Of Punks and Prostitutes (Everyone Has Their Price)

Linda Ashby with Soo Catwoman and members of the Bromley Contingent 

(L-R: Debbie Juvenile, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Sharon Hayman, and Simon Barker)

Photo by Ray Stevenson (1976)

 

 

I. 

 

According to the official trailer, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is the staggering story of a punk group that not only "held the record business to ransom", "stuck a safety pin through Her Majesty's nose" and "turned the national press into an occupied zone", but also "smuggled a Great Train robber into the top ten and destroyed the myths of their own success" [1]. 

 

All of these things are true: but were the Sex Pistols really a "kamikaze gang of cat burglers and child prostitutes" [2], or is that just a metaphorical mixture of Mclarenesque fantasy and hype? 

 

Leaving aside ideas to do with self-destructive behaviour and criminal theft, let's examine the more disturbing claim that the Sex Pistols - using that term in its wider application to refer not simply to the members of the band, but to all the many colourful, creative, and often fucked-up characters associated with them - might be viewed as child prostitutes ...

 

 

II.  

 

Some readers may recall that back in July 2019, I published a post in which I discussed an idea central to the Swindle project that the music industry ruthlessly exploits the young artists it controls as well as the young fans who buy its products [3].   

 

It doesn't simply make a point about the exploitative nature of the music business from a financial perspective, however. It also explicitly suggests with its language of pimping and prostitution that the music industry has a sleazy underbelly [4]. 

 

Not that Malcolm was adverse to exploiting young flesh himself in order to create a stir and he seemed to genuinely delight in the world of pornography, fetish, and prostitution, as his early T-shirt designs for Sex make clear. 

 

And many of the kids who hung around (or worked in) his store on the Kings Road and later became friends and followers of the band fronted by Johnny Rotten, also seemed drawn to the world of vice; particularly those who fell under the spell of Linda Ashby, a key figure in the early punk scene and a professional dominatrix, skilled in the art of S&M.    

 

 

III.

 

Ashby, with her short blonde hair, distinctive eye makeup, and often dressed in a favourite outfit from The London Leatherman [5], was a member of what we might term the illicit underground; that demi-monde of gay bars, strip clubs, sex shops, drug dens, and houses of ill repute frequented by a wide variety of people, from artists and entertainers, to politicians and bowler-hatted city gents.  

 

She was also one of those rare customers at 430 King's Road who actually had money to spend and, before long, her large central London apartment - just off Green Park - became an important location for the punk elite to meet up and crash out. This included members of the Bromley Contingent, who were famously photographed by Ray Stevenson in 1976 cavorting on the floor having just spray painted her walls with graffiti [6].

 

Of course, being associated with a known prostitute did not make the teens who gathered round her prostitutes themselves, although, everybody's favourite punk blonde, Debbie Wilson (aka Debbie Juvenile), when not following the Sex Pistols or working as a sales assistant at Seditionaries alongside her best friend Tracie O'Keefe [7], wasn't averse - according to Bertie Marshall (aka Berlin) - from turning tricks in Mayfair to clipping mug punters in Soho. 

 

Indeed, Marshall also worked as a rent boy and he described himself and his friends, like Debbie, who were on the game, as a bizarre and exotic pack of whore hounds [8]. 

 

And so, the phrase from The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle trailer with which I opened this post wasn't entirely fictitious, nor referring simply to the manner in which record companies exploit young talent. There was an all too literal sense in which prostitution was an acceptable (and celebrated) aspect of the punk lifestyle - as it was in the contemporary art world at that time [9].          

 

Notes

 

[1-2] Lines from the official trailer to The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980), narrated by the famous British newsreader and commentator on BBC Radio John Snagge. To watch on Youtube, click here.

      Note that this commentary - entitled 'Pistols Propaganda' - can also be found as the B-side of the Sex Pistols' single '(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone' (Virgin Records, 1980), released from the soundtrack of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979).

[3] See the post entitled 'Young Flesh Required: Notes on Punk and Paedophilia' (18 July 2019): click here. 

[4] In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate in Anti-Oedipus (1972), flows of capital and flows of desire belong to one and the same libidinal economy. Thus sexuality, as they say, is everywhere; as much in the boardroom as in the bedroom; "the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate ..." it's all about desiring-production. 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 293.

