Acknowledgements & Credits

List of Illustrations

Index

For Andy

Who says he will never read this

THEN

We're sitting in Brook's on Brompton Road, just up from South Kensington station. We come here a lot. Me and Andy, that is. We live just around the corner, on Exhibition Road. We like Brompton Road, and we especially like it here. We like to sit in the window seat, so we can see who's coming and going.

An old couple – at least 60, they are – stand outside, reading the menu. He's wearing a camel-coloured Crombie coat with a black velvet collar. He has proper gentleman's shoes, black leather, nicely polished. There's something slightly racy about him, but it's hard to say what. She's a little more showy. She has henna'd hair and ruby red lipstick.

But what was she wearing? I really can't remember.

Does it matter? Not too much, I suppose, but it's bothering me. Why do I remember some things so clearly – what somebody was wearing, what somebody else said decades ago – and not others. If, like Christopher Isherwood, I am a camera, then I'm a malfunctioning CCTV, blinking on and off, capturing moments randomly and putting them into storage.

Well, she'll have to be wearing something. Perhaps a pink bouclé jacket and skirt, and black patent court shoes. That'll do.

Rewind. Ah, there we are. There we were.

That'll be us, says Andy.

Oh, so you think we'll still be together when we're 60, I say.

No, says Andy. We'll be married to other people.

We're quiet for a while, watching as the old couple decide to come in, open the door, walk past us and find themselves a table. I can't imagine living to be 60. I can't imagine Andy at 60 – married to someone else, but still meeting me for lunch.

Forty years go by.

And here we are – just like that.

69 EXHIBITION ROAD

Andy calls me Max. I don't know why.

He won't say, and I'll never know.

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69 Exhibition Road – now there's an address. Next to the Mormon cathedral, with an Arab men's hostel on the other side. The men from the hostel stand around outside wearing those nightgown type things (djellabas, brown for bachelor) and make comments I don't understand when I walk past wearing that pink rubber mini-skirt from SEX, stockings and suspenders, and the Terry de Havilland black patent boots.

I always answer back, and I don't think they understand me either, but we kind of understand each other. They're always pretty cheery, actually, nothing nasty – I quite like them. There's no way they'd touch me or do anything horrible.

Unlike the Chelsea fans who wander around South Ken on a Saturday evening, all boozy and rowdy. I don't like them, no, not at all. Once, a couple of them called me a slut and pushed me against a wall, right next to Dino's Restaurant, and one of them tried to put his hand up my skirt. I kicked him hard with the Terry de Havilland's. Don't you ever, I said, don't you ever do that again, to any girl. Then I ran.

You might think it's hard to run in stilettos, but it's not if you wear them all the time. Anyway, it wasn't far to Daquise's and I popped in there for a cup of tea and a cake, and to catch my breath. I found out a lot later that Mr Daquise was in fact a Ganjou Brother, one of a very famous acrobatic troupe who had performed all over the place, even the London Palladium. I didn't know that then, he was just the chatty Polish man with the cake shop. But it's nice to think now that he was actually a very proficient acrobat, and if the Chelsea fan had come in after me, I bet he would have caught hold of him, spun him round and round his head, and thrown him to his brother, like he was a Juanita.

So Daquise's is at the beginning of Exhibition Road, and 69 is much further up, right opposite the Science Museum where that strange underground tunnel from South Ken station comes out. The one that has posh buskers, string quartets or whatever. On Sundays, the road is full of ice cream vans, feeding the tourists who've turned up four hours too early for the museums – which open at 2pm not 10am on a Sunday. I've thought a few times about putting up a tea stall outside the front door. Andy thinks it's a good plan. Marco says we'll get beaten up by the ice cream men, who are always fighting with each other, letting down each other's tyres and things. Ice cream turf wars, apparently.

I like to think that ours is the house where Roman Polanski filmed Repulsion. Even if it isn't, it does look like it could be. Lots of houses around here do. Ours has steps up to a big black front door with peeling paint, and dirty white Doric columns on either side. No doorbell, you have to knock and no one ever hears, so you have to shout. Andy and I are on the top floor, so sometimes we hear people shouting, and sometimes they have to cross the road and really shout, or whistle. Then, you have to go down six flights of stairs to let them in. We tried keys on a string out the window for a while. I can't remember why that didn't work. There's no phone in our room – the only phone in the house is a rattly old pay phone in the basement that takes 2p coins. There's a story there – I'll get to it in a minute.

