THE FACE2: PERSONAL CONTRIBUTIONS.

Having digested Paul Gorman's history book, THE GENERALIST decided to try and track down all the contributions I made to the mag over what period.

My name was on the masthead [from Issue 10/ Feb1981] for several years as one of the many freelance contributors. I was very much an outrider, contributing shorter pieces to the Intro and review sections. Whatever reputation I had at this time came mainly from my work at the NME as 'Dick Tracy' where I'd staked out some territory. I got on well with Nick Logan but I was never one of his star writers. It was great to hang out at the various Face offices [Mortimer Street and The Old Laundry] and to pitch in stories to Paul Rambali and Lesley White.

I wrote three features that made it into print:



⧫A three-page piece on Montgomery Clift - now one of this blog's perennial and most popular posts [THE FACE No 9/Jan 1981]










⧫ An exclusive feature on the great Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski based on original interviews. Full text on this blog.

[THE FACE No 76/August 1986]


⧫ A significant feature on the fashion designer Katherine Hamnett which helped establish her radical credentials, reprinted for the first time in FACE3 post to follow.

I was also selected by Nick to travel to Paris and represent The Face at the Actuel office for the European issue, organised by the late Jean-François Bizot (1944 – 2007). See FACE 4 post

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PREVIEW SPREAD ON 'RAGING BULL' [THE FACE No 10/Feb 1981]

THE FACE 16/August 1981]

THE RIGHT STUFF  

" . . the world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this IT, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way."
THE Right Stuff is the mythic essence of America and who better to write about it than New Journalist Tom Wolfe, who has spent an entire career observing the social mores, the trends, the styles of USA as viewed from the perspective of bizarre social, private groups like bikers, surfers and acid heads.Wolfe may be the only living writer who can handle fashion and technology with equal ease. He observes the cut of an astronaut's cuff while delineating the technological statistics of a Saturn launcher. He revels in the incongruity of it all, the specialised language: the words, baby, the words.

In essence, this shimmery paperback is a history of the American drive into space, from the postwar world of the test pilots to the end of the Mercury programme, ending before the Man on the Moon became reality. For those who lived through this Space Race, here is a completely new view of events, a startling revisioning of information previously only made public through the sanitary sieve of LIFE magazine, which airbrushed out all warts and blemishes.

This is the only book that will actually give you the experience of an orbital flight round this planet, in a superb chapter that can only have been constructed from endless hours of conversation. Or was it?

Wolfe's technique is flawless, his prose propelling you along like high-octane fuel—and there are no joins. Here is a class performer at work, a showman with a serious bent. He lays bare what it meant to be an astronaut. The Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving cycle. What it feels like to inhale pure oxygen to cut through a hangover, and then charge out into the stratosphere to break the sound barrier in prototype needleplanes that bend and strain. What it feels like to be strapped in a centrifuge, spun at unbelievable speeds, with clusters of wires up your rectum. What it feels like to be sitting in an armchair which fits like a glove, sitting on top of an ocean of explosive fuel and pointing at the stars.

Reading Tom Wolfe in full flight is an EXPERIENCE. He lights an afterburner under your imagination—and the korker is it's all true. Don't miss this.

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THE FACE No 21/January 1982

Sadat is shot. The Pope is shot. Reagan is shot. The Yorkshire Ripper is caught and caged. Operation Bright Star sees American paratroopers playing war games in Egypt. Russians stage massive invasion rehearsals on the shores of the Baltic. Thousands die and are dying in the deadly and frightening Spanish cooking oil disaster. Youth riots in Zurich, Berlin and Amsterdam are followed by Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side. The Springboks trigger riots in New Zealand. CND grows and grows and grows. The dole queue grows and grows and grows. Bob Marley dies, a cadet tries to shoot the queen, and the Royal Wedding brings millions of royalists onto the streets. Abel Gance and William Holden die. One by one the hunger strikers die and bombs return to London. Afghanistan grows into Russia's Vietnam. Libya plays chicken games with the White House. Europeans discover themselves to be living in the next nuclear target zone and take to the streets. The Oi! cult meets the Orange People. El Salvador. The deathly duo Haig and Weinburger. The year of Tony Benn and the SDP. Solidarity and the Space Shuttle. The Commander of Nato forces in Europe misses terrorist bomb death by inches. Voyager has a close encounter with Saturn. Lech Waleska keeps on shining. Meg leaves the motel. 1982 promises to be exciting. ■ DICK TRACY 

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THE FACE No 30/October 1982 was a good issue for me: three stories in the Intro Section and a full spread at the back of the magazine which I was proud of . Great layout. 