[5] The London Leatherman (est. 1972), which caters to connoisseurs of a certain taste, significantly influenced the fetish fashions and accessories sold at Sex by McLaren and Westwood and, later, the wider punk scene. Thus, the name Ken Magson arguably deserves to be more widely known than it is: a brief biography can be found on The London Leatherman website: click here. 

      A description of the LP7 Wrestlers Suit favoured by Ashby - and a photo of her wearing such - can also be found on thelondonleatherman.com: click here.

 

[6] Ashby would have regularly encountered members of the Bromley Contingent not just at 430 Kings Road, but also at Louise's, a lesbian club in Soho that they and members of the Sex Pistols liked to frequent and where her girlfriend at the time would often DJ. 

      The photo session I refer to with members of the Bromley Contingent, taken at Ashby's flat by Ray Stevenson in October 1976, featured in the first (and only) issue of the Sex Pistols fanzine Anarchy in the U. K. One of the pictures (cropped) can be seen at the top of this post. 

[7] See the post entitled 'Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks' (4 December 2018): click here, in which I pay my respects to (and express my fondness for) Debbie and Tracie. 

[8] See Marshall's memoir, Berlin Bromley (SAF Publishing Ltd., 2006). 

      Marshall - aka Berlin - was just 15 in 1976 when he and fellow suburban misfits Susan Ballion (Sioxsie Sioux), Steven Bailey (Steve Severin), and Simon Barker (Six) began to hang around 430 King's Road and follow the Sex Pistols. They formed the core of the Bromley Contingent and, along with a small handful of others, can be regarded as those whom one cultural commentator at the time described as the "'extreme ideological wing of the Peculiars'". 

      See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 329, who quotes Peter York writing in an article entitled 'Them', in Harpers & Queen (October, 1976).     

[9] I'm referring here to the Prostitution exhibition (1976) by the performance art collective founded by Genesis P-Orridge - COUM Transmissions - at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which included (amongst other delights) pornographic images, used sanitary products, bloody bandages, rusty knives, and dirty syringes. The opening night show featured a stripper and prostitutes and punks were invited to mingle with the gallery audience; this included members of the Bromley Contingent, some of whom - including Debbie - got their pictures in the papers. 

      Perhaps not surprisingly, the show - which ran for just over a week - caused press outrage and debate in parliament; one Tory MP described all those involved as the wreckers of civilisation. Despite criticism from almost every quarter, the ICA director, Ted Little, defended the show which is still regarded to this day - almost 50 years later - as one of the most controversial in both the ICA's history and that of British contemporary art, challenging moral and aesthetic values in a manner similar to McLaren's Sex Pistols and obliging him to thereafter up his game as a provocateur. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'We Are All Prostitutes' by The Pop Group (Rough Trade, 1979): click here.  

    

Tales from Storyville 1: Shame Upon Those Who Think Badly of It (With a Note on Tony Jackson)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

For those who don't know, Storyville is not simply the title of an excellent series of BBC TV documentaries made by various international filmmakers. It was also the red-light district of New Orleans, established by municipal ordinance to officially regulate (and profit from) prostitution between 1897 and 1917.

The ordinance originally designated a thirty-eight block area to be known as The District, but it was soon universally referred to as Storyville, after Sidney Story, a city alderman, who wrote the guidelines to control activities within this zone of tolerance. Story, whose big idea was to replicate the port cities of Europe that legalised prostitution, was not amused by this. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Storyville soon became the most popular - and swingin' - part of town [1], both with locals and tourists who were able to purchase Blue Books to familiarise themselves with the district and give an indication of what girls and services were being offered at which houses (prices, however, were not included). These guides, priced 25c, and available from saloons, barbershops, and street corner vendors, were inscribed with the French motto (more usually associated with the British Order of the Garter): Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Although the brothels employed black, white, and mixed race prostitutes, African-American visitors were barred from legally purchasing services within them, demonstrating how, at this point in time, racial concerns (and racism) trumped even commerce [2]. Despite this restriction on a potential source of income, by 1900 Storyville was fast-becoming New Orleans's largest centre of revenue; the world's oldest profession proving itself to still be the most lucrative.        

So why did it all come crashing down in 1917?