+

This is the third room I've lived in, in this house.

The first is not mine, it's German Monika's – a narrow room on the third floor, oddly unbalanced as it's small but has a very high ceiling, a chopped-up room carved from a much bigger space. There's a bed, and a little cooker with a mini-oven that she uses as a heater, toasting her feet in it with her long boney legs propped up on the only chair in the room.

So it's while I'm staying at Monika's, which I did frequently through late 1976, being homeless at the time, that I meet Andy. I'd gone downstairs to the basement to use the pay phone, and down there in the dingy hall with the brown Lino and the lights that didn't work properly and the smelly coal cellar and possibly rats scuttling (mice at the very least) I find two skinny boys, very young and shy. One has dark hair and brown skin, and one has brown hair and light skin. They don't look particularly unusual or weird or whatever, but they are wearing straight-legged jeans, not flares, and that kind of marks them out as other.

Excuse me, the brown-skinned one says in a very polite grammar-schoolboy type way, do you happen to know someone living here called Monika? So I take them upstairs to Monika's and while she makes us all a cup of tea I play them my new Ramones LP, and we all agree that it ought to self-destruct after 100 plays; that's what punk records should do. They ask me if I like The Stooges (yes) and if I have a copy of Nico's Marble Index (no). Their names are Bid and Andy. Bid is the brown-skinned one, and Andy is the pale-faced one. They have a band, and Bid is the singer, with Andy on bass, and Monika the second singer. They invite me to come along to a rehearsal: I could be the drummer, as they didn't have one. I say that I don't play drums, and don't have a drumkit, but they don't seem to think any of that is too important…

+

Room two. Eventually, Monika gets fed up with me sleeping on her floor, and speaks to Mrs Baker the housekeeper who offers me my own little room – it's in the basement at the front of the house, so I get to see a lot of feet and legs going by outside, framed by railings. It has a single bed, and a wardrobe or cupboard, something anyway where my clothes are, and a kind of sideboard-cum-shelf thing that has my make-up on it, and a kettle. There's nowhere to cook anything, so there are quite a lot of pizza boxes. And there are baby mice that escape from the coal cellar and run under the door, playing hide-and-seek in the discarded boxes.

Andy and I have just started going out together, or staying in together, more to the point, and he stays round a couple of times a week. We either get take-away pizza (which you have to go and get, no one delivers, this is England) or we go out to eat at Brook's (for hamburgers) or Dino's (for spaghetti) or Bistro Vino (if we're feeling posh – they're all avocados with prawns and steak au poivre) before taking a taxi down to The Roxy in Covent Garden, which has just opened. I used to go there when it was a gay club called Chaguaramas.

We are sort-of gay. I am bisexual, and Andy describes himself as a male lesbian. He calls me Max. This might be because I have a Pearl Maxwin drumkit – we are playing in a band together now, that did happen, a Band With No Name that had one, two or three singers, depending what day of the week it was: Bid, Monika and a rather nervous art-student friend of Andy's called Stuart, who comes and goes in a mysterious way. It might be because the Dirk Bogarde character in our favourite film, The Night Porter, is called Max. Or it might be for some completely other reason. He won't say, and I'll never know. Andy is 18 and has just left school. He works in a bank, so when he stays over, he has to get up really early, get the Tube from South Ken back to his mum's house in Balham, then get washed and dressed in his work suit and go off to the bank. After a while, Andy leaves the bank and is briefly a student at London School of Economics. I think that lasts for about a fortnight.

So, I'm in this little room next to the cellar, me and the mice, and as you know the only phone in the house is in the basement, so I end up answering it most of the time. But as it's nearly always for me, that's OK. And it's nearly always my erstwhile bandmate Stuart, who I've become friends with, and who has taken to calling me daily to hold long conversations about life, art etc (his life and art, mostly). Stuart had dropped out of the Band With No Name after one of his many mystery disappearances, and now had another plan. The day before yesterday's phone call was all about how I needed to encourage Andy to leave Bid and come and play bass with him in his new venture.

Yesterday's call was familiar territory – it's been the topic a few times. It's about how Stuart is going to shrug off his current sick, feeble persona and transform himself into someone new. Clark Kent to Superman. He's going to be reborn. He'll be a first man, like Adam. What do I think of the name Adam? Like Adam Adamant, I say (we both like the Adam Adamant TV show).

