Dreamscape – Toyah Willcox Fansite

In memory of a woman who did it her way, a woman who really cared about animals (especially cats), a woman who was a punk icon… Rest in Peace Jordan.

English woes – Derek Jarman’s apocalyptic visions of England are as relevant as ever

In The Last of England, a collection of autobiographical sketches, diary entries and script notes published in 1987, Derek Jarman offered a ferocious state of the nation address:

Young bigots flaunting an excess of ignorance. Little England. Criminal behaviour in the police force. Little England. Jingoism at Westminster. Little England. Small town folk gutted by ring roads. Little England. Distressed housing estates cosmeticised in historicism. Little England. The greedy destruction of the countryside. Little England.

It’s a passage that encapsulates many of Jarman’s most persistent concerns: national identity, reactionary politics, the representation of the past, architecture, landscape and ecology.

… Jarman’s shoots were renowned for their sense of camaraderie. Toyah Willcox, who starred in Jubilee, said, ‘the whole thing about Derek was that he allowed everyone to learn. He was the most fantastic teacher. There was no elitism, there were no closed doors.’ The emphasis placed on collaboration, thrift and imagination was partly a matter of necessity. For the majority of his career, his films had tiny budgets, though public money from the BFI and Channel 4 was forthcoming from his fourth feature onwards. Jarman’s cinematic ambitions were, however, constantly hindered by battles with producers and funding bodies. ‘The money required to make a film, let alone a consistent cinematic career, can evaporate like snow in June,’ he noted.

• Continue reading at Apollo Magazine.

Interview: Jordan Mooney : the iconic face of punk on then and now and Star Trek

Certainly personifying and symbolizing the face of “Punk” from a female point of view, “Jordan” caused a sophisticated anarchy that revolutionized equality in music for women at a time when it pretended to be a male profession. Beyond that she was, and still is a, heroine who dares to evoke the threat of imagination. Jordan defied sensibility and at the same time defined it.

Celebrated for her audacious fashion sense, her musical abilities, and her courageous and tantalizing artistic view, Jordan was privy to the most sacred Punk bands to ever emerge, including a close relationship with “The Sex Pistols”. She was also the very first manager of “Adam and the Ants”. She had a supreme role in Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s SEX boutique, and starred as the lead in one of the most impacting films of the time, Derek Jarman’s ” Jubilee”.

• Continue reading at Louder Than War. View details on Jordan in Conversation, with John Robb, taking place at Home Cinema, Manchester on Saturday 21st January, here.

The Electric Palace in Hastings, East Sussex is holding a Jubilee evening in March, with a screening of the film and a Q&A with Amyl Nitrite herself, Pamela Rooke, aka Jordan.

Fri 24 Mar – 7.30pm JUBILEE (18)

Derek Jarman, 1978, 100mins, UK. Plus Q&A hosted by Ted Polhemus with Jordan aka Pamela Rooke.

Queen Elizabeth I is transported through time from 1578 to 1978, where she sees what has become of her once glorious kingdom: law and order have broken down, punks roam the streets, decay eats away at the fabric of society. With a cast featuring Adam Ant and Toyah Willcox in a vivid postapocalyptic urban landscape, this is the ultimate punk movie. Bar serving special seasonal drinks after the screening. All tickets £10.

• Visit the Electric Palace website. See a list of forthcoming screenings/events via their downloadable brochure.

A rare interview with Jordan, punk’s enigmatic frontwoman

Working with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren, performing with the Sex Pistols and acting for Derek Jarman – Jordan Mooney reflects on a life of iconoclasm

With her legacy being celebrated in new tome Fashion + Music (out now, by Laurence King Publishing), punk legend Jordan discusses some of her most significant moments with the book’s author, Katie Baron.

Still one of punk’s most-fetishised poster women, Jordan Mooney’s pivotal role at the nexus of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s riotous (Sex and Seditionaries-era) world was vital to the looks of bands like the Sex Pistols and Adam and the Ants. She’s often immortalised in grainy black-and-white photography, as a severe vision of bleach-blonde-beehived, Cleopatra-eyed, latex-sheathed, fuck-you defiance, yet, there is far more to her influence than straightforward anarchic provocation. Rebellion was actually something of a by-product. Art (“I often described myself as a living work of art”), personal expression and a militant desire to champion the outlier were all at the real crux of her infectious perspective. As punk celebrates turning 40 this year, Jordan revisits her iconoclastic life.

At 14 you changed your name – why?

Jordan Mooney: I truly felt like I’d been labelled the wrong thing, like a kind of name dysmorphia.

You were suspended from school for your haircut, and famously given your own spot in a first-class carriage on the train to avoid your outfits provoking outrage in fellow commuters – do you think dressing the way you did was an act of bravery?

Jordan Mooney: People often refer to the name and the things that I wore as demonstrating bravery and shaking things up, but while I showed off to the best of my ability it wasn’t about bravery because I didn’t care what people thought. I’ve always been extremely comfortable in my own skin. It’s like being in an art movement – someone has to start it.

• Continue reading at Dazed.

Wishing a very Happy 60th Birthday to, punk icon and Jubilee legend, Jordan – aka Pamela Rooke.

Jubilee is showing tonight at the Rio Cinema in Dalston, London.

The midnight movie lives on in Dalston!
SAT 9 Jun • Late Night | JUBILEE (18) 11.30pm

(UK 1977) dir. Derek Jarman. 100m. Jenny Runacre, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Orlando, Ian Charleson, Richard O’Brien.

Celebrate the 2012 Jubilee with Derek Jarman’s safety-pin and barbed-wire vision of a 1977 London in ruins (all burning prams and castrated policemen) which combines a meditation on English mysticism guided by a time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I and a wild ‘n’ crazy tale of the rampages of a gang of personality punk psychos. Soundtrack contributions come from Adam and the Ants , Wayne County and the Electric Chairs , Chelsea, Siouxie and the Banshees, the Slits and Brian Eno. Rule Britannia!

An interesting article on punk in ‘The Independent’ yesterday. It includes a gallery of great photos, featuring rare shots of Adam Ant, Jordan, Billy idol, Little Nell, Siouxsie etc, plus Derek Jarman at the premiere of Jubilee.

Anarchy in the UK: The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 was also the year that punk hit
Photographer Simon Barker was there to capture it. Michael Bracewell opens his archive.

Punk lasted in the UK for little more than 14 months, between 1976 and the Jubilee Summer of 1977. Thirty-five years later, in another Jubilee year, how might we regard the intense, chaotic, moody, surreal, futuristic-yet-Victorian aesthetics of the movement? In answer to this question, photographs taken at the time by Simon Barker, also known as Six, go a long way to articulating the ways in which a phase of youth culture attained the impact of a manifesto – while never quite losing the cool allure and faintly slapstick temperament of its confrontational amateurism.

• Continue reading, at ‘The Independent’, here.