One of the highlights of the financially ill-starred WOMAD festival was African Expo, a blend of traditional and modern pieces in all mediums out of which Martin Lovis' pictures on the South African regime stood as one of the best contributions. They force the spectator to face this fascist reality, to see with new eyes a situation which time and familiarity have accustomed us to. Lovis' skill at blending imagery and his development as an artist stem from three sources; his training as a photo-retoucher in a South London printing company, his time at Bromley Art College where he discovered colour theory and four years spent working in advertising and marketing. This combined experience enables him to produce seamless paintings in a photo-realist style. Lovis, now 28, lives in Ladbroke Grove but we met in the dim basement bar of the Africa Centre where the sound of Soul and Lovis' naturally soft speaking voice combined to thwart detailed enquiry. However some facts did emerge: notably that all the proceeds from the sale of reproductions of the 30 paintings he produced on South Africa during 1979-80 have been donated to Medico International, a Frankfurt-based organisation which promotes basic health programs in the Third World. Anxious not to be dubbed as solely a political artist, Lovis' work will move in new directions in the future. He has produced book jackets and has just completed the cover for a Zounds compilation album on Rough Trade. Living in the material world means paying the phone bill. Art directors take note.  

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Bert Stern was at one time the highest paid photographer in the world, producing startling advertising shots and personality profiles, fashion portfolios and photo exclusives that were original, imaginative and distinctive. He wanted to make a movie before he was 30 so he took film cameras to the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival and the result is called 'Jazz On A Summer's Day', the godfather of all music documentaries, rated by Scorsese and Altman as one of the best films ever made. Featuring the first footage of Chuck Berry alongside Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong and a host of lesser-knowns, Stern took his skill as a photographer and applied it to the motion picture with great force. Looked at 25 years later it has a modern feel and retains its power intact. Packed with incidental detail, beautifully observed, it stands as one of the great music films.

Stern went on to photograph Twiggy in 1967, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Marisa Berenson and Marilyn Monroe- his pictures of her being featured in the recently published 'The Last Sitting' (Orbis £12.50). He was a patient of the legendary Dr Feelgood, who gave him B-12 shots with amphetamine and is credited as being the man who gave Cary Grant LSD. His empire collapsed, everyone thought he was dead, but his fortunes have recently revived. [Stern died on June 26, 2013. See Wikipedia]

THE FACE No 32/ Dec 1982

A less lucky legendary American is featured in 'Lenny Bruce Without Tears', a startling black and white film compiled from newsreels, interviews, snatches of his club act and intimate footage - spliced together with talking heads like Kenneth Tynan, Paul Krassner and Malcolm Muggeridge. If you've never seen Lenny in action this will hit you between the eyes. It's a powerful and disturbing document from the underground which raises the question as to where the radical protesters of the  Eighties are hiding. Both films are available through Nikon Video, an independent distribution company. Ask for them at your local video dealer. You will not be disappointed.'

THE FACE3: DRESSING FOR THE APOCALYPSE / KATHERINE HAMNETT

THE FACE No 41/September 1983.
 Interview conducted July 6th 1983

I am not in the habit of interviewing fashion designers but Katherine Hamnett sounded enough like Dashiell Hammett to interest even the most hard-boiled scribe. The fact is that when I read her rap about her next collection being inspired by the women at Greenham Common I had to know more.

Ever since, I keep running into outlying branches of the Katherine Hamnett fan club. They are everywhere and mention of her name inspires an enthusiasm in the unlikeliest people. In person she is a blast, a burst of energy and ideas, self-deprecating and autocratic by turns, loose and with a sense of humour.

She is also rated internationally alongside Yves St Laurent and Kenzo and cannot produce enough clothes to keep up with the demand. This woman is HOT and very central. She runs a thriving export business on the products of her imagination and she is anti-nuclear and anti-pollution. Her language is a mixture of the London of Mary Quant ("fabby French cigs") and the argot of advanced science ("doing a quick scan").

She says: "Now I'm 35 this is the age when you are in your strength. One's got to start doing something. When I feel good now I'm so angry."

Her workplace is in Islington, a two-floor design studio/production office behind a metal yard, reached by ascending an iron staircase. The decor is white with black rubber floors. Katherine isn't here yet so I take a seat and browse through the press clippings.