Today's call, he's talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, speeding almost. (I know he's not actually speeding because he never ever takes drugs – he doesn't even drink or smoke.) But he sounds like he is, he hardly draws breath, the ideas come so thick and fast. Adam, he's decided on Adam. Adam Ant. The band will be called The Ants. Like The Beatles, except The Ants. It'll be bigger than The Beatles (believe me, Maxie). It'll be so big that big stadiums will be filled with little girls wetting themselves. He's going to wear leather trousers (like Jim Morrison? I say) and a leather jacket, but with a bare chest underneath (like Iggy Pop? I say). I'm struggling to picture skinny little Stuart throwing off his glasses and checked lumberjack shirt and becoming this god who makes all the little girls scream and cry. After about 20 minutes, in which I've said about six words in total, he says, You need to believe in me, Maxie, I need you to. Yes, I say. Yes. I believe. I don't, deep down, I think he's maybe heading for another hospital spell. And I think dressing head-to-toe in leather like Jim Morrison is a bit silly, but I force myself to say yes. I try to believe. It's important to him – I'm his muse. He needs my approval. He calls me daily. But maybe he calls everyone he knows daily. Maybe we're all muses.

+

Meanwhile, Andy and I decide that we are going to be married, and Mrs Baker finds us a nice new room. So now I'm Max, the husband, and Andy is my wife, and our marital home is a big room at the top of the house. We move in Spring 1977. We have to share the bathroom, and we have no sink in our room so we not only wash but also do the washing up in the bathroom, which is very big, with chairs in it, big enough to use as a second sitting room, which is what we do sometimes. You can see Harrods out of the window, and it's a particularly nice view in midwinter, when the shop is all lit up with Christmas lights.

The new room has two big windows, and a small stove in the corner, with two burners. There is no fridge – we put the milk out of the window in plastic carrier bags. There are two single beds, which we've pushed together. A chest-of-drawers and a table that we've painted cyan blue. Almost turquoise, really. Three walls are white and one is painted matte black. The black wall has a neat line of black and white photos (Andy is neat, Andy likes neat – he thinks I'm really messy, which I'm not), mostly cut from magazines or newspapers. Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up in the draft from the subway. An electric chair that looks like the one in the Warhol prints. A one-legged soldier returning from Vietnam. Just pictures we like, no particular reason.

Above the cyan blue table is an Evening News poster: Sex Pistol Number 2 Knifed, it says. On the other table, between the windows, is a plastic Ringo Starr model, with drum kit. Ringo and Mickey Dolenz and Charlie Watts and Moe Tucker are my favourite drummers – although I don't know if Mickey Dolenz really played on the Monkees recordings, but I loved the songs so who cares. I like drummers who don't try to be anything other than someone in the background who hits things. I especially don't like people who have lots of drums. My drumkit has a bass drum, a floor tom, one hanging tom, and a snare. I also have two cymbals. I threw away the hi-hat because it is hard to play a hi-hat in stilettos.

Our room takes up most of the top floor, the only floor that doesn't have a really massively high ceiling, because it is in the roof space. On the landing there's a hatch that you can climb through to get on to the roof. Andy does it all the time; he goes up there to sunbathe. Which is not very punk, you might think, sunbathing. But he does it anyway. And there isn't really any one thing that is ‘punk’ – that's a very tabloid idea. Punk, actually, is whatever we want it to be. Adam and Andy, for example, don't have very short hair. Andy's is long at the front and parted on the side, falling over his face when he plays bass, which he does with his head down and his legs crossed. For yes – Stuart, now Adam, got his way, and Andy is playing in Adam's new band, which is (as he promised) called The Ants.

Andy always tries to stand still when he is playing, and Adam always tries to bump into him and knock him over, or put his arm around him and kind of drag him down. People say Andy never smiles, but I can see the little Andy smile trying to escape when Adam does that. Andy doesn't like his teeth so he doesn't open his mouth when he smiles. Adam's hair is curly and sort of tousled. He smiles a lot. With teeth. He jumps around a lot – you might call it dancing, but it's more like some sort of shamanic exorcism, especially when he's singing something that starts slowly then really speeds up and goes crazy, like ‘Plastic Surgery’, which is usually their opening number. It surprises people who haven't seen them before because it is really, really slow at the beginning, and most people think punk is fast. But it isn't, not always.

