From left: Kent, James and Nylon. Please advise if you are the photographer or know their identity.
Artist/thinker Judy Nylon has sent me this great shot taken at London punk haven The Roxy in the spring of 1977.
Nylon is captured in the act of copping a light from New Musical Express writer Nick Kent in the company of Brian James, guitarist with The Damned.
Front of one of Malcolm McLaren’s own Smoking Boy shirts. The image is repeated on the back.
Nylon is wearing one of the pink jersey cap sleeved polo-neck shirts featuring the image of a smoking boy, appropriated in a typically disruptive and perverse act from the odious Boys Express magazine by the late Malcolm McLaren and sold through SEX, the outlet he operated at 430 King’s Road with Vivienne Westwood (by the time this photograph was taken it had been transformed into Seditionaries).
Photographer Kate Simon and Chrissie Hynde (lifting the front of her mohair jumper from Sex), London, 1976. (c) Joe Stevens
Nylon suspects it is one of the shirts McLaren gave to photographer Joe Stevens and worn at times by her musician friend Chrissie Hynde. As related here, when McLaren came up with the design and its variants to promote his new charges the Sex Pistols in the early spring of 1976, he gave them to “cool-looking people” (in his words) to help spread the word.
There is no doubting Nylon’s cool, here or at any other time.
In The Roxy image Kent appears to be wearing an embroidered black/silver silk stripe jacket from, I would guess, Granny Takes A Trip, his favourite boutique, also in the King’s Road at 488. And James is sticking to the leather jacket familiar from performances and promotional shoots during the early days of The Damned.
Nylon does not know the identity of the photographer. If it was you, or you can help, please do not hesitate to make contact.
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