If you don't get why I love this artist's work, we cannot be cool
So, my partner, Chi Chi, is reading 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You by Tony Wilson, the recently deceased yet immortal Mancunian television personality and, more importantly, one-time proprietor of Factory Records. Cheech keeps relaying to me humorous anecdotes and anarchic folk tales, reminding me why Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Party People is one of my favorite movies. The movie’s subject was post-modern before music biopics were post-modern.
However, there are two things I’ll point out as unfortunate about the movie that documents Tony Wilson’s life (in which he is but a minor character) and they both involve the absence of women.
1) Where is ESG? They were a New York-based punk-funk sister-act that Martin Hannett (the label’s go-to producer) helped commit to record and who opened the The Haçienda, Factory’s night club, the womb of Madchester. But more later. I have a feeling we’ll be talking more about them in subsequent blog entries.
2) More importantly, where is Linder Sterling, a Mancunian art student and leader of overlooked post-punk band, Ludus? She was circulating in the scene in the late 1970s, around the same time that Factory was signing A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, and a little band called Joy Division (they don’t need a link, do they . . . oh, okay).
Hmm. Maybe her absence from the movie has something to do with how she proclivity to wear black dildos and raw meat in Ludus’s performances (despite being a vegetarian — the lengths some will go to for art!). Missed opportunity, Winterbottom and company. This imagery sounds like cinematic gold to me. (Note: For more on this, I recommend reading Lucy O’Brien’s chapter “The Woman Punk Made Me” in Punk Rock: So What?)
Anyway, Linder was there too, I swear. She got her start at Manchester Polytechnic, piecing together collages out of magazines, suturing pornographic images, sports, shiny cars, and even shinier appliances into something thoroughly punk and thoroughly British. Something like this.
The only proper way to watch polo
However, she got her start putting this little bit of business together for the Buzzcocks. Observe the cover she made for their single Orgasm Addict. Maybe you’ve seen it before.
Slippery female bodies and irons, together at last
Anyway, she’s awesome. In addition to music and art, she dabbled in making accessories. She’d fashion earrings out of coat-hanger wire and lint, dipping them in glue and red paint so that they’d resemble used tampons. Appropriately, she called these pieces “menstrual jewelry.”
And even though she’s become a part of history, as all of punk has, she’s still vital and working today. She’s welcome to any hypothetical dinner party I throw, as long as she throws a tampon into the (veggie) shepherd’s pie.
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