The answer, of course, has to do with the puritanism of wartime leaders, who suddenly rediscover their moral backbones: the US Navy had sailors located in New Orleans and the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, did not want them to have any distractions before being sent to fight. And so he pressed to have the whorehouses of Storyville closed and for prostitution to be recriminalised throughout the entire city. This included even the famous Mahogany Hall, an establishment employing forty women run by Lulu White, which drew its clientele from amongst the wealthiest and most influential men in Louisiana.

Baker - with the support of the American Social Hygiene Organization - is on record saying of the young men he was about to send overseas in order that they might have the (dubious) honour of killing and dying for their country: 'I want these boys armed and clothed by ther government; but I also want them to have an invisible armour ... a moral and intellectual armour for their protection overseas.' 

Whilst the New Orleans Mayor, Martin Behrman, and others strongly protested the closure - You can make prostitution illegal, but you can't make it unpopular - Storyville officially shut up knocking shop at midnight on November 12, 1917.

It continued, however, in a much subdued (and, thanks to Prohibition, sober) manner to be a centre of entertainment throughout the following decade. But essentially the wild times were finished and almost all the buildings in the district were demolished during the 1930s to make way for public housing. Today, there are just three saloons still standing from the Storyville period.  

Notes

[1] Many of the more more upmarket brothels would hire a piano player and sometimes a small ragtime band. Thus, although jazz did not originate in Storyville, it flourished there as in the rest of the city and it was where many visitors first encountered this new style of music, associating it thereafter with vice. Musicians who emerged from Storyville include Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Tony Jackson, the latter of whom would become the most popular (and flamboyant) entertainer in New Orleans. As Louis Balfour reminds us, even fellow musicians conceded that Jackson was the hottest performer in town - which is nice. He was also the best-dressed and many attempted to copy his style; the argument being that whilst you couldn't hope to play the piano as well as him, at least you could try to look as good. 
       
Many remember Jackson today as the writer of the song 'Pretty Baby' (1916), the original lyrics of which were said to refer to his male lover of the time. This much-covered song later inspired the 1978 film of the same title, directed by Lois Malle, and starring Brooke Shields as a 12-year-old prostitute (Violet), working in a Storyville brothel: click here for a recent post on this.   

[2] Even the Blue Books, which alphabetically listed the names and addresses of all the prostitutes of Storyville, separated them on the basis of race; going so far as to categorise girls with one great-grandparent of colour (i.e., who were only one-eighth black by descent) as octoroon.   

To read part two of this post - on the photos of Storyville taken by E. J. Bellocq - click here. 

To read part three - on the poetry of Natasha Trethewey - click here. 

Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt

"All is dust and lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. 

Men are mere stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail 
or are played out, I put them scornfully aside."

I.

Love is blind. But when a woman gets into her 30s and sees her looks are starting to fade and hair beginning to whiten, it's only natural that she begins to doubt the veracity of this expression ...


II.

Eugénie Brécourt was born in Paris, in the spring of 1837. She was fated to become one of France's most notorious women; a true femme fatale who broke many hearts and ruined the lives of numerous men, before finaly ending up behind prison bars ...  

Neglected as a child, she was adopted by a nobelwoman who took pity on her. Her parents, however, reclaimed their daughter when she was eleven and immediately put her to work selling gingerbread on the streets. At seventeen, the kindly Baroness found her a job at a silk factory and agreed to once more care for the young woman. She even stumped up a dowry of 12,000 francs when Jeanne decided to marry the local grocer.

Unfortunately, married life didn't suit Jeanne and after a rumoured affair with an army officer, her husband left her and she went missing ... When she reappeared, having apparently tried her hand (and failed) at acting, literature and journalism, it was as a prostitute calling herself Jeanne de la Cour.     

I don't know the secret of her deadly charm, but she obviously had something; one of her lovers committed suicide; another died by taking an overdose of Spanish fly; a third was taken to hospital in suspicious circumstances, where he, too, eventually died.

Brécourt was completely indifferent to their suffering and something of her attitude towards men can be gleaned from the quotation above with which I open this post; it's a libertine philosophy that has a distinctly Sadean feel to it.

To be fair, working as a prostitute had also taken a toll on Jeanne's health too and in 1865 she was obliged to enter an asylum, suffering from hysterical seizures and a loss of speech. Hospital records describe her as being of dark complexion, with very expressive eyes. Although clearly of a nervous disposition and prone to fantasy, she was also said to be agreeable.