She was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1948. Daughter of an air attache, she grew up in European embassies, Cheltenham Ladies College and graduated to fashion design at St. Martin's School of Art under Bernard Nevi11. She freelanced for two years, then established a company called Tuttabankem with Ann Buck. Unfortunately her husband owned half the company and, when their marriage split, so did the firm. She freelanced further afield for a while in Rome, Paris and Hong Kong until her son William was born in 1976. Hibernation in the household lasted three years but in 1979 she was forced by circumstances back to work since when she's gone from strength to strength.

Suddenly here she is coming up the iron stairs, arms by her side, tall and elegant, wearing an African print duster coat with matching tapered trousers of her own design. We sit down on two old airline chairs in the middle of the room and pretend that there is a bubble round us so none of the other ten people in the room can hear what we're saying.

She's already checked me out on the phone with someone to see whether my affidavits stand up to scrutiny. She sends out for Special Brew and the conversation begins. I want to know why she thinks a designer is in a position of power.

"I suppose it means you dress the elite. You could say intelligent, powerful people wear our clothes, wear our message — in the end, that's what it boils down to. You can decide what they're going to look like basically and that means a lot. If they're read off totally as the clothes they're wearing, as the person they are, you're creating their persona.

"So I say let's make peace and ecology very fashionable. Everybody thinks, What can I do? You look at the situation in the world at the moment, the politicans aren't really representing the people. You've got a chance to let people represent themselves to an extent. If you change the face, if you change what it looks like, people are going to feel it really, aren't they. That's where I think my area of responsibility lies.

"I think you are in a position of power that you can just come out with a look which changes the world for six months on a certain level."

That's quite an opening speech but she apologises and says she'll get into it in a minute. She is fascinated by the relationship between the clothes you wear and the attitudes you adopt. She says: "What you represent in your clothes is your values — what you think is nice, what you think is beautiful, where you'd like to be at. Your hair can be wrong but if your clothes are saying that, you will be saying that. It's like a disguise isn't it but it's more than that. It's a complete statement about where you stand in the materialist world."

For Katherine fashion comes out of the ground, from the collective subconscious which she tunes into and sketches out the results like automatic writing. She mentions some research she read at college which has obviously stuck in her mind by a guy called Stephen Black. He showed his subjects a range of fashion garments, put them in deep trance hyponosis and then told them what they were wearing and asked them how they felt. The result was a flood of precise feelings.

She obviously relishes the business of fashion. "The reason we've been successful," she says, "is we don't just do anything. There's a terrific discipline it's got to fit into. I work very much with applied psychology, market research and then you have to think what you can bear to see. One extraordinary garment is marvellous but you can't imagine selling two thousand of them because it would look stupid.

"So it's a particular kind of garment you've got to produce which is going to look different on anybody, that you can wear different ways, that different age groups can wear. You can dress it up or you can dress it down. You can look one thing one week and another thing another. It fits everybody — which is quite difficult. That's really what's quite nice about designing clothes for mass production, the fact that it's so hard."

She works fairly constantly, always planning a year ahead always thinking and sketching. When an idea reappears three or four times she begins to shape it up, works with a pattern cutter to produce a prototype which is then "shaved down" until it's right. When everyone's happy it goes into sampling, it's shown, orders are taken and it goes into production.

Her work is very hot in the USA and Italy but over here she keeps her outlets limited because she doesn't want to see them all over the Kings Road. They would become stale and odious.. She is trying to be good, free, unrepressed, flexible, honest and eager. She admits that clothing is a youth thing and that the older you get the harder it becomes but she says "our backup is to try and produce what was English quality. Down to the nail!"

And here we have one of the taproots of Katherine Hamnett's beliefs and ideas, her concern for this country and for its future. "My father was in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp for three years. His two brothers —fighter pilots — were killed in the war. Without being sentimental those people gave their lives for what they considered was this country. Look what's happening to it now. I feel because they're dead, if I am to go on working it's because of a debt I owe them.

"Britain is one of the most uncomfortable places to he. I think it is repressive and people are very tense here. At the same time it's also the most creative place to be. Something's got to happen because it's either going to go positive or negative."

On the positive side she ranks Malcolm McLaren, a "great Englishman. He's completely inverting the system and they're lying there with their legs open, lapping it up." She obviously shares his fascinations and obsessions but brings a different insight to bear. She would have voted SDP if she hadn't moved and lost her voting papers but realises now they've got no strength.