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Once Andy and I are actually properly living together, we buy a small black-and-white TV. A Dirk Bogarde season gives us the chance to see The Damned, which joins The Night Porter as a firm favourite. When Mr Bogarde is in town for a book signing, we run along, taking our vintage fan magazines with us. Good Lord, where did you get those? asks the white-socked one. We are also walking distance from Portobello Road's Electric Cinema where all the latest European arthouse releases, such as Borowczyk's Story of Sin, are premiered, and where you can catch afternoon double-bills for next to nothing – eating mango ice cream whilst watching any number of Victor Hugo or Jean-Luc Godard classics.

While we are down Portobello Road, we pop round the corner to the Rough Trade shop to pick up a few records – we probably buy five or six a week. Mostly, of course, for the music but if they have a good record sleeve, that's a bonus. Take The Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict, for example, with its contemporary surrealist artwork by a friend of the band called Linder – a beautiful blue-on-yellow screenprint of a female nude with an iron in place of her head and a pair of smiling mouths replacing nipples. Oh and talking of art, we are living right next door to the V&A, so that's always good for an outing – it's free so you can nip in anytime you like just for a five-minute gander at a Paolozzi poster or whatever. We're also a stone's throw from Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, so we have the newish (newer than the V&A, anyway) Serpentine Gallery to go to, although we go off it a bit when we're thrown out of the cafe when we go there for an ice cream – being awkward customers, or looking suspicious or something. Still, there's always the new Dayvilles on Brompton Road if we want posh American ice-cream with nuts and mint chips and what-not – or if it's the more mundane Mr Whippy with a chocolate flake type stuff you're after, there's always the vans parked outside our house, which sit there all day with their engines running.

Exhibition Road is always bustling and noisily busy during the day, as people come and go to the museums and universities, and buskers entertain them, and ice-cream men give them sustenance, but it's eerily quiet and echoey at night, other than for a short burst of activity when it's chucking-out time at the Albert Hall. It's an odd street – built in Victorian times and designed to ferry thousands of spectators from South Kensington Tube station to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park and back. It is very wide, with many large buildings in the top section, so has interesting acoustics. There's one evening when we head off out and decide to leave a bit of entertainment for the street running whilst we're gone. We set up Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music on repeat play on the record deck and, with the windows wide open, place the speakers on the sills. As we head home late at night, we get to the junction with Cromwell Road, and although it's as busy as ever with traffic, being the start of the A4, we hear a strange sound above the noise of the cars, a kind of deep drone with a jangling metallic whir ricocheting off all the museum buildings. We know what it is, of course, but we can't believe how loud it is. We walk on the opposite side of the road to usual, past the Natural History Museum, and can see the men from the hostel next door to our house standing outside on the pavement, staring up at the sky. The small crowd parts for us and, smiling hello to our neighbours, we go through the front door calmly, then as it slams behind us bolt up the many flights of steps to sort it out before Mrs Baker works out that it's something to do with us.

We settle in to married life. I go out to work, entertaining the lunchtime clients in the clubs and bars of the City and East End – which Andy doesn't really approve of, and so never discusses – and Andy stays home and does the housework, and buys the dinner. Or at least, he does when he's not being an Ant. I occasionally bump into Monika on the stairs as I go out with my suitcase full of frillies. She also, oddly, now disapproves of my job, even though it's also her job. "Your Kant is just for Andy" she says. It takes me a while to work out that she's not talking about the German philosopher. Truly, the mind shapes and structures experience.

When Andy is being the housewife and planning the cooking, he sometimes shops in Bute Street in South Ken, where he often bumps into Kenny Morris from the Banshees (who we suppose lives somewhere nearby) at the baker's, or comes across Jon Pertwee in the butcher's, in which case he hums the Doctor Who theme quietly under his breath in homage. Or he goes to Waitrose on Gloucester Road, which is just a short walk away. He always wears his leather motorcycle jacket, and his black leather gloves. Once, he gets stopped by a policeman who asks what he's got in his bag. Onions says Andy, and gets told off for being cheeky. But he has. When the policeman looks in the bag he sees onions, green peppers and mince, to make a chilli – Andy's favourite dinner. We think it's the gloves that did it. Who wears black leather biker gloves to go shopping in Waitrose?

So, on our little two-ring cooker, we make lots of lovely dinners. It's years before I learn how to bake a potato, living for so long without