After several months, she was discharged though advised by her doctors to spend time resting in the spa town of Vittel, in northeastern France. Here, Jeanne claimed the title of Baroness for herself and nursed a wounded pigeon back to health. She also determined to find a permanent benefactor who would secure her future, having no intention of ending her days destitute, which, alas, was the fate of many a woman in her position.

Enter Rene de la Roche ... 

III.

Roche was a wealthy young man who had the misfortune to meet Jeanne at a ball in Paris, in 1873. He quickly became infatuated by the woman 16 years his senior and by the end of the year they had entered into a fateful relationship ...

Whilst Roche was away on a six month trip to Egypt in 1876, Jeanne went to visit a fellow prostitute with a lover who was blind not only to her moral shortcomings, but who, being visually impaired, incapable also of witnessing the very obvious signs of her physical decline. This got Jeanne thinking and on Roche's return to France she hatched a plan to deprive him of his sight.

Jeanne managed to persuade an old friend from her childhood days to help her, having told him (falsely) that Roche was the son of a man who had done her wrong. As arranged, Nathalis Gaudry carried out the diabolical assault in January 1877, throwing sulphuric acid in the face of the innocent victim.

Roche completely lost the sight of one eye and that of the other was significantly damaged; he was also, of course, terribly disfigured. Just like the injured pigeon, Roche was now made dependent upon Jeanne's loving care and, initially, neither he nor anyone else suspected her role in the matter.

Jeanne undertook the duty of care with every appearance of genuine devotion. Roche was consumed with gratitude for her untiring kindness; thirty nights she spent by his bedside and it was his wish that she alone should nurse him.

Gradually, however, his friends and family became suspicious and increasingly concerned by Brécourt's behaviour; frustrating, for example, their attempts to see or communicate with him. Eventually, the police were alerted and opened an investigation. Despite brazenly informing them that they would never find any evidence against her, they did just that and six months after the attack, both she and Gaudry found themselves standing in the dock.

Brécourt was defended by one of France's top criminal lawyers and her case aroused great public interest. Several famous faces and well-known writers sat in the public gallery to observe and record the proceedings. She was, if you like, the Roxie Hart of her day - although, unlike Roxie, Jeanne wasn't acquitted.

Having been found guilty, she was, rather, sentenced to fifteen years penal service; her accomplice got off with just five years jail time, having pleaded guilty but with mitigating circumstances - namely, being under the spell of a woman who was part-witch, part-seductress. He told his interrogators that he was madly in love with Brécourt and would have done anything she asked: Ses désirs sont des ordres!

What, if anything does this case teach us? I'm not sure. Some might cite it as evidence that the female of the species is more deadly than the male, but that's just a piece of sadomasochistic fantasy, isn't it?

Note: readers interested in this case might also find the following two posts to their tastes: the first in memory of Cora Pearl and the second in memory of Laura Bell: click here and here respectively.

 

Ding Dong! In Memory of Laura Bell (Queen of London Whoredom)

Detail from a portrait of Laura Thistlethwayte (née Bell) 
by Richard Buckner (1871)

"She had a small doll-like face, piquant and provocative, big blue eyes, a strawberry-and-cream complexion, 

cascades of glorious golden hair, the most shapely pair of shoulders in London, and a soft, persuasive voice. 

She was, in short, well-armed for her attack upon male susceptibility."

Irish-born beauty Laura Bell is a famous example not only of a good girl gone bad, but a bad girl discovering religion and becoming an ardent preacher against vice. I'm not sure which is the most interesting of these moral phenomena; the fall into sin, or the adoption of Victorian values and bourgeois conventions. Let's investigate ...    

Bell was born in Dublin, in 1829, but grew up in the village of Glenavy, Co. Antrim. As a bored teenager with something of a wild streak, she decided to leave home and find work as a shop girl in Belfast, supplementing her meagre earnings by also working as a prostitute. Finding that she derived more pleasure - and certainly made more money - from whoring rather than retail, Bell decided to move to Dublin and establish herself as a courtesan. Among her illicit lovers was the famous surgeon and author Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar).