The daughter of very ambitious upper middle class parents, she was aware of the class system from an early age and of the international power trips that go on. She says: "People think there's three classes; it's more like 300. In every class, if you get into it, there's incredible subdivisions. It's extraordinarily stratified. Bernard Shaw said: 'One Englishman can't open his mouth without making another despise him.' It's true, we've all got this awareness and fear.

"I think here we're more aware of class than any other country. I think President Carter said we invented racism and it's something that comes out of it because basically, every class hates every other class and would murder them quite happily."

But Katherine Hamnett has more than class on her mind. She begins to sound like Doris Lessing, for God's sake. "It's getting so much worse I don't see that we're going to avoid some apocalypse." That's the talk of a woman with two sons (aged seven and two) who doesn't like the look of the future and the point where she connects with the voices of Greenham Common.

Her talk is scattered with references to the Parent Teachers Association she's involved with (strong on getting lead out of petrol) and her anxieties have been increased by the fact that she's just taken her seven-year old to a second educational psychologist. He told her that the boy is above average and yet he's innumerate, basically illiterate and still reading mechanically. This has obviously coloured her views and adds energy to her attack.

"We're destroying all our future. The only thing a country's got is its youth. If you cannot afford education you get a decline in civilisation. From what I see of what they're picking up in the State Schools it's just aggression and defiance. To an extent you can't blame them. If this is all we're prepared to dish out to them, why shouldn't they?

"According to people in established positions, anybody under 25 is rubbish and ought to be killed. They don't give a shit about them. They give less than shit. They just want to keep them quiet. It's the most selfish thing you've ever seen. And for who, for what?"

At this point Katherine decides we should go downstairs and talk some more. Her brother comes in to ask about the arrangements that evening for their mother's birthday. She says she rescued him from the army and he's now working for her.

Geoffrey, the man she lives with who was also inadvertently drawn into the business, comes in to close the windows and lock up. She goes for him: "Out. Get out, you guys. I'm just doing a very crucial thing on a copyright which he might print. Please go away for two minutes. Simply fuck off." There's a hint of a smile but only a hint.

Here's Katherine Hamnett on copyright: "The Italians are founder members of the EEC which is supposed to be free trade. Their clothing industry is the size of Fiat. Our clothing industry would be considerably larger than it is if it was handled sensibly. They're copying all our styles and selling them all over Europe. We've got no comeback. We've got no right of injunction on copy, no copyright laws whatsoever.

"I think there should be because I think the creative areas in this country — whether it's music, painting or fashion design — we're stronger than anybody else in the world and we could be exploiting it. We are categorically better than they are. We could be turning it to the good of the country.

"The strongest export from this country is ideas. The guys in Silicon Valley are all English. Creativity, genius, talent and ideas —the growth industry we've got in this country right now."

The conversation takes its final turn, back to her deeper concerns. She wants to express this feeling in as strong a way as possible, burn it into the tape so that you will read it.

"I think we've got to go for world government. I think there's no other way to eliminate war. We all face extinction, our children face extinction. Nobody wants to feel that babies are dying from lack of food when they've got butter mountains, meat mountains, milk lakes. This is the only obscenity.

"People who have children are the only people that care really. Single people don't care. They have it whammed home to them that the individual, the child, the baby is the most colossal thing that anybody can produce. It's so much greater than any artefact or empire.

"Science fiction is another consumer tool, a tool of the armaments industry. It has to be. If you accept that there's no life in the entire continuous billions of galaxies — that we're the only life that exists — it's far healthier.

"The only thing that's important is survival, and it's possible. There's enough land, enough sea that everybody should be able to live on this planet and just enjoy this extraordinary gift that is life. We are stardust. This is the Garden of Eden."

Later, on the train home, I listen to snatches of the tape. I'd asked her about Radical Chic. "What was that, I missed it." I explained it was where fashion adding energy to a movement it merely sucks it off and sells it to the High Street.

Her reply is revealing: "Quite a fightening thought, really. It hadn't occurred to me before. Well we're going to do it very blatantly. I'm just going to do t-shirts. If people think they can't make a stand, at least they can wear one."

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Katherine Hamnett has revealed how Margaret Thatcher let out a 'shriek of horror' when she realised the legendary fashion designer had hijacked a 1984 Downing Street reception for fashion designers to make an anti-nuclear protest. Hamnett smuggled one of her infamous slogan T-shirts into the event, putting it on when she was inside and approaching the Prime Minister for a chat. The garment was emblazoned with the words '58% don't want Pershing', in reference to the then Prime Minister's decision to allow U.S. Pershing missiles to be stationed in Britain despite the majority of the British public being opposed.