Having successfully learnt all the tricks of her trade - and still only twenty years of age - Bell decided to head to London and try her luck amongst some of the richest and most powerful noblemen in Europe. Eventually, she would be known as The Queen of London Whoredom and ride daily around Hyde Park in a gilt carriage drawn by two white horses, with a young pageboy wearing a black and yellow striped waistcoat sitting proudly behind her. She wanted to cut a figure as a woman of sex, style, and substance and this she certainly succeeded in.      

It was whilst in the Royal Park that she met the Nepalese Prime Minister, Jung Bahadur Rana, who was immediately captivated by her and installed her in a beautiful house in Belgravia, showering Bell with outrageously expensive gifts during the three-month period they spent together.* Before he returned to Nepal, he presented Bell with a diamond ring and the promise that he would always be there for her should she ever need his assistance.

When Bell wrote to him in 1857, asking that he send forces to help the British crush the Indian Mutiny, it was probably not quite what he'd had in mind. Still, a promise is a promise - and Bell enclosed the diamond ring with her letter to remind him of it - so he duly sent troops. One wonders what other woman - apart from Queen Victoria - could've stepped into world political history in such a decisive manner at this time ...? 

I'm not sure when (or why) Bell chose to quit her lucrative and adventurous life as a courtesan; perhaps after she married Capt. Augustus Frederick Thistlethwayte in 1852 and moved into a new home in Grosvenor Square. Or perhaps after she found old time religion in 1856 and started referring to herself as God's Ambassadress.

From this point on she mostly hosted evangelical tea parties for high society (rather than orgies) and wanted to save London's prositutes (rather than reign over them)**; eventually forming a very close and long-lasting friendship with William Gladstone, who also had a thing for rescuing fallen women.

Because there is no God - or, if you prefer, because God is a cunt with a cruel sense of humour - just when Bell was at her most righteous and telling everyone who would listen about His Love, her husband - who liked to sermon the servants by firing his pistol into the ceiling - accidently shot and killed himself, leaving her a heartbroken and lonely widow for her final years.***

Bell died, seven years after Thistlethwayte's fatal accident, at her home in West Hampstead, in 1894. Many of those who knew her at the end of her life had no idea of how notorious a figure she'd been in her prime and most obituaries made only veiled references to her life as a prostitute, stressing instead her charity work and kindness to animals. 

Notes

* To give you some idea of just how outrageously expensive these gifts were - including the house in fashionable Belgravia - it's believed that Rana spent in the region of £250,000 on Bell during their brief affair; that's £21 million in today's money, making her one of the most expensive rides in history. 

** Having said this, there's evidence to suggest that Bell may have continued to have the odd affair; including one, for example, with the artist Edwin Landseer (best known for sculpting the lions in Trafalgar Square). 

*** Actually, this isn't quite the case; Bell's marriage was not a happy one and she and her husband had largely lived separate lives; she hosting lavish parties in London, while he spent his time hunting in Scotland. One of the main bones of contention between them was the fact that Bell liked to spend way beyond her means and had no concept of living sensibly on an allowance. By 1870, she owed her creditiors £25,000, much to Thistlethwayte's chagrin.

Those interested in the lives of famous 19thC prostitutes might like to read a sister post to this one on Cora Pearl: click here. See also 'Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt': click here.

    

That Voodoo That You Do

Image: Santeria Church of the Orishas

When you see a lurid and salacious news headline containing the words black magic and Brazilian transsexuals, it's difficult not to have one's curiosity piqued; especially when the story unfolds not in Haiti or South America, but in Spain, and provides further evidence of how global migration (or Völkerchaos) is bringing unexpected forms of cultural diversity onto the streets of our towns and cities.       

According to reports, Spanish police arrested 13 members of a multi-national trafficking ring on suspicion of using Santería - a voodoo-like religion infused with elements of Catholicism - along with more mundane methods to coerce fifteen young transwomen into prostitution and drug dealing. 

It sounds uniquely bizarre. But, as a matter of fact, this is not the first time that migrants have been smuggled into Europe and then forced into a life of crime by gang leaders claiming to possess occult powers. And, sadly, I don't suppose it'll be the last ...

Welcome, then, to the new normal of sex slaves and raw chicken hearts; a reality that also incorporates grooming gangs, child brides, bushmeat, and halal slaughter. And I think to myself ...